by Dave Bartell
“Where do you think ten million euros in diamonds came from? Rome abandoned Britannia long before their Empire fell, and I doubt they mined it out. I think some Roman miners reached Iceland and found kimberlite.”
“So where do we start? We can’t just show up in Iceland with a shovel,” said Ian.
“I’m more understated than that,” said Robert, taking a sip of his iced tea. Ian noticed the effort it took Robert to control the glass, almost like a child sitting at the grown-ups table and drinking from a big glass for the first time.
“Go on,” said Ian after Robert got the glass back on its coaster.
“A small stroke,” said Robert with a wave of his good hand. “The doctor says I’ll regain full use if I keep up my exercises. Anyway, I’ve been following the old professor, and it turns out his grandson has been researching Roman tunnels beneath London. Last week he was in central France exploring extinct volcanoes. He’s in Iceland now,” said Robert.
“What’s his name?”
“Darwin.”
Ian squinted as if in response to a poor joke.
“Really. It’s Darwin. Like I said, these people are eccentric dreamers,” said Robert. “We need to get you up there. If he were to find something, he’ll need experienced help.”
“Okay. It’s plausible, but I can’t just drop my business and run off on an adventure. What’s in it for me?” asked Ian.
“Three hundred thousand euros and thirty percent of any claim,” said Robert.
Ian stood and walked to the deck railing, grasping it with both hands. The day had warmed, and the breeze shifted onshore, carrying with it the warm saltiness of the Mediterranean Sea. He soaked in the sweeping curve of the rocky shoreline and the tourist-choked promenade. Far over the horizon loomed the vast continent of Africa. He had traveled to many of the European cities and the diamond cutting factories in India and South Asia but always felt a pull back to southern Africa. He loved the land, but its perennial turmoil was wearing on him.
He had been down this path before. Robert left wreckage in his wake. He was sophisticated and charming, but also deceitful. He derived pleasure from controlling and then beating people. That Ian had accepted the invitation to Nice was an admission that Robert still pulled the strings in his life.
But Robert was declining and Ian sensed the opportunity to sever their ties, or at least assert a more dominant position. He needed money to attract better-paying clients to his business. The cash Robert had promised would do it, but Ian had seen diamond deposits. There could be serious money involved if the discovery panned out.
“I’m interested,” said Ian, sitting back down at the table. “But the diamond evidence is weak. I’d need at least a million for the job and a much higher percentage stake.”
“How much higher?” asked Robert.
They negotiated a final job price of €500,000 and a forty percent stake in any find. Robert agreed on €250,000 up front as good faith, and Ian moved to the kitchen to brew more tea while the transfer was made.
“What’s your plan?” asked Ian when he saw the alert from his account confirming the deposit.
“Simple—at a high level, we get you on any exploration with this guy Darwin. He’s talented, but has no experience with the kinds of logistics required.”
“What, we’re just going to ring him up and say, ‘Hey, Darwin, I hear you need tunnel experts’.”
“No. We’ll work around him. Leave that to me,” said Robert.
25
The Dig Site
After lunch Darwin grabbed his backpack and caving helmet from the trunk. It turned out he had parked a couple meters from Eyrún’s car.
“What does… your company… uh—” He paused.
“Stjörnu Energy,” said Eyrún.
“Yeah. What do they do?”
“We generate electricity with the geothermal energy from the volcanic infrastructure below the island,” she said.
“What do you do?” asked Darwin.
“Geologist monitoring the thermal activity for anomalies.”
“Is it dangerous?” asked Darwin, trying to make the conversation flow.
“Not unless you go looking for trouble,” she said, gathering her hair into a pony tail and snugging on her helmet.
“I hear there are a lot of lava tubes in Iceland,” he continued.
“All over,” she said and turned to Pétur to get his helmet on.
“What about Assa?” asked Eyrún.
“She has a deadline to meet. How long will we be?” asked Pétur.
“A couple hours at most, unless it’s a dead-end,” said Eyrún.
“Sounds about right,” Darwin added.
Eyrún slid through the opening first, followed by Darwin and Pétur. The walls were ragged and cracked as if some master stone mason had an aversion to squares. The color palette started at dark brown and faded to black, like soot-coated nineteenth-century buildings.
An occasional orange rock on the floor exposed unoxidized iron rich rock that matched its mate on the wall from where it had fallen. Blotches of lichen and other saprophytic plant life dotted the floors and walls like random bird droppings. It smelled like a damp, moldy basement.
Darwin tried to make a mental map of the underground space as they went. At present, he figured they were about twenty meters left and ten below the room where they began. His caving buddy Zac taught him to visualize himself like the small dot in a video game.
“Think of it this way,” Zac had said last summer in Darwin’s office at UC Berkeley. “We’re in your office, right? In two-dimensional space, there’s a door, a hallway, stairs and so on. In three-dimensional space, we’re on the third floor. But someone is sitting over our heads and someone else is below your chair. There’s a basement and an underground corridor that runs under that path you see out your window. Now imagine those offices, corridors, and stairwells are surrounded by solid rock instead of open air. That’s a cave.”
At the time, they were collaborating on a research project in the Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. During a war in 1872, the Native American Modoc tribe used lava tubes to their advantage against the US Army’s superior force. Darwin had used the project to bolster research on his Londinium theory of the Romans and Icenians.
“This looks like a braided maze, but with all the cave-ins, it’s hard to get a sense of the layout,” said Eyrún.
“What’s a braided maze?” asked Pétur.
“It’s when the lava tubes split and rejoin creating a series of interconnected tunnels that overlap each other. Something like braided hair,” she said.
“How do lava tubes form?” asked Pétur.
“Lava flowing on flatter areas acts like a river. It erodes the soil underneath and cuts a channel, but air cools the lava, so the sides harden as the flow cuts deeper. The top crusts over forming a roof. The flowing lava keeps cutting deeper underground and, when the eruption ends, the lava drains out leaving a tube,” said Darwin.
“I think I get it,” said Pétur.
“There are great pictures online I can show you later. Hand me that big light,” said Darwin. He took it and crawled halfway into the space on the other side of a rock pile that was blocking the tube. Suddenly, there was a muffled yell.
“What?!” yelled Pétur and Eyrún.
Darwin pushed himself back out the opening and turned his head toward them. “Sorry, forgot my head was in the hole. I said I think there’s a window in the chamber on the other side. Bring the rope up here. Careful. The rocks are loose and a little sharp.”
“A window?” asked Pétur.
“A hole where the lava flowed down to another tube,” said Eyrún.
Pétur followed Darwin up the rock pile. A few of the rocks slid and made a hollow scraping sound as he groped his way into the half-meter-high opening. “Are you sure this is safe?” he asked Darwin, who was now down the other side of the pile.
“It’s safe, Pétur,” said Eyrún from
behind. “It’s been here five hundred years, but nothing has ever crawled over it, so the rocks are just settling.”
“Okay,” said Pétur, who continued through the opening. They entered a circular cavern about ten meters across that had a different feel than the rough tube on the other side of the rock pile. The walls curved smoothly from floor to ceiling and gave more feeling of being in a sewer complex than a natural cave. There was a two-meter-wide hole in the floor just off center.
Eyrún explained that the lava flowed in through the opening they climbed over and swirled around like a drain, before dropping down the hole. They crawled to the edge and shined the light down exposing another chamber about three meters below. Its floor was circular about seven meters in diameter and resembled a satellite dish. Rocks lay strewn across its surface. The far end of the chamber ran away into darkness.
“Whoa!” said Darwin, lifting his head and smiling at Eyrún.
“What?” asked Pétur.
“Big lava tube.” He waved the light around the dark opening.
They tied the ropes and clipped on harnesses for the short belay to the floor below. Pétur sat with his back against the wall, heels braced on a ridge in the floor. The short depth required nothing more technical. Darwin and Eyrún needed an anchor to lower themselves into the hole and pull themselves back out. Eyrún reached the bottom first and tested the concave floor by banging a rock. The sound echoed in the surrounding chamber.
“What are you doing?” said Pétur, crawling to the edge and peering down.
“Making sure it’s solid,” said Eyrún. “The lava pooled into a lake before running down the far tube. As it cooled on top it might have receded underneath, leaving a false floor.”
Darwin walked around the edge of the curved floor to the opening on the other side. The room went dim when he shined the light into the tube on the far side. “Merde,” he said.
“What?” asked Eyrún, unclipping herself from the rope.
“Darwin, Eyrún, wait,” yelled Pétur. “You said we weren’t going far.”
Darwin turned and walked back into Pétur’s headlamp spot. “I’m looking for something. I’ll know in a few meters if it’s here.” He retreated from view. He walked about ten meters into a yawning opening about twice his height and wide enough for a two-lane road. The enormous lava tube swallowed his light as it ran to an infinity point. He ran his light around the walls and estimated that this tube was similar in size to the one in Clermont-Ferrand. Could it be connected? he thought.
He turned his light to its highest setting and scanned the left wall. They were forested by a slime that grew in unappetizing yellows and burnt oranges. Stalactites hung like snot from the ceiling adding to the creepy feeling.
“Hey?” Pétur called after a couple minutes.
“We’re fine,” Eyrún yelled back. “We’re just out of sight, but hear you fine.”
“See anything?”
“Massive lava tube. Give us a few more minutes.”
Darwin caught something in the beam. A clear spot on the wall. He moved closer. Nothing. Just some of the tube wall sloughed off, leaving clean rock underneath.
“What are you looking for?” asked Eyrún.
He jumped. She had crossed over behind him and asked the question almost in his ear.
“Uh, it’s hard to explain,” he said, turning toward her.
“Can I help?” she asked.
He turned back to the wall and he saw it. A patch where the lichens and other growth was thinner. He stepped up to the wall and lifted the light high over his head to minimize the reflection. There it was. No doubt about it. He felt the blood pound in his ears. An Aquila symbol.
He pulled out his iPhone and scrolled to a photo. The chisel marks were identical.
“It’s the same,” said Darwin to himself.
“What?”
“A marker,” he said, holding the photo for her to see.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “The Romans came down here?”
“They did,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later. Hold the light over here,” he said and snapped photos.
When he finished, she stepped in for a closer look.
“There’s something else here,” said Eyrún.
He stepped up next to her. There was something else, partially obscured by the lichen. A single handprint just below the Aquila and a name scratched in the dark rock:
A. CICERO
“Oh my god,” he said.
Darwin reached out with his right hand and placed it over Agrippa’s. The rock was cold, but he felt a tingle.
26
When they returned, the sun was still well up in the sky at 5:30 p.m. Darwin noted that they were gone just shy of two and a half hours. Everyone left their pits and sat around, wide-eyed, talking about the lava tube. They all wanted to see it, but Pétur said it was too dangerous. Kristín assigned him as the dig foreman.
“Why do you suppose the Romans went down that far?” asked one of the grad students.
“That’s just too much for me to think about,” said Pétur with Assa at his side, arms locked around his waist. “Hilmar said to come by about seven. I don’t think we will get any more done here today. How about we put everything away and head up to the farm?”
No one objected.
Darwin texted a photo of the handprint to Emelio while they secured the site for the evening. He called him during the short drive to Hilmar’s house because sometimes Emelio did not respond to texts for days.
“Darwin!” answered Emelio.
“Did you see the photo I texted you?” asked Darwin.
“Found what?”
“The lava tube in Iceland. Look at the picture I texted you.”
“Wait. Let me look at this thing,” said Emelio, sounding father away.
Darwin waited, knowing Emelio was looking for his reading glasses and then looking for the messaging app. He had helped Emelio organize his iPhone a few weeks earlier.
Emelio whistled, then said, “Is that a lava tube?”
“Yeah. It’s as big as the tube in Clermont-Ferrand and it runs out under the ocean. It also has the same markers as in France and that handprint under the Aquila points to the tube.”
“What handprint… oh, I see it. That’s amazing. Who else knows about this?” said Emelio.
“I’m here with a local guy named Pétur. He’s part of the team from the University. We’re the first people to go down the tunnels. Well he and a woman name Eyrún, but I didn’t tell them about connecting to the UK.”
“Can you keep this quiet?” asked Emelio.
“I doubt it. Everyone on the dig site knows.”
“Well, keep me posted. People like treasures. We’re not the only ones looking for bits of old Rome,” said Emelio.
Hilmar’s farm comprised ten hectares starting at the base of the hills down to the ocean, but the only arable land stopped at the Ring Road. He grew oats and barley during the short cool summers which provided income and feed for the Icelandic sheep that free-ranged most of the property.
Three houses contained the expanding family. A larger main house where Hilmar lived with his wife, Margrét. His son Jón and his wife, Greta, and their three children lived in the second. His daughter Brynhildur and son-in-law Sveinn, who also had three children, lived in the third. Darwin lost track of who belonged to whom. He figured this did not matter much anyway, as everyone used first names.
About thirty people gathered at the end of a day to share drinks, food and stories. The sun warmed the surrounding vegetation and a light breeze mixed the fragrances of crops and roasting meat. Beers in hand, everyone gathered around the appetizers. Darwin felt an arm wrap around his back and a large hand squeeze his shoulder.
“Tell me about this remarkable find, Darwin. I never suspected this kind of thing would be discovered on my land,” said Hilmar.
“You’ve heard most of what there is to tell,” replied Darw
in.
“But I want to hear it in your words. What about this Roman fellow who left some kind of mark?”
Darwin retold the story as a few others joined around. When he finished, Hilmar asked, “So what happens now?”
“Not sure. The dig belongs to the University. I’ll call Kristín later and tell her what we found.”
“Humph,” Hilmar squinted at Darwin and seemed to be about to say more when a bell proclaimed dinner was ready.
Just about when Darwin thought he would burst from all the food, the pies came out. Margrét laid out pies made from bilberries the children had picked up the small canyon behind the farm. His warm slice oozed a blue purple juice into the homemade ice cream. The tastes bounded around his mouth—tart, sweet, creamy, vanilla. He liked this place, though he suspected he might feel different in January.
The party was still going strong when Darwin, Pétur, Assa, and Eyrún left for the cabins. Darwin stared out the windshield at the landscape muted in twilight.
“What do you think we should do next?” asked Pétur.
“Huh?” said Darwin.
“About the tube.”
“First thing is to tell Kristín,” said Darwin.
“How far do you think it goes?”
“Hard to tell. I suppose we can follow it.” Darwin had figured he would find another tube like Clermont-Ferrand, but the thought of following a tube under the ocean was almost beyond imagining.
Pétur’s mobile chirped. He looked at it, then down the road at Eyrún’s car. “Darwin, I wonder if I could ask something?”
“Go ahead,” said Darwin.
“It’s okay to say ‘no’.”
Darwin glanced at Pétur and said, “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s our anniversary, Assa’s and mine, three years, and, well, would you mind if Assa and I stayed together?” asked Pétur. “I mean, you share with Eyrún.”
“Just for sleeping,” he tacked on.
“Um,” Darwin considered the question.
