“I thought you might say that,” she sighed.
They approached the door. It was enormous, at least five feet across and close to fifteen feet high. There was no sign of hinges.
“Pins in the bottom and the top,” said Holliday. “A pivot door.”
“Let’s get the bar off,” said Wanounou.
He hammered at the brackets with the curved end of the crowbar, knocking off most of the rust welding the iron bar to its supports. The rest he dug out with the chisel end. When he was done all three of them lifted the iron bar away from the door and laid it on the paving-stone floor. Their hands and clothes were stained with streaks of rust.
Wanounou hauled on the immense latch, but the door didn’t budge. He fitted the chisel end of the crowbar into the narrow crack between the door and wall, then he and Holliday heaved. For a moment nothing happened, but then there was a shrieking sound and the entire door moved a few inches toward them, grinding over the stone floor.
“Anybody got any WD-40?” Peggy cracked.
Holliday and the professor rested for a second, then repeated the process. By the third time they’d opened the door a full eighteen inches-enough to squeeze by.
“Nobody’s been through that door in about a thousand years,” said Holliday. “Who goes first?”
“You do,” said Wanounou with a melodramatic sweeping gesture of his arm. “This whole thing was your idea after all.”
“Just as long as there’s no snakes,” said Peggy. “Are there any snakes in Israel?”
“Sure,” said Wanounou. “Cleopatra and the asp, remember?”
“Any underground?”
“Just the blind worm snake.”
“What are they like?”
“A blind snake that looks like a worm.”
“Very funny.”
“They’re about ten inches long, black, and highly polished. And they’re not poisonous.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a species of albino scorpion.”
“Blind snakes and albino scorpions… Great.”
“I’m going through,” said Holliday. “Anybody coming along?”
Switching on the other flashlight, he turned sideways and squeezed through the opening, disappearing into the darkness beyond. Peggy went next, with Wanounou following her.
The passageway beyond the door was entirely different from the one that had led from the staircase to the storage chamber. Here the walls were raw native rock rather than dressed and quarried stone. The floor was rough, unworked limestone, and the roof, instead of being a plain barrel vault, was a soaring crevasse, its peak lost somewhere in the gloom. They were in fact now walking along an enormous crack in the earth created by some cataclysmic earthquake millennia before. When they spoke their voices echoed from the ragged stone.
“ ‘With dead Saladin’s echoing voice it calls us into battle once again,’ ” said Holliday, quoting from the message from the sword and swinging the flashlight around, lighting up the passage. Shadows jumped and flared in the moving beam like flitting bats.
“Doc, you’re getting spooky again,” Peggy warned.
“Sorry.”
“The passage is splitting,” called out Wanounou in the lead.
Ahead of them the passage split in two, the left fork narrower, the roof a lowered flat slab at about room height. The right fork was wider than the one they stood in, an extension of the same soaring crack in the earth. Holliday and Peggy joined the professor.
“Which way?” Holliday asked.
“It’s a toss-up,” answered Wanounou. “It’s not as though they put up a sign.”
“Just like the highways,” laughed Holliday.
“I say we go right,” said Peggy firmly. “Actually I’d like to just get the hell out of here, but that would mean going back up that stupid staircase and I don’t think I could deal with that right now, so I say we go right. Maybe they’ll have a Starbucks at the other end.”
Wanounou looked at Holliday. “Well?”
Holliday shrugged. “Suits me.”
They went to the right, where the passage was wide enough to let them walk three abreast. They walked on for another hundred yards, and then the passage suddenly opened up again, the roof soaring above their heads. The sound of falling water thundered.
“Incredible,” breathed Peggy as the light from both men’s flashlights played over the way ahead. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
21
In front of them lay an immense underground lake. At its far end a waterfall gushed down fifty feet before striking the main pool. Except where the waterfall struck, the water was as black as pitch.
This time it was the Israeli archaeology professor who spoke the words.
“ ‘In the black waters of the Pilgrim’s Fortress a treasured silver scroll is found,’ ” he whispered. “This has to be it.”
“Where?” Peggy said. “All I see is a big reservoir of water. You think an arm is going to come up out of the water like the Lady of the Lake or something?”
“Maybe,” murmured Holliday, excitement slowly coming into his voice. He pointed the beam of his flashlight into the center of the pool. A small island had formed over a million years or so, limestone in solution dripping from the roof of the cavern to fall into the water, eventually, drop by drop, eon after eon, building up and creating a small solid hillock rising into the open air.
Now the island and the long, wax-like dripping from the ceiling seemed to be reaching out to each other. In another hundred thousand years perhaps they’d even join together to form a solid column of stone.
“What?” Peggy said. “All I see is one of those stalacthingumajiggies. What’s so special about that?”
“Stalag-thingumajiggy,” corrected Wanounou. “Stalac tites come down, stalagmites go up.”
“Whatever,” said Peggy, exasperated. “It’s cold, it’s creepy, and there’s no scroll, silver, or otherwise. Can we go home now?”
“Look at the base of the stalagmite,” instructed Holliday, holding the beam of the flashlight steady.
“That’s no natural formation,” said Wanounou. A right angle of stone seemed to be jutting out from the frozen ooze of dripstone, surrounding it like the corner of a cube.
“The base of a column?”
“An altar?”
“Maybe.”
“You think there might be something underneath it?” Peggy asked, suddenly understanding.
“Could be,” said Wanounou, staring out across the water.
“Well, let’s go and find out,” she urged.
“How do you propose doing that?” asked the professor.
Peggy shrugged. “Swim out with Doc’s rock hammer and whack the thing until it breaks. Like opening a piсata.”
“Hardly rates as good archaeological field technique,” responded Wanounou.
“To hell with that,” said Peggy. “Let’s do it.”
“I told you, I’m not much of a swimmer,” the professor said.
“It’s two hundred feet,” said Peggy. “A hamster could swim that far.”
“I can’t swim at all actually,” admitted Wanounou, coloring with embarrassment. “I never learned.”
“Doc?”
“It was your idea,” said Holliday. “I’m willing to come back later with a rubber raft and the right tools and do it properly.”
“And go down that stairway again?” Peggy scoffed. “No way,” she said. She toed off her sneakers and undid her jeans.
“What are you doing?” Wanounou said, startled.
“Going for a swim,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the pool. She wriggled out of the jeans, pulled the T-shirt over her head, and put out her hand. “The hammer,” she said to Holliday. He handed it to her, grinning, and she jammed it into the waistband of her panties. Wanounou looked at her as though she was insane.
“What?” Peggy frowned. “Do I need a bikini wax or something?”
The professor blushed furiously.
Peggy turned around and dipped the toes of one foot into the water. She winced.
“Cold.” She shivered.
“Come on, kiddo, if you can do the creek behind Uncle Henry’s in May you can do a cave in Israel during August.”
She gave him a nasty look, wrapped her arms around herself, and stepped tentatively out into the pool.
“Anything nasty likely to be in here with me?” Peggy called out, looking back at Wanounou and Holliday, her voice echoing loudly around the cathedral-sized cavern. “The bottom feels slimy.”