The gate keeper reached for the control buttons, then hesitated. "Hey!" he said.
Bulnes paused to look back. "Well?"
"You forgot your key."
"Oh. Sorry." Although Bulnes did not know what the key was for, he came back down a few steps with his hand out.
The man handed him a big bronze object with a long curved prong, more like a kind of sickle than a key.
Bulnes said, "Thanks" and started back up the steps. The trap opened. Bulnes paused long enough for it to reach nearly full gape, then went up, thrusting his head into the darkness.
At that instant, an alarm bell rang loudly.
"Hey!" said the gate keeper again.
This time Bulnes kept on going.
"Come back!" said the gate keeper, reaching for a button. With a slight change in the quality of its whirr, the trap door began to close again. A glance showed Bulnes that the gate keeper was fumbling in an open drawer, no doubt for a gun.
Bulnes hurled the bronze key in his hand at the head of the gate keeper. The heavy object bounced off the man's balding cranium. As the key clattered to the floor, and the man started to fall after it, Bulnes turned. He skipped up the remaining three steps and hurled himself away from the opening. The trap door brushed his heels as he leaped out and closed with a thump and a click behind him.
Blinded by sudden darkness, Bulnes cracked his shin on some unseen object. Cursing under his breath, he began feeling his way. He was in a large room cluttered with all sorts of furniture and piles of objects, some of metal and some of cloth.
Any minute, he expected the trap door to reopen to void men and guns. His throwing the key had seemed like the smart expedient, but if this room turned out to be locked from the outside, it would not prove to have been so clever after all.
As he steered his course among the obstacles he at last found a wall and began feeling his way along it. He covered one wall, bumped his head against an unseen bronze statue, made a right angle, and continued some meters along the next wall before he came to a door. And what a door! A huge bronze affair, as wide as he could span with his arms, and, moreover, one of a pair.
The door was closed (as he found by fumbling) by a large bolt on the inside. He pushed the bolt, and then the door itself. The huge valves swung silently open.
Bulnes found himself facing a row of small Doric columns interconnected by a metal railing, and beyond that a larger row. Ahead, slightly to the right, the massive form of Athene Promachos towered against the stars, topped by the triple-crested helmet of the goddess. He now knew where he was — on the porch at the west or rear of the Parthenon. The room in which he had emerged from the tunnel system was the storage room occupying the rear third of the building. This room, Flin had explained, was the true "Parthenon," the temple as a whole being properly the New Hekatompedon.
Bulnes turned, pushed the great doors closed again, and hurried to the bronze rail and climbed over.
He trotted down the steps at the end of the Parthenon and sprinted for the Propylaia, dodging art works by starlight. He had almost reached his goal when from the forest of columns in front of him a deep voice with a Scythian accent spoke: "Who there?"
Damn the Scythians! Bulnes ducked behind a statue and paused, watching and listening. Boots stamped on the marble in front of him. He headed back the way he had come, crouching. Any minute now, the back doors of the Parthenon might fly open to disgorge more enemies.
Right in front of him, Bulnes recognized a statue to which Flin had called his attention when he had shown him the place. It was Myron's bronze Athene, a slender, girlish goddess more to Bulnes's taste than the beefy colossal Promachos by Pheidias. As Bulnes remembered his colleague's chatter, this statue was to be one of a pair. The other statue not yet mounted was to be that of the satyr Marsyas.
Marsyas's base was there even if the satyr himself was not. With the Scythian archer coming up behind him and the puppet-masters in the Parthenon in front, Bulnes adopted a desperate expedient. He shucked his chiton, wrapped it around the papyrus, and threw the bundle away.
Then he mounted the pedestal of the statue of Marsyas, naked, and struck a statuesque pose. It was too bad his skin was too dark to pass for marble and too light for bronze. But, in the starlight, perhaps nobody would notice.
The doors of the Parthenon opened, and a small group of men came out. By rolling his eyes Bulnes saw that they were dressed in chitons. They spread out purposefully. One passed not far from Bulnes, but behind him. It took all the will power Bulnes could summon not to turn his head.
The voice of the Scythian archer came again from the direction of the Propylaia. Somebody blew a whistle, and the men in the chitons ran back to the Parthenon. In a matter of seconds they were all inside, and the doors closed again.
This time the Scythian came on with determination, calling out: "Who there? Who you? I see you! Come out, you thief!"
Bulnes stood very still as the fellow clumped past, not ten meters away. The policeman continued on his way to the west end of the Parthenon. He sniffed around the porch, like a willing but 'none too intelligent watchdog, and then walked back toward the Propylaia. Bulnes cursed silently and waited a few minutes longer. Heat lightning flickered on the horizon.
When the Scythian failed to reappear, and the rear doors of the Parthenon stayed shut, Bulnes slipped down from his pedestal, donned his chemise, rolled up his battered papyrus, and set . out for the north side of the Akropolis. Flin had said something about stairways down the mountainside at this point.
It took him an hour of solid, sweat-soaked searching to find the stairway he sought. It was hidden behind a screen of bushes and architectural froufrou so that none would have suspected its presence. The stair led down, not on the outside, but into a cleft where the whole north side of the Akropolis had come adrift from the main body of the rock. The stair sloped down through the crack between this colossal slab and the solid part of the crag.
Bulnes had to feel his way step by step through nearly total darkness. He should, he thought, be approaching those caves on the north side of the Akropolis that Flin had pointed out. He had to move, however, at such a snaillike pace that it took him nearly half an hour to cover a hundred meters.
The stair at last leveled out, -its risers becoming shorter and shorter until he was shuffling along a path at the base of the cleft. After many minutes more of feeling his way, he got a glimmer of light from ahead: yellow lamplight, if he was any judge. There came a murmur of voices.
Now and then, the cleft came together so that he had to squeeze through the gap. The voices grew louder. Bulnes found himself standing at the back of a cave — no doubt one of those he had seen from below. It was actually a double cave, two caverns 'having a common mouth. The light and sound were coming from the other, mostly out of sight around the rocky bulkhead that divided them.
There was a stir of motion at the cave entrance. A man in a long chiton came around the bulkhead toward Bulnes. Bulnes shrank back into his tunnel.
The man came, not at Bulnes, but toward his left. Arriving at the cave wall, back where the rocks narrowed, the man pulled aside a curtain and squeezed into a hole in the rock. The curtain fell back into place, inconspicuous among the other offerings and objects ranged around the wall of the cave.