“Great.” Billie shook her head. “So, time’s running out, quickly.”
“It seems so,” Sam agreed.
“Back to the logistics,” Tom said. “Where are you planning on entering the temple?”
“According to our dive operator, there’s a large square opening at the base of Ball’s Pyramid at a depth of forty feet. It’s made of obsidian and goes so deep, no one has ever tried to reach the end.”
The Gulfstream came to a complete stop next to the small airport. A minivan covered in the words Dive Lord Howe Island pulled up out the front of it.
Sam said, “Here’s our ride now.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
It took two hours by boat to reach Ball’s Pyramid, which jutted dramatically out of the Pacific Ocean – a giant spire rising 1844 feet into the dark, foreboding sky. It was a monument to the once active volcano that existed seven million years ago.
On board the dive boat was their skipper, Randy and dive operator, Henry. It was Henry, a blond-haired twenty-something dive instructor, with an easy-going attitude and carefree smile, who Sam was most interested in. The man had drawn a detailed map, including depth and surrounding rock formations as navigation guides, to the entrance of the tunnel into the submerged grotto.
Sam studied the drawing. It depicted a rectangular entrance, that looked remarkably similar to the descending passage inside the Great Pyramid of Giza with the one exception being that this one was totally submerged.
He made a couple notes on his dive slate and put the map down. Turning to Henry, he asked, “Will you be joining us on our reconnaissance dive?”
Henry shook his head. His response, visceral. “No way. You couldn’t pay me enough to go inside. I’m happy to guide you to the main entrance, but once there, you’re on your own.”
“Thanks, we appreciate your help.” Sam smiled, sympathetically. It was a common enough response. Even very good divers don’t like the idea of being confined in a small tunnel, under water, where there’s no chance of surfacing if there’s a problem with their dive equipment. “I take it you don’t like cave diving?”
“No. I love cave diving and shipwrecks. I instruct in both diving specialties. But there’s no way I’m going inside that thing.”
“Do you know of anyone who has?” Sam asked.
“No way. No one. There’s been a few who have looked at it, even the occasional diver who’s penetrated the first thirty or so feet, before turning around and never going back inside. But, to my knowledge, no one’s dived it to the end, mapping out the length and depth of the grotto.”
Sam’s lips curled with curiosity at the mystery. “Why?”
“Why doesn’t anyone go inside?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirmed.
Henry swallowed hard. “The place is evil.”
“Evil, really?” Sam grinned, and raised a curious eyebrow. “How so?”
“The fish – when we had fish – avoided the place like it was poison. Even the coral that grows throughout the region spurns the entrance, for a distance of twenty-feet. Really, you can see a defined line in the shape of a rectangle, precisely twenty-feet out from the entrance.”
“That’s interesting.” Sam was intrigued, but without any explanation, he still needed to dive the foreboding grotto. “All right. We still need to go inside it.”
“I thought you’d say that. I’m just telling you what I know.”
Sam, Tom, Billie and Genevieve finished setting up for a prolonged cave dive – using Diving Rebreathers. Traditional SCUBA diving required the use of a tank, or multiple tanks of breathable gas, in an open-circuit system where exhaled gas was discharged directly into the environment. But a Rebreather used a closed-circuit system with a scrubber to absorb exhaled carbon dioxide, reusing any of the original oxygen content. Oxygen is then added to replenish the amount metabolized by the diver. The benefit being that only a small amount of oxygen is required, allowing prolonged dives, regularly up to four hours, greater bottom times, and reduced decompression times – because the dive computer can automatically adjust the gas ratios to meet your metabolic needs at varying depths.
Tom finished checking Sam’s set up. “We’re all checked. Good to go.”
Sam glanced at the dark clouds approaching. He wasn’t sure what to believe about the grotto, but the sky certainly appeared evil. Looking at the rest of his team, he said, “Remember, we’re on the clock with this one.”
He then pulled his full-face dive mask over his head, checked that it formed a perfect seal, and stepped into the water.
The warm water rushed over his body. According to his dive-computer, it was 78 degrees Fahrenheit. There was minimum chop on the surface, as he signaled, all okay.
Sam confirmed that the rest of the team was good, and then followed Henry to the entrance of the rectangular grotto. The visibility was excellent – more than a hundred feet and his line of sight reached the rocky seafloor.
It was a short dive to reach the entrance. They descended quickly and Sam made the almost imperceptible adjustment of his jaw and slight swallowing movements to equalize the pressure in his ears.
They leveled out at a depth of forty feet.
He followed Henry around two large, submerged boulders and under a ten-foot high swim through – or covered opening between two rocks deemed not-quite a cave dive – and into another calm pool of crystal clear water.
Henry pointed to the opening up ahead.
Sam’s eyes followed where Henry had pointed. There, carved into the side of the submerged section of Balls Pyramid was a rectangular, descending tunnel. At a glance, there was no doubt in his mind that the opening wasn’t the natural result of erosion – it had been manmade.
Henry, who was the only one in their group who wasn’t wearing a full-face dive mask and therefore couldn’t speak, handed Sam his dive slate.
Sam glanced at the slate.
On it, Henry had written, THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU. GOOD LUCK.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Tom led the remaining group of four divers into the descending passage. The idea was that, being the biggest and the most experienced cave-diver, he would be in the best position to determine if they reached an unpassable tunnel.
The descending passage was the same size and shape as those found in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the pyramid buried in the Kalahari Desert, which were designed to have adult men and women walk inside. So, they offered plenty of room for diving. Even so, he wasn’t taking chances. Every thirty feet he stopped and drew an arrow with chalk and wrote, THIS WAY OUT.
In the descending tunnel with identical walls it was impossible to tell how far they’d traveled by the time they reached the bottom, but his depth gauge now showed a depth of 104 feet. Unlike other pyramids that they’d searched, this one didn’t have any secondary passages, like the ascending tunnel found in the Egyptian pyramids. At the bottom, the tunnel opened up to a large hypogeum, very similar to the one found in the Orvieto Underground. Tom shined his flashlight across the walls. Large and small rectangular-shaped stones lined the floor, walls and ceilings.
Sam said, “It’s nothing more than a dead-end!”
“It looks very similar to the hypogeum we explored in the Orvieto Underground,” Genevieve said.
Tom grinned. “It’s not just closely resembling, but exactly the same.”
“So what are you saying we do?” Sam asked.
Tom sighed. “We need to bring the black light wand down here.”
It took close to an hour to reach the dive boat.
Tom removed his fins, passing them to Henry, and then climbed the boarding ladder. He took three steps and sat down, removing his face-mask and rebreather. Billie and Genevieve were the next to climb up and Sam the last.
Henry helped remove Sam’s oxygen tank. “Did you find what you were after?”
Sam smiled. “Yes. We’ll need to make a second dive, using a black light to identify what we’re after, but we’re confident we’ve
found the right place, thanks to you.”
“That’s great news.” Henry said, “You just missed a message from Elise on the radio by about half an hour.”
Sam wiped the saltwater from his face with a towel. “What was the message?”
“She has the fourth sacred stone and has chartered a flight to Indonesia to deliver it. Says for you to catch up with her once you’re done here. Said she couldn’t wait for you to complete your work here.”
“Elise has left?” Tom asked, puzzled. “Did she say why?”
Henry sighed. “She said it couldn’t wait any longer.”
Randy joined the conversation. “Whatever the heck all of you are involved in, the world is really copping a beating now.”
Tom tried to swallow the fear that rose in his throat. “What’s happened?”
“A whole bunch of stuff that shouldn’t have,” Randy said. “I’m starting to really believe we’re about to witness the end of the world, don’t you think?”
Sam said, “Not if we can do anything about it. What’s happened?”
“A cruise ship carrying 3,500 passengers and 1500 crew hit an iceberg and sunk. So far there’s still nearly thirty passengers unaccounted for.”
“That’s bad luck, where was the cruise ship traveling that she didn’t heed ice warnings?” Sam asked.
Randy sighed, his lips curled up in the anguish of a story that he knew no one would believe. “The Strait of Gibraltar.”
“It hit an iceberg in the Mediterranean?”
Randy nodded. “I said it was bad, didn’t I?”
“What else?”
“There are more than five class four hurricanes in the northern hemisphere and six class five cyclones in the southern. Each of them recording winds in excess of a hundred and eighty miles an hour, with three being the most powerful on record.” Randy took a breath and then continued. “A set of tornadoes ripped through Germany, atmospheric rains flooded Las Vegas, and icebergs washed up on Venice beach, too.”
“Atmospheric rains?” Billie asked.
Sam said, “Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere – like rivers in the sky – that transport water vapor from the ocean. These columns of vapor move with the weather, potentially moving as much water as the Amazon River. When they make landfall, they can release their entire contents in a very short period of time. They’re pretty common, but can be deadly depending on when and where they hit.”
“Back in 2011, for example,” Tom said. “There was a mass die off of oysters in San Francisco Bay after an atmospheric river overnight dumped so much fresh water that it reduced the salinity of the bay.”
“Sounds pretty bad,” Billie said. “But then so do earthquakes, wildfires, and icebergs where they don’t belong. So what are we going to do about it?”
Tom glanced at his dive computer. “We have another hour before our residual nitrogen levels are low enough to enter the water again.”
Sam said, “After that, we’ll return to the submerged hypogeum and place the third sacred stone – then we’re off to Sigiriya to help Elise deposit the fourth stone.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Sigiriya – Palace in the Sky
Elise took a Qantas flight from Lord Howe Island to Brisbane and then a commercial flight to Colombo Airport, Sri Lanka and from there she chartered a local single-engine aircraft into Sigiriya. All told, she’d been in the air nearly fourteen hours. She’d slept intermittently. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She glanced at the dark clouds in the sky, they appeared to be somehow getting closer no matter where she went.
Sigiriya was an anomaly in the Sri Lankan landscape. Rising 660 feet from the surrounding land, the monolith had been chosen by King Kasyapa in the fifth century of the Christian Era for the site of a new capital after he had wrested the throne from his father and an older half-brother who was the rightful heir. It was a good choice, eminently defensible. After the king’s death, it was used as a Buddhist monastery until the 14th century, and then fell into oblivion until its rediscovery in 1831 by a British army officer.
Archaeological evidence placed the earliest occupancy of the area around the rock in prehistoric times, and the hills surrounding it were filled with cave dwellings and crude rock shelters. When the rock itself had been selected as both fortress and citadel, it provided places for the uppermost palace, other palaces located behind lavish lower gardens, and a mid-level terrace into which had been carved a massive lion guarding a gate that led to the winding stairway providing the only modern access to the extensive ruins of the citadel palace.
She paid a local driver to take her to Sigiriya – which meant Lion’s Rock – and was a UNESCO listed World Heritage Site. As he pulled up to the entrance to the landscaped gardens she paid him the agreed price, giving him a gold-colored 5000 Sri Lankan Rupee banknote as a tip.
The man looked at her and shook his head. He tried to pass the note back to her. “I can not take this. It is too much. Thank you.”
Elise smiled at his honesty. She squeezed his hand closed on the banknote. “I have two more for you if you wait here until I get back. Can you wait for me?”
The driver’s eyes widened. “Yes. Very good. I will wait here.”
“Thank you.”
She walked up the main path where tourists and locals were funneled by two wire fences into a single gate. A small desk and two security guards checked her passport and her payment before she was allowed entrance onto the heritage site.
Elise moved briskly, meandering through the moats, bridges and stone paths that formed the water gardens. Artificial, rectangular lakes were symmetrically aligned on an east-west axis. Each one was connected to the outer moat on the west and the large artificial lake to the south of the Sigiriya rock. All the pools were also interlinked using an underground conduit network fed by the lake, and connected to the moats. A series of circular limestone fountains, fed by an underground aqueduct system, flowed freely – and was said to have done so for nearly fifteen hundred years.
At the end of the longest rectangular lake she followed a path of stone toward Sigiriya. After a few hundred feet she reached a pair of giant boulders that leaned in against one another to form a natural arch. A signpost said the boulders had once come from high up upon the main citadel, where the king’s warriors would roll them off at intruding armies. Elise smiled as she read the description and looking up at the main Lion’s Rock. It must have been an impossible task to try and overtake the ancient city.
She ducked under the twin boulders and into what was described as the boulder gardens. There, several large boulders were linked by winding pathways. The gardens extended from the northern slopes to the southern slopes of the hills at the foot of Sigiris rock. The pathway took her past eight caves, the walls of which were once adorned with beautiful frescoes. She glanced in each one, but there was nothing to suggest the caves had anything to do with the sacred stone she was carrying in her backpack. She read the note outside one of the caves, which said that the remains of meditation limestone seats, used by ancient monks, were found inside.
She left the last of the big boulders, and entered the terraced gardens at the base of the Sigirya rock. A series of terraces rose from the pathways of the boulder garden to the staircases on the rock. These were created by the construction of brick walls in a concentric mold that hugged the main stone. Just before the Lion’s Staircase, she passed through the Mirror Wall.
Commencing at the top of a flight of steep stairs at the terraced gardens, it traversed a distance of six hundred and fifty feet along a gallery once covered with frescoes to a small plateau on the northern side of the rock on which the Lion Staircase is located.
The Mirror Wall was a parapet wall with a seven-foot-wide inner passageway that inched its way precariously along the near-perpendicular western surface of Sigiriya Rock. The outermost section of this passageway was built up to create a protective wall. The walkway was then paved with polished mar
ble slabs. Only about three hundred and thirty feet of the wall still existed, but brick debris and grooves on the rock face along the western side of the rock clearly show where the rest of the wall once stood.
Archeologists believed that its mirror-like sheen was once achieved by using a special plaster made of fine lime, egg whites, and honey. The surface of the wall was then buffed to a brilliant luster with beeswax. Elise stared at the Mirror Wall. It now appeared to be stained in hues of orange. It was lined with various inscriptions, written by visitors both old and new. A few security guards were protecting it, preventing any further damage. Two thirds of the way along the wall, two steel spiral steps led nearly forty feet up the main rock, so that tourists could get a better view of the remaining frescoes.
The frescoes were remarkable artistic feats for their time. They depicted the upper half of bare-breasted women, who were believed to be Sinhalese maidens in the posture of performing various tasks. Some archeologists believed it was possible they were the King’s wives or merely performing some sort of religious ritual. Elise stared at a couple of the frescoes. Despite depicting near naked women there was nothing lewd, indecent or seductive about their appearance.
She walked to the end of the Mirror Wall, where it opened up to the Lion’s Staircase. That stairway now held hundreds of people slowly making their way to the top. Elise eyed the rickety-looking structure with doubt. It looked as if it might collapse with just her weight. How was it holding so many people, and when would it break loose from its moorings and send them all to their deaths?
She shuddered. She’d been documenting dozens of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions around the globe for weeks. Even a minor tremblor in this location would dash everyone on that stairway to the rocks below. She would almost prefer the shallow stone steps carved into the side of the living rock itself.
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3 Page 72
