There was air, dusty but breathable. And it was hot, just like an entryway to Hades.
“Georges? William? Robert?”
“It just gets worse and worse,” one of them groaned.
“Is everyone still alive?”
“How do we tell?”
“Well, we’re here, I think. So the ring showed something after all. The sarcophagus wasn’t the treasure, it was only the trapdoor to it. All we have to do is keep our wits about us, discover whatever secrets are down here, and find a way back out.”
“Our wits! We can’t see a thing.” I think it was Cuvier.
“Ethan, we fell several seconds straight down before hitting that slope,” Fulton said. “I doubt we can climb back up to that tomb, and what good would it do us if we did?”
“When our enemies open it, they’ll see which way we’ve gone,” Smith added.
“Perhaps, or perhaps my sword tip triggered a spring,” I said. “The bottom opens, but then springs back. They may open the sarcophagus to find us and, instead of our corpses, it will be empty once more. They’ll think it a miracle or, more likely, that we were never in there in the first place and gave them the slip. Quite ingenious on our part, really.”
“Why should they care?” asked Fulton. “We’re doomed anyway. We’ve gone from one grave to a bigger one.”
“No, I run around in these underground places all the time,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “There’s something down here, maybe something that hasn’t been seen since medieval times. I think there was a Freemason mark where I triggered the collapse of the trapdoor. This may be a Templar tunnel, my friends.”
“Templars?” Smith groaned. “What are you talking about?”
“Apparently that group of Crusader knights was on the trail of some ancient mysteries and succeeded for a time in finding some. I discovered one in the Near East, in a lost city, and another in the American wilderness. They seem to have been systematically reassembling the past. After the Saracens drove the Christians from the Holy Land, the Knights set up strongholds in places like Cyprus and Malta. Perhaps they came here, too, and built that hidden door for later generations who never came. We may not be in peril, but in luck. We’re on the cusp of rediscovering what Napoleon and Fouché really sent us to find, some ancient weapon of a lost civilization. Maybe we’ll win a prize.”
There was a long silence in the dark. Then the Frenchman spoke again, slowly, carefully. “You realize that we are all completely insane?”
“If so, then Napoleon is, too. Think about it. He’s heard rumors of a weapon connected with Og and Atlantis, and takes a chance by sending us here. I didn’t much believe the legends myself, when we saw the poverty and rawness of this island, but a tomb with a trap? With a Masonic engraving? Come, my friends, there has to be a reason. We’ve tumbled into a pit, it’s true, but perhaps a pit with a reason for being. I know we’re bruised, bloody, without food or water, and lost in pitch blackness without a clue where to go, but fortune may actually be smiling on us.” I grinned in the dark. “I’m quite excited, actually.”
Silence, again. I hoped they hadn’t crept away.
“Before we can find buried treasure,” I continued briskly, “we have to decide which way to go. My hope is the slope we just tumbled down leads to a tunnel we can follow without any junctions, caverns, or drops. We can hold hands, taking turns groping through the dark.”
Groans. “I’m not holding your hand,” Fulton said. “We’ll light a candle.”
“Candle?”
“I kept one when we ignited my fire hose.”
“You had a taper?” Cuvier asked. “Why didn’t you light it in the sarcophagus?”
“There was hardly a point. There was nowhere to go and the flame would use up the oxygen.”
“All Americans are lunatics,” the zoologist muttered. “Not just Gage.”
“Well, I can make a flash in the pan of my longrifle,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s gather some lint to have something to better catch the wick.”
So we did, and some priming from my powder horn and a pull of the trigger produced what was in the darkness a blinding flash, which ignited a ball of lint we in turn used to light Fulton’s candle. With no holder, we stuck the wax shaft temporarily in the barrel of Smith’s blunderbuss. Then we inspected ourselves for damage. We were filthy, torn, and raw from scrapes in our tumbles, but surprisingly intact. The very tip of my rapier was bent slightly and our weapons knocked about, but nothing—including our bones—seemed to be seriously broken. The candle illuminated a steep dirt slope, down which we’d tumbled. The sarcophagus was far out of sight above. In the other direction was a narrow tunnel, just high enough to stoop in, that twisted through lava rock.
The tube led downward, toward Hades.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Our underground way twisted like a worm. At times the ceiling was high enough to stand freely and at other times we had to crawl, always fearing we’d come to a dead end. The walls bulged in and out irregularly, casting doubt that medieval knights had carved it.
“They apparently used nature’s casting,” Cuvier said. “It’s probably a lava tube. Volcanoes will sometimes have pipes through which molten rock flows. When this island was a volcano, this may have been a conduit from the central peak to the sea.”
“The island is still a volcano,” Smith corrected.
“Does that mean lava could flow through here now?” Fulton asked worriedly.
“Only if there were an eruption,” Smith said. “But if there were, we’d be suffocated by gas or cooked by heat long before any lava came.”
“I see.”
“Or earthquakes could collapse the tunnel on top of us,” added Cuvier.
“Heated water could boil us alive,” suggested Smith.
“Or scald us to death with steam,” agreed Cuvier.
“At Mount Etna, onlookers have been killed by flying rock.”
“At Vesuvius, they’ve found corpses petrified by the ash.”
The two savants seemed to be enjoying themselves. “I love science, don’t you Robert?” I asked Fulton.
“It’s much more sensible to work with things you can control, like machines.”
And so we explored, bunched up behind our little candle. It not only provided light but gave us assurance, by burning, that there was still breathable air.
“If we’re alive, there has to be an outlet drawing air somewhere, eh?” I asked the others.
“Yes,” said Cuvier. “Perhaps the size of a door. Or, the size of your finger.”
“Well, yes.”
Twice we slid down rubble chutes, seeming to creep closer and closer to some kind of hell. I was hot, but how much was my imagination? I wiped my sweat and noticed how dry my throat was. Then we crawled over a sill and our horizontal path momentarily ended. We had come to a vertical shaft that led both up and down, smooth and round like a well. I looked up, but the top was dark and presumably sealed. There was no easy way to climb up there. I ripped a scrap from my shirt, lit it with the candle, and dropped it down. There was a dirt floor twenty feet below, and the tunnel led on from that.
“The shaft isn’t wide,” I said. “If we jam ourselves across, we can inch our way down. I’ll go first, and when I get partway you can pass the blunderbuss and candle.” The wax had already burned halfway.
Somewhat awkwardly, we made our way to the bottom of this well and came upon a surprising discovery. The tunnel that continued on from the shaft was braced with timbers! It appeared to be an excavated mine instead of a natural passage. The wood looked very old, dry, and cracked, but protected from rot by the dryness of the warm passageway. There was a pile of excavated sand and crude rusted tools.