Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs
Page 19
Indiana Jones found the submarine at the coordinates Belloq had provided, although he had not expected the boat to be perched on a shelf overlooking a five-hundred-foot drop. Belloq had not volunteered to Indy how he knew the location of the missing submarine when Berlin did not, or why he had chosen to share this information. The latter, Indy suspected, had to do with the Nazi's treatment of Belloq— Bellosh!—as an employee. But whatever his reason, Indy didn't care. The important thing was that the Crystal Skull was again tantalizingly within his reach, if not quite within his grasp.
But soon, Indy told himself as the brass diving helmet was bolted into place over the breastplate of the nylon diving suit. Soon. Then he stepped off with his lead boots into the freezing waters and began his descent.
He landed almost on the deck of the U-357, thanks to good soundings by the crew of the French salvage ship Jules Verne. Although he had done some hard-hat diving before, he had never attempted such a deep or a cold dive. His breath was coming in gasps. He forced himself to gain control before proceeding.
Walking across the bottom of the ocean in comical, exaggerated steps, Indy made his way to the bow of the submarine and entered the torpedo room through the gap in her hull. He was careful not to snag his air lines on the jagged edges, and he pulled plenty of slack in with him in order to be able to move freely inside.
He snapped on the diving lamp at his belt.
He took a wrench from his belt and laboriously turned the mechanism in the center of the pressure door between the torpedo room and the rest of the boat. Air bubbles—the last air the crew had breathed—streamed from the perimeter of the door as the interior equalized to ambient water pressure. He could also feel a groan shake the boat from stem to stern as her weight shifted.
The door opened freely on its hinges.
Indy stepped awkwardly through the bulkhead and proceeded down the hall. There was plenty of paper and trash floating in the clear, cold water, but no sign of a yellow canister. Indy proceeded to the officers' quarters, a few yards down the hall, and opened the cabin door.
Kroeger floated out of the cabin like a ghost, his arms extended toward Indy, his blond hair washing back and forth over his perfect forehead.
Indy jumped, hitting the back of his head against the diving helmet. Instinctively he put his gloved hand up to the helmet in an attempt to rub the sore spot, but of course he couldn't.
Indy pulled Kroeger's body out of the doorway, then took the diving lamp from inside his belt and shone it over the interior of the cabin. Time was running short. The crew of the Jules Verne had said that at this depth, Indy would have only about fifteen minutes to search the wreck. If he ignored that time limit, he would risk the bends. Indy was about to leave the officers' quarters when a thought occurred to him.
He shone the light upward.
The yellow canister floated against the ceiling.
Indy tugged the canister down and placed it beneath his arm, then began to trudge back down the corridor the way he had come. Even though his arms and legs were freezing, inside the diving helmet sweat rolled from Indy's forehead and dripped into his eyes.
He had almost made it to the torpedo-room bulkhead when he felt the deck shift beneath his feet. Suddenly the hallway had tipped over on its side as the U-3S7 rolled to port and inched a little farther over the shelf.
It was difficult to walk against the curved interior of the pressure hull. Indy stumbled over the pipes and other equipment that were secured to the wall. So he tried swimming. That didn't work, because of the lead boots. He could kick, but he didn't get anywhere. Finally, he grasped his air line and began to haul himself along toward the bow with his right hand. His left arm was fighting the buoyant yellow canister.
As he squeezed through the bulkhead door the boat shuddered and began to fall backward over the cliff. Indy lost his hold on the canister, which became entangled in the mass of pipes and fittings in the torpedo room.
Desperately, he pulled himself through the torpedo room and out of the gash in the hull. The bow of the U-357 scooted along the bottom toward the abyss, threatening to suction Indy down with it. Indy jerked frantically on the lifeline to signal the crew to haul him up.
On the deck of the Jules Verne, the crew removed Indy's helmet. Behind him, the pump used to force air down the line spun to a stop.
"What happened?" the dive master asked, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
"I had it," Indy said. "I had it under my arm and then the submarine shifted and started to go over the edge. I had to let go of it and get out."
"That is the way with wrecks," the dive master said. "Opening, closing hatches, shifting weight, you never know what will happen. But at least you made it out alive, monsieur."
Indy looked up as the other members of the crew rushed to the side and pointed. When the U-357 reached the end of her long plunge to the seafloor beneath the shelf, her hull had buckled and broken in two, freeing all manner of buoyant debris: hats, clothing, unused life vests, tins of food.
"Look!" Indy shouted.
A yellow canister had popped to the surface and was bobbing happily among the waves.
"Bring us around," Indy said. "Let's haul it in."
As the Jules Verne came about, however, another yellow canister emerged, two hundred yards away. Suddenly there was a third and a fourth, and finally a score of yellow canisters that covered several acres of water.
The crew hauled one after another aboard only to discover they were oil drums, but resembled the type of gas canister in which Belloq had packed the skull.
"I'm sorry," the captain told Indy. "We cannot catch them all. Wind, tide, currents..."
Afterword
Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs was inspired by the expeditions of Roy Chapman Andrews to Outer Mongolia in the 1920s. These expeditions, which made headlines around the world for the discovery of the first dinosaur eggs (fossilized, alas!) known to science, were sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The discovery fired the imagination of the world because, at that time, scientists still did not know how dinosaurs bore their young. The adventure was also downright romantic, because Outer Mongolia was one of the few places left on earth that could legitimately be called terra incognita.
A few words about Andrews, the museum that he made famous (or perhaps it was the other way around), and other matters related to this original Indiana Jones adventure, are in order.
Roy Chapman Andrews
Andrews is often cited as the inspiration—along with Saturday-afternoon adventure serials and the James Bond movies—for the character known as Indiana Jones. Whether Indy co-creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had Andrews in mind or not, he was in many ways a real-life Indiana Jones: smart, brave, resourceful, and often at the center of discovery and controversy.
A black-and-white photograph of Andrews in The New Conquest of Central Asia, a massive book about his fossil-hunting adventures in Mongolia, shows him posing with a cluster of dinosaur eggs. He is dressed in khaki, from his belt hangs a holstered revolver, and his eyes are shaded by a wide-brimmed hat. If you mentally add the bullwhip, you have a scene that could have been plucked from any of the Indiana Jones films.
Andrews was born on January 26, 1884, in Beloit, Wisconsin, during a thirty-below-zero winter storm. After graduating from college, he set out for New York—he had earned traveling money by doing taxidermy—bent on fulfilling his childhood ambition of working for the American Museum of Natural History. When he presented himself and the museum director explained that there were absolutely no jobs available, Andrews offered to scrub floors. When asked how a young man with a college education could be serious about such a menial position, Andrews said that it wasn't just any floors they were talking about—it was the museum's floors.
After a few months of wielding a mop and helping out with odd jobs, Andrews got his first real break by being assigned to help in the construction of a life-size
model of a blue whale. The whale, which was to hang in the third-floor gallery, had turned into a major disappointment for the museum because its paper covering sagged, making it look hungry rather than majestic. Andrews solved the problem by coming up with a wire-mesh-and-papier-mache skin for the whale.
From there, it was on to increasingly more challenging tasks as Andrews was sent around the world to collect real whales for the museum. Eventually he was asked by a publisher to write an article about whales and whaling, which led to another lifelong passion for Andrews: writing about his adventures.
After a stint in China that involved some shadowy connection with army intelligence during the First World War, Andrews returned to the museum and in 1920 proposed to director Henry Fairfield Osborn a plan so ambitious that it bordered on the foolhardy: an expedition into the little-known Gobi Desert that would attempt to reconstruct the entire past history of the Central Asian plateau. This meshed perfectly with Osborn's conviction that the area was the prehistoric staging ground for the world's human and animal life. Mongolia, Osborn believed, would be that place where humanity's much-touted evolutionary "missing link" would be found.
In April 1922, Andrews led the first expedition into Mongolia, a place that had not been previously noted for fossils. In fact, only a single rhinoceros tooth had ever been found. But four days after crossing the Great Wall into Outer Mongolia, the expedition found a cornucopia of fossils literally at their feet. In 1923, the expedition discovered fossilized dinosaur eggs in the area they had christened the Flaming Cliffs.
The expeditions that continued during the 1920s resulted in the museum's acquisition of an encyclopedic collection of fossils and established Mongolia as one of the richest fossil beds in the world. But because of changes in the area's political climate since the Red Russians had won control of it, the last expedition occurred in 1930.
Although none of the expeditions found anything that even remotely resembled a missing link, Andrews remained convinced to his dying day that the evolutionary Garden of Eden lay buried in Mongolia, just waiting to be discovered.
Although Andrews had many other adventures, and continued to write books about them, nothing was to rival the glory of the 1923 field season on the Mongolian plateau.
In 1933, Andrews took Osborn's place as director of the museum. The museum was at a low point. It had been hit hard by the Depression, and all field-work had been curtailed. Unfortunately, this time Andrews was unequal to the task at hand, but because of his fame, he lingered for years in the director's chair. Finally, in 1941, on the advice of a troubleshooter that had been brought in to evaluate the museum, the board of trustees asked Andrews to resign.
Andrews retired to Carmel, California, where he died in 1960.
Although most of Andrews's books are out of print, he was a popular writer in his day and many can still be found in the collection of any metropolitan public library. Titles to look for include his autobiography, Under a Lucky Star (1943), and a collection of true stories called Heart of Asia (1951). Some of his natural-history works are Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera (1916), The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932), and This Amazing Planet (1941).
The American Museum of Natural History
In the early years of the twentieth century a mop-wielding employee by the name of Roy Chapman Andrews called the museum "the most wonderful place in New York," and many would agree with that assessment today
Located at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West, the museum is a labyrinth of interlocking buildings containing thousands of exhibits that invite weeks of careful exploration. The complex also includes the Naturemax Theatre and the Hayden Planetarium.
Among the museum's most popular exhibits are a ninety-foot fiberglass model of a blue whale (it has replaced the papier-mache model that hung for decades); the largest meteorite ever found in the United States; and many thousands of dinosaur fossils, including several dozen eggs. Visitors should be careful, however, if the fossils bring the name of Roy Chapman Andrews to their lips—unofficial museum shorthand for rough treatment of a specimen is to "RCA" it, from Andrews's reputation for getting things done in the most direct way possible.
The museum was founded in 1869 by Albert S. Bickmore, a naturalist who had a vision of establishing the nation's leading natural-history museum in the nation's foremost city. Over the years the museum has become a city unto itself, including the publication of its own nationwide magazine, Natural History. But in addition to its role as an irreplaceable scientific resource, the museum's pursuit of understanding the natural world has also become an important spiritual resource for many Americans.
The memorial service for Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who with Bill Moyers mesmerized public-television audiences in the 1980s with The Power of Myth, was held at the American Museum of Natural History. As a boy, Campbell had stared in awe at the museum's exhibits of Native American masks and totems. That awe inspired him to a lifetime of spiritual adventure.
Although many articles and several books have been published about the museum over the years, one of the best is a volume by Douglas J. Preston called Dinosaurs in the Attic (1986). The book contains a wealth of anecdotal material about the museum's collections.
The Allergorhai-Horhai
Although somewhat different-looking from its counterpart in Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs, the allergorhai-horhai is the legendary sand-worm of the Gobi Desert. Andrews wrote that all northern Mongols believed in it, but that he had never run across anyone claiming to have actually seen one.
"It is said to be about two feet long," Andrews said, "the body shaped like a sausage, and to have no head or legs; it is so poisonous that even to touch it means instant death."
Andrews concluded that although the beast was probably mythical, there might be some shred of truth in the legend because all of the descriptions he had heard of it were so similar.
The Sixty-Million-Year-Old Fish
Science sometimes stumbles across an animal that it previously declared extinct, and that's what happened in 1938 when a South African fishing trawler brought up in its nets a curious-looking fish called the coelacanth.
It was the first live specimen of the fish that had ever been found, and the next youngest (and obviously dead) specimen that science had was sixty million years old. Older specimens went back more than four hundred million years, older even than the oldest dinosaurs.
Since the advent of diving submersibles, many live coelacanths have been observed on the ocean floor, at depths of around six hundred feet—but only in the Indian Ocean, where that first one was hauled aboard. In 1965, however a hundred-year-old silver religious artifact was discovered in Spain that appeared to be a detailed representation of the distinctive-looking coelacanth. The discovery asked the following question: How did a nineteenth-century Spaniard know what the fish looked like?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAX McCOY is an award-winning journalist and author whose Bantam novels include The Sixth Rider and Sons of Fire. He lives in Pittsburg, Kansas.
Valley of Bones
Fresh from a ride in a Nazi submarine, Indiana Jones is persuaded by a beautiful missionary to search for her missing father in Mongolia. Professor Angus Starbuck has discovered a dinosaur bone in the Gobi Desert. But unlike other such discoveries, this bone isn't ancient! As Indy crosses from China through a treacherous mountain pass into Outer Mongolia, he runs afoul of the region's fiercest warlords. Meanwhile, the world's last innocent people, dwelling in Stone Age paradise, are poised on the brink of destruction. Suddenly Indiana Jones is dueling wild dogs and bloodthirsty killers in a desperate effort to save the most historic discovery of the twentieth century: the last living triceratops!