“Of course.”
“Then let’s go.”
One of the Arab diggers took the wheel of the truck and drove it slowly toward the digs. Between the tents Indy and Sallah got out. They moved stealthily toward the Map Room, Indy carrying the five-foot staff and wondering how long he could contrive to be inconspicuous with so long a piece of wood in his hand. They passed several uniformed Germans, who hardly paid any attention to them: they were grouped together, smoking and talking in the morning sunlight. When they had gone a little further, Sallah indicated that they should stop: they had reached the Map Room. Indy looked around for a moment and then walked, as casually as he could, toward the edge of the hole—the ceiling of the ancient Map Room. He peered down inside, held his breath, and then looked at Sallah, who produced a length of rope from under his robes and tied one end of it around an oil drum located nearby. Indy lowered the staff inside the hole, smiled at Sallah and took one end of the rope. Sallah watched grimly, face covered in perspiration. Indy began to lower himself inside the Map Room.
The Map Room at Tanis, he thought. At some other time he might have been awed by the mere thought of actually being in this place; at some other time he might have paused to look around, might have wanted to linger—but not now. He reached the floor and tugged on the rope, which was immediately pulled up. Damned hard, he thought, not to get excited by this place—an elaborate frescoed room lit by the sunlight streaming in from overhead. He moved across the floor to where the miniature model of the city of Tanis was laid out: a remarkable map cut out of stone, immaculate in detail, so well constructed you could almost imagine miniature people existing in those buildings or walking those streets. He couldn’t help but be astonished by the craftsmanship of the map, the patience that must have gone into the construction.
Alongside the map was a line created by embedded mosaic tiles. There were evenly spaced slots in this line, each accompanied by a symbol for a time of the year. The slots had been made to accommodate the base of the staff. He took the headpiece from his robes, reached for the staff and looked at the reflected sunlight that had already begun to move slowly across the miniature city at his feet.
It was seven-fifty. He didn’t have much time.
Sallah had gathered the rope, bunched it in his hands and begun to move back toward the oil drum. He barely heard the jeep that came up alongside him, and the loud voice of the German startled him.
“Hey! You!”
Sallah tried to smile dumbly.
The German said, “You, right. What are you doing there?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He inclined his head in a gesture of innocence.
“Bring that rope over here,” the German said. “This damn jeep is stuck.”
Sallah hesitated, then he untied the rope and carried it toward the jeep. Already another vehicle, a truck, had appeared; it stopped some feet in front of the jeep.
“Tie the rope from the jeep to the truck,” the German said.
Sallah, sweating, did so. The rope, he thought: the precious rope is being tugged away. He listened to the engines of the two vehicles, watching the wheels squirm in the sand. The rope was pulled taut. What was he going to do to get Indy out of the Map Room without a rope?
He followed the jeep a little way across the sand, failing to notice he was standing beside a kettle of hot food cooking over an open flame. There were several German soldiers seated around a table and one of them was calling to him to bring some food. Helplessly, he watched the German.
“Are you deaf?”
He bowed subserviently and lifted the heavy kettle, carrying it toward the table. What he was thinking about was Indy trapped in the Map Room; what he was wondering about was how, without a rope, he could get the American out.
He began to serve, trying to ignore the insults of the soldiers. He served hurriedly. He spilled food across the table and was cuffed around the side of the head for his efforts.
“Clumsy! Look at my shirt. Look what you’ve spilled on my shirt.”
Sallah lowered his face. Mock shame.
“Get some water. Hurry.”
He rushed away to find water.
Indy took the headpiece and fitted it carefully to the top of the staff. He placed the base of the staff in one of the mosaic slots and listened to the sound of the wood clicking against the ancient tile. The sunlight caught the top of the headpiece, the yellow beam moving within a fraction of the tiny hole in the crystal. He waited. From overhead he could hear the sounds of voices shouting. He blocked them out. Later, if he had to, he’d worry about the Germans. But not now.
The sunlight pierced the crystal, throwing a bright line across the miniature city. The line of light was altered and broken by the prism of the crystal—and there, in those miniature buildings and streets, it fell across one spot in particular. Red light, glowing against a small building, which, as if by some ancient chemistry, some old artistry, began to glow. In amazement he watched this effect, noticing now some markings of red paint among the other buildings, markings that were fresh and clean. Belloq’s calculations.
Or miscalculations: the building illuminated by the headpiece was eighteen inches closer than the last red mark left by the Frenchman.
Terrific. Perfect. He couldn’t have hoped for anything better. Indy went down on his knees beside the miniature city and took a tape measure from his robes. He strung the tape between Belloq’s last mark and the building glowing in sunlight. He made his calculations quickly, scribbling on a small notepad. Sweat burned on his face, dripped across the backs of his hands.
Sallah didn’t go for water. He scampered between tents, hoping none of the Germans would stop him again. Panicked, he began to look for a rope. He didn’t find one. No rope, nothing in sight. He scurried here and there, slipping and sliding in the sand, praying that none of the Germans would notice his peculiar behavior or call on him to perform some menial task. He had to do something fast to get Indy out. But what?
He paused. Between a couple of tents lay several hampers, their lids open.
No rope, he thought; so in such circumstances you improvise.
When he’d made sure he wasn’t being watched, he moved toward the hampers.
Indy snapped the wooden staff in two and stuck the headpiece back into his robes. He placed the pieces of wood in a far corner of the Map Room, then he went to a spot directly under the hole and stared upward at the bright sky. The brilliant blue blinded him momentarily.
“Sallah,” he called out, caught between a shout and a whisper.
Nothing.
“Sallah.”
Nothing.
He glanced around the room for an alternative way out, but there wasn’t one as far as he could see. Where was Sallah?
“Sallah!”
Silence.
He watched the opening; he blinked against the harsh light, waited.
There was a sudden movement above. Then something began to fall from the hole and for a second he thought it was the rope, but it wasn’t: instead, what he saw descending was a bunch of clothing tied together, clumsily knotted to create a makeshift rope-shirts, tunics, pants, robes and—of all things—a swastika flag.
He caught hold of the line, tugged on it, and then began to climb. He surfaced, dropping flat on his stomach as Sallah started to haul the line of clothing out. Indy smiled and the Egyptian stuffed the makeshift rope inside the oil drum. Then Indy rose and followed Sallah quickly between some tents.
They didn’t see the German who was walking up and down with an expression of dark impatience on his face.
“You! I’m still waiting for that water!”
Sallah spread his hands apologetically.
The German turned to Indy. “You’re another lazy bastard. Why aren’t you digging?”
Sallah moved toward the German while Indy, bowing in wonderful subservience, hurried off in the other direction.
He moved quickly now, his robes flapping as he rushed between tents. And from behind,
as if some suspicion had just been aroused, some crime suspected, he could hear the German calling after him. Wait. Come back here, Indy thought, The last thing I intend to do is come back, dummkopf. He hurried along the tents, caught between his unwillingness to look suspicious and his urge to start digging for the Well of the Souls, when two German officers appeared ahead of him. Damn, he thought, pausing, watching them stop to talk, light cigarettes. His way was blocked.
He slipped along the sides of the tents, hugging such shadow as he could find, and then he moved through an opening, a doorway, and stepped inside one of the tents. He could wait here at least for a few minutes until the way was clear. Those two Krauts could hardly stand out there smoking and talking all day.
He wiped sweat from his forehead, rubbed the damp palms of his hands against his robes. For the first time since he’d entered the place, he considered the Map Room: he thought of that weird sense of timelessness he’d felt, an experience of being somehow suspended, afloat—as if he himself had become a trapped object in the jar of history, preserved, perfect, intact. The Map Room at Tanis. In a way it was like discovering that a fairy tale had some basis in reality—the legend at the heart of which there is truth. The thought touched him in a fashion he found a little humbling: you live in the year 1936, with its airplanes and its radios and its great machines of war—and then you stumble across something so simply intricate, so primitively elaborate, as a miniature map with one specific building designed to glow when struck by light in a certain way. Call it alchemy, artistry or even magic—however you cut it, the passage of centuries hadn’t improved anything very much. The movement of time had merely slashed at the roots of some profound sense of the cosmic, the magical.
And now he was within reach of the Well of the Souls.
The Ark.
He wiped his forehead again with the edge of his robes. He peered through the slit in the tent. They were still there, smoking, talking. When the hell would they find a reason to move on?
He was pondering a way out, trying to think up a means of making an exit, when he heard a noise from the other corner of the tent. A strange grunting, a stifled noise. He turned around and peered across the tent, which he had convinced himself was empty.
For a moment, a moment of disbelief, wild incredulity, he felt all his pulses stammer and stop.
She was sitting in a chair, tied to it by crisscrossing ropes, a handkerchief bound tightly around her mouth. She was sitting there, her eyes imploring him, flashing messages at him, and she was trying to speak to him through the folds of the handkerchief pressed against her lips. He crossed the floor quickly, untied the gag and let it fall from her mouth. He kissed her and the kiss was anxious, long, deep. When he pulled his face away, he laid the palm of his hand flat against her cheek.
When she spoke her voice faltered. “They had two baskets . . . two baskets to confuse you. When you thought I was in the truck I was in a car . . .”
“I thought you were dead,” he said. What was that sensation he felt now—unfathomable relief? the lifting of guilt? Or was it pure pleasure, gratitude, that she was still alive?
“I’m still kicking,” she said.
“Have they hurt you?”
She seemed to struggle with some inner anxiety. “No—they haven’t hurt me. They just asked about you, they wanted to find out what you knew.”
Indy rubbed his jaw and wondered why he detected an odd hesitation in Marion. But he was still too excited to pause and consider it.
“Indy, please get me away from here. He’s evil—”
“Who?”
“The Frenchman.”
He was about to untie the rope when he stopped.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Look, you’ll never understand how I feel right now. I’ll never be able to find words for that. But I want you to trust me. I’m going to do something I don’t like doing.”
“Untie me, Indy. Please untie me.”
“That’s the point. If I let you loose, then they’re going to turn over every particle of sand around here to find you and I can’t afford that right now. And since I know where the Ark is, it’s important I get to it before they do, then I can come back for you—”
“Indy, no!”
“You only need to sit tight for a little longer—”
“You bastard. Turn me loose!”
He slipped the gag back over her mouth and tightened it. Then, kissing her once more on the forehead, ignoring her protests, her grunts, he stood upright. “Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
I’ll be back, he thought. There was a very old echo there, an echo that went back ten years. And he could see doubt in her eyes. He kissed her again, then moved toward the opening in the tent.
She thumped her chair on the floor.
He went outside; the German officers had gone.
Overhead, the sun was stronger now. It beat down insanely.
Alive, he thought: she’s alive. And the thought was something that soared inside his head. He began to rush, moving away from the tents, from the excavations, out into the burning dunes, out into that place where he had a rendezvous with Omar and his diggers.
He took the surveyor’s instrument from the back of Omar’s truck and erected it on the dunes. He aligned it with the Map Room in the distance, and consulting the calculations he had made, he got a fix on a position some miles out in the desert, out in untouched sand considerably closer than the spot where Belloq was mistakenly digging for the Well of the Souls. There, he thought. The exact place!
“Got it!” he said, and he folded the instrument and stuck it back in the truck. The place was well hidden from Belloq’s dig, concealed by the rise of the dunes. They could dig unobserved.
As he was climbing into the truck, Indy noticed a figure appear over the dunes. It was Sallah, robes flapping, hurrying toward the truck.
“I thought you were never coming,” Indy said.
“I almost didn’t,” Sallah said, climbing in back.
“Let’s go,” Indy told the driver.
When they had gone out into the dunes they parked the truck. It was a barren spot in which to be looking for something so exciting as the Ark. Overhead the sun was incandescent, the color of an exploding yellow rose; and that was what it suggested in its intensity, a thing about to burst loose from the sky.
They went to the spot which Indy had calculated. For a short time he stood and stared at it—dry sand. You could never dream of anything growing here. You could never imagine this ground yielding up anything. Certainly not the Ark.
Indy went to the truck and took out a shovel. The diggers were already moving toward the spot. They had leathery faces, burned faces. Indy wondered if they managed to live beyond forty in a place like this.
Sallah, carrying a spade, walked alongside him. “I believe they might come here only if Belloq realizes he’s working in the wrong place. Otherwise, there would be no good reason.”
“Who ever heard of a Nazi needing a good reason?”
Sallah smiled. He turned and gazed across the dunes; miles of nothing stretched away. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Even a Nazi would need a good reason to wander in this place.”
Indy struck the ground with the point of his spade. “He’d still need a requisition and have it signed in triplicate in Berlin.” He looked at the diggers. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get on with this.”
They began their dig, heaping sand, laboring hard, furiously, pausing only to drink water that had already turned warm in the camel-skin bags. They dug until the light had gone from the sky; but the same heat remained, tethered to the sand.
Belloq sat in his tent, drumming his fingertips on the table that held maps, drawings of the Ark, sheets of paper covered with the hieroglyphics of his calculations. There was a dark mood of frustration inside him; he was edgy, nervous—and the presence of Dietrich, as well as Dietrich’s lackey Gobler, didn’t help his frame of mind much. Belloq rose,
went to a washbasin, splashed water across his face.
“A wasted day,” Dietrich said. “A wasted day . . .”
Belloq toweled his face, then poured himself a small shot of cognac. He stared at the German, then at the underling Gobler, who seemed to exist only as a shadow of Dietrich.
Dietrich, undeterred, went on: “My men have been digging all day—and for what? Tell me, for what?”
Belloq sipped his drink, then said, “Based on the information in my possession, my calculations were correct. But archaeology is not the most exact of sciences, Dietrich. I don’t think you entirely understand this fact. Perhaps the Ark will be found in an adjoining chamber. Perhaps some vital piece of evidence still eludes us.” He shrugged and finished his drink. Usually he loathed the way the Germans nit-picked, the way they always seemed to hover around him as if they expected him to be a seer, a prophet. Now, however, he understood their change in mood.
“The Führer demands constant reports of progress,” Dietrich said. “He is not a patient man.”
“You may cast your mind back to my conversation with your Führer, Dietrich. You may well recall I made no promises. I simply said that things looked favorable, nothing more.”
There was a silence. Gobler moved in front of the kerosene lamp, throwing a huge shadow that Belloq found curiously menacing. Gobler said, “The girl could help us. After all, she was in possession of the original piece for years.”
“Indeed,” Dietrich said.
“I doubt if she knows anything,” Belloq said.
“It is worth a try,” Gobler said.
He wondered why he found their treatment of the girl so unsettling to him. They had used her barbarically—they had threatened her with a variety of tortures, but it seemed apparent to him that she had nothing to tell. Was this some soft spot, some awful weakness, he had toward her? The thought appalled him. He stared at Dietrich for a moment. How very badly they live in fear of their sorry little Führer, he thought. He must strut through their dreams at night—if they dreamed at all, a prospect he couldn’t quite believe. They were men stripped of imagination.
The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Page 12
