Yin passed Ethan one of the mugs as she made her way forward, and he sat back down in his seat and gestured with a nod of his head towards the cockpit.
‘Arnie reckons that we’ll land within an hour on the lake to the south of Angor Wat. After that we’ve got to make our own way north.’
‘That’s fine,’ Lucy replied. ‘Believe me, out there nobody is going to find us unless we want them to.’
‘And just where is it that we are going?’
Lucy pulled out a map from her bag and unfolded it until it showed a particular area of mountainous and jungle terrain in the north of Cambodia.
‘Mahendraparvata is an ancient city of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia,’ she explained as she moved to sit next to him. ‘The location of the city has been known for years, but most of it remained concealed by forest until it was uncovered by a recent archaeological expedition. Apparently they had the use of advanced airborne laser scanning technology.’
‘What’s there that is so important to us?’
Lucy pulled out a photograph and showed it to Ethan. He instantly recognised the sun icon from the underwater temple at Yonaguni, a semi-circle of radiating lines of various lengths extending downward from the sun. But this one was located on a carved stone that looked as though it were atop a structure of some kind, the tops of the forest canopy visible surrounding the monument.
‘And this was taken at Mahendraparvata,’ he surmised.
‘Just two years ago,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘The name Mahendraparvata means ‘Mountain of the Great Indra’. It is derived from Sanskrit words and is a reference to the sacred hill top site commonly known as ‘Phnom Kulen‘ today where Jayavarman II was consecrated as the first king of the Khmer Empire in the year 802. The name is attested in inscriptions on the Angkor-area Ak Yum temple.’
‘802 AD?’ Ethan echoed. ‘That’s a lot more recent than the Yonaguni site engraving.’
‘Much, but the inscription on the Yonaguni monument is the closest physically to this one, and I cannot believe that such a close location is not somehow connected, especially as the Yonaguni altar faces toward Mahendraparvata. My guess is that whoever carved the inscriptions at Yonaguni passed on the tradition to those who lived at Mahendraparvata, or they at least in some way inherited the religion or beliefs behind the inscription.’
‘So, what are we going there for if we already have an image of the icon?’
‘That’s the interesting bit.’
‘I had a feeling that you were going to say that.’
Lucy pulled out the image of the icon from the Yonaguni monument and held it alongside the one from Mahendraparvata. ‘Notice anything?’
Ethan stared at the two images but he could see nothing particularly different about them.
‘They look the same to me.’
‘The lines, radiating outward from the sun,’ Lucy encouraged.
As though sunlight had suddenly burst from the image, Ethan spotted it.
‘They’re slightly different lengths,’ he realized. The radiating lines varied from one icon to the next. ‘But that could be an error on the part if the person who carved them.’
Lucy shook her head.
‘These people built temples as big as modern buildings with no mortar, constructed from nothing but perfectly carved rocks. They built the temples at Angor Wat, complexes as big as modern towns, with ornate carvings from thousands of tonnes of rock. They knew how to carve an icon without screwing it up.’
‘So what does it mean?’
Lucy smiled as she looked at the two images. ‘It means that there could be a message inside the differences between the two images. It means that if we can decipher that message, we can follow the directions it gives us. These icons are trying to tell us something.’
Arnie walked down from the cockpit and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Yin’s taking us in toward Angkor Wat. Your destination is about twenty eight miles north of Siem Reap, below Phnom Kulen mountain in Siem Reap Province. You’ll have a hell of a time getting there as there’s nothing to follow but goat tracks, the area is filled with bogs and reed beds, and to cap it all the entire zone is a landmine hazard from back in the heady days of the war here.’
If Arnie had thought that he might dissuade Lucy from going any further, he was about to be very disappointed.
‘I know,’ Lucy replied. ‘An archaeological expedition to find Mahendraparvata was co-led by Damian Evans of University of Sydney and Jean-Baptiste Chevance of London’s Archaeology and Development Foundation. The team uncovered dozens of temples out there and even figured out a reason why the civilization collapsed. I’ve studied their work extensively.’
Arnie nodded, turned and marched back toward the cockpit. ‘Good to hear. ‘We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes.’
‘He’s not much interested in digging,’ Ethan said to Lucy. ‘What happened to the city? Why did it vanish?’
‘Deforestation,’ Lucy explained. ‘Quite the warning shot across modern civilization’s bows once again. Virtually every single ancient society collapsed because its population exceeded the ability of the land around it to support them. The city of Mahendraparvata declined as water management issues and a growing population starved the area of resources.’
‘Bleak,’ Ethan agreed. ‘I still don’t understand why we actually have to travel to this place.’
‘Because the photograph I have here doesn’t show any context,’ Lucy explained. ‘If we’re going to decipher what this message is then we need to know how they relate to each other. Sun worship was a common religion among ancient societies for obvious reasons. I’m hoping that if we can obtain some kind of orientation information from the site at Mahendraparvata, then it might tell us something about what the messages mean.’
‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Arnie to stick around,’ Ethan admitted as he glanced towards the cockpit.
‘We’ll have the advantage by then,’ Lucy pointed out. ‘Nobody knows that we’re here, right?’
Ethan heard the engine note change and the Catalina began descending toward the ethereal layer of clouds below. He got up and made his way forward to the cockpit to see both Arnie and Yin engrossed in their navigation duties. The Catalina descended into the cloud, both pilots silently monitoring their instruments as the aircraft flew in zero visibility through the glowing orange and gold mist. Ethan and Lucy both got into seats just behind the cockpit door and strapped in as the aircraft bounced and gyrated in the turbulence billowing up from the land below to form the clouds.
It was almost ten minutes before the aircraft emerged from the cloud base and Ethan got his first glimpse of the Cambodian wilderness. A patchwork of rice fields, the ankle-deep water reflecting the warm broken sunlight in silvery patches, stretched before them between thickets of dense jungle draped in veils of mist. Ahead, vast mountain ranges vanished up into the clouds, and before them was a wide strip of water burnished by the sunrise as though some careless giant had laid an enormous copper sword across the plains.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Lucy murmured, momentarily stunned by the scenery before them.
Arnie pointed to the water and gave Yin a thumbs up, his wife nodding as she guided the Catalina toward the water. Ever descending, the Catalina passed over the rice fields and Ethan could see women toiling far below, men guiding oxen through the fields, white specks against the green that stopped moving and probably were looking up at the aircraft as it passed overhead.