by Max McCoy
"Bats," Indy muttered. "Still not so bad. I can handle bats. Just mice with wings. Maybe I shouldn't have scared the cougar away."
Ten minutes later the commotion in the cavern had died down enough for him to attempt to relight the flame of the carbide lamp. He unclipped the bulky brass lamp from his helmet, thumbed the flint wheel, and a shower of sparks ignited the oxyacetylene gas with a satisfying pop.
"Good," Indy said as he returned the light to his helmet.
He shimmied up the rope, scrambled onto the ledge, and after making sure the mountain lion really was gone, cut the rope below the frayed portion. Then he hauled in the wet rope and, as he slung it over his shoulder, noted that it was both heavier and colder than before.
He returned to the fork in the passage and took the left branch again. This time, when he reached the literal dead end where the cowboy lay, he inspected the area more carefully.
There were no marks or other unusual features on the smooth expanse in front of him, or on either wall. The floor was the same as the rest of the path. Then he looked up. He was at the bottom of a narrow chimney that led up into darkness.
"Pardner," Indy said consolingly to the dead cowboy, "you fell."
Indy turned his pack around so that it rode against his chest, and readjusted the coil of rope. Carefully, he straddled the remains of the cowboy. He put his back against one wall and his feet against the other and began to inch his way up the chimney. The walls were smooth and, in places, slick, so he had to proceed very cautiously. Also, the higher he rose in the chimney, the farther apart the walls were. What had begun as a rather snug and easy climb had become an uncomfortable and dangerous test of flexibility and coordination. A false move could result in a twenty-foot plunge.
Just when he thought the walls were too far apart for him to go any farther, Indy found a handhold chiseled into the rock behind him. He searched for another, higher, and found it. Carefully he turned around, jammed his fingers in the holes, and began to climb even higher.
Forty feet above his starting point, the chimney ended in another lateral passage. Indy threw the pack up over the lip of the chimney into the passage, then pulled himself up. A turtle was carved into the floor, its head pointing deeper into the mountain.
"Okay," Indy said as he stood up and brushed the dirt from his pants and the elbows of his jacket. "I've made it this far. I'm still game."
He slung the pack, by one strap, over his shoulder, but just as he was about to take a step he froze. In the dust that had collected on the floor of the passage, at the edge of the shaft, he could discern the outline of a bare, left human foot. The toes were pointed toward him.
Indy glanced back at the mouth of the shaft, then down the passage toward the beckoning darkness. He crouched down and dabbed a finger into the dust, then rubbed the red sandlike stuff between his thumb and index finger.
"It could be a thousand years old," he said to himself, "or it could have been made this morning. Which is it?"
He brushed his fingers and stood up.
"There's only one way to find out," he muttered.
There was little dust and no footprints as he went deeper into the passage, and his only guide was the occasional turtle sign urging him to go on. From the lip of the shaft he had been counting his steps, and although he had traversed less than the length of a football field, the oppressive atmosphere made it feel as if he had journeyed to the very center of the mountain. Again, the sound of water was growing louder.
On his ninety-seventh stride, Indy stopped.
The passage opened into a small natural cavern and then appeared to end in a shimmering waterfall cascading upward. The torrent emerged, geyserlike, from a pool in the floor and appeared to be swallowed by the ceiling.
For a moment Indy was dumbfounded.
Then he extended his hand toward the water and his fingers met cold, translucent calcite. Over the ages the mineral had followed the course of the water to form the elaborate drapes and folds of a real waterfall. Beyond his fingertips, beneath the veneer of calcite, the water still flowed, but because of a steady stream of air bubbles appeared to surge upward. The water was falling in the direction dictated by gravity, but the air in the water was coursing upward as demanded by physics.
Indy guessed that the water had passed through so many layers of finely porous limestone that it had become charged with air, like the mechanically pumped water in an aquarium.
Indy searched the formation for a passage through or around it, and his expectations were realized when he found, behind one of the calcite folds, a small opening at the base.
He got down on his hands and knees and examined the opening, but he had to hold the lamp at such an odd angle that he could tell little. He pushed the lamp ahead of him and squeezed his head and shoulders into the opening, then had to twist his hips around to accommodate his legs.
The sides of the passage were cold and damp.
It had started fairly straight, but soon began to meander at crazy angles through the rock. In negotiating one particularly sharp curve, Indy's pack became wedged between his back and the wall, and became stuck even tighter when he attempted to pull it free.
Indy grumbled, shifted the position of the Webley on his hip, and laboriously turned over. The pack came free, but he now found himself on his back. He continued for a few more yards, then began to hear the blood rushing in his ears, and it occurred to him that his head was suddenly lower than his feet. The farther he went, the steeper the angle became.
Indy's stomach sank—or did it rise?—with the realization that he could no longer back up. He attempted to wiggle his way back up, but the angle was too steep, and he was going in the wrong direction.
For a moment he had a vision of the next generation of explorers finding his skeleton jammed in the narrow passage. The wisest of the cavers would inspect the rotting leather jacket, the rusted gun, and the frayed bullwhip, then shake his head sadly and comment to the others: "Poor devil didn't know he was in trouble until it was too late."
Indy wiggled harder.
It was the wrong thing to do.
The hard hat—with the attached carbide light—fell from his head. Indy tried to grab it, but could not free his arms. The hard hat slid down the passage, illuminating successive portions like the headlight of a locomotive passing through a tunnel before winking out of sight about thirty yards away.
Indy forced himself to stay calm.
He had no choice but to go forward.
He inched his way along on his elbows and knees. As the angle became even steeper he began to slide. He used his feet against the side of the passage to slow his descent. When he reached the place where the hard hat had disappeared, he suddenly discovered why: the passage turned down and became another chimney, and Indy plunged headfirst into it.
He broke the ten-foot fall with his forearms, landing next to the hat in a bed of red clay. It was upside down but the carbide lamp was still burning, and what Indy saw by its flickering light took his breath away.
The chamber was heaped with gold.
Along the rock ledge against the wall were mounds of gleaming nuggets, some the size of walnuts. Here and there were piles of quartz, and even at a distance Indy could see the thick veins of gold that ran through the crystals. There were stacks of ingots as well, cast by the conquistadores shortly after their arrival in—and plundering of—the New World. There were piles of Spanish armor, mostly helmets and breastplates, and a couple of heavy swords. There were three Wells Fargo strongboxes, a golden communion cup studded with jewels, and a long chain made of golden links.
In the center of the chamber was a massive calcite formation that nature had shaped into something resembling a sacrificial altar. On top of the altar was a carefully constructed ring of human skulls encircling a pile of jewelry and old gold coins. Poking its diamond-shaped head from the center of this pile was a world-record rattlesnake—obviously stuffed, Indy noticed with relief.
The snake and t
he skulls glittered curiously in the light.
They had been sprinkled with gold dust.
He counted thirteen skulls, and although most were yellow and brittle with age, a few were chillingly white. One was whiter than all the rest, the black crust on it undoubtedly dried blood.
Indy turned slowly as he surveyed the room, mesmerized by the amount of wealth and half expecting to see a naked wild man swinging a sword at his head.
There was more wealth in the chamber than could have possibly come from the Guadalupes. Every period of the last five hundred years of the history of the Americas was represented in some fashion.
Indy felt light-headed.
It wasn't the value of the objects that made him dizzy, but the untold history behind them. How many lives had been lost in the struggle for so much wealth, and how many chapters in the history books would have to be rewritten to accommodate this one magnificent room? Indy had an urge to take out his pencil and notebook and make a quick survey of the chamber, to take the first step in the long road to understanding, but he knew that was forbidden. He was an interloper here, a mercenary, a thief; it was justifiable thievery, perhaps, but thievery nonetheless. The chamber had to remain secret for now. It wasn't just that Indy did not want people asking questions about this particular expedition; he wanted to protect the chamber as well. He suspected it was still actively used as a storage area by the Apaches—or at the very least, judging from the most recent addition to the calcite altar, it was being actively guarded. In ages to come, the chamber might belong to history, but for the present Indy knew it must belong only to the Apaches.
His price for keeping the secret was three bars of gold.
He took them from the nearest stack of Spanish ingots. From their markings Indy knew the bars had originally been minted far away, and that would make them difficult to trace back to this chamber in the Guadalupes.
Then he searched for a way out.
The answer, of course, was in the footprints in the clay floor. They matched the one he had discovered earlier on the floor of the passage. They threaded their way through the treasure trove, around the calcite altar, and to a doorway on the other side.
Indy paused and took one last look at the chamber of gold, as if to imprint it in his memory. He was still looking back over his shoulder as he stepped through the doorway. As soon as his foot fell on the ancient wooden panel set in the floor, and he felt the sickening click! of its mechanism engaging, he knew he should have been looking down instead.
Indy plummeted through the darkness in a torrent of dust and debris that threatened to choke him. Then he struck the surface of the subterranean lake with a tremendous splash.
At the shock of the cold water, Indy reflexively sucked air into his lungs just before his head disappeared beneath the surface. The gold bars, as heavy as lead weights, were dragging him to the bottom. Indy fought against the straps as he sank, and the helmet with the extinguished carbide lamp fell away, but he had other problems to worry about. As he managed to squirm his left shoulder out of the pack, he felt his knees touch the rocky bottom. Now that he was no longer tumbling through the water, it was easier to deal with the potentially deadly burden. He slid the pack down his right arm, but did not release it to the keeping of the dark water. Holding tightly to one of the straps with his right hand, he found the end of the coil of rope with his left. He brought his hands together, threaded the rope through the strap, then tied it. His lungs were beginning to ache, but Indy told himself that he had come too far to leave the gold behind now; he took the time to find the other end of the rope and loop it beneath his belt. Then he took the Webley from its holster and shoved it blindly in the pack before kicking hard for the surface.
From the relatively mild water pressure on his ears, Indy knew the lake was less than twenty feet deep, but the swim to the surface against the drag of the rope made it seem like a hundred and twenty. He broke the water and instinctively threw his head back to clear the water from his eyes, but without light there was nothing to see in the cavern. Indy chose a direction and began swimming, hoping that he had not picked the long way across the lake.
Soon his shins were scraping on a rocky bottom, and he stood in the shallow water. By touch, he hauled in the heavy pack as he coiled the rope. He slipped the rope and the pack over his shoulder, then felt for the bullwhip at his side. It was still there.
He searched his pockets for something, anything, which would make light. But Indy did not have so much as a cigarette lighter; because he didn't smoke, he had never gotten into the habit of carrying one. He didn't need one for the carbide light, because it had its own striker. He had tucked some matches in the pack, but of course they had since been drenched. And, Indy thought, that probably wasn't the only thing the water had ruined.
"Fudge," Indy said. He would ordinarily have uttered a stronger expletive, but dire circumstances always made him a little more careful with his language, just in case it mattered. Somehow, Indy knew that it did.
"What am I going to tell Marcus?" he wondered aloud. Then: "Well, that's assuming I get the chance to tell Marcus anything. If I don't get out of here, I won't have to worry about it, but that seems a rather extreme way to avoid telling a friend some bad news."
Indy hesitated.
Talking to himself was a way of easing tension. It was also a good way of gauging his level of anxiety, because he had learned never to readily admit—not even to himself—his own misgivings, especially when a situation demanded action instead of reflection. He knew that the more he talked to himself, the more worried he became.
Indy took a couple of steps forward, then stumbled.
He sat for a moment in the water, looking blankly around him, not willing yet to concede that his eyes had been rendered useless.
He shouted: "Hey!"
The sound of his own voice echoed harshly back to him from half a dozen directions, but none offered a clue as to which one he should take.
He listened harder.
Somewhere, just at the edge of his hearing, Indy was able to catch the whisper of rain falling. Then, more distinctly, the rumble of thunder.
He closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side like an owl as he attempted to locate the source of the familiar sound. He was concentrating so intently that the sound seemed to exist in the middle of his head, a three-dimensional thing that had color and form: the rain was blue and mistlike, while the thunder was streaks of orange. When he turned his head to the left, the sound dimmed, but as he turned back the sound and color grew until reaching their maximum when his nose was pointed at a forty-five-degree angle to the right.
His eyes still shut, Indy stood and began to make his way cautiously toward the sound of the rain. He did not hurry, for fear of stumbling over a rock and breaking his leg, and he tested each step before he placed his foot down, for fear of plunging down a chasm to his death. But he kept the image of the rain clearly fixed in his mind's eye.
Indy crept along in this fashion for another fifty yards or so, every so often bruising his shin against an unseen boulder. Then he would stop for a moment, let the pain subside, and again take his bearings. Although it was a painful and slow process, at the end of every repetition of the cycle, the sound of the rain grew more distinct.
An hour later he came up against a wall.
Indy was certain he had been on a correct heading, and that the obstacle was not a solid expanse, but perhaps a ledge. He could not, however, reach the top of it with his outstretched fingers.
He uncoiled the bullwhip and flicked it upward, testing the barrier. The whip hung suspended for a moment before its own weight pulled it lazily down, looping over his head and shoulder.
"Ah," he said with satisfaction.
He used a couple of practice strokes to pay out the length of the whip behind him, then put his back into it as he cracked the whip up into the darkness. The tip lashed itself around the base of a stalagmite.
Indy tested his weight against
the makeshift grappling hook a couple of times, then pulled himself up the ten-foot drop hand over hand. The leather whip creaked and groaned in protest, but held firm. When he finally scrambled onto the ledge, he was rewarded by the sight of a pinpoint of light shimmering at the far end of the tunnel. The sound of the rain was louder here, and it was more than just the sound of rain; it had become the sound of rushing water.
Indy drew in the bullwhip and rested on his knees for a moment, staring at the light.
"Good thing it's still daylight out," he said.
The pinpoint of light seemed to dance, however, swinging from side to side and then zooming up before floating back down.
Indy shook his head and looked again.
Still, the light seemed to move.
"Autokinesis," Indy told himself. "A visual phenomenon in which a stationary light seems to move of its own volition. That's what it has to be."
Indy gathered up his things, struggled to his feet, and began to advance cautiously down the tunnel toward the light—which still seemed to sway as if it were a lantern carried in front of someone.
"Hallo!" a voice echoed down the corridor. "Mr. Jones, are you in here?"
Indy stopped dead.
"Yes!" he said. "Right here!"
"Are you unhurt?"
"Yes!"
"Then come quickly toward me," the voice called. "There is much danger."
"I have no light," Indy called.
"There is no time. Do your best."
Indy began to step quickly along, feeling his way as best he could. He had approached close enough to the light that he could make out the floor and sides of the tunnel in its beam, and the hazy shadow of a figure standing at its end.
Then he bumped his head on the low ceiling and, at the same time, lost his footing and fell up to his armpits in a hole in the floor. He tried to pull himself out, but his right arm was wedged too tightly against his body.
