by Tom Pollack
“Thank you, Johnny, but not tonight. I’ll tell you what—if I can decipher the language puzzle, I’ll gladly indulge tomorrow with you, and we’ll celebrate our success!”
At ten thirty p.m., early by Neapolitan standards, Renata suggested they call it a night. With a final ring of smoke punctuating his words, Silvio concurred, pointing out that they needed to make a six thirty a.m. start in order to beat the first church bell calling early worshippers.
To her great relief, Amanda slept soundly, even though before nodding off she had a few butterflies in her stomach about the mission—especially when Silvio had mentioned the aftershocks from last month’s earthquake. But the challenge and potential reward were worth the risk. Yes, such an adventure had its dash of danger. But thousands of people—she thought of miners, firemen, skydivers, and spelunkers—operated under hazardous conditions. Besides, she smiled to herself as she drifted off to sleep, exploring this site was probably safer than big wave surfing.
CHAPTER 7
Near the Nuovi Scavi Ruins—Ercolano
HER WRISTWATCH ALARM AWAKENED Amanda at five thirty a.m. She dressed in jeans, a blue and gold UCLA T-shirt, and a thin pullover. Half an hour later, she knocked on Juan Carlos’s door, and the two of them went downstairs to the kitchen together. Renata had prepared a simple breakfast of rolls, fruit, and coffee. Silvio, freshly shaven and immaculate in a starched white long-sleeved shirt and khaki slacks, appeared a few minutes later. During breakfast, the group reviewed Amanda’s chief objectives.
“If you get the doors open,” Silvio said, “just make a quick survey of what lies behind. I know it will be tempting for you, as a professional, to begin a detailed inventory. But the season has only thirty days to run, till the end of October. We won’t be able to fit a large project into the schedule. It will be much better if you can give us an overview, so that we can plan for next season—and try to raise funds for larger equipment to widen the crack if we need to.”
Amanda nodded.
“How much time do you think she should spend in there, nonno?” Juan Carlos asked his grandfather.
“No more than three hours,” Silvio replied. “If we can’t get the door open by ten o’clock, we’ll have to call it quits. There’s too much chance of attracting attention. We also have to reckon with the danger of Amanda’s inhaling poisonous gases. At the slightest hint on the gas meter, Amanda, you get out fast.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “Anyway, if I can’t crack the code, at least I can brush away a lot of the debris and get better photographs than what we have now.”
With breakfast finished, Silvio donned a light jacket, while Juan Carlos fetched the tote bag that Carmelo had delivered last night with Amanda’s equipment: notepad, pens and markers, copies of the robot’s digital pictures, headlamp attached to a wireless headset and microphone, digital camera for stills and video, miniature digital tape recorder, measuring tape, trowel, brush, a small pick, a gas emissions meter, a gas mask, a clinometer for measuring slopes, a prismatic compass, and an alidade for showing degrees of arc.
Renata met them at the front door. Kissing Amanda on both cheeks, she murmured, “Buona fortuna, Amanda. See you at lunch time.”
“Arrivederci, Renata,” Amanda replied.
The streets of Ercolano were deserted. A brisk fifteen-minute walk brought the archaeologists to the site, where Carmelo and three other team members were already waiting.
“Buongiorno, amici,” Silvio saluted them. All the men shook hands formally. “Cominciamo bene” (let’s begin).
They all descended the makeshift steps. Amanda transferred the contents of the tote bag to her backpack, and then attached the pack to a strong cord that she wound around her waist. Juan Carlos handed Amanda one last item: his fancy S. T. Dupont lighter.
“In case you need it. A good luck charm,” he said, kissing her softly. “Coraggio, Amanda. You’ll do just fine,” he said. She looked at him with a smile. The concern in his eyes would be her best ally.
“Remember,” warned Silvio. “Not more than three hours. Use the wireless headset to keep us informed, and try to be back here by ten at the latest.”
She nodded, tapping her Timex.
Juan Carlos chimed in, “And then we can head to the eleven o’clock mass, just like old times!”
Amanda paused, then smiled. “All this working on a Sunday was making me wonder about you, Johnny. Just don’t expect me to remember all those hymns!”
Facing the jagged crack, Amanda waved to the group with a thumbs-up sign, placed her backpack on the ground, squeezed through, and then dragged it after her.
She found herself in a long, narrow corridor. She paused, let her breathing settle, and began to step gingerly over small cracks. Switching the headlamp on, she oriented herself by comparing what she saw with some of the robot’s digital pictures. About twenty meters ahead the corridor curved abruptly to the right.
Following the route and making the turn, she discovered the robot’s remains. It had indeed been crippled, apparently by a chunk of debris dislodged by an aftershock. Examining the crumpled machinery now would be a waste of time, so Amanda continued onward.
Fortunately, the ground she needed to traverse within the crack was relatively level bedrock. She shuffled along, at one point turning sideways, removing her backpack, and exhaling completely to navigate through the tightest space. “This must be the spot where Johnny had to give up,” she said to herself.
As she gradually ventured deeper into the crack, only the sound of her breathing punctuated the eerie stillness. About three minutes after negotiating the turn, her headlamp picked up a glimpse of the double doors. Then, after about ten more feet, the corridor widened enough to allow a full view of the ornate bronze portals. Impressive in both scale and design, they were approximately thirty feet tall and each about ten feet wide.
“Here’s where I really go to work,” Amanda thought. She extracted the brush from her backpack. After twenty minutes of careful cleanup, she stepped back from the doors to acquire an overview and ponder the possibilities of decipherment. She drew her notepad out of the backpack and began to compare the known with the unknown.
Two of the texts had already been transcribed by Silvio’s team. The first, in Latin, was a traditional Jewish proverb: “The story is truer than the truth.”
The second text, in Greek, was a quotation from the historian Plutarch: “Time is the wisest of counselors.”
After brushing away the dust, Amanda counted a total of five inscriptions on the right-hand door, all within about a two-foot space just below eye level. She pored over the Aramaic expression, scribbling possibilities onto her pad until she arrived at a coherent translation: “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” The source, if she was not mistaken, was the Greek philosopher Socrates.
That left the Chinese and the Hebrew. Moving a bit closer and studying the Chinese characters, Amanda read: “You shall eat dust all the days of your life.”
“That’s odd,” she murmured. The words were those of God to Satan in the book of Genesis. They were part of the divine punishment on the serpent for the temptation that led to the original sin of Adam and Eve. What were they doing inscribed on an ancient door in Italy in Chinese?
She tackled the Hebrew text last. Reading from right to left were these words: “The truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.” Amanda recognized the proverb as a saying attributed to the Confucian philosopher Mencius in the fourth century BC. Stranger and stranger. Here, in the final two texts, was almost a mirror image: a Hebrew scripture rendered in Chinese, and a Chinese saying written in Hebrew.
After recording the texts in her notes, she turned to the left-hand panel, where her cleanup had revealed multiple images. There were five rows, each with five pictograms. Silvio had been right about their formation. All the pictograms were in 3-D—slightly raised above the surface of the door.
It was a reasonable hypothesis that the five texts on the right were somehow related to
the images on the left. After all, they were all inscribed on the same set of double doors, and the numbers were similar. If Silvio’s guess was correct that the inscriptions figured in a pattern to release a combination lock, there had to be certain critical points of contact between the sayings and the pictograms.
Or between the correct pictograms, since there were five for every saying. As far as Amanda could see, each of the symbols suggested a certain idea or conceptual field. She ransacked her brain for what she had learned about symbolism, both in the ancient world and in more modern eras.
She knew that symbols could be generally divided into two broad categories. The first was universal and conventional, at least for a particular time period or culture. Symbols of this type included the rose for love, the dove for peace, and the flag for a nation state. The second type was more specialized and particular: for example, a tiger or a pirate for a local sports team.
Amanda decided she had to look for universal symbols. The proverbial texts were multicultural and multilingual, crossing boundaries of the ancient world. If there was a matchup, the symbols would also resonate across a broad spectrum.
She therefore ruled out any narrow interpretations, such as the well-known symbolism for the Christian apostles that matched each of the Twelve with a weapon that indicated his martyrdom. Thus, a knife was used for Bartholomew, who was flayed to death, and a saw for Simon, who was cut in two. Besides, she thought, none of the texts on the right-hand door was overtly Christian.
The first break occurred when her glance fastened on a symbol at the far right of the fourth row. It was a sword. Could the sword be matched with any of the quotations?
Amanda’s eyes eagerly scanned the right-hand side once more. “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings” read the middle proverb. Socrates, she well knew, was put to death by his fellow Athenians in 399 BC by being forced to drink hemlock, and not by the sword. But the sword was the closest symbol for death among any of the images on the door.
“If this line of reasoning is valid,” Amanda thought, “I could comb the visual symbols for persuasive correspondences with key words in the texts.”
Bingo. The Chinese character for truth, on the left-hand door, offered an obvious match with the proverb from Mencius, rendered in Hebrew, on the right-hand side: “The truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.”
Amanda glanced at her watch. It was eight fifteen and she had not reported back to the team. “I’m not going to tell them anything until I’m reasonably sure,” she thought. And she continued to attack the puzzle.
There were many images to choose from. A balance scale, for example, suggesting fate in the Homeric epics and justice in more recent times. An apple and a sparrow, used in ancient Rome to suggest erotic love. “The challenge here on both sides of the door,” Amanda thought, “is to winnow the irrelevant from the important.”
“Time” and the hourglass made up her third match. That covered the Plutarch quotation. Likewise, “You shall eat dust…” from Genesis and the depiction of a serpent. Finally, the Jewish proverb about stories suggested to Amanda the depiction of a papyrus roll. As she knew better than almost anyone else, papyrus was the writing medium for ancient storytelling.
She stared at her notepad. She had translated all the proverbs. She had identified the symbols that credibly matched each one. Where to go now?
Amanda decided to experiment. The order of the quotations, from top to bottom, correlated with the following symbols: hourglass, sword, “truth” character, serpent, and papyrus scroll. She pressed each raised symbol in turn. Nothing happened.
She was momentarily stumped. “There must be a further layer in this puzzle,” she mumbled.
Then she remembered—a combination lock. If the raised symbols were like numbers on a combination dial, they had to be depressed in a certain order to activate the lock’s tumblers. And if each symbol correlated with a key word in each of the five texts, maybe the proper sequence depended on a combination of the key words.
“What combination would be appropriate?” Amanda asked herself. “With over three thousand possibilities, I could be here for a long time.”
She thought through some simple approaches, such as alphabetic or chronological sequencing, but none seemed to match the sophistication of the overall puzzle. Then an idea occurred to her: a combination that produced yet another proverb, consistent with the overall meaning of the five maxims she had in hand.
Five words to play with, if her evaluations were correct: time, death, truth, dust, story.
It was now eight forty-five. She spoke into her voice-activated microphone and relayed a progress report.
“Silvio, can you hear me? I’ve made progress, but I need more time.”
Silvio’s warm voice came through clearly.
“Take your time, Amanda. We’re here for you. Any sign of gas?”
In her linguistic zeal, she had forgotten all about the silent, invisible enemy. She hurriedly extracted the gas emissions meter from her pack and switched it on. The needle remained at zero.
“No, there’s no indication on the meter and I feel fine. Just let me get through this last stage of the puzzle.”
“Brava! Keep us current.”
So now, how to fit the five words together into a statement that made sense? Thinking this language puzzle was created by a learned scholar thousands of years before, Amanda devised three criteria: the expression would have to be proverbial in nature; it would have to reflect on the relationship of time with human life and death; and it would have to stress the importance of storytelling and truth.
She stood before the doors calmly, as if they could telegraph the solution to her. Her mind was as receptive as she could manage.
Then it came to her.
“Neither time nor death can turn a story’s truth to dust.”
Where had she heard such a saying? She couldn’t think of the source. But it was compelling.
Taking a calming breath, she firmly pressed the symbols in sequence: hourglass, sword, papyrus roll, truth, and serpent. For a split second there was only silence.
Then she heard a click and a low rumble, and the massive doors parted in front of her.
Through her headset came Juan Carlos’s concerned voice. “What was that noise, Amanda? Are you okay?”
“I’m great, Johnny! I got the doors to open, and I’m going inside.”
“Fantastic,” chimed in Silvio. “Please be careful in there.”
Grabbing her backpack from the ground, Amanda stepped over a marble threshold into a cavernous chamber. She gasped at the scale as she shined her light around. The space was so large that her headlamp didn’t allow her to discern its overall dimensions from where she stood inside the doorway. Pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius impeded the swing of the doors and also enveloped some of the contents; other furnishings, though, stood free and clear.
“That’s odd,” she thought. She knew that every other dwelling in Herculaneum had been totally enveloped by the eruption. How could only a small amount of volcanic flow have made it inside this structure?
She had only an hour before she was due to leave. She remembered Silvio’s admonition about making an overall survey rather than a detailed inventory. She would have to hurry, now that she was inside.
She walked toward the middle of the space, which she could now make out as a circular room, yet she could not see the ceiling. As Amanda neared the center of the rotunda, she noticed what seemed to be a pair of human figures standing frozen in space and time. She decided to walk the perimeter of the chamber and return to the figures at the center as she was leaving.
There was a lot to see on her brief inspection. Silvio was not going to be disappointed. There were frescoes, marble statues, mosaics, maps, papyrus scrolls in metal tubes, and display cabinets with artifacts. The exhibits, like the inscriptions on the doors, seemed to cover huge arcs of history, from ancient Egypt and China to Greece and Rome. The Museo Archaeologico Naz
ionale will have to create a new wing, she thought, if they could raise the money.
But why had all these objects been assembled? Perhaps a wealthy citizen of ancient Herculaneum had conceived the idea of constructing his own private art gallery. But how could this patron of the arts have known such a diverse spectrum of cultures, even in the cosmopolitan early Roman Empire?
Amanda made another report to Silvio’s team, although there was increasing static the deeper she ventured into the buried chamber.
“I’m inside the chamber, and it’s magnificent! There are all kinds of spectacular artworks here. Like nothing we’ve seen in Herculaneum. I’m taking notes and pictures. There are what look to be two bodies standing upright covered in volcanic ash at the center of the room, next to a large telescope. My small headlamp is not bright enough to see the whole chamber. Will you guys just give me a bit more time? Say until ten thirty or eleven o’clock?”
Before Silvio answered, Amanda’s next footstep fell on an unstable portion of the floor, and she heard the rumbling noise again. She was now about fifteen yards from the bronze doors. She swung herself around so that her headlamp could pick them up in the narrow beam. She saw the doors slowly folding closed. Her exit was cut off.
And so was her wireless connection.
Alarmed, Amanda looked down at the floor. She was standing on a section that wobbled slightly and was shaped like a fish. It must have acted like a pressure pad, triggering the doors’ closure.
Panic was foreign to Amanda’s nature. Ingenuity had gotten her inside, she figured, and it would get her out okay, too. Turning again to the center of the room, she saw a glimmer of reflection from her lamp, so she slowly approached the central pair of figures, coated in volcanic ash.
Standing in a shallow, recessed area of the marble floor, they looked as if they were locked in combat, with a well-muscled wrestler on the left grappling with a smaller, leaner adversary on the right. Had they been mock wrestling at the moment of the volcanic eruption and then caught, like flies in amber, for all time? Or was this serious combat?
