Che Lu reached into the old straw bag next to her and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents onto the floor with a clatter. Four pieces of bone lay there.
“Did you ever figure out what those are?” the old man next to her asked. Che Lu had known Lo Fa for most of her life. He had been branded a thief a long time before by the government, but now she supposed he might be called a freedom fighter. He wore a faded blue shirt and black pants. His AK-47 lay next to him. He had found the bones near the tomb and sent them to her in Beijing, prompting the beginning of her journey here.
She picked up one of the bones and handed it to him. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long fiat sides that had markings etched into them.
“They’re oracle bones.”
Lo Fa turned it in his hands, then tossed it back. “Are you a witch who throws bones to read the future now? I thought you were an educated person.” He spit to the side. “I can read yours and my future without using those—we’re going to die in this tomb along with that alien creature.” He nodded his head toward the tall figure of Elek, wandering through the stacks of equipment and large containers that filled the floor of the cavern.
Che Lu agreed that Elek was not completely human—the red, elongated eyes confirmed that. But he also wasn’t Airlia, as he was shorter than the projection of the Airlia sentinel in the upper-level passageway had shown and some of his other features were different. Some sort of hybrid between human and alien, Che Lu had decided, a bastard designed to do the bidding of hidden alien masters. Ever since Lo Fa had found the oracle bones and sent them to her, her beliefs had experienced more change than in the previous seven decades.
“You must have hope,” she told Lo Fa.
He snorted. “Hope is a bad thing. Hope is what children have before they know any better. I am too old for hope.”
Che Lu pointed at Elek. “They—and the aliens they work for—came to Earth a long time ago. Many, many generations before you were born. But we—humans—are still here. You have lived a long life. We must work to ensure that our children’s children also have the same opportunity.
“They are not all-powerful. Look how he searches the cavern. And he cannot get into the lowest level, which is where he wants to go. He is as weak as we are.”
“And as trapped,” Lo Fa noted.
Che Lu indicated the oracle bones. “I could not read those at first.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a leather notebook. It was battered, with burn marks on it. “This is Professor Nabinger’s, the man who deciphered the high rune language. I have been using it to read the writing on the bones and on the walls of the upper levels of this tomb, since we have had nothing else to do since being sealed in.
“I always thought our civilization was the first to develop writing. In fact, the Chinese word for ‘civilization,’ wenha, means the transforming influence of writing. But the language on these bones is older than ours.”
“Spare me the lecture,” Lo Fa said. “You are not at the university now. What do the bones and the walls say?”
“You have something else to do?” Che Lu asked. “Perhaps a lecture will open your mind up, old man, keep it from turning into a rock.”
Lo Fa laughed. “Go ahead, Mother-Professor.”
The latter term was what her students at the university in Beijing had called her. Che Lu felt a pang for those she had left in the capital. She had no doubt the upcoming turmoil would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look mild in comparison. Always blood had to be spilled to grease the wheels of change. She wished it were not so, but her long life had shown her that it was the way of reality.
She rested a hand on the battered leather notebook. “Professor Nabinger was a very smart man. His mind was open, unlike yours.” She picked up one of the oracle bones. “The writing on this was dismissed as gibberish by most scholars I showed them to. The same as similar writing all around the world. What we do not understand, we choose to ignore.
“Nabinger was an Egyptologist. He didn’t ignore the markings that didn’t fit with standard hieroglyphics. He searched around the planet and found similar writing in other places. Dating those sites, he was amazed to discover that this strange runic writing predated the oldest recorded language that was generally accepted by historians.
“The problem he had was explaining how a similar written language could be in places as far apart as Egypt and South America. Remember, old man, this was in an age when man would rarely sail out of sight of shore. Despite not being able to explain the why, he decided to study the what he did have. He gathered as many examples of what he dubbed the high rune language and tried to decipher it.”
“I am more interested in the why,” Lo Fa said. “Why was this same language in such diverse places? Did the Airlia leave the writing?”
Che Lu shrugged. “Some of it, maybe. But most examples Nabinger found had slight, sometimes major, differences in style and syntax from place to place, which indicated to him that they all came from a root language, and then, as people who had learned this root language spread across the planet, they made changes to it as their own societies developed.
“My fellow anthropologists at the university always argued that civilization began in such diverse places as Egypt, China, Southeast Asia, and Central America, all at roughly the same time period. They called this the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believe that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of each other. These isolated groups of people all crossed a threshold into civilization about the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ. Isolationists explained the timing with natural evolution. We particularly like that theory here in China because we believed our early civilization was much more advanced than the others. After all, we believed we were the first to have a written language, the first to invent gunpowder, the printing press—all those things we were so proud of for so long.”
Che Lu rubbed her wrinkled fingers across the bone. “Now we know this isn’t true. We weren’t the first to invent writing, and we were not the first to invent civilization. Indeed, the earliest dynasties here and in the other places were probably just shadows of the civilization our forefathers had to abandon at Atlantis. Even if the humans were just servants to the Airlia there, they probably lived in a style greater than even our current level.
“When Artad destroyed Atlantis to stop Aspasia and his rebels, some humans escaped. They not only seeded the myth of Atlantis and the Great Flood wherever they went, they also started to rebuild civilization. This is the diffusionist theory of the birth of civilization, which we now know to be correct.”
“And the aliens who survived?” Lo Fa asked. “Where did they go?”
“We believe that Aspasia and his followers went to the Airlia base on Mars. And now we think he is dead, killed by Captain Turcotte during the destruction of the Airlia talon ship fleet. Artad”—she waved her hands around the cavern—“perhaps he sleeps below us like Aspasia slept on Mars. I think that is the reason Elek desperately wants the key for the lower level.”
“Waking Aspasia was a bad thing,” Lo Fa said simply. “Why should waking Artad be any better?”
“I cannot answer that,” Che Lu said.
“Something else,” Lo Fa said. “If they used Gao-zong’s tomb to hide Artad, then maybe the Airlia had much more to do with our country’s growth than we could even imagine.”
“True,” Che Lu conceded. “Nabinger did determine that the high rune symbol for ‘help’ was built into the very shape of the Great Wall in western China, north of the city of Lanzhou. It is the only man-made object that can currently be seen from space with the naked eye. There is no way the people who built the Great Wall could have known the shape they were building was more than just protection against the barbarians.”
Lo Fa still had one of the bones in his hands. “What do these tell you?”
Che Lu leaned close. “They give hints. Of Shi Huan
gdi. The First Emperor. The Son of Heaven who unified China and pulled together the Great Wall.”
Lo Fa nodded. “You said earlier he might be buried here in the tomb, even though Gao-zong was of the Tang Dynasty, well after Shi Huangdi.”
Che Lu simply waited. She knew Lo Fa was much smarter than he appeared, or else he would have died long ago plying his chosen profession.
Lo Fa’s eyes widened. “Do you think the alien Artad could have been Shi Huangdi—the founder of the First Dynasty?”
“I told you of the legends surrounding Shi Huangdi. It is written that when he was born there was a great radiance in the sky, coming from the direction of Ursa Major. But the word ‘born’ can have different connotations. It could also mean when he arrived.”
“From the stars,” Lo Fa filled in.
“Or simply from the sky in one of the bouncers the Americans have, or even the mothership that is now floating in orbit around our planet.
“The stories say that when Shi Huangdi met the Empress of the West in the mountains of Wangwu, they invented something. But again, invented could be used to explain something no one had ever seen before. The best the storytellers could describe it was twelve large mirrors mounted on tripods that pointed to the sky. These devices were supposed to be able to manipulate gravity. When they were operated they emitted loud noises. They were also supposed to be able to look at the stars.
“And there is Chi Yu, the Lord of the South who fought with Shi Huangdi.” Che Lu was excited, and some of it was rubbing off on Lo Fa. “There was indeed a chance that the old legends were stories of fact.”
“Maybe Chi Yu was Aspasia—or someone from Aspasia’s camp,” Lo Fa interjected.
Che Lu nodded. “Yes. While Shi Huangdi ruled in the north of ancient China, Chi Yu ruled in the south. And Chi Yu was said not to be a man but a machine. A metal beast which could fly about.”
Lo Fa looked about. “If Artad sleeps here, perhaps Chi Yu still exists. Perhaps the metal beast is hidden, waiting to come alive and attack us.”
Che watched as Elek strode across the chamber once more. “You might be right that awakening whatever is below might be a very bad thing.”
Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania
D - 43 Hours
The leopard moved stealthily through the high grass, then paused. Nostrils flared wide as it drew in the scent borne on the breeze. Ears twitched and the head turned back and forth. It smelled fresh earth, which was strange, and, stronger than the dirt, the scent of the two-legged creatures, which was also rare here, deep inside Ngorongoro Grater.
The leopard had experience with the two-legged ones from its time on the Serengeti Plain to the west. It knew they were to be avoided. The leopard loped to the north, circling around the area.
Downwind from the leopard, Mualama looked up from the shovel in his hands. “Hush!” he hissed at the other man in the hole with him.
After a moment’s hesitation, Lago stopped digging and slumped down, wiping the sweat from his brow. “What?”
“Shh.” Mualama held a long black finger to his lips. “There is something out there in the bush.”
Lago sank down to sit on the edge of the pit they had excavated. After the climb down Mount Speke, the trek to the airfield, and the return to Tanzania, the last thing he wanted to do was come here and dig, but his uncle had been insistent.
“It was a leopard,” Mualama finally said as he heard a growl. He turned his attention back to the hole.
“A leopard?” Lago repeated, his eyes darting about the thick, four-foot-high grass that surrounded their location. “Will it attack?”
“It is more concerned that we leave it alone,” Mualama said. He found his nephew amusing. The young man would climb mountains and scuba-dive for fun, but the wonders of nature on his own continent held little interest for him.
They were in the northern part of Ngorongoro Crater, a remote spot in north Tanzania. Ngorongoro was the second-largest crater on the planet. Over twelve miles wide, it encompassed more than three hundred square miles. The crater was twenty-two hundred meters above sea level, well over a mile in altitude. Geologists claimed it was the remains of a huge, ancient volcano that had been worn down through erosion. Mualama was not sure how much stock he put in the geologists’ claims. All he had to do was look to the east from the rim of Ngorongoro and he could clearly see the snowcapped summit of Mount Kilimanjaro a hundred and twenty miles away. Being a logical man, he had to ask why that ancient volcano wasn’t worn down as far as this one. They were equally old and experienced the same weather.
There was no doubt the crater was a spectacular and remote place. It was difficult to get to with only one, often washed out, dirt track covering the last fifty miles to it. Once the dirt road reached the rim of the crater, it switchbacked down the steep rim, in places so narrow that even Mualama, who had been here before, had feared for the ability of his old Land Rover to stay on the road.
The land inside the crater was mostly open grassland with intermittent thick bush, although near the rim there was thick forest. Soda Lake, which filled the center, was a broad expense of water, but it was not deep, less than four feet in most places. Because of its isolation, difficult access, and the resulting lack of human intrusion, the crater teemed with wildlife.
At the edge of the pit they were digging, a surveyor’s scope rested on a tripod. This morning, Mualama had used it to make his final measurements, incorporating the data from the drawing in Burton’s manuscript. This spot had been triangulated to within ten meters. But ten meters was still a large area when one had to dig using only two shovels, and it was uncertain how deep the object sought was.
“Are you sure something’s here?” Lago asked, a question he was asking with increasing frequency the more dirt that was removed.
Mualama paused. “We are never sure until we find what we are searching for.”
Lago waved his hand about, taking in the entire crater. “This is a big place. Why here? This specific spot? How did you know the drawing referred to the crater?”
“I’ve been here before,” Mualama said. “I have information from other sources. Burton’s drawing was just the final piece. Even he didn’t know the exact location—he just knew something was somewhere and he had some clues. Years ago I found the first sign there.” Mualama pointed to the crater wall, two miles distant.
Lago looked, confused. “What?”
“The dragon,” Mualama said. “Do you see its head?”
Lago squinted. “That rock outcropping?”
“Yes. With a little imagination, it could be the profile of a dragon. That was the first sign. Drawn on a piece of ancient parchment, carefully preserved by monks, who themselves did not know what they were guarding or where the dragon sign was to be seen.
“Of course I—like Burton—didn’t know where to look for the sign, or the other signs I learned about. It was only last year that I learned that it was in Ngorongoro Crater that I could line up the signs. And now I have the last piece of alignment.” He pointed. “The notch there in the crater wall matches the drawing we just found. Where Burton found that, I do not know, nor does he say. And that, Nephew, is why we are here.”
“If it wasn’t from Burton’s manuscript, how did you discover that it—whatever it is—would be in this crater?” Lago wanted to know, not satisfied with his uncle’s vague answers.
“Have you heard of the church of Bet Giyorgis?”
Lago indicated he hadn’t.
Mualama pointed at the canteen hanging from Lago’s shoulder. The young man passed it across, and Mualama drank deeply before continuing.
“Legend has it that one night King Lalibela of Axum was taken up to heaven while he was asleep and ordered to build a temple, a place of worship. It was said that when he came back he ordered construction begun on Bet Giyorgis and that the workers were aided by ‘angels.’
“The church is very strange. Certainly given the tools and level of technology of the time, the te
mple would have been impossible to make. It is constructed inside of solid rock. In a way, you could call the entire church a sculpture cut into the rock. A most intriguing mystery that has begged to be answered for centuries.”
“The Airlia built it?” Lago guessed.
Mualama nodded. “Perhaps. The entire perimeter of the church is a trench cut into rock four stories deep. Then the remaining large square of stone in the center was made into the temple. The central church was shaped in the shape of a cross, but you can get to it only through passageways cut through the stone. Then the center of that cross shape was hollowed out of solid rock. There are numerous paintings and frescoes on the walls throughout. On one of those I found drawings that led me to question the monks.
“A couple in particular interested me as they would have interested an explorer like Burton. One showed two snow-covered peaks. Another showed only one such peak. The peak in both panels I recognized as Mount Kilimanjaro.”
“But you said two peaks in the first drawing?” Lago was confused.
“This was the other peak. The sister of Kilimanjaro.”
“But this has been a crater for ages,” Lago said.
“Perhaps,” Mualama said. “Perhaps not.”
“There’s no indication the volcano has been active for over twenty thousand years,” Lago argued.
At least the student had done his geological homework while in school, Mualama granted. “Perhaps the top of the mountain was destroyed in some other manner.”
To that, Lago had no answer. The thought of something powerful enough to shear off the top of a mountain as large as Kilimanjaro and leave this crater behind was beyond his ability to comprehend.
“Why did you go to the church in the first place? Why did you start following this dead man’s trail?”
“That is a long and complex story that began when I was a young man—about your age—studying in England. What do you know of Sir Richard Francis Burton?”
“Only what you have told me so far.”
“Your education is lacking,” Mualama said. “Sir Burton translated the Book of the Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra. He was quite a linguist, with a mastery of many languages. It was because of one of his trips here to Africa and an unpublished letter he left written in a tongue that no one else could read—like his manuscript, but a different language—that I was first directed to this location. At first I thought it was a work of fiction, but now I know it was not.”
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