Atlantis Gold

Chapter 10

“I don’t see it.” Jayden walked up to the edge of the drop-off and stood next to Hunt.

“Me neither.”

“You sure this is where you kicked it off?” Jayden’s gaze swept the steep hillside below. Scrubby vegetation covered the mountain, with a few small evergreen trees here and there dotting the inclined landscape.

“Yeah, see there’s where my foot came into contact with the dirt. He indicated a scuff mark made by his shoe.

Jayden eyed the spot, then stepped a little closer to the edge and continued looking for signs of the bronze head. “We’re going to have to go down there, then, because I don’t see it.”

Hunt concurred before adding, “See that plant there? Looks like it got recently crushed, so it could be that the head rolled down that way.”

“Might as well start there, “ Jayden agreed. The pair of ex-military men began picking their way down the steep hill. As far as they could tell there were no vertical sections, and they could face downward while they moved, not needing to face the cliff as with rock climbing. Still, it was no walk in the park; hands were needed to steady themselves, and twisting an ankle was a constant threat.

“Watch for snakes,” Hunt said.

“What? Are there snakes here?” Jayden looked around nervously.

“I don’t know. Seems like there could be.”

Jayden made a spitting noise. “Geez, Hunt, I’m supposed to be looking for a bronze head, now you want me to keep an eye out for snakes, too?”

“Well you’ll be of no use if you get bitten by a poisonous snake.”

They continued their slow and cautious descent down the hill. About two-thirds of the way down the terrain became less steep, making the going easier, but at the same time more overgrown with thorny scrub brush, making it harder to see the ground.

“Ouch, damn! These brambles hurt.” Jayden paused to pull a thorn from his arm, leaving a speck of blood.

“I think you’ll live,” Hunt said, kicking some brush out of the way. He eyed the remaining slope down to the lakes. “I don’t think it could have rolled all the way down to the water.”

“That’s good. Because I don’t think it’d be good luck to have to scuba dive twice for the same head.”

“Down there it changes. See those rocks?”

Jayden followed to where Hunt pointed. A low, crumbling rock formation, overgrown with vegetation, formed a break in the hillside before it sloped the rest of the way down to the water. “That should form a nice little backstop for our rolling head, I would think.”

Hunt and Jayden slid the rest of the way down to the lip or rocks and began looking around. There was still a lot of plant life that had to be kicked out of the way, but after seeing the rock wall, Hunt became more convinced that the rolling head couldn’t possibly have made it over, unless it had rolled far off course to either side, a prospect he didn’t want to think about as he eyed the lake below.

“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Hunt said, eyes to the ground.

“Uh, yeah, about that. Half of it’s around here, anyway.” Jayden pointed, and Hunt gasped.

The head had broken on the way down when it impacted a rock, and half of it — the top half — lay at Jayden’s feet. Hunt picked up the empty bronze shell. A puzzled expression overtook his features as he examined what remained of the artifact. “Funny, but it seems awfully light, even just for half of it.”

“Let’s find the other half, It’s got to be around here somewhere.” Hunt held onto the broken half and resumed searching the ground along with Jayden, who couldn’t help but needle his friend while they looked.

“So how do you feel about busting up an ancient artifact? Nice going, really.”

Hunt shook his head. “It’s not like I meant for it to break. I thought it would just roll down a ways and stop in the grass. In fact, it’s just my luck these seem to be the only rocks anywhere — whoa!”

“What?”

“I found it. But look at it!” He knelt and picked up the other half of the statue, extricating it from a stand of weeds.

“What’s that inside it? That greenish blue stuff?” Jayden asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Hunt dropped the empty broken half he’d already found in order to concentrate on the new one. He ran his fingers over the bluish-green substance that had been revealed inside the head. “It looks like an amethyst crystal. The whole head looks like it was filled with some kind of fancy crystal, the kind that would go for thousands at a gem show.”

“Let’s see…” Jayden bent down and picked up the hollow half of the head. Then he fit it over the protruding amethyst on the half Hunt held.

“Perfect fit,” Hunt observed. “Definitely had to have been inside the head already. Not some kind of freak accident, like it just rolled down the hill into the gemstone or amethyst or whatever it is. Quartz, maybe.”

Jayden rolled his eyes. “Ya think?”

“The question is,” Hunt said, ignoring the sarcastic jab, “why was it inside the statue head in the first place? What does it mean? Back in the days when it was made, no one would have known, except perhaps expert sculptors who could tell by the weight, that there was anything unusual inside it.”

Both of them paused to look around. Were they being observed? But there were no people within sight or even earshot. No boats on the lakes, no traffic of any kind on the bridge. The bridge, Hunt thought. He recalled the tourists talking about it, how it exactly divides the two lakes. He looked over at it now. Divides the two lakes. One green, one blue…one green one blue…

“Earth to Carter, what’s up?”

He stared into the crystal-filled head as he responded. “This head is filled with blue-green rock.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

“One lake is green. One is blue.”

Jayden looked briefly to the lakes, then back to Hunt. “Carter, did you hit your head on the way down here? You feeling okay?”

“Just bear with me. When you mix green and blue together, what do you get?”

Jayden shrugged. “Some kind of blue-green.”

Hunt pointed at the mineral inside the statue head. “Kind of like this, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Don’t you think it’s too much of a coincidence that this statue head, that used to be here on this very island, is filled with a rock the exact color of the two lakes where they come together?”

Jayden looked to the two lakes, focusing under the bridge where a bright blue-green line demarcated one lake from the other. “Like whoever made this statue put the rock in there as a color coded clue?”

Hunt held his hands up in a why-not gesture. “Even after all these years, the color is remarkably similar.” He looked to the water beneath the bridge.

But Jayden was still unconvinced. “Or it’s the same color now but it didn’t used to be. How do we know?”

“The legend of the tears is pretty old.”

“How old? Eleven thousand years?” Jayden crossed his arms.

“I don’t know. It’s a legend. But this place — the Seven Cities lakes, is often mentioned as a possible resting place of Atlantis.”

“And with all that attention you think no one’s ever had a peak down there under the bridge? I mean c’mon, Carter, what are the chances?”

But Hunt was undeterred. “It won’t take much effort to have a look down there for ourselves. First of all, let’s just walk the bridge and see what it looks like. We’re pretty close to it from here.”

Jayden agreed to that and they made their way the rest of the way down the slope to the lake itself, to the deeper blue one. They were able to follow its shoreline along the water’s edge toward the bridge without major difficulties. Parts of the shoreline were grassy while others had stands of pine trees to thread their way between.

No one was on the bridge when they got to it. Hunt felt a little conspicuous walking around with a broken bronze head filled with some kind of gemstone or mineral, but he had no bag in which to put it. As they reached the bridge, the water depth and color changed immediately. Deep and blue became shallower and bluish green, or cyan. Looking out onto the green lake, they could see that it was shallower with a little more wave action.

Hunt and Jayden walked out onto the arching wooden bridge, which was low to the water, until they were about halfway across at its highest point. They looked down into the crystal clear waters.

“It’s like that guy said,” Jayden admitted. Formations of large boulders sprawled out in the shallow depths below.

“Must be lots of caves and caverns down there,” Hunt observed. “But let’s think about this for a minute: Whoever it was who made that statue for the Portuguese explorers to find here in the Azores all those years ago, they went through the trouble of embedding a mineral gemstone of some type into the statue’s head, which was attached to the body of a man who was riding a horse.”

“And the whole thing was fixed to a base with an inscription reading ‘go that way’.” Jayden recapped.

“Some say that inscription was written in Incan. I read that on the plane.”

“So what do the Azores have to do with the Incas?”

Hunt stared into the water while he answered. “Hate to say it, but maybe we should drive back into town, rent some scuba gear, and come back here to find out.”

“I’m so worn out from our little shopping spree and the hike back here, that I don’t even feel like diving,” Jayden huffed as he shrugged out of a large backpack.

“Think about how refreshing it’ll be once we hit this cool, crisp mountain lake water,” Hunt said, attaching a breathing regulator onto a scuba tank.

“I thought tears are supposed to be warm.”

“Wow, I’m impressed. I didn’t think you paid that much attention to the legend.”

“I like to surprise people now and then.”

The two finished setting up their gear and took a look around. The tranquil scene was just that; they were the only two people in sight for miles. During the hike from the nearest available parking spot to the bridge, they’d worried that there would be tourists here and they would draw too much attention. But right now, anyway, they were the only ones here.

“Let’s just drop down and have a look-see. Doesn’t have to take long,” Hunt said, climbing onto the bridge railing. He sat on the rail so that his back faced the water.

“Just like a backwards roll entry off a boat?” Jayden clarified.

“You got it. Put a little air in your vest so you don’t sink too fast, wouldn’t want to hit one of those rocks.”

“Got it.” Hunt heard the hiss of air as Jayden pressed a button to put air from his tank into his buoyancy compensator vest, inflating it.

Hunt flopped over backwards into the lake with a splash, and Jayden followed suit a minute later.

“So clear it makes me dizzy,” Jayden commented after lifting his face from the water.

“Let’s drop down,” Hunt said, releasing air from his vest with an escaping hiss. The pair began their descent into the lake. It was hard to say how deep it actually was since the bottom was a disorganized pile of boulders, sort of like the pyramid chamber, but on a flat plane rather than a steep incline.

The descent took only a few seconds before they reached the smooth tops of the highest-reaching boulders. A thin layer of green, slimy algae covered them, causing Hunt to lose his footing when trying to stand on one. Looking up, he could see the underside of the bridge in a distorted, watery view. He felt a tap on his leg and looked over to see Jayden pointing down at a gap between two large boulders.

Hunt nodded and he followed Jayden as they finned head first into the crevice. It opened into a small cavern. Jayden stopped a few feet inside the entrance, waiting for Hunt to catch up. A few startled fish darted out the way they came in. Aware that they were now in an overhead environment, where there was no direct access to the surface, Hunt checked his gauges, which told him he had plenty of air left and that they were only twenty feet underwater. Looking around the enclosed space, Hunt saw light streaming in from the opposite side of the cavern.

He and Jayden moved across the boulder cavern side by side, observing the floor and walls of the space as they passed. Nothing out of the ordinary was visible, only natural rock, and some leaf litter and tree branches from the surrounding lake vegetation. They emerged from the cavern only to see another opening between a group of boulders a few feet deeper.

Hunt pointed down to it and Jayden nodded before finning toward it. Again, they entered a cavern and swam through it. Like the last one, it also held nothing unusual. They continued to poke around the boulders, swimming over and through them for the next hour, without finding anything noteworthy. Hunt had begun to feel the chill of the mountain lake when he checked his air gauge and saw that he was getting low; it was time to head back up.

He flashed the face of his gauge to Jayden and jerked a thumb towards the surface, the signal to ascend. Jayden nodded and the two divers slowly made their way back up to the surface of the lake. Hunt immediately checked the bridge for signs of people but was relieved to see that it was empty. He’d periodically glanced up at it while underwater, since the water was clear enough to see people on it, but he hadn’t seen any. He and Jayden quietly made their way to the bridge on the shore closest to them, careful not to make loud splashes, which might carry far across the lake and draw attention.

“No sign of Atlantis,” Jayden quipped.

Hunt flipped over onto his back for the semi-long swim to shore. “Sure was a lot easier getting in than it is getting out, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s nice when gravity’s on your side.”

Hunt agreed as he stared up at the mountainside that towered above the lake while he kicked backwards toward shore. He admired the green vegetation lower down on the crater wall, and then a few bursts of color where wildflowers grew higher up — reds, yellow…and at the rim, near to where they had parked the car earlier — an explosion of cyan.

“Hey Jayden, how much do you think this place has changed since whoever it was put that statue here?”

“What do you mean, like this lake?”

“The lake, the crater, the wildlife — the trees and plants — you think they’re still the same kind, in about the same places?”

“You sure do wonder about some weird stuff. I suppose it’s mostly the same though, why?”

“On the way back into town to return the dive gear, I think we should stop off at the top of the crater one more time.”