"Katerina, wake up,” Achmed said, shaking her shoulder gently. She lifted her head from the desk, blinking away much-needed sleep. Achmed ignored the small puddle of drool sitting on her paperwork.
"What is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes as she sat up.
"There's been another spike,” Achmed said. Excitement poured from him, as did concern. The latter quickly brought Katerina fully awake.
"What's got you all fired up?"
"I tried plotting the three spikes against Angus's map. I was trying to see if I could identify a certain line of weak tunnels. I entered the data for the three spike epicenters and found something.
Achmed walked quickly through the maze of equipment, leading Katerina to the computer that constantly displayed Angus's green and yellow tunnel map. Three red dots glowed softly.
"What am I looking at?” Katerina asked. Achmed worked the mouse and the keyboard.
"The initial aberrant spike was 2.34 kilometers below ground zero, 3.02 kilometers away from the main shaft.” The first red light started to blink.
"This is the second one,” Achmed said, still tapping keys. The second light began to blink. “It is 1.78 kilometers down, and only 1.25 kilometers from the main shaft. The third one happened while you were dozing, only an hour ago. It's 0.58 kilometers down, 0.32 kilometers from the shaft."
"The tremors are getting closer to the shaft?” Katerina asked.
"Not tremors, cave-ins,” Achmed said with excitement. “I'm now positive those are cave-ins, but that's not all — look at this."
A line representing one of the small natural tunnels glowed a brighter yellow than the rest. The line was very close to the first red dot, and ended directly under the second. Achmed tapped again; another yellow line pointed away from the second dot, ending near the newest spike marker. The red dots seemed to be connecting the yellow lines, making one long line where before there had been only separate tunnels.
"So the cave-ins are occurring between existing tunnels?"
Achmed nodded.
"How much space do the red dots represent?"
"It's impossible to tell, they're just epicenters,” Achmed said. “But judging from Angus's map, if the cave-ins do connect the existing tunnels, we're talking between fifty and a hundred meters of solid rock each time. But that's not all, look at this."
Achmed rotated the picture so that they looked straight down on the red dots and the bright yellow lines. He tapped the keys and a new flashing green dot appeared.
"What is that?” Katerina asked.
"That's the main shaft,” Achmed answered.
Katerina felt her stomach drop. The three red dots and the yellow lines weren't perfectly straight, but the path was clear.
They formed a line.
A line heading for the shaft.
Chapter Twenty
Connell's forty-five minute walk from the elevator shaft to Mack's discovery had a few rough spots, but wasn't that difficult. He'd left Bill Cook to guard the base of the elevator shaft. Cook was a thick man, a younger, bigger version of O'Doyle, and would have slowed them down. Lashon Jenkins was tall but skinny, a wiry, athletic man with mocha-colored skin and intelligent eyes.
In some places the caves forced Jenkins, Connell, Veronica, and Sanji to crawl on their bellies, KoolSuits skidding along dirt and rocks, but for the most part they were able to walk comfortably upright. The caves were little different from the adit — a long stretch of rough, unremarkable stone walls.
The big cavern itself, however, was a completely different story. Connell hated to admit it, but he felt just as amazed as everyone else by the place the miners had quickly dubbed “Picture Cavern.” The massive space easily ran the length and width of a football field. The ceiling arched high overhead, as if the cavern were a small domed stadium. Powerful flood lamps lit up the flat, dirtless stone floor. Something was imbedded dead-center in the cavern's arching roof, something not natural. It was possibly the size of a beach ball, but there was no way to get at it without constructing elaborate scaffolding to reach the hundred-foot ceiling. Besides, no one cared about the ceiling — the walls held everyone's attention.
"What do you make of it, Dr. Reeves?” Connell asked the glassy-eyed Veronica.
"I don't know,” she said quietly, as if she were in a church. “I saw drawings in Cerro Chaltel, but nothing like this. We couldn't check this far underground without something like these KoolSuits. I don't understand it, I don't know how people could survive in this heat long enough to create all of this."
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, staring in awe at the brightly colored carvings and paintings that covered every last inch of the sprawling stone walls.
Veronica Reeves basked in Nirvana.
At Cerro Chaltel, drawings were sparse, spread so far across the endless tunnels that each one was like discovering a lost treasure. With each drawing she had moved closer to understanding the Chaltelians’ writing. She was convinced they had a written language — not just pictographs, but actual words. When her workers at Cerro Chaltel discovered another crude, priceless drawing, Veronica would rush to the find, hoping each time it would be the Chaltelian Rosetta Stone.
Down here, under the Wah Wah Mountains, things were different. An unbelievable amount of painted and carved pictures filled the walls. Up to a height of about twelve feet, art covered almost every square inch of space, not just once, but twice. The first set of pictures were regimented, cultured carvings. The second set were wild, multicolored, primitive paintings, drawn like graffiti atop the carvings. The combination created a chaotic, electric feel.
"This is amazing,” Sanji said, his voice a reverent whisper.
The carvings showed a level of stoneworking skill that defied imagination. Forgotten symbols dominated the ten-inch by ten-inch relief carvings. Smooth edges and perfect curves proved a tribute to the abilities of long-dead artisans.
Some clearly recognizable images, like junipers, mountains, and animals, illustrated scenes from the desert above. Other images were unknown, their meanings lost. She smiled at a picture clearly illustrating the Wah Wah mountain range from a distance. The carving, easily the largest one in the cavern at ten feet wide by eight feet high, was a photorealistic relief of the peak above them. The skill was phenomenal. The mountain carving looked perfect, right down to identifiable landmarks. Work that detailed, that exquisite, must have taken decades to complete.
While the carving quality boggled the imagination, the paintings looked like Cro-Magnon cave drawings; primitive by any standard. Perfectly preserved in the hot, dry cave, the bright, angry colors of the paintings showed many unrecognizable figures — probably the Chaltelians’ myths and religious icons.
"Why would they cover such wonderful carvings with such crude drawings?” Sanji asked, eyes wide with wonder.
The difference between the carving and painting skills pushed Veronica to an immediate conclusion. “The paintings seem almost like vandalism,” she said. “It's like there are at least two distinct cultures down here. One became very good at working stone, and another that came after possessed only rudimentary ability."
"But the low-quality work is on top,” Sanji said. “The paintings are on top of the carvings. I would think the culture would get better as time wore on."
"My first guess is that the Chaltelian culture was taken over by barbarians, for lack of a better word,” Veronica said. “Or, possibly, what I consider to be the Chaltelian culture is actually the barbarians, and another group, an older group, made the carvings."