Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  The flying boat nosed into the lagoon and came to a stop in the still water. They leaped out into the foam, slipping and struggling as the rocks slid away under their feet. Kowalski's men made the flying boat fast and unloaded the equipment. While they did that, Grant walked up the shingle slope to the back of the beach. Beyond, he could see a tight ravine filled with trees and bushes. A small river trickled out of it into the lagoon.

  Reed joined him. Even there, on the shores of the Soviet Union, he was still neatly dressed in a suit, a waistcoat and a tie. His one concession to practicality was his boots, black army boots that poked incongruously from under his tweed trousers.

  'Heroes' temples were always supposed to cause lush vegetation to grow up around them. It was thought to show the fecundity of the hero's presence.'

  'Doesn't make it any easier to find.'

  Reed didn't answer. He stared about him at the lonely bay: the sepulchral cliffs, the dark sky, the keening birds and the pebbles that rattled like bones.

  Soon shalt thou reach old Ocean's utmost ends,

  Where to the main the shelving shore descends;

  The barren trees of Proserpine's black woods,

  Poplars and willows trembling o'er the floods:

  There fix thy vessel in the lonely bay,

  And enter there the kingdoms void of day.

  'At least it sounds like we've got the right place this time.'

  Grant heard footsteps crunching up the beach behind him. He turned and saw Jackson.

  'Where to now, Professor?'

  Reed shrugged. 'The Odyssey talks about a river. I suppose we should follow it.'

  They made their way round the edge of the lagoon, splashing through the shallows and reeds, until they reached the place where the river entered it. Kowalski's men struggled under the weight of all the equipment they had to carry: as well as their rifles and packs, they had brought picks, shovels, the Bismatron and what looked to Grant like blasting charges.

  Jackson reached a small islet of broken stones and looked back. 'Does it have a name, this river?'

  'Homer calls it Acheron — the River of Grief.'

  Jackson shook his head in mock despair. 'You sure know how to pick 'em. Don't tell me where it leads; I don't want to spoil the surprise.'

  They followed the river inland. Grant led the way. There was no path, no way through the undergrowth at all. In the narrow valley the trees grew so close together they were all but impenetrable. They hid the sky, stretching their branches towards the light like the hands of the damned. Many of the smaller trees seemed to have been choked off completely by their taller rivals, but they had no space to fall. Even in death they stayed upright, their leafless corpses black and rotting. The only way through was to stick to the river, hopping from rock to rock, sometimes wading through. Mercifully it wasn't deep — little more than a stream — and the water never came much above their knees. Even so, they struggled to avoid the undergrowth. Creepers trailed from the overhanging trees like snakes, snatching at their hair, while half-submerged stumps and branches lurked in the stream to trip them.

  There was almost nothing to see beyond the water and the woods, but gradually Grant had the impression that the valley was narrowing around them. The ground got steeper; the stream quickened. Ahead he could hear a rushing noise that seemed to float above the trees. He came to the bottom of a little cataract, where the fast-flowing water frothed and bubbled, and looked up. Not far ahead he could see cliffs and sky framed between the trees like a doorway.

  The rushing noise had become a roar. Grant scrambled up the last few rocks, ignoring the water splashing all over him, soaking his shirt and trousers. He halted at the top, crouching on a flat boulder, dripping.

  He had come to the top of the valley. The forest stretched away on either side, curving round to meet the cliffs that curved back to join them. The round hollow between was filled by a broad pool which emptied into the stream where he stood. The surface of the lake was black and fathomless, except at the foot of the cliffs where it bubbled and frothed under the impact of the waterfall cascading down from the heights above.

  Jackson and Reed clambered up beside him, crowding on to the boulder like castaways on a raft. Kowalski and his men waited below.

  'Now what?'

  Reed gazed at the waterfall. 'According to Homer, we should come to a place where two other streams join the river.'

  'What are they called? The river of hurt and the stream of pain?'

  'The River of Fire and the River of Lament, actually.'

  'Sorry I asked.'

  Grant pulled the tablet out of his knapsack and unwrapped it, trying to shield it from the spray blowing across the pool. 'It looks like two streams in the picture. Unless they're just contours in the mountain. What does the Bismatron say?'

  Jackson scrambled back down to rejoin the marines. Grant saw him take the Bismatron out of its box and turn it on. The rush of water drowned out whatever noise it made; the needle barely flickered.

  'Not much.' He frowned at the dial. 'Maybe something. I guess we have to go on.' Jackson pointed to the cliffs beside the waterfall. 'Can we get up there?'

  Grant eyed it up. It wouldn't be easy. The cliffs weren't impossibly high, perhaps fifty feet, but the white stone was icy smooth, even without the fine coating of spray from the waterfall. 'Sure,' he said casually. 'Have you got a rope?'

  With one of Kowalski's men in tow, Grant splashed his way round towards the waterfall. The others watched from the far rim of the pool. It was hard even getting close to the foot of the cliff: it seemed to drop well below the surface of the lake, so there were few rocks to stand on. Where the trees and the cliffs joined, Grant paused. There didn't seem to be anywhere to stand — except maybe a rocky shelf that protruded a few inches from the base of the cliff a few yards away. Grant peered into the pool but saw only his own reflection on the black mirror.

  'I'm wet enough anyway,' he muttered. He shrugged off his knapsack, slung the coiled rope over his shoulder and jumped in.

  The water was warmer than he'd expected and in this corner of the pool the current actually pressed him back against the cliffs, rather than sucking him out towards the spout. He kicked through the water and hauled himself up on to the shelf, shivering to be in the breeze again. The cliff thrust out at him, chest to chest; he couldn't stand without the feeling he might fall backwards at any moment.

  He looked over to the marine watching from the shore. 'Wish me luck.'

  Grant was no stranger to climbing. As a boy he'd spent hours crawling all over the chalk headlands at Flamborough; as a man he'd hauled himself up more walls and cliffs than he cared to remember. But this was a different challenge. The surface of the rock was soft and undulating, like skin. The only way to get any purchase was to spread himself like a lizard, clinging on to the low swellings in the cliff. He could only move by sliding his hands up inch by inch. Even on the smooth rock his fingers were soon rubbed raw. His wet clothes weighed him down, though at least the shirt stuck to the cliff face as much as his own body. Sometimes, that seemed to be the only thing holding him up.

  He glanced down. That was a mistake — not because he feared heights, but because he saw how little distance he had come. He turned his attention back to the cliff and struggled on. For a short while the slope angled in a little and the going got quicker. Then, suddenly, the cliffs bulged again, more than vertical, hanging out over him. There was no hope he could squirm up that. He pressed his cheek to the rock and glanced right: no way round. To his left the waterfall suddenly seemed thunderously loud.

  There was no alternative. Bracing his legs as best he could in the shallow hollows in the cliff face, he lunged upwards. His palm slammed against the overhang; his arm shuddered; his fingers closed — and felt a thin pucker in the rock. Not a moment too soon. Just as he touched it his foot lost its purchase. He kicked out, thrashing to find a foothold, but his boots just skidded off the rock. For a moment he dangled in space, his whole we
ight crushed into his fingertips.

  He could have let go, fallen, trusted to luck and hoped for the pool to catch him. It hardly crossed his mind. Inch by inch, pound by pound, he hauled himself up. The tendons in his fingers felt thick as hawsers; the cramp in his hands was almost unbearable. Even the bones in his arms ached. He reached up again and this time his hand closed round something firmer. Hope gave him strength; his toe found a small dimple in the rock and he pushed himself up. With a gasp of release he hauled himself over the lip of a small ledge. It was tiny, less than a foot deep, but to Grant it felt like a football pitch.

  When he had caught his breath he looked up. He was still well below the summit, but the way was easier now. A thin crevice split open the cliff- not much, but enough to worm the toes of his boots into. After what he'd already endured, it was almost as good as a ladder. He worked his way up and at last hauled himself over the top of the cliff. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard and rubbing his arms.

  'What have you found?'

  The faint shout from below drew him back to the present. He looked down. Reed and Jackson were still standing on the boulder at the head of the stream, staring up like frogs on a lily pad.

  What had he found? He looked around. He had come into a high, steep-sided valley, almost like a sunken meadow. There were no trees, only the stream winding through the thick turf. It was surprisingly placid here; even the noise of the waterfall seemed distant and muted. In a strange way it reminded him of Scotland. At the far end of the valley, in front of another cliff, two stone columns stuck out of the ground like tusks.

  He unhooked the rope from his shoulder and tied a bowline round an outcrop of rock. He tossed the rest of the rope over the cliff. Then he lit a cigarette. In a few minutes the first marine had pulled himself up, followed — at varying speeds — by Jackson and the others. Reed came last, with the equipment, harnessed into the rope and hauled up by the marines. He didn't seem to have suffered from the ordeal; in fact, his face shone with excitement. He looked around in wonder. 'Remarkable,' he breathed. 'Like a lost world — stout Cortez and all his men. We might be the first men to tread here for three thousand years.'

  'Let's hope there aren't any more coming.'

  A breeze whispered down the valley. Soaking wet from scrambling through the stream, they shivered. Grant looked back at the way they'd come up. The forested slope hid the beach, while the sea had all but disappeared in a smear of fine haze.

  They headed up towards the two pillars. The ground was soft, the grass thick and abundant. Wild celery grew in the crooks of the stream's meanders. A desolate quiet filled the valley.

  It ended in another cliff, the walls curving round like the stern of a ship to close it off. As they drew near, they examined the rock pillars they had seen from the waterfall. They were colossal: they stood on either side of the stream, almost thirty feet from base to top. The white stone had been weathered smooth, but Grant, looking at them, had the sense that there was something indelibly artificial beneath, as if the columns had been cased in molten wax that still modelled the man-made contours under the surface. The more he looked at them the more he convinced himself he could see human shapes shrouded in the stone: bulges that could have been hips and shoulders, dips where the megalithic waists should have been. At the very top, hard to see from below, each pillar tapered to a conical cap that might once have been a head. And, on the right-hand column about three-quarters of the way up, two swellings that Grant felt sure had once been breasts. He pointed them out to Reed, who nodded.

  'Philostratus describes two statues in the temple, "crafted by the Fates". He claims they were Achilles and Helen.'

  'Helen of Troy?'

  'Precisely: the face that launched a thousand ships.' He saw Grant's confusion and chuckled. 'Yes, she's not usually associated with Achilles. But there's an obscure version of the legend that claims she actually came to live with Achilles on the White Island.'

  'Why would she do that? I thought the whole point of the Trojan war was to get her back to her husband. Doesn't it rather spoil the ending if she runs off with another man?'

  'And a dead one at that.' Reed sighed. 'The Greek myths have been tidied up and reordered immeasurably in the last two and a half thousand years — not least by the Classical Greeks themselves, who were appalled by the mess their ancestors had left them. Other versions of the myth said that Hecate was the woman who came with him, or Medea, the witch more commonly associated with Jason and the Argonauts.' He threw up his hands. 'Take your pick. It's most likely that they were all aspects of the female goddess.'

  'The snake woman?'

  'Indeed.'

  Grant looked at the right-hand pillar again. Even eroded by the ages, he thought he could see something of the goddess's high hourglass figure in the stone. He remembered the tiny figurine in the cave on Crete; and then, with his next breath, Marina, kneeling over him on the hotel bed, her blouse torn open and her arms outstretched. He checked his watch. Eight hours until Kurchosov's deadline.

  He shook his head to clear it. 'If these are the statues, this must be the place.'

  'And look.' Reed was staring at the cliff. Behind the stone pillars, hidden until now by their bulk, they could see two spouts of water tumbling down the cliff. Both emerged from holes in the rock, cascaded down through deep-cut channels, then flowed across the earthy ground to meet at the head of the stream a few yards in front of the cliff. The surface of the water bubbled where they joined and eerie wisps of steam rose off it.

  There the dark rock o'erhangs the infernal lake,

  And mingling streams eternal murmurs make.

  Jackson looked at Reed. 'Which one's the River of Fire?'

  Reed walked forward. He passed between the two pillars for a second Grant saw them as the posts of a giant door and knelt by the left stream. He dipped his finger in. 'It's warm,' he exclaimed. He stepped across to the far bank and tried the other channel. 'This one's icy cold.'

  Standing back a little, as if reluctant to step between the pillars, Jackson gazed at the cliff behind. At its foot the two becks enclosed a small triangle of land that came to its point where the waters met. The wall behind was smooth and unbroken.

  "What do we do now?'

  First draw thy falchion, and on every side

  Trench the black earth a cubit long and wide.

  Kowalksi grunted. 'What does that mean, Shakespeare?'

  Reed fixed him with the polite, vacant smile he reserved for only the most irredeemably obtuse pupils. 'It means you have to dig a hole.'

  They took their spades on to the triangular strip between the streams. While Reed watched, the others cut away squares of sod and piled them in a turf wall round the stream bank, then began excavating the black earth beneath. The soil wasn't deep, and it wasn't long before their spades rang on stone.

  Jackson paced impatiently. 'What exactly are we looking for?'

  'Homer says Odysseus spoke to the dead by squatting in a pit. If we're correct in our surmise that there was actually a temple here, I imagine we'll find it somewhere beneath our feet.'

  'Is there anything else we can do?'

  'You could pour offerings to the dead. Homer specifies milk, honey and wine, followed by a scattering of barley grains.'

  'Sir, take a look at this.'

  They looked round. They had cleared the sod and earth from a rough pit about three yards across now, down to the bedrock two feet below. At the back, just in front of the cliff, a square of black earth filled the rock. The marine stuck his spade in, thrusting it down as far as he could. The blade sank in without a sound.

  'Seems to be some kind of hole that's been filled in with dirt.'

  'Clear it. I'll get…' He broke off. A low drone, like a bumblebee echoed above the valley. 'What the hell is that?'

  Grant squinted up, but the raft of clouds pressed too low to see anything. 'Could be nothing.' But again his instinct warned otherwise. 'Maybe a routine patrol. The Soviets have plenty of bases
around the Black Sea.'

  'Tell me about it.' Jackson glanced uneasily down the valley. 'Kowalski, take your men and make sure there's nothing coming up behind us. Grant, you dig.'

  Kowalski led his men at a run back towards the top of the waterfall. Grant began hacking away at the hole. It seemed to be a sort of shaft sunk into the rock, barely two feet square. It wasn't easy to excavate: for each shovelful of soil he prised up, half of it had slipped off the spade before he could lift it out of the hole.

  A few feet away Jackson had got out the Bismatron and was kneeling beside it. He flicked a switch. Grant heard it crackle into life. There was a blast of static, then a rapid series of pops like the distant sound of a car backfiring.

  'Shit,' Jackson breathed. 'This thing's going off like the fourth of July. We have to be close. How're you doing?'

  The hole at Grant's feet was now almost two feet deep. The spade was all but useless there: he couldn't get any sort of angle on it at all. He pulled it out, stood on the tip and bent back the handle until it was at a right angle to the blade. That was a bit better; now he could use the spade to scoop the soil out like an oversized ladle.

  Inch by inch the hole got deeper, but still there was no sign of an end. Grant was down on his knees now, plunging the spade up and down like a piledriver. Even then he could barely touch the bottom.

  He thrust the twisted spade into the soft earth once more, pulled it towards him to scoop soil on to the blade and lifted. It didn't come; instead, he almost pitched himself forward into the hole. He peered in. The flattened tip of the spade seemed to have caught on a lip inside the rock; he could see a dark crack between the earth and the stone. He pushed the spade back and jiggled it around. The crack widened; loose soil tumbled into it and vanished into unseen space beneath. There must be a tunnel or a chamber underneath the shaft.