The lead archaeologist shook his head. “The room outside the tunnel may have collapsed, too. We could be stuck down here for days.”
Dunk shrugged. “Then we should take advantage of that time to do what we came here to do. There could be internationally important finds here. We owe it to the world to reveal them.”
Emotions flickered across Jack’s face as he weighed his colleague’s points. The rest of them sat deep in thought, too. In the silence, a muffled clanking began above them.
A rush of relief flooded through Winnie. “They’re digging for us.”
“What can we use to signal that we’re OK?” Chaz got up and grabbed a flashlight, shooting the beam around the room.
Behind Jack, two lead pipes ran up the wall. A chunk of one was broken off. He picked up the broken piece and banged it three times against the other pipe on the wall.
The clanking above stopped.
Jack banged the pipe three times again.
Three answering clanks sounded.
Winnie let her shoulders sag with relief.
“Yes!” Dunk shouted. He turned to Jack. “See? We don’t have much time to record what’s down here. You know this building is going to be ruled unsafe for the rest of the dig.”
“It is unsafe.”
The two men glared at each other.
“Here are the lanterns.” Hank dragged a crate out of a pile of rubble, carried it over, and set it on the floor next to them. “If you’re going to explore, you’ll need them.”
Jack looked down at it, then around at the extraordinary room. Sighing, he turned back to Dunk. “Your point does have some validity. I’ll help you document the archaeology, but not our team members’ emotions under this degree of strain.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. Anyone else want to poke around with us?”
Hank reached for the camera. “I can take over shooting. My head has stopped bleeding.”
“I’ll join you, too,” Chaz said.
“Chaz!” Winnie said involuntarily.
He met her gaze, his muted smile telling her he was glad she cared enough to worry. “All we’re doing is looking around. Either the place collapses on us or not. We might as well be doing what we came here for.”
She thought about it, then got up, too. “What the heck. I could use the distraction.”
They all rummaged around to find working flashlights. Using shoelaces, Hank tied one to the top of the camera and focused the beam and lens on Dunk. “We’re rolling.”
The show host pointed toward the pool in the center of the room. “This large pool establishes that we’re in a public bathhouse.” Walking slowly toward one of the archways, he glanced back toward the others. “What might these side rooms constitute, Jack?”
His co-star joined him onscreen, and they moved toward the closest one. “Presumably changing rooms, saunas and cold baths.”
Both men shone lights inside, and Hank filmed them entering the first room.
Winnie and Chaz went to the doorway and got a view of another tiled room furnished with four person-sized tables.
“This type of room was called a destrictarium.” Jack patted one of the tables, then wiped his dust-coated hand on his baggy cordoroy pants. “Bathers would have been oiled up here and scraped down by enslaved attendants.”
Dunk grinned, despite the seriousness of their situation. “Good for some, eh?”
“That’s what the Romans thought.”
They backtracked, then moved into the next chamber, which had space enough for all five of them to step inside. This time Enza and a limping Amara migrated over to watch from the door.
Flashlight beams flitted around the room, unveiling stone benches lining three of the four walls. The lights gravitated to a single spot where a central fresco of a scantily clad woman straddling a nude man came into view. Though the colors had faded and the plaster had chipped in spots, the most significant body parts remained intact and conspicuous.
Dunk raised an eyebrow. “What have we here?”
Winnie smothered a smile and directed her flashlight elsewhere. On the wall adjacent to her, another erotic fresco depicted a man taking a woman from behind. She swung her light across the room and revealed a woman with her legs hoisted over a man’s shoulders.
“Whoa,” Chaz said next to her. “If we’re stuck here all night, let’s call dibs on this room.”
A ripple of laughter circled them, and several faces turned their way – including Hank’s with the camera attached to it. She grimaced. Noticing Enza slip out of the room, she guessed the girl had been embarrassed for her.
Even Chaz looked slightly abashed by the reaction his comment evoked. “Unless anyone else wants to flip us for it, of course,” he added.
Winnie shot Dunk an imploring look. “Can that be edited out of the program?”
He gave her a crooked grin. “Oh, I think not. But we will consider ceding the room to you two for the night.”
Thankfully, Jack continued with their work. “Erotic art was common in ancient Rome,” he said in narrator mode. “This was likely an apodyterium or changing room.”
He focused his flashlight on the far end of the room, where a second doorway stood, filled with a blob of hardened volcanic flow, molded with the shape of two long-gone wooden doors. Walking over to it, he said, “This blocked doorway probably led outside to an exercise area called a palestra. You can still see the impression the doors left in the pyroclastic flow before the wood decomposed.”
“It doesn’t look like we’re getting out that way.” Dunk said. “Shall we see what the other rooms hold?”
As they started walking toward the door, a feminine scream echoed through the subterranean chambers.
“Enza!” Dunk ran out of the room with Hank close behind him and the others trailing. In the main chamber, he paused, looking around frantically until a sob from one of the side rooms directed him. “We’re coming, love,” he shouted.
With him leading, they all rushed in. Enza stood, pale and paralyzed, next to a small pool surrounded by stone benches. As Dunk rushed to put his arm around her, his flashlight lit up a human skull on one of the seats.
Winnie gasped.
Several of the others lifted their lights, and she made out a skeleton lying with its hands over its face. Next to it lay a pile of coins. On an adjacent bench, another human form slumped beside a set of keys. On a third bench, another figure lay, still wearing a ring and bangles. Two more victims sprawled face-down on the floor.
Enza buried her face in Dunk’s chest. “It’s the curse of the goddess! We’re all going to die down here, like them.”
Jack stepped up beside them. “Enza, love, these folks have been here for 2,000 years. They’ve long been at rest.”
Her crying only grew harder. Ignoring Jack’s comment, she grabbed Dunk by the shirt. “This is our fault!”
He looked over her shoulder at Hank. “Stop shooting.”
Hank lowered the camera, a grim look on his face.
Dunk wrapped an arm around Enza and hurried her out of the room. Looking unnerved, Amara left, too. The rest of them stood staring at the skeletons.
Chaz turned to Winnie. “Now, aren’t you glad I called dibs on the other room?”
A nervous laugh slipped out of her. “I would still rather have my room at up the house, even with the burning statue in the bathroom.”
Jack took a deep breath. “We should keep busy. Let’s shoot some comments on this room, then move onto the next one. Are you OK with that, Hank?”
“Sure.” He picked up the camera and flipped it on.
Jack maneuvered into the area between two of the benches. “This smaller pool likely represents a cold bath, making this room the frigidarium. As you can see, we’ve found the remains of five adults here. We don’t have an osteoarchaeologist on the team, so we can’t say what gender they are.”
Chaz stooped beside the skeleton adorned with jewelry. “This one is wearing several pieces of valuable jew
elry – likely a wealthy woman. The person beside her was carrying that set of keys, and there’s a large pile of coins next to the bloke over there. It looks like they were on their way out of out of here when the volcano erupted. They just left it too late.”
Jack’s mouth twisted. “I’ll remember this next time I’m tempted to procrastinate.”
Chaz eased his way around to the skeleton on the other side and bent to look at the coins without touching them. “I don’t want to move anything without it being properly recorded in situ, but the coins I can see show Titus as Caesar. One is tails-up and shows a goddess holding ears of grain. The finds are consistent with burial in the year 79 eruption.”
Jack shone his flashlight at the skeletons on the floor. “There’s no evidence that the other skeletons were carrying anything valuable. They may have been enslaved people. Let’s move on.”
As they approached the next room, an undercurrent of white noise came into earshot, growing stronger as they got closer. “Is that water rushing?” Winnie wondered out loud.
They entered, and the sound grew clearer, though she still couldn’t see an underground stream. Their lights revealed a plain tiled chamber featuring a marble bench with holes in it, like a multi-seat outhouse, along the outside wall.
“A latrine.” Chaz stepped up to the seating and shone his light down one of the holes. “And it’s still in working order after 2,000 years.”
She took a peek and saw water rushing by below. “That looks like a pretty effective flushing system.”
Jack grinned. “If we’re stuck here all night, this will come in handy.”
She smirked at him. “Too bad we’re not likely to find any toilet paper that survived.”
“The ancient Romans used sponges,” he said.
Chaz flit his flashlight beam around the area. “The sponges didn’t make it either.”
“That’s probably just as well.” Jack turned back toward the door. “There’s one more chamber. Let’s see what’s in there.”
He entered first, his flashlight revealing a tighter room with stairs leading up to a dark doorway. “I don’t suppose this is an alternate way out. It looks too dark up there. But let’s see.”
He climbed the stairs with Hank following him.
Chaz and Winnie went up behind them, choosing their footing carefully in the poor lighting. The exertion in the dusty air made her cough, and she noticed the others doing the same. “It seems dustier in this area.”
At the top, they found themselves in a red-and-white painted room, half-filled with volcanic debris. Jack turned his flashlight on the wall next to them, revealing floor-to-ceiling, built-in masonry shelves. “This may have been the library that our scroll cases came from.”
Chaz directed his light into one of the dark recesses, leaning over to look inside. He repeated the action with several other nooks. “These are all empty. If there were scrolls here, they must have been removed in the early stages of the eruption.”
“Or sometime since then.” Jack was staring at the opposite side of the chamber. “Look – this room has been breached.”
They focused their lights on the other wall and saw a hole in it that led to another dark space. Jack and Chaz walked up to it, shining their flashlights into the adjoining room.
Standing on tiptoes to get a glimpse around them, Winnie could see piles of rubble and dirt. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, and dust particles floated in the air. “Goodness. What the hell happened?”
“Perhaps World War II munitions exploding,” Chaz said.
“Indeed.” Jack frowned. “But it looks like the explosion just happened. It could be what caused the partial collapse in the other room.”
“Then there could be more explosives,” Chaz said. “We should go back.”
As they started to retreat, Winnie’s flashlight caught a glint of something on the floor. “Wait. A coin.”
She stooped and examined it. “That’s odd. It reads ‘Carolus Imperator Augustus.’ Charlemagne didn’t reign until the eighth century. This building must have been breached during the Middle Ages.”
Hank moved in to get a close-up of the coin.
On the other side of her, Chaz studied it, too. “So, the question is whether the ancients removed the scrolls from here or someone did it much later.”
“We can debate that another time,” Jack said. “Hank, did you get a good shot of the coin?
“Yep.”
“Then let’s get back to the baths.”
Venti
THEY FOLLOWED THE rhythmic clanking back to the central chamber. As they entered, Chaz glanced up toward the blocked tunnel. “No passage to freedom yet, I see.”
No one bothered to respond.
Amara, Enza and Dunk sat on the floor writing up tent labels. They already had several dozen of the antiquities tagged.
Winnie sat down beside them. “Good to see something productive getting done despite the stressful situation.” She noticed, however, that the lanterns looked dimmer than before, and she couldn’t think of a positive way to spin that. If they ended up down here in complete darkness, she didn’t know how they would stay sane.
Jack also joined the labelers. “Dunk Mortill writing up labels?” he asked with exaggerated surprise. “In fifteen years of doing the show together, I’ve never known you to lag behind the forefront of exploration before. And this is what kept you from catching up with us in the other rooms?”
His longtime colleague didn’t look up. “I didn’t want to leave Enza. What did you find?”
“Among the highlights, a functioning latrine and a nonfunctioning library.”
That got Dunk’s attention. “What do you mean, ‘nonfunctioning’?”
“Ransacked. Not a scroll in sight. Interestingly, as we were leaving, Winnie spotted a medieval coin on the floor, suggesting the place might have been cleaned out long after it was buried.”
“Bloody hell!” A scowl creased his face. “Is there any way the coin could have worked its way underground by accident?”
“Didn’t look like it,” Jack said.
“So all the best finds have been looted.”
Amara reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “It’s a big site. There could be heaps of untouched rooms.”
He pushed her hand away. “We won’t get to see them. The rescue squad will have us out of here within hours.”
A hint of annoyance flashed across her face before she looked back down at her work. “Is that the worst thing that could happen?”
As if to prove her point, the lantern closest to Enza flickered and went out. The teenager gasped.
Winnie didn’t like it, either. “Are these the only lanterns we have? They’re all going to die soon, and then it’s going to be a long, dark night in here.”
“There are a few more in the box,” Amara said, “but they don’t work.”
Enza started to cry again. “We are in our own tomb.”
“Maybe the problem is only loose parts.” Chaz went to the crate and pulled out a lantern. He unscrewed the bottom and started pulling out the components. “If I can get more of them to work, we’ll burn one at a time to make the light last as long as possible.”
“Good idea.” Winnie moved over to help him.
Slowly, Amara pushed herself up on her feet, wincing as she put weight on her ankle. “I suppose I’ll hit the latrine while we’ve still got light. Enza, would you mind coming with me? We can take a couple lanterns with us.”
She agreed, getting up and taking Amara by the arm. Her sobbing stopped, now that she had something to do.
As they made their way across the chamber, Dunk watched them. “Be careful!”
Amara nodded to him over her shoulder, and they left.
Winnie turned to the men. “OK, now that Enza is gone, is anyone besides me terrified there will be another collapse?”
Silence dominated for a moment, during which Dunk finished a label and placed in front of an ancient hinge on the floo
r. “I’m confident it’s all over.”
Jack looked at him in surprise. “Your reasoning?”
“Gut feeling.”
He let out a snort. “That’s our Dunk, a great proponent of the scientific method.”
“In any case,” Chaz said, “this room is probably the safest place down here. The vaulted ceiling should be quite strong.”
Winnie hoped so. As she checked for cracks above them, a drilling noise came from the area of the blocked tunnel. The sound grew louder; then some rubble broke away and tumbled down the slope.
Hank grabbed the camera and focused it on the tunnel just as a four-inch-wide pointed cylinder broke through.
Jack jumped up. “Contact with the outside world!”
The drill bit retreated, leaving a pipe behind. A thin beam of light shone through.
He cupped his mouth and called, “Ahoy! Can you hear us?”
Something slid out of the pipe and down the slope – a walkie-talkie, Winnie realized.
The speaker crackled, and Domenico’s anxious voice came out: “Enza, carina, can you hear me?”
Dunk picked it up and pressed the button. “Dom, it’s Dunk. Enza’s fine, but she’s in the next room. She’ll be right back.”
“Grazie Dio!” Domenico said, his tone filled with relief. “There is more than one chamber down there? Is anyone hurt?”
“There’s plenty of room. Amara injured her ankle, but the rest of us are OK – but Will isn’t with us. Did he get out?”
“We dug him out a half-hour ago. He was unconscious. He has been taken to the hospital.”
Winnie exchanged a concerned look with Chaz. Their boss may have been a jerk, but she didn’t want to see him hurt.
Frowning, Dunk pressed the button again. “How bad is his condition?”
“It’s not clear, but I assure you he will receive the best care.” A pause ensued, then the speaker crackled on again. “It may take some time before we can get you out. We’re going to send down water and food. What else do you need?”
The Five-Day Dig Page 20
