Beneath the Dark Ice ah-1

by Greig Beck

  The first leg to Macquarie Island, though the shortest, seemed to take forever. When the door of the helicopter finally slid back, a desolate granite landscape was revealed with a freezing wind that moaned its loneliness to a few wet-eyed seals lying at the grey water’s edge. They were meant to stretch their legs, but the cold made the very marrow in Aimee’s bones ache and she just pulled her parka hood further down over her face. Mercifully, the HAWCs managed to refuel in only thirty minutes and they shot up once again to complete their trip. No one spoke this time and most chose to simply doze or stare introspectively at their shoes. Even the HAWCs, now wrapped in their white snow coveralls, looked like hibernating polar bears, conserving their energy for the tasks ahead.

  In Dante Alighieri’s vision of hell, the lowest circle of Hades appeared as a frozen lake that leached all warmth from the human body and spirit. His allegorical imagery of perpetual frozenness was thought by some to be a metaphor for distance from the grace of God’s warmth.

  Aimee was reminded of those passages from Dante’s work as she looked at the flat stretches of white terrain covered by rolling, wind-driven waves of frozen snow and ice. The cold stung her nose and made her eyes water; even her teeth hurt. Before he left, Tom had told her it was the coldest place on earth, with vicious winds called katabatics that could reach 200 miles per hour and freeze-blacken the skin in seconds. Far from God’s warmth, Aimee thought again, and took a shuddering breath that seared the back of her throat.

  They huddled just inside the doors of the helicopter as the HAWCs quickly unloaded the equipment. Apart from the soldiers, no one was desperately keen to jump out into a hostile environment that stung any exposed areas of the face and made the breath leave your body in white plumes like a flock of small ghosts.

  First Lieutenant John Johnson appeared in the doorway and shouted over the top of the howling wind. “OK people, we’ve been given the all-clear on any gas traces, so no need for the breathing equipment. The drop lines are still in place from the previous mission team, so we’ll use those and have a first briefing on the cave floor. You’ll actually find it a lot more hospitable down there than up here.”

  Aimee turned to wave to the helicopter pilot, before it immediately dusted off to the McMurdo American base for refuelling. The additional gusts from the rotor blades barely made any difference to the stinging winds swirling around them.

  The team stopped and looked at the enormous hole before them. It dropped away to an inky blackness and no walls could be seen at or under the rim — that meant that where they were standing was probably hollow underneath. Aimee’s stomach gave a little flip, and for the first time she felt like refusing to go any further. She steeled herself and tried to bolster her spirits with a little “come on, girl, you’re tougher than this” speech. Waiting for her turn at the edge of the giant black hole, it seemed to make little difference today.

  By now all the equipment had been lowered into the cavern and two of the HAWCs had dropped over the edge. Another of the soldiers, who had to be Tank given his size, grabbed Monica and Matt Kerns and harnessed them into a drop cradle. The carriage itself was little more than a seat made of straps attached to a winch device bolted to the ice. Tank walked the strapped-in team members towards the edge, briefly held his hand up to his ear to receive some form of communication from the cave floor, nodded to the passengers and then pushed them gently out into the abyss.

  When it was Aimee’s turn to be lowered into the pit, Tank grabbed her by the harness and gently walked her to the edge. She was thankful for the large man pulling her forward as her legs would have flatly refused her own command to move. The butterflies that had previously tickled her insides had now churned her entire diaphragm into a whirlwind of giddiness that threatened to spill up over her lips. She looked down at her feet, now on the very lip of the black hole, and flashes started to go off in her head. Just as unconsciousness threatened to take her she heard Tank’s deep voice close to her ear. “Dr. Weir, don’t close your eyes, don’t look down; just stay focused on me or the rope.” She smiled at him, but was glad he didn’t see her expression as she suspected it looked more like a frightened rictus. Tank finally pushed her and she spun down into the darkness. Her mouth filled with saliva and she swallowed hard while concentrating on the rope in front of her; never had rope fibres fascinated her so much.

  The relay continued for twenty minutes as the HAWCs rushed to get everyone out of the elements as quickly as possible. When Aimee touched down on the cave floor what immediately struck her was the sheer size of the cavern. Equipment had been unpacked and lights constructed facing primarily outward from their camp, set up just under the southern lip of the ceiling drop area. Truck-sized boulders were heaped towards the centre among some airplane debris; however the rest of the cave was surprisingly bare. It was definitely warmer out of the Antarctic wind; in fact, much warmer than it should have been. The team had removed their bulky snow clothes and now just wore their heated cave suits. As yet, no one needed to turn their helmet lights on as they were still close to the giant column of light that poured into the cave through the ceiling.

  Within minutes of hitting the ground Aimee felt the final effects of vertigo leave her muscles, and with her vision cleared she quickly looked about the cavern floor for traces of Tom’s party or anything to give a clue to his whereabouts. She could feel a trickle of perspiration under her helmet and as she pulled off her bulky parka, Silex appeared beside her. She turned to him and asked, “It shouldn’t be so warm; volcanic activity, you think?”

  Silex nodded. “Hmm, it’s got to be twenty degrees warmer down here than up there — above freezing easily. It does all make sense, though. The Antarctic is still quite geologically active. We surface dwellers just don’t know about it as most of it happens under the ice. In fact, Mt. Erebus is erupting constantly.”

  “You’re probably right. That would account for the ice cap being so thin here, allowing the plane to break through, and also why this cave system isn’t totally iced up.” Aimee drew in a breath and wrinkled her nose. “Do you smell that? Strange — sharp and acrid, a bit like ammonia.”

  Silex moved in closer to her. “Sub-surface oils can contain all sorts of natural contaminants — paraffins, cycloparaffins, aromatic hydrocarbons. Hell, I’ve smelt deep pumped oil that smelled of roses one moment and rotten eggs the next. Every time it’s different,” Silex tried to look rakish, but ended up just leering. “I love being out in the field.”

  Aimee didn’t like the way he was peering into her face as he spoke. “Aimee, I know you miss Tom and I know you don’t want my sympathy, but we’ll find out what happened to him. I really hope we can work together and learn from each other. I can help you a lot with your career. In fact, I think you should head up your own company; you know you’re good enough. It would be my pleasure to help in any way I can.” His head was bobbing up and down slightly, like a heron scanning for tadpoles. He reached out to grasp her upper arm. Aimee smoothly intercepted it with her own hand and turned it into a friendly handshake.

  “That’s very kind of you, Dr. Silex, thank you.” Maybe she had been overly sensitive. Maybe he just has a very different personality to what I’m used to, she thought. He’s probably more worried about me than anything else. She released his hand, gave him a small nod and a smile.

  “OK, you just let me know if I can help. Well, we’ve got work to do. And please, call me Adrian!” With that he turned and gave a friendly wave over his shoulder and headed briskly towards the main group.

  Monica surveyed the giant hollow carefully. From her experience, caves could be anything from wet and slimy, to dry and dusty, and for the most part unless they were newly formed via earth movement, they were geologically very old. This cave bothered her — it was strange. It had to be millions of years old, but there appeared to be areas that looked recently gouged — although recent in geological terms could mean tens of thousands of years. The ceiling was what she expected, but the ground an
d walls of the cave looked like something had been dragged along them, abrading every protuberance smooth. Glacier pipes could do that — the heavy, dense ice moving underground and wearing away the rock over a period of thousands of years, but usually they needed more of a slope — strange.

  The light from above coupled with their eyes now adjusting to the semi-darkness allowed the farther walls to be seen in more detail. To everyone else it just looked like more broken cave debris, but to Matt Kerns it was a magical impossibility.

  “Can’t be, can it be? Not Mayan, no, no older, much, much older.” He scurried off from the group with Monica in pursuit, trying to slow him down.

  Alex noticed the small commotion and called to Takeda, pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at Matt’s disappearing back. Takeda nodded and followed them. Once Matt was in among the fallen debris he stood for a few seconds, waving his torch back and forth so he could take it all in. Though heavily worn, two colossal stone heads, lips full, the noses wide and the faces flat and broad could be made out from the broken rocks. Both were about nine feet in height and looked to weigh close to twenty tons each. There also seemed to be a destroyed dwelling which was actually carved into the wall — not built onto it, but hewn from the very cave wall itself.

  “Wow, are these the Mayan ruins you were so excited about back home?” asked Monica.

  “Yes. I mean no. Looks a little like Mayan but so much older. Even older than Olmec, thousands of years older, but still with some similarities. Mayan statues are usually carved to represent their rulers as being benign and all-knowing. These look to be in pain or great fear and I don’t know what these coils are meant to represent wrapped around them; wait, there’s picture writing.”

  Matt stuffed his torch into his pocket and rushed again to another section, trying to balance among the jumble of debris and take multiple photographs of the artifacts at the same time. The corner of the cave where they worked flared brightly and darkened in time with his camera motor drive.

  “You can read that?” asked Monica.

  “Pictoglyphs — picture symbols. It’s writing, but in a series of images — you don’t read it, you interpret it. I doubt anyone today could translate all of it. The problem is the symbols don’t represent letters; sometimes they’re syllables, words, sometimes sounds or even ideas. Primitive and complex at the same time, but still a whole phonetic language system. Looks like Mayan or Olmec, but the Olmecs had about two hundred characters, the Mayans even more. However, there are some images here I’ve never seen before. You know, there’s probably only two people in the entire world who could even attempt to read this, and one of them is in Central America right now.”

  “OK, I’ll bite, who’s the other one?”

  Matt had his torch back out. He shone it on his face and smiled. “Stand back, beautiful, this is where the magic happens. Ahhh, if I had more time I could probably draw out more of its meaning. The best I can do is to give you a guesslation, and at this point it’ll be heavy on the guessing part. Don’t blame me if I tell you it’s about a boy with a banana stuck in his ear though.”

  Matt ran his hands over some of the glyphs, and then changed to another section looking for a place to start. “Interesting. Some of these symbols look Mesoamerican. This single glyph here of two identical kneeling warriors is very similar to one in Mayan that represents a pair of demi-god brothers, from their original creation myth. They were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque and spent their life annoying or outwitting troublesome gods.” Matt scanned ahead along the carvings, narrowing his eyes at an image, his lips moving as if working a new word around in his mouth before continuing.

  Without turning he started to speak again. “OK, this might well be some sort of variation on one of the most ancient Mayan myths, but as there are so many different character sets I’m going to make a few pretty big leaps here. From what I can translate, it tells a story of a secret or hidden underworld.” Matt moved to the next row of symbols and continued. “Anyway, these monstrous underworld dwellers had a mixture of human, reptilian and other animal characteristics. That might mean bits of those animals or they chose to change themselves into all of them at once. It also tells how the king sent an army to journey into a realm of horrors beneath the earth to defeat the enemies of ‘All People.’ Hmm, don’t know what this next one means, or this… Strange symbols. You don’t have a spare Rosetta Stone, do you?”

  Matt had turned around to shine the torch on Monica who mouthed the word magic and raised her eyebrows. He chuckled and went back to his translation.

  “OK, before they reach their destination they’re attacked and nearly all the army is captured or decimated by the ruler of the underworld — the Qwotoan. The only people who returned to tell the story were the brothers. Wow, see this? It’s a little like the Mayan numbering system. There’s a base number, and the dot over it represents it being multiplied by ten.” Matt pointed to a symbol with dozens of dots pressed into the stonework above it. “I think this here represents thousands dead. No, that can’t be possible, I must be mistranslating.”

  Matt paused and screwed up his face. “Odd, this last bit looks to have been written later. Even the glyph style is slightly different. I think it just says: ‘We are lost, Qwotoan comes!’ ”

  Matt knelt down among the debris and sorted through flat pieces of stone that had onioned off the face of the wall. Discarding some and selecting others, his lips moved as he tried to tell himself the story of the ancient civilisation. He was running his hands over a piece of flat stone with faint upraised markings when Monica touched him on the shoulder. He turned and held the small stone tablet out for her to see. It showed a number of small symbols in the ancient icon-imagery of the long dead culture depicting what looked like a warrior tangled in some sort of rope or tentacles. Another smaller image showed an eye looking over a city surrounded by a lot of dots and squiggles.

  “What’s it say?” said Monica, kneeling down next to him and squinting at the carved rock.

  Matt was looking at the stone and hmmd to himself before speaking. “It’s a little more about the warrior brother’s descent to find Qwotoan and slay what looks like the ‘Devourer’ or ‘Deceiver.’ Why does that name Qwotoan ring a bell? Damn, I can’t make out all of these pictoglyphs without some more work. This language has some characters that could be Olmec, some Mayan, Aztec, even what looks like some Egyptian hieroglyphs; and this bit here could even be Sumerian. It’s all mixed together. This could be some form of root language. But why is it here? Why were they here?”

  “And where are they now?” asked Monica. “They all seem to have disappeared.”

  “This spot is probably just an outpost, but this symbol represents a reference to the ‘City’; and this here looks like the Mayan root word for water—‘Atl,’ and the Olmec word for surrounding land. No wait, that could be land surrounded by water.” He rocked back on his heels. “You know there are plenty of ancient stories with tales of a lost continent. Antarctica wasn’t always frozen under a mile of ice, you know, and many people speculate about what may lie undiscovered beneath this continent’s deep ice mantle. Like, just how did fifteenth-century cartographers manage to get hold of maps of the actual coastline of Antarctica which exists under the ice, when our modern cartographers could only achieve this a few decades ago by seismographic means? A lot of these ancient races have legends about their forefathers arriving from the sea after a great catastrophe in their homeland. Their legends talk about their homeland sinking, or ‘going below’ as it’s been interpreted; but what if that didn’t mean sinking under water, but going below ice?”

  “Dr. Matthew Kerns, you are not going to tell me this is Atlantis, are you?” Monica asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t say that. Atlantis was Plato’s allegorical story; however, in Mayan and Olmec and even Aztec legends, they directly refer to a place called ‘Aztlan.’ The Mayans originally believed they came to the Americas from an overseas paradise called Aztlan which sank aw
ay from sight.” Matt gathered his thoughts. “Look, hear me out, there’s a section of an ancient Mayan codex called the Troano Manuscript that to this day is still defying a full translation. However, in the 1800s a classical archaeologist by the name of Augustus le Plongeon attempted a partial interpretation. His reconstruction recounted a legend passed down for hundreds of generations about the tragedy of a ‘Great Golden City,’ which was swallowed in a terrible cataclysm that took place nearly 10,000 years before the writing of that codex.”

  “Uh, and he said the Mayans knew about this place, did he? What happened to him?” Monica gave Matt a look that radiated a mixture of disbelief and mock gravitas.

  “Not exactly. He called the country ‘Mu,’ but no one would support his work, and of course there was no cross-validating data. For his trouble he was discredited, but look, there is one thing that my studies have taught me and that’s extraordinary civilisations have come and gone, but eventually the earth gives them back to us.” Matt’s eyes burned with excitement.

  “I don’t believe it. They discredited him just because he called it ‘Moo’?” Monica couldn’t help laughing and Matt jumped to his feet, pulling Monica up with him.

  “Very funny, cavewoman. Come on, we’ve got to find more evidence, this could be huge.”

  Eight

  Alex stood on a small boulder and raised his voice so it would carry to all the team members. “Ladies and gentlemen, full team briefing in fifteen minutes. Enjoy your last hot coffee as we will not be taking it into the caves. Please check and pack any equipment you will need; we’re going to be very busy shortly.” He stepped down without any further interaction. This was not the time for questions and answers.