Kaba handed him a flashlight so he could look on his own. Will did the same for DeGard.
The four beams flashed around on the walls of the cavern as the group continued to move further into the mountain. The walls were cut roughly into the ancient stone. DeGard noted the extraordinary difference between the carving here and at the ruins of Nekhen.
“It almost seems as if this place was created in a hurry,” he scanned the jagged walls with analytic eyes. “It is nothing like what we saw before.”
“Maybe it was done with cheaper tools,” Will offered jokingly.
The humor was lost on DeGard as he ran his hand along the rough surface. The room was twenty feet wide at its opening and maintained that width for fifty feet, at which point it began to narrow towards the center. By the time the group had reached the back of the cavern, it had slimmed to a five-foot wide passage.
Will led the way with the other three falling behind him in single file, creeping deeper and deeper into the dark. The walls became moist the farther they went.
“Is it possible,” Lindsey began, his voice bouncing off the corridor walls, “that this place is much older than the one we found outside of Luxor?”
“That is certainly likely,” the Frenchman answered. “But there is no way to be certain. And where are the carvings, the inscriptions? There is nothing here but cold, wet rock.”
The passageway made a sudden turn to the right and as the four moved forward, the last remnants of outside light disappeared at the lip of the entrance. They were plunged into complete darkness, save for the flashlights in their hands. Like before, the cavern path began to descend downward, something Lindsey took to be a good sign since the passageway in Nekhen had done the same.
They continued down for another fifty feet, the air became more damp and musty. Without warning, the floor leveled out, and they could see a wall at the end of the tunnel. Will wondered if it was another turn in the path. When they arrived at the dead end, they were greeted with the first signs of humanity they’d seen since entering the cave.
Dramatic lettering, almost like calligraphy, stretched from one side to the other. There was an object also carved out of the stone, just below the words. It was a tree with two trunks stretching over what Lindsey imagined was a river.
DeGard was behind the other three and pressed forward to get a look at what they’d found. His expression turned pale for a moment. Then he began to laugh. The others didn’t know what was so funny, seeing that he was the only one of the four who could read the engraving.
“What is it” Lindsey demanded. “What is so funny?”
The Frenchman took a step back and tried to catch his breath. “I tried to tell you…that it was only a legend.” He barely got the words out between laughs. “I knew there was something fishy about this cave. It was clearly created much later than the one we found near Luxor.”
Lindsey’s eyes narrowed in the faint residual light of the beams. “What? What are you saying, man? Make some sense, will you?”
DeGard got a hold of himself and shone his flashlight onto the lettering again. “This says ‘Immortality is only for the righteous.’ It is written in Latin. And I would say it was probably done around the late third to early fourth century.”
Chapter 24
The yellowish rock walls of Khor Virap rose up from the hill as if they were carved from the earth itself. Sean peered through the windshield at the almost eerie spectacle of the ancient fortress against the backdrop of Mount Ararat. The snowcapped peaks and dramatic slopes of the mountain loomed ominously off in the distance.
Crossing the Armenian border had been little to no trouble, which explained why there were so many Armenians living in the major cities of Turkey. They had apparently immigrated, looking for work.
They had veered off of the asphalt thirty minutes ago, now bouncing along the bumpy dirt road towards the ancient citadel. In the center, the round tower of the chapel extended up three or four stories, built of contrasting red blocks.
The small caravan of SUVs had passed a few farms en route to the fortress. Nothing was growing, though, due to the cold weather in that part of the country. Sean imagined during the summer months the region exploded with greenery from the different crops that were grown. Still, he’d never really liked flat lands, preferring mountains and forests to anything else.
A few minutes later, the trucks stopped in front of a gate at the foot of the hill near the monastery. Jabez had claimed that the location was a sacred pilgrimage spot for many Armenian Christians, but during the winter months it was almost completely empty, save for the monks who maintained it. From the looks of, he had been right about the low tourism during the cold season.
Jabez exited the driver’s side of the vehicle and walked casually over to a small, wooden guard shack. A monk appeared in the doorway and spoke for a few seconds with Jabez. The man in the brown robes then nodded his head and floated over to the gate, unlocking it and moving it out of the way for the vehicles to pass through.
The Arab returned to the convoy and hopped back in the SUV, shaking off the outside cold as he did. Sean had noticed the remarkable change in temperature just a few hours outside of Istanbul. He figured a climb in elevation was probably the main culprit.
Jabez steered the SUV onto the winding road that led up the hill to the fortress. “They are going to let us drive to the top. Usually, visitors are required to park down here and walk up. Thankfully, there aren’t many people here this time of year, so making an exception for us is not a problem.”
The narrow street only had two turns before they reached the top of the hill where Jabez parked next to a short, stone wall. Adriana hopped out of the vehicle and looked out across the plains, holding one hand over here forehead. Her dark brown hair flapped in the cold breeze that swooped up from the flatland and over the hill. The main peak of Ararat and its smaller sibling towered over the land from the Armenian western border.
Jabez trotted back to the other truck and gave the other men some instructions before returning to the front of the lead vehicle. One of the men in the back of the other SUV got out and climbed into the driver’s seat of the other vehicle.
“I told them to go over to the town and fill up the fuel tanks to save time. They should be back by the time we finish here,” Jabez explained.
Firth grumbled about something while zipping up his coat. Sean and the others followed Jabez up a slight rise to a wide-open gate leading into the monastery. The trucks disappeared around the bend, heading back down the mountain.
Sean had never seen anything quite like it. The external wall was clearly built as a protective barrier from invasion, or possibly to keep people in. On the inside, instead of a castle or a garrison, the small chapel stood as a stark contrast to the facility’s original purpose and infamous history.
The long, boxy design of the chapel was accented by triangular gables, and a twelve-sided tower jutting up in its center, topped by a dome. From a distance, the building seemed to be more reddish in color. But up close, Sean now saw many charcoal-hued blocks, and a few lighter ones as well. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for the differentiation, which added more curiosity to the place.
Jabez acted as the tour guide as the small group neared an atrium made from gray stone, another odd contrast to the rest of the building.
“This chapel was built in the year 642 A.D. by Nerses the Builder.” He raised a hand as if to display the building. “It has been an Armenian Apostolic Monastery for much of that time. The name Khor Virap means ‘deep well’ in their traditional language. It was given that name because of the pit that Saint Gregory was cast into.”