Temple of Gold

by A. J. Stewart

  Lenny walked out from the trees with his hands up. It was maybe a hundred yards across the clearing. He didn’t run. He didn’t want to startle anyone, and he’d get their attention soon enough. He was about a third of the way across when the first of the soldiers spotted him. The man stiffened, and then took a step. His buddy followed his gaze, and together they took a moment to figure out what they were looking at.

  No doubt Tan had told all his men about the foreigners on the loose, and now here one was. Lenny slowed; he didn’t want to get too close. He wanted them to come to him.

  Like moths to a flame, the two soldiers lifted their guns and left the cave entrance. Left the cover of the trees. Entered the sunlit clearing. One of them yelled something at Lenny, but he paid no mind. He waited until both men were fully in the sun, guns up, in firing position.

  Then he dropped. He hit the ground hard and disappeared into the low scrub. The soldiers hesitated and one of them dropped his sights to look at the ground where Lenny had landed.

  He went down second. The soldier with his gun still raised posed the greater threat, so Lucas took him out first. Lenny knew it was a tactical consideration rather than a practical one. The second man barely had time to gasp before he too was hit.

  Jungles swallow sound. Clearings, not so much. Lucas had fired from within the foliage to suppress as much of the sound as possible, but the shots still cracked into the clearing. How much Tan or his men would have heard down the hill, Lenny didn’t know. There was no point waiting around to find out.

  Both men dashed for the cave. Lucas came left and Lenny came right, and they edged up to the rocks. One large boulder sat in front of the dark hole, with a space behind that felt oddly like a narthex in a church. Both men slid over the boulder and moved toward the dark entrance.

  It didn’t look like a mine. There was no evidence of materials being brought out. No rubble, no mine carts, no train of men pulling ore from the earth.

  It was large enough for one man to enter but not two side by side. Lenny took three quick steps inside and pressed himself back against the side of the entrance. Even here it was already milder than outside. The rock was cool to the touch, and he felt the sweat on his back drawn from him like a sponge. Lucas moved inside and pushed against the wall, too, and for a moment they stood, not daring to even breathe, while their eyes adjusted to the dark.

  The light from outside lit the interior for only a few feet, and then the blackness became absolute. There were no burning torches lighting the way. Lenny took a breath and stepped forward. He held one hand out in front of him as the last of the light was sucked away, and then he was completely and totally blind. He brushed the fingers of his right hand against the wall to remain oriented. If the cave widened and he lost touch, it wouldn’t take much to lose his bearings, too.

  He felt for the flashlight on his belt, for reassurance as much as anything. He didn’t want to use it. He didn’t want anyone within to know they were coming. He moved slowly but steadily deeper into the dark.

  Then he stopped. He felt his leading hand hit rock. Lucas’s hand bumped against Lenny’s back and he stopped too. Lenny felt around. The side, the front, the other side. The tunnel was no more than three feet across, and there was solid rock ahead.

  “Dead end,” whispered Lenny.

  “Maybe it branched off?” replied Lucas.

  “We’re going to have to light it up.”

  “I got it,” said Lucas.

  The tunnel burst into light. For a moment it was blinding, so complete had the darkness been. Lucas slowly moved the flashlight beam. Solid rock surrounded them, and beneath their feet was only dirt. Lucas shone the flashlight back toward the entrance but saw no tunnel branching away. He directed the light back past Lenny. More rock.

  “Wait,” said Lenny. “Keep it there.”

  Lenny ran his hands across the rock face, slowly and methodically. He swept to the left, and then got lower and came back to the right. Then he stopped.

  “There’s a gap, down low.”

  Lucas aimed the light at the floor but saw no difference in the rocks. Lenny dropped to his hands and knees and crawled forward. It was as if he were being eaten by the earth. There was no apparent entrance, no visible way forward, and yet Lenny’s head and torso disappeared. Within a few seconds, he was gone.

  “Mate?” whispered Lucas. “That’s some serious Houdini stuff, that is.”

  Lenny’s face appeared from below the rock.

  “It’s a choke point. It goes down and then back up.” He disappeared again.

  Lucas shook his head. “If only your mother could see you now, boy,” he said to himself, killing the flashlight as he, too, dropped down and followed Lenny’s lead.

  He squeezed through a tight space and ended up on his knees. He raised his hands to stop his head hitting rock as he straightened, but the space opened above, and he stood upright. Then, Lenny’s face appeared in his own light, just above Lucas’s eye level.

  “There’s something up here,” he said.

  Lucas clambered up to join Lenny. They were in a larger cave now, about the size of a living room. Ahead were more rocks, and beyond those rocks: light.

  They switched their flashlights off, and then stepped up to the rocks ahead. As they continued, the light ahead brightened, and the men stopped in their tracks and peered over the top.

  The space fell open before them into a giant cave, the length of a football field. The ceiling might have been fifty feet or it might have been a hundred, it was impossible to tell. Kerosene lamps flickered against the rock walls, making it seem like the cave itself was breathing.

  But the cave walls weren’t what Lenny was focused on. What he was looking at was a temple. It reminded Lenny of Angkor Wat, the famous Cambodian temple that had once been the center of the largest city in civilization. This temple wasn’t so large, but what it lacked in size it made up for in grandeur.

  The entire temple was solid gold.

  The structure glowed in the lamplight. It was classical Khmer architecture, its elements balanced and precise. Towers shaped like lotus buds rose around the temple, so tall they reminded Lenny of the fuel tank on the space shuttle he had seen on TV, taking off on its maiden flight the previous year. Galleries spread from either side, and columns were adorned with bas-reliefs. Majestic stairs rose from the cave floor to the grand entrance, guarded by sculptures of Hindu deities.

  Both men’s mouths dropped open.

  On the far side of the temple, men were chipping away at the rock face, and it was then that Lenny realized the temple seemed to dissolve into the cave itself. They recognized the slow gait of the men and women who carried rubble from the temple to an area further to the side of the cave. Other than them, there was no one to be seen.

  “How do you reckon those crook folks managed to get in here?” asked Lucas. “That was hard work.”

  “They are made of sterner stuff than they appear.”

  Lenny tapped Lucas’s shoulder and they moved on, around the edge of the cave, keeping to the shadows beyond the lamplight. It was difficult to keep their eyes off the golden temple. Lenny edged closer to the base of the massive stairs that led to the entrance. There must have been a hundred steps, all shining gold and each twenty yards across.

  The air was thick, as if they were scuba diving, and they stopped in the last of the shadows to consider their next move. Getting the sick villagers out was step one. Step two was anyone’s guess. Neither man carried a camera, and neither would be able to describe the scene later in adequate detail. Lenny looked around the huge cave, and then back up the steps.

  There, standing emperor-like at the top of the steps was Professor Rangsay, hands on his hips, staring down at Lenny and Lucas.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Lenny stopped breathing, as if that would do him any good. Rangsay stared at him for the longest time, and then the professor looked across the cave like Caesar surveying his domain. Rangsay yelled something at th
e workers and though they stopped to listen, they gave no response, returning to their work, chipping or carrying rubble away from the temple. Rangsay looked over the space one more time, and then he turned and walked away.

  “I thought he saw us,” whispered Lucas.

  “We’re in shadow, he’s in light.”

  “Where’d he go, you reckon?”

  “Inside the temple, is my guess.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  Lenny frowned. “So now I’ve got to have a plan?”

  “Just asking, champ.”

  “What great ideas do you have?”

  “Mate, I wasn’t expecting to see a gigantic temple made of solid gold today, so I’m pretty much out of ideas.”

  “How about this, then? You take out any soldiers you see, and then get those villagers the hell out.”

  “I don’t speak Cambodian, or Kampuchean, or any of it.”

  “Everybody speaks gun,” said Lenny. “You point, they follow.”

  “Good plan. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go see what the hell our friend Professor Rangsay is up to.”

  As Lucas ran away, Lenny took a look around for soldiers or guards. Finding none, he dashed up the golden steps. The metal beneath his feet shone, having been polished by the passing of feet. It was harder going than Lenny had expected; the pitch of the steps was steep and the thick air made breathing laborious. But he didn’t stop. He just kept pumping his arms until finally he was at the top.

  If anything, the temple was more impressive from the top. Before him was an open forecourt, surrounded by pillars that were twenty feet high and adorned with bas-relief carvings of faces. He had no idea how one went about carving gold. He figured it was usually cast, but the size of the pillars and reliefs suggested that to have been an impossibility. The forecourt extended both left and right into galleries, and ahead, a highly decorated entrance led into the temple itself.

  The entire structure gave the impression of being the center of something else—a bigger complex perhaps, but it was as if the rest of the complex had simply been consumed by the earth. Lenny glanced down at the cave, where the soft lantern light gave the expanse a ghostly quality, and sent a shiver down his spine. He took a breath and noted the air seemed stale, musty, and impure, but he noted nothing unusual in the smell or taste.

  He turned and ran toward the entrance. A few lanterns had been placed in the forecourt, but the closer he got to the entry, the darker it became. He paused at the entrance. The surface here seemed different from the forecourt. He ran his finger along the wall and found it smooth but covered in an organic grime, something akin to lichen. As he brushed it away he saw the dull gold below, and felt more decorative carving under his fingertips.

  A battery-powered light on a tripod lit the inside of the low entrance, and Lenny was forced to bow slightly as he moved through. He thought perhaps that was the point. After a short corridor, he came out into a large foyer of some sort. The ceiling rose above to an indeterminable height. The chamber seemed to be vaguely semi-circular, with exits dotting it like the starting point for spokes on a wheel. Only one of these exits offered any glimmer of light.

  Lenny followed the light further into the temple, deeper into the cave. He felt the heaviness in his chest, and began to breathe more rapidly to compensate. He edged his way down a barely lit corridor, where the lichen-like fungi grew thick on the walls and floor. As he trod carefully, the light ahead grew stronger until he reached another doorway into another room, this one brightly lit.

  This room was immense, and had been cleaned and polished so the gold shone almost blindingly. It looked like a burial chamber of the sort Lenny had seen in magazines—pictures of Egyptian tombs—but the iconography was completely different. Not Egyptian at all. Life-sized carvings of people covered the walls. At second glance, Lenny realized many of these people had multiple sets of arms. They weren’t people at all.

  They were gods.

  Professor Rangsay stood in the center of the room. His arms were crossed, and he was looking over one of the carvings like a critic in a museum. Lenny stepped inside, his hand casually on his rifle. The floor was different again. This was wood, and it shifted slightly under Lenny’s weight.

  “A gold temple and a wooden floor?” he asked.

  Rangsay didn’t move, almost as if he were expecting company. “The floor is temporary. There is a burial chamber below us. There was a false floor here, rotting away. We put this one in so we could clean up the walls.” Rangsay glanced at the floor and then up again at the walls. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Lenny. He moved fully into the room. At the end of the space, furthest from the entry, was a statue. It had to be ten feet tall. It was a man, or a version of a man, one that had multiple arms—Lenny counted eight. The face was serene, eyes closed, with the beginnings of a smile, like something belonging to the Mona Lisa.

  “Buddha?” asked Lenny.

  “Vishnu, actually,” said Professor Rangsay. He turned to look at the statue and Lenny came up beside him. The professor was still sweating despite the mild temperature of the cave.

  “What do you know about Hinduism?” asked Rangsay.

  “Not much.”

  “Vishnu is one of the principal deities in Hinduism, and the second of the Hindu triad. He is the protector of the universe. Brahma, the first of the triad, is the creator, and Shiva, the third, is the destroyer.”

  “The protector, huh? I like him.”

  “You mentioned Buddha. Buddha is what is known as an avatar of Vishnu, a form the god took when he came to earth to protect us.”

  “I thought I recognized him.” Lenny took his eyes from the statue and glanced around the room. “What is this place?”

  “As I said, it is a burial chamber.”

  “I mean this whole place?”

  “It is a temple.”

  “I get that, but why is it underground?”

  “I do not know,” said Rangsay. “That is what I hope to find out.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “Perseverance, sir. I did what an anthropologist does. I read, I researched. And then I got out in the field and I searched.” Rangsay turned to Lenny. “Have you heard of Angkor Wat?”

  “Professor Ung asked me the same question.”

  “I’m sure he did. And your answer was?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Did Ung tell you its history?”

  “A little. The previous regime—your friends, the Khmer Rouge—weren’t kind to it.”

  “They are not my friends, and people have been unkind to Angkor Wat long before Pol Pot. You see, it was once a great city, so much more than the temple that remains. It was the capital of the Khmer Empire, erected in the early twelfth century. But toward the end of that century, there was a gradual shift in the religion of the empire. Buddhism became the preferred religion over Hinduism.”

  “I thought Hindus revered Vishnu.”

  “Yes.”

  “But didn’t you just say Buddha is a version of Vishnu?”

  “Very good,” said Rangsay. “Indeed he is. The ninth avatar. But as is the way of man, one group will honor the god, and another will come to honor the human version of him, and soon they will believe two similar, but distinctly different things. So it goes. In the latter part of the twelfth century, Angkor Wat was sacked by the Chams—traditional enemies of the Khmer—and when the new king eventually restored the empire, he established a new capital. Angkor Wat transitioned to a Buddhist temple, which it remains today. I believe that around the time of the sacking of Angkor Wat and the move away from Hinduism, a group of Hindus established this temple.”

  “Why build it in a cave?”

  “As I say, that is what I hope to learn. I believe it may have been a defensive decision after the sacking of Angkor Wat, but there also may have been religious motivations.”

  “Okay, so why gold?”

 
; “As a testament to Vishnu, I suspect. Perhaps because the sun does not shine here, they built in gold to recreate the light. I don’t know, yet.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “There are hints of it in the literature, but no known locations or images. Passages here and there talking of a temple of gold, or a temple of darkness and light. Beyond that, I got out and scoured the earth. The research led me to the west of the country, and from there I did what a prospector does. I searched for gold.”

  Lenny nodded. It was an impressive sight, and he was impressed by Rangsay’s determination.

  “Professor Ung would be happy for you.”

  “Ung,” he said, scoffing. “The bookworm. He never could have found it. He thought I was wasting my time, collecting samples of soil, testing them at the university.”

  “So why was General Tan so interested in your temple?”

  “Tan? Huh. He was not—is not—interested. He does not care for history, nor does he understand its importance.”

  “So why are you still here? Why didn’t he kill you back when he killed so many at the university?”

  “Greed, sir. Greed. Before the fall of Phnom Penh he was no more than a rabble-rouser. He was easily led. All that talk of a free Khmer empire, all of us toiling side by side in the fields, with and for each other. He had not the education to know that he was being used. Pol Pot and his cronies, they are all educated men. They were the elite. They studied in France. Where do you think they learned of Marx and Lenin? They renounced education and academia, not because it was wrong but because it could challenge them. Uneducated fools like Tan were their foot soldiers. Tan neither believed in nor understood Marxism. But he understood my stories of golden temples.”