by Alan Baxter
“What is it?”
She held the journal up so Crowley could see it without taking his eyes completely off the road. In large, rough scrawl was one word: BLIND.
“So that particular legend would appear to be true,” Crowley said. “See what comes before it.”
Rose turned back a few pages, scanned, read slowly. Then she let out a small laugh and read aloud. “Ahiga came by. Says I was seen coming back from the cave.”
Crowley’s heart skipped a beat. He glanced over to see Rose smiling.
“Says the council won’t like it,” she went on, “and I should leave. Asked what was so special about the cave. Ahiga was quiet for a long time, then said ‘the dark god lives there’. Superstitious nonsense.”
Crowley glanced over again and Rose looked up, grinning. “Do you think the cave is the city?” she asked.
Crowley shrugged. “Regardless, it sounds like a promising lead. But it’s worthless unless he gives directions to this cave in question.”
Rose held the journal up for him to see again. “You think this map might be good enough?”
Chapter 46
Haunted Canyon Region- Grand Canyon
The sun beating down was hotter than it had been last time they were in the canyon, but still not too bad. They had taken the precaution of bringing a lot of water and new climbing gear from a brief stop at a surplus store on the way in. After getting back to the hotel the night before, Crowley had photographed the journal and sent all the information to Cameron. He and Rose had fallen into their separate beds and slept like the dead. By morning, new messages from Cameron made them both happy. He had combined the map and details from the journal with the information he’d already amassed and confirmed a location in the Haunted Canyon area.
How accurate do you think this is? Crowley had messaged.
You doubt my skills, bawbag? Cameron had immediately pinged back.
Crowley laughed, sent his thanks, and now they found themselves at the foot of a high cliff, hoping Cameron’s skills were indeed up to the task.
“There’s definitely a ledge up there,” Rose said. Her voice wavered with hope and the preparation for disappointment.
Crowley couldn’t blame her for that. Her last experience in the canyon had been bad. “In Cam we trust,” he said with a grin. “Come on.”
They began the climb, working together well, taking care with well-placed pitons. Crowley sincerely hoped they were in the right place, as any disappointment now would be the end of the road. He saw no other way forward if this proved a dead end.
“Look here.” Rose, a little above and to the right of him, pointed to a crack in the rock. “Fresh handhold chiseled here. Evidence someone has climbed recently.”
As she moved on, Crowley followed and looked for himself. It was unweathered. She had a point. He allowed himself a little more hope.
“I wonder if it was Lily,” Rose said from above.
“We can hope.”
Sweating, but exhilarated, they finally reached the ledge and crawled up onto it. It was fairly large, several meters deep, and a small cave entrance yawned darkly right in front of them. Crowley looked up at the canyon wall, arching out, casting the ledge in shadow.
“This would definitely be hard to see from above or below,” he said.
Rose couldn’t keep a smile from her face. She pointed up. “Look there. And there.”
Crowley followed where she indicated, saw several small indentations in the cliff edge high above. A rippled edge to the rock and slight discoloration from the stone either side. “That certainly looks like the erosion of a seasonal waterfall,” he said quietly.
“Let’s go.” Without waiting for him, or even looking to see if he followed, Rose hurried into the darkness.
Crowley quickly followed her in, taking a deep breath and letting his caution rise higher than his excitement. He understood Rose’s need to find Lily, but they had been shot at too much for him to think this encounter would be violence-free.
“Slow down,” he said softly, as kindly as he could. “Bad guys might be here, too. Let’s not give ourselves away.”
Rose paused, glanced back at him. Then she nodded. Crowley fell into step beside her and they moved cautiously forward, guided by the light of a single small flashlight, half-shielded by Crowley’s hand.
The passageway was neatly hewn from the stone, flat-floored and roughly arch-shaped, some four meters or so high and about as wide. As they moved along, it narrowed to around three meters. Crowley glanced back to the brightness of the entrance, growing smaller behind them.
“Side passages,” Rose whispered.
The passages branched off at about forty-five degrees to the right and left, and the main passage continued on.
“Which way?” Crowley asked.
Rose shrugged and turned left. Crowley flashed his light along, checked both sides of the new corridor. Along each side were a number of oval-shaped wooden doors. Rose glanced at him, eyebrows raised. Crowley smiled, tried the first door. It opened onto a room about the size of an ordinary living room in a modest modern house. The wall between the room and the passage was a good meter or more thick, ventilated by round air spaces only a couple of centimeters in diameter. The passage and the room were chiseled or hewn as straight as could be laid out by any engineer.
“This place is incredible,” Rose said. “You really think it’s old?”
“I do,” Crowley said, realizing she shared his thoughts. What if the place was relatively new, not the ancient lost city of legend. It was entirely possible. “Only exploration will tell us that, I guess.”
They checked a number of other rooms, some as big as ten or fifteen meters square, but otherwise all similar. The ceilings of many converged up to a center point. As the passage continued on it bent slowly to the left until Crowley estimated they were at a right-angle to the main passage they had left. Eventually the side passage ended, with the largest rooms either side. The other similarity the rooms shared was that they were all empty.
After another five minutes they had established that the side passage to the right was symmetrically identical.
“So many rooms,” Rose said. “What are they for?”
“If this place is a lost city, I guess they could be living quarters.” Crowley did some quick calculations. “If we assume several people per room, what we’ve seen so far could accommodate hundreds of people. More than a thousand, maybe.”
“So I guess we need to go deeper to find anything more interesting.”
Crowley lifted his flashlight beam to see ahead along the main passage. “I suppose so. Let’s go.”
Their feet scuffed and echoed dully off the stone as they moved cautiously onwards. Before long they emerged into a much larger space. Again Crowley explored it with his light. Rose gasped.
“This is just like Shepherd described. I can’t believe it’s real.”
“It is. And it’s huge!”
The room was circular, the ceiling arching high above in a smooth dome. Evenly spaced around the room, thirteen passages radiated out like sunbeams, exactly like Shepherd’s description, each one a dark mystery.
Crowley strained his ears to listen, tried to guess which might be the right way. But silence pressed in on him.
“I guess we try a few?” Rose said.
They started to the left, checking quickly but carefully along the neatly carved corridors. They came across various chambers, carvings of Egyptian deities, hieroglyphs.
“Okay, this is starting to look a lot more like a lost Egyptian city and not some modern excavation, after all,” Crowley said. “I’m more than a little weirded out here.”
A few scattered artifacts littered various spaces, but they got the feeling that there was once a lot more. Several empty alcoves adorned the walls, rooms had scratch marks on the floors where things that must have been quite heavy had been dragged around.
“This place has been pretty soundly looted, I’m thinking,” R
ose said.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Hard to imagine what people might have found here when it was first discovered.”
They moved around the chamber and when they reached the passage heading directly opposite the one they had entered by, Crowley reached out to stop Rose walking further. He crouched, looking closely with his flashlight.
“Partial footprints,” he said. “Here in the dust. More here.”
They searched more closely, before Crowley stood. “Based on the size of the prints, I thinks it’s two men and one woman.”
Rose took a deep breath, clearly trying not to get too excited. She placed her booted foot alongside one of the smaller prints. “Lily and I wear the same size.” She took her foot away and her print neatly matched the other in length and width.
She didn’t say more but it was obvious to Crowley where her hopes lay.
“Come on,” he said. “But let’s be quiet.”
They moved along the passage and soon came to a strange drop off on one side that led to a large, rounded chamber. It was a several a meter fall to the circular floor, but two copper hooks extended from the near edge.
“You think some sort of ladder was attached there?” Rose asked.
“Yeah, probably,” Crowley said. “As it’s rounded, I wonder if it was a granary.” He pointed his flashlight down, picking out reflections of shining silvery metal. As he played the light around, they caught sight of a number of yellowish stones, each engraved with a head or face of some sort. “Worth anything?” Crowley asked.
Rose smiled. “Impossible to say without a closer look and I don’t think we should waste time climbing down there.”
“No. Certainly not now anyway.”
They carried on, spotting the occasional stray footprint here and there, but the passage floors were fairly clean. After another fifty or so meters, they emerged into another large room. Evenly spaced along the curving back wall were numerous life-size statues, each standing in its own alcove. Each a representation of an Egyptian god. Horus with his hawk’s head, Ra with a large sun disc. Isis and Osiris. And at the end of the row, jackal-headed Anubis. All beautifully carved, detailed and enameled or lacquered with bright, shining colors. The hall itself shone, carved out of a hard rock resembling marble. Between them and the statues were tables laden with tools of all descriptions, all seemingly made of copper.
Crowley picked one up, turned it over in his hands. “If this place is as old as we suspect, this is pretty amazing.”
“The copper?” Rose asked.
“Yeah. These people clearly knew the art.”
On a bench running around the workroom lay charcoal and other materials no doubt used in the process. Slag indicating the smelting of ores littered the benches. There were urns and cups of copper and, possibly, gold, beautiful in design. The pottery showed more of the enameling evident on the statues. On several pieces and on the walls and tablets of stone were numerous mysterious hieroglyphics.
Crowley and Rose moved around the tables and approached the statues. As they drew nearer they saw that each alcove had a door behind its occupant. Crowley checked the two nearest and discovered they were false, simply carved artistically into the stone wall.
He cast a nervous glance at Rose.
She shook her head. “No, no, no. We can’t have found all this to only meet a dead end now.” She hurried to the end of the row, to Anubis. “If anything, this one surely…” She pushed in behind the statue and put her shoulder to the carving of the door. It didn’t budge.
Tears in her eyes, she stepped back out into the littered chamber and cursed eloquently. Crowley was quite impressed by the range of her vocabulary. He paid closer attention to the door behind Anubis and his eyes narrowed. The door looked different from the others. He slipped into the space and had a closer look with his flashlight. A tiny crack ran around the carved outline. He quickly checked the alcove beside Anubis and this one had no similar fine crack.
“What is it?” Rose asked, hope quavering in her tone.
Crowley didn’t answer. He went back behind Anubis and pushed against the carved door. It didn’t move. With a strength born of frustration, he threw his shoulder into it. It made a cracking sound, a scrape, then swung open. He smiled at Rose. “Looks like you just didn’t have the weight for it. We haven’t reached the end of the line just yet.”
Chapter 47
Lost Egyptian City, Grand Canyon
Crowley and Rose moved forward cautiously, listening hard, their flashlights once again masked with cupped palms. They emerged into a huge empty room, the ceiling rising high above them to a point like the inside of a pyramid. Against the far wall was an intricately carved Sphinx head, twice the size of a large person, its mouth open. Beyond the mouth was darkness, a passage continuing on. Without need to discuss it, they walked through the mouth and came out into another large room, bigger than the previous one.
“This place is immense,” Rose whispered.
“It is. And long-abandoned, it would seem. But also long since looted. What could your sister want here? What have others missed?”
He shone his light around the walls and saw tiers of shelves with urns, stacks of old, tarnished weapons, scraps of leather and furs, degraded and mostly rotten. The urns and cups on the lower tiers were crude, while on the higher shelves the artifacts were finer in design, showing a later stage of civilization.
“It’s like a history of artisanal skill,” Crowley said.
Along the two long walls of the room, fifty meters or more each, were small divisions like cattle stalls. Old wooden bed frames, broken or run-down, could be found in some. Crowley pointed them out, then gestured to the old weapons up the front end. “A barracks?”
Rose pursed her lips, looked around. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But there are no other doors leading out. Have we reached the end of this place?”
“Bloody disappointing if we have. But it can’t be.”
Rose frowned. “Why not?”
“Couple of things.” Crowley pointed to the dusty floor. “For one, we didn’t see a single footprint heading back toward the entrance. Nor did we encounter anyone or find any trapdoors.”
“So we must have missed something.” Rose moved back to the entrance, brows creased together. “Maybe a side passage or something?”
Crowley scratched his chin, frustration gnawing at him. “I think there’s something we’re missing right here. Why would the soldiers be quartered all the way at the back, unless...”
Rose turned to face him, eyebrows raised. “Unless they were guarding something important.”
“Right. Otherwise, they’d be nearer the front wouldn’t you think?”
“Well, that’s entirely speculation, but yeah. It makes a kind of sense.”
“Let’s look around here more closely. See if there’s another concealed door or something.”
They spent a good ten minutes poring over all the shelves and tables in the huge space, looking for anything that wasn’t simply aged junk. Eventually Rose called Crowley over. When he joined her, she pointed to a huge urn, bigger than any others.
“Is it me, or is this off-center?”
Crowley shone his light over it closely, stood on tip-toes to see in the top. The interior was black and empty, but he spotted something else. “Look. Handprints on the lip.” His light showed up the greasy marks, left in the dry, pale pottery. “You think maybe someone has moved it recently?”
Rose smiled. “Maybe. You try.”
Crowley pushed and pulled at it, but nothing happened. Then he had another idea and turned it like a crank. It was heavy, stiff, but pivoted slowly with a muffled grinding sound. The section of wall behind it dropped out of sight.
“This whole place keeps rewarding the persistent visitor,” Crowley said with a grin.
They stepped through, the urn slowly rotating back to its original position once Crowley had released his grip. As the urn turned, the door rose back up from the floor.
“I hope there’s another mechanism on this side,” Rose said, her voice rising slightly in concern.
Crowley looked quickly around, found a small wooden table nearby, broken like the rest. He grabbed a sturdy looking table leg and jammed it in the gap while there was still around a meter of opening left between the top of the rising door and the ceiling. The door stopped, the urn ceased its motion.
He smiled at Rose. “We can climb over there easily enough to get out.”
As Rose began to nod, relief washing over her face, the table leg splintered with a loud, dry crack and shattered. The urn spun and the door slammed up and closed before they could move.
They stared in silence for a moment. “Or,” Crowley said eventually, “we hope there’s another mechanism on this side.” He squeezed Rose’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I don’t think this place is designed as a one-way trap.”
“You said yourself there were no footprints coming out the other way!”
He had already thought of that but was hoping Rose hadn’t. Of course, she was too smart to miss a detail of that magnitude. “Then there’s another exit,” he said. “Either way, for now we have to keep on, right?”
Rose sighed. She turned her light to shine around the room they’d entered and gasped. It appeared to be some kind of crypt. It was one of the largest chambers they had found thus far, all four walls slanting back as they rose from the floor at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. On each wall were three rows of neatly hewn alcoves and on the shelf of each alcove stood a mummy. There were several small benches, each scattered with copper cups and pieces of broken swords. The mummies were all wrapped in a rough fabric and daubed with a kind of reddish clay.
They turned in a slow circle, playing their flashlights over the walls.
“Hundreds of them,” Crowley said in a low voice.
“I wonder if they were all dignitaries or just the general population?” Rose said.
