The night before, Anlon had pulled out the Waterland Map to take another stab at deciphering Devlin’s cryptic drawing. As he mulled the unusual topography and color-coded markings, he had to remind himself it was really two separate maps that Devlin merged into one.
The first of the merged maps was the source of the color-coded markings. Devlin had seen the map during visions with Malinyah’s Sinethal. From those visions, he learned the markings represented sites where the Munuorians cached their special Stones in advance of a near-Earth asteroid encounter. The Munuorians feared the asteroid would devastate the planet and stashed the Stones as a precaution. A prehistoric example of man hiding acorns ahead of a winter storm, Anlon thought.
The second map merged by Devlin was copied from a wall drawing found in an Egyptian pyramid at Giza. This map supposedly showed the topography of the mythical Egyptian underworld known as the Duat. Devlin’s interest in the Duat map was driven by a practical consideration. Its topography was similar to that of the map he viewed during visions shared by Malinyah. Instead of trying to draw Malinyah’s map from memory, Devlin simply traced the pyramid’s Duat map and then inserted the Stone cache locations shared by Malinyah.
Shortly after Devlin’s death, Anlon had learned that Devlin was originally drawn to the Duat map early in his search for the Munuorians, long before he found the Sinethal and met Malinyah. Subsequently, he learned the reason for Devlin’s interest in the map from Devlin’s friend and fellow archaeologist, Cesar Perez. According to Cesar, the catalyst was an obscure academic article penned by a contrarian scholar.
Anlon recalled how excited Cesar had become when he realized the connection between Devlin’s map and the article. The man had jumped out of a chair, pounded a fist against his open hand and exclaimed, “Of course! The Waterland Map.”
In the article, Cesar had explained, the scholar offered an unconventional explanation for a curious feature of the Duat. Wherever the Duat was discussed in Egyptian texts or murals, it was always described in inordinate topographical detail. Cesar had said the ancient Egyptians didn’t view the Duat as an ethereal vacuum filled with clouds. They viewed the Duat as a physical place with mountains, rivers, valleys and the like. Not only did the Egyptians describe these geographic features, they also named many of them.
Anlon had since read the article himself. In it, the scholar suggested the Duat was, in fact, a physical place. It was Earth as it existed prior to the mythical great flood. Only, the scholar didn’t believe the flood was mythical. Based on other cultures’ mythologies of the event, he believed a planet-sized asteroid passed close to Earth. In the process, it caused vast changes to the face of the planet, including a great flood that washed over Earth, destroying everything in its path. It caused new mountains to rise and other lands to be submerged beneath the sea. Water became land and vice versa.
The heretical academic suggested the ancient Egyptians carried a memory of this event and baked it into their theology. They saw the Duat as the face of the Earth before the flood — a world that was submerged by the great flood. Hence, when the sun set on the new world, it rose in their underworld…or the world they knew before the flood. The scholar dubbed the previous world the “Waterland.” Devlin just borrowed the name for his merged map.
With the article circulating in his mind, Anlon had studied Devlin’s merged map late into the night in the hopes some new clue would pop out. When none did, he had headed for bed. Careful to avoid waking Pebbles, Anlon had tiptoed into the bedroom and slid under the covers. She had stirred and then nuzzled up against him, but she never awoke. For another hour, Anlon had stared into the darkness while reflecting on the Waterland tale.
Although Anlon’s specialty was biomechanics, not geology, his scientific background offered enough of a grounding to imagine the implications of a close encounter with a planet-sized asteroid, especially one with a magnetic polarity different from Earth’s.
As the asteroid neared Earth, its gravitational field would have caused the oceans to rise up in huge swells. Given Earth’s current waves and winds are dictated by the Moon, a body in space that sits nearly two hundred and forty thousand miles away with a mass equivalent to just one percent of Earth’s, Anlon wondered what would have happened if an asteroid with fifteen percent of Earth’s mass, the same as Mars, passed halfway between the Moon and Earth.
Would not Earth’s waves and winds have gone crazy driven by the gravitational pull of a body with fifteen times the Moon’s mass at half its distance? Wouldn’t the stronger waves and winds have swamped the lands and given the appearance of a great flood to those on the ground?
Anlon had envisioned the intense gravitational pull also triggering volcanic eruptions and earthquakes on a global scale. Such a pull might have been strong enough to disrupt the Earth’s crust, causing portions of the crust to buckle in places and rise up in others. Astronomers point to such effects when moons get too close to their host planets, Anlon had thought. Why not a passing asteroid?
Combined with the monster waves, the stresses on the Earth’s crust would have caused water to flow differently around the changed landscape. To the people on the ground, Anlon imagined it would have appeared as if new mountains had sprung from nowhere while other lands disappeared beneath the oceans.
If that wasn’t terrifying enough, Anlon had contemplated the implications of a passing asteroid with a strong, oppositely polarized magnetic field. Electrical storms the likes of which no living person had ever seen. Huge caverns riven by tremendous bolts of lightning. Raging fires everywhere.
Eyes closed, Anlon had imagined the oppositely-polarized asteroid reaching out and grabbing hold with one gravitational hand and one magnetic hand and ravaging the planet. Then, as it moved past, he envisioned the asteroid inflicting a final indignity. When all the forces, gravitational and magnetic, released, the Earth flipped upside down like a spinning ball dropped in water.
At an average speed of sixty thousand miles per hour, equivalent to high-end speeds of modern-day near-Earth asteroids, the prehistoric asteroid would have terrorized Earth’s inhabitants for far more than a week. The worst of it would have lasted half a day, but it would have seemed a slow-motion train wreck for three days beforehand. And its physical aftershocks would have persisted for months, if not years, as the planet tried to adjust to its new orientation and topography.
All that assumed not a single piece of the asteroid broke off due to Earth’s gravitational pull. If one included the effects of chunks breaking off the asteroid and pummeling the planet, the landscape changes would have been amplified further.
Prehistoric Armageddon. If it really happened, Anlon had thought, it was stunning to believe anything survived it. Devlin had believed it happened. And he believed there were survivors. And these survivors set their memories of it on stones, on paper, in songs and in tales told by fireside. And in those tales, they spoke of strange men who arrived by sea, bearing curious stones. Men who rescued the survivors from the brink of extinction and helped them build a new world.
Too wired to sleep, Anlon had tossed off the covers and returned to his office to study the map some more.
As another chorus of beachgoers began to belt out a Bruno Mars tune, Anlon stifled a yawn and sipped from a glass of lemonade. The urge to lean back and go to sleep fought with his desire to crack Devlin’s map and the riddles posed by the journals.
Setting the glass down, he lifted the Dominica journal and stared once again at its cover. As Anlon saw it, the primary challenge reading Devlin’s map was the lack of a key or legend. While Devlin had inserted color-coded dots on the map in various spots near or along coastlines of the preflood land masses, he inconsistently applied the dots. In some locations, there were five, in others two. Some places had green, red and black dots. Others green and brown or other combinations. But, Devlin left no explanation as to what the dots signified!
Compounding matters, there was a second challenge to interpreting the map. Devlin had ins
erted longitude and latitude grid markings, but to Anlon, the coordinate grid appeared to be inaccurate.
When Anlon had first viewed the map, the grid led him to believe it would be a simple matter to layer a current world map atop Devlin’s drawing and align the respective longitudes and latitudes. However, that didn’t work. Nearly all the color-coded dots were ocean bound.
It didn’t take long before Anlon considered flipping the Waterland Map upside down — a la the planet flip described in the great flood legends. But, when he inverted Devlin’s map and again lined up the grid with a current world map, many of the dots were still positioned far from any land mass. While it seemed reasonable to assume some of the preflood caches were submerged after the asteroid passed, Anlon had expected more marked points to appear on land. Further, inverted or not, he had expected at least one of the map’s points to line up with Dominica, Guadeloupe or Martinique. None did.
Yet, Devlin found one of the Munuorian caches on Dominica.
This fact had led Anlon to consider a chilling possibility. Devlin wasn’t able to read the map either! At least, he hadn’t been able to until he went to Dominica. The map was a work in progress, which explained why Devlin didn’t provide a key. It also explained why he went to Guadeloupe and Martinique in addition to Dominica. The brilliant SOB had used the three islands as directional finders to fine-tune the map.
Anlon had reached this conclusion after plotting the coordinates of each island. This exercise showed the southernmost tip of Guadeloupe was almost exactly one degree of latitude north of Martinique’s northernmost point with Dominica nearly dead-center between the two.
When he realized how closely the three islands were positioned, Anlon reexamined the Waterland Map and the latitude and longitude markings. Given the map’s small, hand-drawn scale, Anlon finally had understood Devlin’s difficulty reading his own map. A misplacement of a given latitude or longitude line by a solitary degree could result in a seventy-mile miss in estimating a cache’s location…a distance equivalent to the span between the three islands!
That told Anlon why Devlin chose to visit the three islands. Somehow, Devlin had lined up the map in a way that placed one of the cache sites somewhere in the Caribbean near those three islands, but Devlin wasn’t able to tell which island was closest to the site given the scale of his own map. So, he had gone to all three to sort it out.
Unfortunately, Anlon had no idea what led Devlin to conclude one of the map’s sites was located in the West Indies. Devlin left no explanation in the notebooks or otherwise. In order for Anlon to line up the map in the same way, he needed another reference point. He wondered if Malinyah had given Devlin a clue to figure it out. Anlon made a mental note to add that question to the list of queries for Pebbles to probe with Malinyah.
While the Dominica book contributed to Anlon’s solution for Devlin’s choice of the islands, it presented other puzzles that continued to bedevil Anlon. The first was a confounding passage toward the rear of the journal:
Finally! Found Sound Stone glyph on western slope of Morne Trois Pitons, approx. GPS coord. = 15°20′28″N / 61°19′38″W. Unusual spike on magnetometer seemed to confirm site, but could not locate entry. Used GPR in grid search around glyph, found two possible cavities, but readings faint. Tried Sound Stone per M, but no judder. Disappointing! Need to find one fast! Running out of time!
The passage indicated Devlin found one of the Munuorian’s Stone caches, but his uncle’s concern about time didn’t make sense to Anlon. Although Devlin did exhibit a sense of panic in the week leading up to his death that May, causing him to hide the map and Stones in different places, the Dominica trip had occurred two months before he was killed. So, what was the urgency in March? Was he already aware of Matthew Dobson’s thefts at that point? Did he already fear others were after his map?
Equally exasperating was the sketch that appeared on the opposing page. The proximity of the sketch in relation to the passage implied a connection, but Anlon could find no explicit link described in the journal.
The sketch closely resembled one of two statuettes that Dobson had stolen from Devlin’s artifact collection. The figurine in question had an ornate dragonlike head and a human body with a face that displayed a menacing snarl. It crouched with legs spread and gripped a swordlike object in one hand. To Anlon, it gave the impression of a soldier preparing for battle. A mythical warrior from some dynastic Chinese period, he supposed.
In the notebook, Devlin’s drawing showed the dragon-man’s features from an offset, rear angle and seemed intended to depict the fine details of the dragon’s head. A spiked mane ran down the center line until it reached the man’s shoulders. Curled flourishes bordered the visible brow, ear and shoulder. Where the mane crested atop the head, a last feature stood out — a small circle drawn around a fish. The same fish symbol was among the six etched on Malinyah’s Sinethal…and was also stamped into each side of the gold coins discovered by Dobson.
If not for the fish symbol, Anlon would have deemed the dragon-man statuette an unrelated relic, but its appearance in the notebook — particularly given its proximity to Devlin’s urgent reference — warranted deeper consideration. After all, if the statuette was valuable enough for Dobson to steal, and for Devlin to commemorate in the notebook, it must be somehow connected to the Stones. But in what way? And what did the statuette have to do with the island of Dominica?
Another conundrum was the figurine’s oriental-styling. In Anlon’s opinion, it just didn’t fit in with the bulk of Devlin’s artifacts. Roughly half of Devlin’s collection was pre-Columbian, including pieces of Mayan, Incan, Olmec and Toltec descent. The other half originated from lands abutting the Mediterranean, including Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian and Greco-Roman pieces. To the best of Anlon’s knowledge, Devlin’s inventory held no artifacts of Sino origin.
If the sculpture wasn’t from the Orient, where did it come from? Devlin’s inventory records provided no information about the dragon warrior. It was one of the missing pieces of information Anlon hoped Jennifer could track down. Setting aside the urgent reference about time and the out-of-context drawing, Anlon was puzzled by two remaining features in the journal.
The first oddity appeared on several pages in the journal. Someone had used a yellow marker to highlight a number of Devlin’s penciled observations. Anlon suspected the highlights were added by Dobson, not Devlin, but at this point it was only conjecture. Since the notebooks had been recovered from Dobson’s home in the same search where Jennifer and Pebbles found the horde of Munuorian gold coins, Anlon speculated Dobson had used the Dominica journal to find and open the stone vault that had eluded Devlin.
The second oddity was more baffling. Toward the end of the book, at the bottom of a blank page, Devlin had scribbled two names as questions: Ometepe? Isabela? When Anlon first found the scrawled names, neither rang a bell, but a quick Internet search revealed both as islands. He discovered Isabela is the largest island in the Galápagos archipelago, while Ometepe sits in Lake Nicaragua on the Pacific Ocean side of Nicaragua. After a bit more research, he discovered an interesting feature of both islands: they are home to prominent volcanos, as are Guadeloupe, Dominica and Martinique.
For some reason, Devlin was interested in volcanic islands, and Anlon had an inkling why, but it meant Devlin was looking for something besides the Stones.
Jennifer slowed to a walk and wiped her brow. Panting heavily, she stopped at the entrance to Incline Beach and bent over. With hands on knees, she checked her time for the five-mile run and grumbled.
Rising up, she cupped her hands atop the knot of her ponytail and slowly walked back to Anlon’s house. As her breathing steadied, Jennifer inhaled the clean mountain air and wondered how hot it was back home in western Massachusetts. August usually meant hot and sticky, quite a contrast to Tahoe’s dry, cool climate.
The change in scenery was just as stark. Western Massachusetts was pastoral. Rolling hills and colonial architecture dominated
the landscape with the low-rise Berkshire Mountains in the background. North Tahoe, she’d discovered, was alpine all the way — tall mountains, towering pines and architecture that ranged in style from lodges to chalets.
Yet, despite the alpine atmosphere, the vibe of summer in north Tahoe felt more like Cape Cod than a mountain resort area. It was Jennifer’s third week staying with Anlon and Pebbles and every day had been a beach bonanza. When she and Pebbles weren’t beach hopping around the lake in Anlon’s open-top Jeep, they were riding his Jet Skis or relaxing on his boat. When they went out to eat or shopped, everyone was in board shorts, bathing suits and flip-flops. And Jennifer noticed there were a surprising number of people immersed in the surfer culture, a surprise given the conspicuous lack of waves on the lake. Pebbles said they were holdovers from the winter season when skiers and snowboarders ruled the area.
To Jennifer, hanging out in Tahoe was certainly a much better way to serve her suspension than moping around Pittsfield. And the change in scenery helped to distract her from stewing about the suspension…most of the time. However, when the unpleasant memory managed to surface in quiet moments, Jennifer found it hard to suppress her anger. She had solved one murder, stopped another in progress, but got busted for destroying the weapon Pacal had used to pulverize Anlon’s body. The punishment just didn’t seem fair to Jennifer given the outcome of the case.
But Jennifer had to admit, with each fun-filled day that passed in Tahoe, it was getting easier to let it go. Anlon and Pebbles had seen to that! Pebbles had become the sister she never had, and Anlon had been a gracious and inviting host. As a result, Jennifer had quickly fallen in love with the area and now understood why Anlon had settled there and lured Pebbles into staying too. If only she could adapt to the altitude!
Race for the Flash Stone (The Anlon Cully Chronicles Book 2) Page 7
