After suiting up and cross-checking to ensure all seals were intact and that their Daeger LAR VII rebreathers were functioning correctly, Rook and Queen ventured out into the murky red water. It was slow going at first, with the surface creeping slowly up their bodies as they waded through the shallows. The lake bottom was relatively smooth and regular, but because they could not see it, they had to test each step before committing to it. The process was further complicated by their long swim fins, which were perfect for swimming but worked about as well as clown shoes for walking. It was only when the water line was almost to her shoulders that Queen ducked her head down under the water to get a look at what lay beneath the surface of Lake Natron.
Beneath, the water was clear but the opaque red skin that floated at the top shut out nearly all light. Queen, who still wore her glasses under the diving mask was able to see everything clearly, but Rook’s way was lit by a high-intensity LED hands-free dive light clipped to the top of his mask. In its brilliant glow, they quickly found traces of the footpath Livingstone had observed — a series of large flat stones that were laid too precisely to be a random occurrence of nature. They followed it further into the lake until they reached a sheer drop off. The path however, did not end there. Someone had carved out a ramp in the porous lava.
Queen swam out over the edge and lowered herself slowly down the face of the submerged cliff, following the course of the ramp with her eyes. The path curled around in a switchback and continued at a gentle slope across the face of the cliff for about twenty yards, and then seemed to fade out of existence.
“End of the road?” Rook asked.
Even though he no longer had his glasses, Queen heard Rook’s voice just fine despite the fact that they were both underwater. The face masks they wore came equipped with ultrasound communicators, which allowed divers to speak to each other over short distances.
“It should be right here.” She swam closer and probed the cliff face.
What looked like solid stone turned out to be only an accumulation of silt that billowed up at her touch. She continued scooping away handfuls of the fine particles until her fingers grazed the harder lava that formed the cliff face. The beam of Rook’s lamp looked like a solid shaft of light, as it stabbed through the cloud of disturbed sediment. Curiously, when he pointed it into the place where she was digging, the shaft seemed to keep right on going.
Without waiting for the silt to settle out, Queen pushed forward into the space she had scooped out and found herself enveloped in a darkness that even the glasses could not penetrate. The effect was only momentary. The suspended particles were like a blanket thrown over her head, but she kept moving forward until she was clear of the cloud. The night vision function of the glasses kicked in again, and even though she was expecting to find herself in the cave Livingston’s bearer had described, the sight of it nearly took her breath away.
“Rook, you have to see this.”
A beam of light shot past her and then she saw him emerge from the swirling cloud. She knew that he couldn’t see as much as she did, but as he reoriented himself, he played the light in every direction, as if he couldn’t quite decide what he wanted to look at.
There was a lot to see.
The mouth of the cave was set high up along a wall that dropped away beneath them, descending at least fifty yards. The ramp continued diagonally along the wall to the halfway point, then curled around in a switchback that brought it to the cavern floor directly below the opening. The cave itself looked like the inside of an enormous egg, but with several ramps crisscrossing the gently curving walls and connecting the floor of the cave to dozens of passages that perforated the solid lava.
The honeycomb of passages out of the main cavern could have been attributed to naturally occurring fissures in the lava but the ramps were clearly evidence of human artifice. But they were not the only indications of such. Carved into the walls in the spaces between the openings were enormous bas relief sculptures, images of animals — elephants, rhinoceroses, lions and many that looked like creatures from mythology — as well as human figures in elaborate costumes. Queen studied the latter carefully. The facial features were unmistakably Sub-Saharan African.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Aleman said. Since the q-phone did not rely on line-of-sight radio wave transmissions, his voice was as clear as it had been on the surface. “Hang on a second.”
Queen could almost visualize him furiously entering keywords into an Internet search.
“Those look kind of like the huge stone heads in Mexico,” Rook said, playing his light over the sculptures. He hadn’t heard Aleman’s comment, but Queen saw the same similarity. The carvings bore a striking resemblance to the mysterious Olmec heads, which were believed to be artifacts of the oldest civilization in America. There were conflicting opinions about the heads, but few could deny that the faces — which dated to 900 BC — looked decidedly African.
“There’s a definite similarity to those,” Aleman agreed. “But that’s not what I was thinking of. Okay, here it is. They aren’t an exact match, but the style is very similar to sculptures done by the Edo people, specifically in the Benin Empire of West Africa, from about the thirteenth to the nineteenth century.”
Queen relayed the information to Rook, then added. “Benin makes more sense than Mexico, but we’re a long way from either place.”
“People like to decorate,” Rook suggested. “Regardless, this looks like the proof Joe was looking for: an ancient African civilization.”
“It is interesting,” she admitted. “But this isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis. I don’t think it’s the slam dunk he was hoping for. Even if this place rewrites the history books, I doubt very much that it will trigger some kind of cultural awakening, and I definitely don’t think it will be enough to stop the civil war in the Congo.”
Rook gave a grunt of grudging agreement. “Still, we’re here. Might as well check it out.”
He stroked through the water and shone his light into one of the passages. Queen swam over to join him and peered inside the opening. There was a short tunnel that opened into a large chamber, considerably smaller than the main vault, but still quite spacious. The floor was uniformly flat, probably smoothed out by ancient workmen, but littered with shapeless lumps of debris. Queen paddled closer and fanned away some of the sediment to reveal a carved stone figurine of a lion.
After uncovering several more just like it, Rook said, “Do you suppose this place was their version of a shopping mall?”
“A trading post?”
“Well, I like ‘mall’ better, but yeah. This was probably their gift shop. I bet if we poked around long enough, we’d find their food court. Maybe we’ll find the ancient African Hot Dog on a Stick?”
“Yeah,” she said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “It might not be a good idea to put anything you find here in your mouth.”
“Okay, think about this. You don’t build a mall, or if you insist, a trading post, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe there was a city here, or up on the surface.”
“We aren’t archaeologists,” Queen said. “The best thing to do is to turn this over to someone who knows what they’re doing. But,” she continued before he could protest, “it can’t hurt to check out some of the other shops.”
Further exploration seemed to support Rook’s shopping center hypothesis, though most of the enclosures contained nothing recognizable. Centuries of submersion in the corrosive lake would surely have dissolved anything organic, and probably most metals, too. If the various chambers had once contained consumer products like clothing, sandals or whatever the ancient people needed for the business of daily life, there was no way to prove it. There was, however, one passage that looked very different from all the others. It was a large opening, much broader than any of the others, situated at the end of the large cavern, opposite the passage back to the lake. Queen had been saving it for last, and after half an hour of poking around in the shops, she decided it was time for one last search.