When he reached the other side he hopped down and leaned against the wall just inside the door. Then he glanced down at his Relic watch.
“I can’t believe that only took ten minutes. Seemed like I was out there forever.” He just stared ahead at the other side of the passageway.
“You did great,” Emily comforted. “Now can we please keep moving?”
He nodded and stood up straight. “Yeah. It’s going to be getting dark soon, and we have no idea where this passage leads.”
Adriana smiled at his resolve. He’d just faced one of his greatest fears and seemed ready to take on the next hurdle without reservation. She’d seen many men come and go in her life. But Sean Wyatt seemed different. He could take a punch and keep going. What was it about him? Was it his sense of adventure, his determination, his vulnerability she’d just witnessed? Or was it something else? She left the questions lingering in her head and came back to the moment. “I scouted up ahead. This corridor starts sloping down.” Adriana took off, leading the way down the passage so Sean and Emily followed behind quickly.
“I’m getting real tired of being underground,” he commented as they moved along the tunnel.
They found themselves in a narrow hall, carved out of the canyon rock. The jagged walls and ceiling of the corridor were done roughly, carved for usefulness not aesthetic appeal. But the sheer volume of rock that had to be removed was simply staggering.
They walked for nearly twenty minutes, continuing downward into the mountain. The path had been a slight grade with a series of right hand turns, winding deeper and deeper into the earth. Sean wondered who had constructed the place and why they would go to such great lengths. The group marched on in silence for another ten minutes until finally, they reached a point where the floor leveled off. Up ahead, their lights shone into what appeared to be a room. As they drew near, their flashlight beams shone through the dust particles in the air, illuminating an enormous chamber. The ceiling was at least fifty feet high with walls separated by the same distance. All three of their flashlights searched randomly around the room until Sean’s light came to rest on something in the center. A stone pillar sat conspicuously in the middle of the room. On top of it rested another piece of gold, similar to the one that had come from the mountain near Adriana’s home outside of Las Vegas. In unison, they moved towards the pedestal. Sean aimed his light around on the floor to make sure they were stepping safely.
“It’s just like the other one,” Emily stated quietly. Even though her voice was just above a whisper, it echoed throughout the giant room.
Adriana had taken her focus off of the shiny object in the center of the room and was checking out the rest of their surroundings. There were four enormous columns in each corner, every single one engraved with a separate set of writing. And every language was one of the most ancient in the world: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sanskrit, Cuneiform, and Old Hebrew. The inner corner of each pillar pointed towards the pedestal in the center. Then she noticed the design of the floor. When they walked in, all she had seen was a plain, stone floor. But from each of the corner columns, a line about one foot wide ran to the center where the small stand held the golden artifact. The wide lines were unmistakably bluish-green.
Sean noticed what had gotten her attention, and he too broke away from admiring the golden leaf in the center of the room to get a closer inspection of the distinctly colored lines. He looked up at the massive stone column that had Sanskrit on it. “Can you read it?” Emily asked from across the room, this time turning towards him and shining her light his way.
Sanskrit was one of the ancient languages Sean had learned almost fluently. It was the only language that was mathematically perfect. The writers of the Hindu Vedas had delivered their entire set of scriptures in Sanskrit, and it was believed by many to be the language of the gods. He’d been fascinated by it in college. And while his friends wondered why he would take classes to learn about a three thousand year-old dead language, he continued to attend. There had only been a few dozen students in the small lecture hall. Word had it that it was anybody’s guess if the course would even have enough people enrolled to run it each semester. But it always did, probably due to several students waiting too long to get signed up for one of the other more contemporary languages. With no options left, they had to go with Sanskrit. At the moment, Sean was glad he’d taken it. “It’s a little different from what I learned, probably an early pre-classical form of the language. But yeah, I can read it.”
Emily had slowly made her way over to where Sean was gazing at the stone. “What does it say?”
“It’s a story,” he said, staring in wonder at the ancient script.
“What story?”
He turned his eyes from the pillar and looked at both women with a semi-shocked face. “If I’m reading it correctly, it looks a lot like the beginning of the Old Testament.”
Chapter 33
Emily appeared to be confused. “You mean, like the Old Testament from the Bible?”
Sean looked back up at the sculpted stone. “That would be the one,” he answered nodding. “It’s the early parts of Genesis, talking about the Garden of Eden. These four bluish-green lines that lead to the center represent the four rivers that ran through the garden: Tigris, Euphrates, Pison, and Gihon. Supposedly they all four ran into one larger river that flowed under the tree of life.”
Adriana glanced back at the small pedestal in the center of the room. It was a simple, rectangular cube carved from the same stone as the rest of the chamber. As she moved closer to the object she noticed that there was something distinct etched into the sides. It was a tree but it was unlike any she’d seen before. The trunks were separate at the bottom but joined about halfway up, then opened into intricately detailed branches, fruit, and foliage.
Sean had also abandoned the corner pillar and walked over to the middle where Adriana was studying the pedestal. “The tree of life,” he whispered reverently.
Adriana nodded.
“But why is all this Biblical stuff here in the United States?” Emily wondered out loud. “Those stories took place on the other side of the world nearly 8,000 years ago.”
Sean started drawing connections in his mind. At first, they seemed impossible. But the more he reflected on the events of the last few weeks and the evidence in stone right before his eyes, the more he began to believe the plausibility.
“What are you thinking?” His old partner asked, interrupting his intense thought.
He shook his head quickly as if snapping out of a dream. “This is going to sound crazy. But what if it is all connected?”
“What do you mean?” Emily asked.
“The Bible, the Native Americans, all of this stuff. Could it be that all of it is connected somehow?”
“I don’t follow,” Starks shook her head.
Villa stood silently, just listening.
“The Egyptian connection to the Native Americans that we found in Georgia, the different forms of writing, all of the evidence that we have discovered from the ancient world all points to one thing. It’s essentially all telling the same story and leading back to one place.” He stared at the leaf shaped piece of gold resting on top of the altar.
“To the Garden of Eden?” Emily asked, finally starting to see the connection.
“Not quite,” Sean corrected her. “If such a place still existed it would have been found by now.”
“The tree,” Adriana broke her silence in a tone more to herself than the others.
“What?” Emily looked confused.