by Alex Archer
No one was stirring—save the couple intertwining themselves in front of the lantern. Annja pulled up a corner of the canvas and saw a slab the size of a manhole cover. There were lines of hieroglyphics—half-closed eyes, stylized birds, cats, cow-headed men. Now this was something significant, she thought. She wondered if Wes Michaels had seen it.
The other two canvases covered similar slabs, one twice the size and in excellent condition with deep etchings that marked it an important find. Good for the students, she thought. She hadn’t seen a piece this large at the Michaels site.
Time to wake someone up, she decided. She started toward the closest tent, when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. With so many shadows, she hadn’t seen the figure hiding. It had bushy hair, and it moved a little awkwardly, so Annja didn’t think it was one of the Arab assassins.
“You, stop!” Her voice was commanding but soft, not wanting to alert the entire camp.
But the figure didn’t stop. It hurried to another collection of shadows and disappeared. Annja let out a frustrated breath and followed.
“What’s this?” Annja figured she’d be practically on top of her target, but instead found only rocks. The shadows from the ridge stretched out and practically covered all of the ground. But the moonlight revealed a metal spike, tall and driven into the ground, and this drew her curiosity. Had her eyesight not been so keen, she wouldn’t have noticed it. She edged closer and saw a second spike, and a rope ladder affixed to them and leading into a tight crevice.
“I bet you went down here, didn’t you?” she whispered.
As if in response, she saw a light bobbing below.
“Definitely interesting.” And definitely a place she would have otherwise explored in daylight, after she’d talked to the students and reported to the police. But the presence of the flashlight-toting stranger forced her hand.
She gave another glance behind her. No one in the tents stirred. People were in there, though. She heard faint cries of passion from the one tent, snoring from another.
I could take a quick look, see if I can find you, whoever you are, she thought. Annja had an inner sense about things, and it was telling her this could be connected to her troubles. Besides, she had a flashlight.
She held the flashlight between her teeth, just as Dari had done when he worked on the bike. She lowered herself over the side and started to climb down, the darkness reaching up and swallowing her.
14
Annja descended slowly, holding the small flashlight in her teeth and keeping both hands on the rope ladder, which swayed precariously.
She didn’t see another light below, and so she thought the mysterious figure might have turned it off, opting to hide in the plethora of shadows.
This is stupid, she thought, coming down here without any equipment. The flashlight in her mouth certainly couldn’t qualify as equipment, and she was in sorry shape with cracked ribs and a sprained ankle.
The flashlight’s beam was so narrow it didn’t reveal anything other than a rock face about ten feet past the ladder. Dari had probably bought it just for its tight beam so he could work on his motorcycle engine, she realized.
I should climb right back up and talk to the students, leave my mystery man to this hole, she told herself. She’d herd the students together with Dr. Michaels’s group and go to the police. The problem was, Annja realized, that this whole thing was one big mystery. And once she’d gotten hold of a mystery, she didn’t want to let go. Like a dogged sleuth out of a good paperback thriller, she needed to puzzle it out, which included finding the figure that disappeared down here. I should climb right back up this instant and…
But she kept going down, and after what she guessed was about a thirty-foot climb, her feet touched solid rock. Just a little look around first, she thought, provided she could see anything with the tiny flashlight. Maybe I can find him…or her. Maybe it’s a student, she thought.
“Hello?” Again she kept her voice hushed. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.” Oh, that’s pretty lame, she chided herself.
She didn’t hear anyone walking, and no one was close enough so she could hear breathing. The floor was slick from what rain had come in. She shuffled to the wall straight ahead, brushing aside the rope ladder as if it was a curtain. The floor was even, and she paused to look down, bending over and holding the flashlight close. She ran her fingers across it.
“Natural and unnatural at the same time,” she pronounced it. It was granite, but it was polished as if it had been worked by men. Not quite to the standards one would find on the floor of a government building or museum, but definitely not something Mother Nature had done on her own. “Curious and curiouser.”
She went to the wall, finding it had been worked, as well, and was covered with hieroglyphics. In her amazement, she momentarily forgot about her quarry. “I wish I could read this,” she whispered. Annja mentally added hieroglyphics to the list of subjects she intended to study—when she had time.
She ran a hand through her hair to brush it off her forehead. It was still wet, and the bun she’d twisted it into earlier had come loose. It was tangled with leaves and tiny branches, and she brushed out a clump of dirt.
Annja tried to study the carvings the way she’d read books when she was a kid with a flashlight under the covers at the orphanage. Line by line.
There were images of birds, looking as if they were walking backward, and there were other birds that faced cow-headed men. There was a cow-headed woman figure that was larger than the other figures. Annja recognized her as Hathor. Again the goddess had upraised arms, as if to welcome the sun. The carvings were deep, hardly weathered, the cave protecting them from the elements and time. Annja withdrew her fingers, not wanting the oil and dirt from her skin to mar the images.
Dr. Michaels didn’t know about this. She was sure he would have told her in his excitement. She suspected hardly anyone knew about them. The crevice opening was small, and would be shielded by the shadows from the ridge even during daylight. She wouldn’t have noticed it herself if the moon hadn’t glinted off one of the spikes holding the ladder. But the students knew about it, and maybe the “master,” and certainly the mysterious figure she’d pursued down here.
Once more she told herself it was time to go back up, that she’d have a chance to explore this later. If the stranger she’d followed didn’t want to be found, she certainly wasn’t going to be able to find him with her dinky light. But the wonder of this hidden place held her, and she continued to look at the hieroglyphics.
The previous night in her hotel room she’d surfed some of the Internet sites about Egyptian deities, specifically Hathor. She was typically rendered as a cow with a sun disk between her perfect horns, or sometimes as a cow-headed woman in resplendent garb. The latter was how she was shown here.
Annja remembered reading that Hathor’s name was sometimes translated as “the House of Horus,” which associated her with the royal family, as Horus was associated with kings. Some saw her as the mother goddess of the entire world, and unlike other Egyptian deities, her priests were male and female. Typically, a male deity had male priests, and a female deity, female priests.
Music and dance were part of the prayer rituals. The figures Annja studied seemed to dance under the narrow beam of her flashlight, and the breeze that found its way down faintly whistled as if in homage to the goddess.
Some saw Hathor as the veritable incarnation of dance, Annja recalled, and the goddess was said to have danced before Ra when he despaired or was lost in melancholy. Artists prayed to her seeking inspiration for their creations. The offerings to her included twin mirrors—one for the goddess to look upon herself and one for the worshiper to see his or her own beauty.
Hathor was worshiped throughout all of Egypt, and apparently in Australia, as well, Annja mused.
“The seductress, lady of turquoise, and lady of malachite,” Annja said. Hathor was called those things among her many titles.
“Mining. There was something about mining.” She mentally called up one of the Web sites she had visited. Hathor was worshiped by miners and was associated with precious metals and gemstones. If a miner held Hathor’s favor, he would have good finds to help support his family.
Annja saw carvings that might have symbolized a mine. That would fit, Annja thought. And there were other shapes, a goose, lion, cat, a tree. Hathor was a goddess who was represented by many shapes, including those. The tree would be a sycamore fig, she thought.
Why a cow? Milk? Nourishing? Life? Hathor embodied beauty, life, security, health, warmth, and Annja figured a cow might be associated with those things…certainly with sustaining life. And a fig tree could exude a milky substance.
She’d read that the goddess was also tied to fragrances, particularly myrrh, which was especially valuable and precious to the Egyptians.
“Like this site must be precious to whoever wants me dead,” Annja muttered. “Hmm…what’s this?” Her light glinted off something in the wall, and she moved it closer so she could see better. “Brass? No, gold.” Just a trace of it, she discovered, inlaid as a piece of jewelry around Hathor’s bovine neck. Wait until Wes sees this, she thought.
There were more traces of gold in some of the other carvings Annja spotted, these at waist height; she’d been looking at eye level and higher until now. The carvers must have taken strands of gold and pounded them into the cracks to inlay it.
There wasn’t a lot of gold—at least not that she could see with her tiny light. But the presence of gold marked it as different from the hieroglyphics at the larger dig.
She pressed her face near the stone and smelled its age. There was a mustiness to the cavern, and despite the breeze that brought a little fresh air down, what she breathed had a stagnant odor.
“Just a few more minutes,” she said. Then she’d go back up. She’d postpone the shoot in South America and stay in Australia, convince Doug there was far more to this than a one-hour piece on fringe archaeology. She owed it to Oliver to put more effort into bringing these amazing sites to light.
Her flashlight flickered and blinked like the tail of a firefly. Then it went out, plunging her into blackest black.
She put the useless flashlight in her pocket, not wanting to litter the cave, and reached her fingers to the wall. She looked up, hoping to see a little moonlight coming through the small crevice, but there was nothing. The ridge shadowing the area let not even a hint of light in. It was a wonder she’d even noticed one of the spikes holding the rope ladder.
Annja didn’t panic. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. Rather, she tended to find it sort of comforting. She walked her fingers along the wall and took baby steps, not wanting to trip or to go too far and miss the ladder. She tried to picture the ladder and how far she’d come from it, but she’d become too distracted by the hieroglyphics to take a good guess. It couldn’t be too far, though, she told herself. This cave couldn’t be that big.
Sounds came to her as she moved. The chirping of some insects that had made a home in this place, the breeze, her breathing and finally the crunch of something she’d just stepped on. She had gone too far, she realized, as she’d not stepped on anything in her initial explorations. She knelt and felt around her feet, finding thin pieces of wood.
Pencils, she realized as she explored blindly. And pens, a clipboard, and—thank God—a flashlight. It was a large, heavy one, with a square battery beneath it that weighed at least a pound. She ran her fingers across it before turning it on, finding a bulbous light at the back with a separate switch, and a half-globe light at the front that was about six inches across. The latter was what she wanted, and so she found the proper switch.
The beam was bright, broad and welcoming, and it revealed an assortment of things around her feet—the writing instruments that she’d broken; three plastic clipboards, each holding a thick sheaf of paper, the top pages covered in notes; a six-pack of bottled water, unopened; an open cardboard box filled with pairs of white gloves and plastic and paper bags; and a tape measure. She set the flashlight on the ground and tugged free one of the water bottles; it went down quickly and soothed her dry throat.
Then she picked up the light again and swung it around so she could get an overall look of the cave—and at the person she’d followed there.
“Oh, my.” It was far bigger than she expected, so large her light didn’t quite reach the opposite wall. Beetles skittered away from the flashlight beam, trying to find refuge in the shadows. A pair of thin brown lizards scampered away, too, as Annja continued to try to take it all in.
She saw no trace of the person she’d followed.
Where could he have gone? And just how big is this place?
It was a man-worked chamber for the most part, with chiseled walls behind her and to her right. Walls made of stone blocks carved so precisely they didn’t need mortar made up the other three walls. It was a pentagon, though not all the sides were of equal length. And all the sides were covered with a myriad of hieroglyphics, many of them inlaid here and there with gold and decorated with stone chips she recognized as opals. The largest figures were of Hathor, but Horus was present, too, and Anubis. Mixed in with the stylized birds she’d seen at the Michaels dig were renderings of kangaroos and wombats and something that might be a koala.
There were three pillars, and whether they were necessary to help support the ceiling or were for decoration, Annja couldn’t tell. They were ringed with half suns, cow heads and more kangaroos. There were symbols in rows and columns that she knew could be translated into words. A few of the symbols she recognized from pieces at Dr. Michaels’s site and from books and Internet sites she’d perused.
Near one of the pillars two lights stood on poles, like those a photographer might use to illuminate a person posing for a portrait. They’d be used to bathe the cave in light, which was something she’d like to do just to get a better look. Cables ran from them to a small generator that sat between two large, intact urns.
Incredible relics, she thought, looking at the urns. What an amazing, amazing find. One of the urns was covered in elaborate engravings of ankhs, half suns and kangaroos, some of them painted. The other was partially covered, as if someone had started work on it and then stopped.
She moved closer to the urns so her flashlight beam might reach the wall behind them. She was rewarded by seeing two more pillars, but these had collapsed into a jumble of broken stones that had become coated in places with lime. The small brown lizards she’d seen earlier had escaped there, and they scurried into a crack in one of the larger pieces. More beetles hurried into the shadows.
“Don’t mean to disturb you,” Annja told them. “I’m just looking.” Maybe an earth tremor had brought the columns down. She tilted the light upward and saw cracks in the ceiling where the tops of the pillars had been. She also saw more hieroglyphics. They appeared to cover every inch of the stone ceiling. “They were very busy here, the Egyptians,” she said.
She only glanced at the symbols; they were similar to the ones on the walls. Then she continued to shine the light around the cave, seeing if there was a niche where the mystery man might be hiding. Chamber, she corrected herself after a moment. She’d only thought it a cave when she came down with Dari’s tiny flashlight. Temple perhaps would be a better term, she mused, as so many of the symbols were of Hathor.
There was a stone head to the east, about the size of a compact car. It was in the shape of a cow’s head with forward-facing human-looking eyes. The top of the head had been chiseled and polished into a flat surface so it could serve as a table or an altar. Annja glided toward it, her light reaching out to more of the chamber beyond.
Maybe the man’s hiding behind the cow head, she thought. She’d grab him and then they’d both go up. She’d go talk to the students and find her way to the police. She’d come back down here and turn on the larger lights, bring a camera and get some shots of everything.
A half-dozen yards beyond the c
ow’s head, the longest of the five walls was revealed to have niches in it. Annja approached them, shivering when she saw the contents. In each niche—and there were dozens—she saw the remains of birds and rodents, all apparent failed attempts at mummification.
No natron, she thought. They tried to use something else, and it didn’t work. There was a fusty smell to this section of the chamber, but that was more from the age of the place than anything. The animals had given up their scents centuries ago. She skirted the wall, grimly fascinated by the collection of bones and strips of cloth. She guessed that she was well under the rock ridge at this point, and that the chamber was easily two hundred feet across at its widest point.
She turned to go back to the rope ladder, thinking perhaps that the man had climbed the ladder while she was lost in the dark. Her flashlight beam struck a slash in the wall that she at first thought merely a discoloration in the stone. But it was more than that, and she hurried toward it. The slash was a passageway, hewed into the rock and rimmed with carvings of Anubis, god of the dead.
“He went this way. He must have,” Annja whispered. She didn’t hesitate; she aimed the flashlight forward and went inside. It was a hallway, more like a tunnel, she thought, considering that it was narrow and the ceiling no more than six feet high. She felt a little claustrophobic, but she kept going, and she tried to picture where she was headed with respect to the ridge and the two dig sites. She could tell she was descending, though only at a slight angle, and after a dozen yards the trail curved gently to the east. After a dozen more yards it swung back to the west, ending at a set of steps that led down. On the walls on each side she saw faint carvings of Anubis, life-size, with the god’s pointed ears touching the ceiling.
She tested the first step, finding it solid. She didn’t want her weight to cause anything to crumble. Have the students been this way? she wondered. After a moment she answered that. Someone had to have come down here. I can practically see their boot prints. My mystery man. The light bounced with each of her footfalls, showing that dust had been disturbed ahead of her on the center of the stairs.