Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  Grant was just taking out another bucket of earth when something caught his eye at the foot of the hill across the valley.

  'What's that?'

  'What?' Reed was lying in the grass, resting while Muir spelled him. He staring right at it, though he didn't seem to have noticed. Grant could never quite be sure what he was seeing.

  'There.' It came again — a series of sparkling flashes, winking at them from the edge of a ridge, near a blackened pine tree. Grant tried to count them, wondering if it could be some sort of message. But to whom?

  'It might be a scrap of cigarette foil, or a piece of broken glass,' Reed suggested.

  'Or someone watching us.' Grant pulled on his shirt and buckled the Webley round his waist. He made his way down the slope, picking a cautious path through the tangled scrub and loose stones. He had to watch his footing carefully; when he looked up he couldn't see the flashes any more.

  He crossed a small stream at the foot of the hill and began climbing up the far side. As he got closer to the ridge he slowed. He could see the black branches of the burned pine tree poking over the escarpment above. A breeze stirred — and among the wildflowers and grasses he smelled a wisp of tobacco smoke. Someone must be there. But he heard nothing.

  He crept to his left, edging his way round the ridge to try to get round the back. A butterfly flitted across his path; the bushes around him buzzed with the sounds of bees and flies. Anywhere else, it would have been a perfect day to lie back in the grass with a cold beer and a girl. He gripped the Webley tighter.

  With a sudden roar a motor kicked into life on the ridge above. Forgetting caution, Grant ran the last few yards up the bank and looked down. A cloud of dust was slowly settling on the dirt track that wound away behind the next hill. Grant ran down it and round the corner — just in time to see the blur of a motorbike disappearing out of sight. He stared after it for a moment — but there was nothing he could do.

  With a curse, he walked back to the hillside. A little hollow indented the slope, just behind the ridge that looked across to the hooded mountain top. A section of grass had been flattened there and half a dozen white tubes littered the ground. Grant picked one up and sniffed it, then squinted down the cardboard barrel. They were cigarette butts — but a good inch of the cigarette was hollow, as if the manufacturer had only been able to afford to fill half the tube with tobacco. Cheap tobacco at that, Grant thought, smelling it.

  There was only one place Grant knew where they made such awful cigarettes. He'd smoked a few himself during his brief stint on the Eastern Front, as much for warmth as for the nicotine. The five men they'd sunk in the bay obviously hadn't been the only Russians on the island.

  * * *

  'They've been watching us.'

  'Damn.' Muir threw his cigarette butt into the marble basin. It hissed and fizzled out. 'How long were they there for?'

  Reed blinked. 'I'm afraid I never noticed them.'

  'Well, pay more fucking attention from now on.' He turned to Grant. 'Do you think they'll come back?'

  'Maybe. After the other night, they'll be careful about getting too close.'

  'Let's hope so.'

  The day grew darker. Clouds rolled in from the west, brooding over the hooded hilltop. On one of his trips to empty the bucket, Grant saw the sun low between the clouds and the sea, a furious crimson mess. The next time he emerged it was gone. Night fell, but the cellar remained in perpetual lamplit twilight. The trench against the wall was almost two feet deep now: when Grant came down the others looked like dwarves toiling in the bowels of the earth.

  Work slowed. They had exposed the upper foundations and come down to a lower level, broad slabs laid without mortar. Now the ground was harder, filled with as much rubble as earth. They had to remove it piece by piece. Soon their hands were chafed raw, their nails split and their muscles in agony.

  At nine o'clock they paused for supper. They sat in the courtyard, shivering slightly in the cool air, and ate the bread and cheese the hotel owner had given them that morning. There were no stars.

  'How far down have we got?' asked Grant.

  'Those ashlars — the big stones — are very old.' Marina had Reed's jacket wrapped round her shoulders and her eyes were glazed. 'We must be close.'

  'If there's anything to find,' Reed cautioned. His earlier exuberance had vanished, broken by the sheer effort of their labour. 'It might be in another part of the temple — or this might be the wrong place altogether.'

  'Only one way to be sure.' Grant took a last swig of water and picked up a spade. 'I'll dig.'

  But his effort was short-lived. He had only been working for a quarter of an hour when he felt a jarring impact. He knelt in the trench, scraping away the soil with his fingers to try to find the edges of the rock he had hit. All he felt was stone. Soon, working with hands and spade, he had uncovered an unbroken rock surface that ran from one side of the trench to the other.

  Marina unhooked one of the lanterns and lowered it into the hole. 'Bedrock.' She swore under her breath. 'This must have been the floor of the original temple. You can see the marks where they used chisels to level it.'

  'At least we don't have to dig any deeper.' Grant let the spade drop to the ground and rubbed his blistered hands together. 'It's too late to get off the hill now. We'll have to go back in the morning.'

  Grant collected the equipment and passed it out to Reed. Marina ignored them. She stood waist deep in the trench and examined the ashlar wall, occasionally sweeping away the crust of earth with a small brush. When Grant had handed up the last of the tools, he turned. Marina was crouched beside the wall, her face inches from the stone as she traced something with her finger. But it was her face that really stopped him. It shone with a fierce concentration, and her dark eyes were wide with awe.

  Grant's weariness fell away in an instant. He scrambled across the low room and joined her in the trench. She didn't say anything, but grabbed his hand and pressed it against the wall. Her skin was warm against his, the stone beneath it cold. She moved his hand down the wall in a slow, sinuous arc. 'Do you feel it?'

  He did — a curve of tiny ridges carved into the rock. He took his hand away and stared closely. Three thousand years had worn it down to almost nothing, little more than a shadow, but his hand had told him what to look for. He traced it again, a crescent moon turned on its side. A pair of bull's horns.

  'We need to pull it out.' Marina took her pocket knife and tried to work her blade into the hairline crack along the edge of the slab.

  'It must weigh a ton,' said Grant doubtfully. The stone was about a yard wide, a foot high and looked to be almost as deep. 'You'd need dynamite to get that out.'

  'The Mycenaeans didn't have dynamite.' Marina kept prying away with the knife. Worried that the blade might snap, Grant stepped back out of the trench.

  Muir popped his head through the hole in the church floor. 'Are you going to spend all night down there?'

  'Marina thinks…'

  Grant whipped round as a huge bang echoed round the cellar. Marina was in the trench holding her knife and even in the lamplight he could see her face was white as dust. A stone slab lay at her feet, shattered into three pieces by the impact on the bedrock. Above it, a dark chasm had opened in the wall.

  'It was a panel.' She was trembling — she must barely have avoided being crushed by the falling slab. 'A door.'

  'Someone forgot to oil the hinges.' Grant jumped down into the trench. The aperture was about the same size as the slab that had disguised it, barely high enough for a man to squeeze through. He stuck in his arm and felt around.

  'It opens out a bit once you get through the wall. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to give you some wriggle room.'

  He took the lantern from the edge of the trench and pushed it through the hole. The fire shone on smooth-cut stone walls, but beyond it all was darkness.

  'Let's see what's inside.'

  Eleven

  It was like posting himself through a let
ter box. Grant had been in some tight spaces before — chasing diamonds in Rhodesia in the thirties — but never anything like this. He twisted his head flush with his body and sucked in his stomach; he wriggled and squirmed into the stone mouth, while Reed and Marina pushed from behind. Then he was through. He lay flat on his belly, breathing hard.

  Something touched his ankle, still sticking out into the cellar, and he kicked instinctively.

  'I've tied a rope to your foot.' Marina's voice was already frighteningly distant. 'If you find something, jerk it twice. If you get stuck, jerk it three times and we'll pull you out.'

  Grant didn't bother to reply. He was in a tunnel, taller than the hole he had squeezed through but no wider. If he got on to his hands and knees, his back scraped the roof.

  There were no stones or mortar to be seen: it must be cut into the rock itself.

  'At least there's no danger of it collapsing,' he consoled himself.

  He crawled forward. The tunnel wasn't high enough to hold the lamp; he had to push it along the ground in front of him, then crawl after it. The air was thick — surely no one had breathed it for three thousand years. More worrying was the sour tinge of gas he smelled.

  Where's a canary when you want one? he thought.

  He crawled on. The only sounds now were the scrape of the lantern as he slid it forward and the dead rustle of his clothes against the rock walls. Whoever had cut the tunnel had done a remarkable job: it never deviated, but thrust straight into the heart of the hill. He tried to imagine the men who had made it. How long had it taken them, with their stone hammers and copper chisels?

  'And what were you trying to get to?' he wondered aloud. Had it been worth it?

  He shook his head. Ahead, something was gleaming in the lamplight. He hauled himself closer, pushed the lantern forward again, then snatched it back just in time to keep it from toppling over. A shiny-faced pool of water stretched out in front of him, cut into the floor of the tunnel. Grant extended an arm and held the lantern above the surface. The water was clear; ripples of lamplight touched the rocky bottom, about three feet down. It would have been easy enough to splash through, Grant thought. Except that on the far side, rising sheer and impossible out of the water, the tunnel and the pool ended together in a rock face.

  Grant stared at it for a moment, then drew his right leg up and twitched it twice. It was an awkward manoeuvre in the tight space — for a moment, he wondered if they'd felt it. Then he heard a noise behind him — far away, it seemed. The grunts and groans of someone trying to squeeze into the tunnel.

  While he waited, he turned his attention back to the pool. It must be fed from an underground spring: it couldn't have stayed like this for so many centuries otherwise. Was it the same source that fed the fountain in the church compound? He leaned out over the water as far as he dared. It certainly had the same sulphurous smell. And if there was a way for the water to come in…

  He lowered the lamp so that its bowl almost touched the water. It was hard to see at that angle, but it looked as though the far wall didn't reach all the way to the bottom. Instead, there seemed to be the dark shadow of an opening at its base.

  The shuffling noise that had been growing louder in the tunnel behind him stopped. A hand squeezed his foot and he craned his head round. Dark eyes watched him from the black midnight behind.

  'Here we are. Theseus and Ariadne in the labyrinth.'

  'Let's hope there's no Minotaur.'

  Grant rolled on to his side, pressing himself against the wall so that Marina could see past him. Her eyes widened.

  'What do we do now?'

  'I don't think they cut their way down here just because they were thirsty. Untie my boots.' Grant pointed to the yawning shadow at the foot of the rock face, though it was invisible to Marina. 'There's an opening. I'm going to see where it goes.'

  Marina unlaced his boots and tugged them off, leaving the rope still fastened round his ankle. He didn't take off his clothes: there was no room.

  'Be careful.' Her voice was small and hollow in the gloom.

  Grant pulled himself forward and slid face first into the water. It was surprisingly warm — almost like a hot bath. He immersed himself in it, enjoying the rare feeling of space. He could even spin himself round to look at Marina. She had crawled forward to the water's edge and for a second their faces almost touched.

  'Give me two minutes,' he said. 'Then pull like hell'

  The water closed over his head like a coffin. He duck-dived to the bottom, pawing out with his hands until he felt the opening in the far wall. It seemed to be about the same size as the tunnel above — wide enough to move forward, too narrow to turn round. He kicked himself through, banging his knee on the rocky floor. The minerals in the water stung his eyes, so he closed them — there was nothing to see anyway. All he could do was press his palms against the sides of the tunnel, washed smooth by the ages, and kick on.

  Two minutes.

  How long was that? In a place without light, without sound, without up or down, how could you measure time? Grant didn't know how long he had been there — nor how far he had come. Did it matter if you didn't know how far you had to go? At first he tried to keep count of his kicks, but he soon lost track. A slow ache crept into his lungs and his thrusts weakened. He would have to turn back soon.

  Two minutes.

  The tunnel widened. The walls pulled away from Grant's reach and his last contact with the solid world disappeared. He was suspended in space — weightless, senseless, timeless. He forgot everything and became nothing. He was alone with the gods, a little fish wriggling forward, driven on by a destiny it could not understand.

  A flash of pain cracked through his skull. He must have floated up and banged his head on the rock ceiling. His lungs were burning now, but when he parted his lips it was only to get a mouthful of water. There were no air pockets here. Did he even have enough in his lungs to get back?

  He opened his eyes — and stared despite the stinging pain. Ahead of him the water seemed to shimmer with a golden light: the warmest, kindest light he had ever seen. He wanted to be near it; he knew that if he could only reach it everything would be all right. The pain disappeared; his body relaxed. He kicked out again, almost in a dream. The golden light was nearer now, all around him, and he was rising, rising…

  His head broke the surface with a splash and a gasp of relief. Pain flooded back, but this time when he opened his mouth he tasted air. He gulped it down, screwing his eyes shut against the water cascading off his face. Only when his lungs were satisfied, when they no longer felt as if they were about to split apart inside him, did he wipe his eyes and open them.

  The light almost burned through his eyeballs, and a hot breath singed his face. He splashed back in terror as the flames licked up in front of him and water droplets sizzled into steam. He shut his burning eyes, then cracked them open a fraction. He had come up in a pool in another small chamber, but instead of a rock face, this one was barred by a wall of fire. He gaped, amazed. The flames seemed to lick out of the rock itself, and the walls round it were black with soot, softly moulded like melted wax.

  Treading water, Grant extended a toe until he found the bottom. It wasn't too deep. Still marvelling at the fire, he let himself stand — and almost immediately collapsed as a tug on his leg pulled his feet out from under him.

  Marina.

  He splashed wildly, scrabbling against the walls for a grip. Marina was strong — she was pulling hard, almost desperately. It was all he could do to hold on, fighting to keep himself from being dragged back into the tunnel. It felt as though his leg would be ripped off. He tried to kick off the noose but it was too tight, and there was no way he could reach it with his hands without losing his grip. All he could do was hold on and pray.

  The rope went still. Grant gave it two deliberate tugs with his leg, waited a few seconds, then gave two more. A moment later he felt two tugs in reply. The rope went taut again, then started to twitch like a plucked guit
ar string as Marina hauled herself along it, hand over hand. Grant braced himself against the chamber to anchor her. Ever closer — then a hand wrapped itself round his calf, let go and she broached the surface like a dolphin. He put out an arm to hold her back from the flame at the far end.

  She shook the water from her head and pushed back the hair that was slicked to her face.

  'Careful,' Grant warned. 'Open your eyes slowly.'

  She gasped. The sound sighed round the chamber. 'What is it?'

  'A gas vent.' Now that he'd had time to think, Grant could remember an evening by a campfire near the Zambezi, yarning and bragging with the diamond company geologists. 'Methane gas escapes through holes in the rock and spontaneously ignites. No one quite knows how it works. Apparently…' He unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it off, rolling it into a loose bundle. With a quick movement, he breasted his way through the water and pressed the shirt into the flames. With a hiss of steam, the cave was plunged in darkness.

  Grant whipped the shirt away and stepped back — straight into Marina. She cried out and grabbed him, wrapping her arms round his bare chest for balance. Her nipples pressed against his back, her sodden blouse leaving little barrier between their skins. Just at that moment he had no time to appreciate it. The flames had leaped up again, as steady and constant as a gas fire in a suburban sitting room.

  Just as they had said. 'It always relights itself,' he marvelled.

  'Is it dangerous?'

  'You don't want to cover it too long in case the gas builds up.' That prompted another thought. 'But if it burns, it's getting air from somewhere. The water seals the way we came. There must be something behind it.'