Atlantis Gold

Chapter 35

Hunt descended the vertical rock chute rung by rung. Looking down, darkness prevented him from seeing what lay below, but it was quiet except for the sounds of Jayden and Maddy’s climbing, several rungs above him.

“Be a good guy and give me a head’s up if you fall, Jayden, so I can brace myself.”

“I was planning on taking you with me.”

Then Maddy said, “Guys, I realize this is all fun and games for you military types, but I’m really nervous, okay? Please stay focused.”

“Who’s got a light?” Hunt asked, changing the subject. “I had to toss mine into the ocean when I hijacked the patrol boat.” The darkness enveloped them a little more with each rung downward.

“Be glad I carry a tube of waterproof matches wherever I go,” Jayden said. He flipped open a latch on his belt buckle, steadying himself against the rock wall with one hand, and then lit one. The sizzle was accompanied by a flame and then they heard a snapping noise as Jayden ripped a stalk from a plant that grew out of the wall. He set it on fire, pleased that it lit relatively easily, having been kept dry down in this vertical chamber.

“Grab some more sticks when you see them,” he said, “because farther down there might not be anymore. Hunt and Maddy collected a few that they stashed in their waistbands, and then they continued on their way straight down. Since Jayden was the one carrying the torch, he had to go slower, but it also meant that he could see better. That’s why Hunt was surprised when he heard Jayden call out that something was written on the walls.

“What, like graffiti?” Hunt called up, worried that he was about to have his hopes dashed that this was an ancient pyramid upon finding out the local gang members have left their mark down here. But it was Maddy, who was closer to Jayden on the wall than Hunt, who responded first

“Oh my God, these appear to be genuine works of art. There’s a bull here, Carter. Bulls are symbols long associated with Atlantis!”

“Let’s keep going.” Hunt continued with his descent, now noticing that there were paintings on the walls in front of him. A naval scene, with longboats being rowed by dozens of warriors, shields in place. Another of a great city, a city built on a series of canals formed in…Hunt nearly gasped as he formed the words in his mind: …formed in concentric rings.

Atlantis!

“You’re going to love this next one, Maddy. But don’t lose your focus on the wall. Keep your footing.”

Carter continued climbing down, and shortly after he heard Maddy gushing over the scenic rendering. “Amazing! It’s got to be Atlantis! I can’t even—”

“Something coming up here.” Hunt’s words put an end to Maddy’s sentence. “Looks like it’s the end of the ladder — it’s opening up into a chamber of some sort.”

But oddly enough the ladder didn’t come to an end on the floor of the chamber, but about six feet up. Hunt waited for Jayden to come down lower with the torch, so that he could see the floor better, to make sure it was in fact a floor. When Jayden came to within a couple of rungs of him, he could see the flames casting his own shadow in wavering shapes on a floor that looked to be made of solid rock tiles.

“It looks solid to me, Jayden. I’m dropping down.”

“Nice knowing you, buddy, if it turns out to be some weird illusion, or if the tiles are breakaway…”

Hunt dropped before Jayden finished his joking around. The thump of his feet hitting the stone reverberated throughout the mountain-shrouded pyramid. “I’m standing on solid ground, not to worry,” Hunt reported. “Come on down.”

Jayden dropped in first, his flaming torch flickering wildly as he fell, and then Maddy made the drop as well. The three of them stood in awe of their new surroundings. They had come to an antechamber of sorts, with the vertical chute emptying out into a polygonal room not seeming to be any standard shape. The ceiling was high and multi-faceted, and the walls were decorated with richly painted murals much more detailed than the ones in the chute on the way down. These, too, depicted scenes of a maritime city, of thriving commerce, culture and everyday life: oxen plowing fields, fishermen hauling in nets bursting with seafood, fish pens for aquaculture, musicians performing in front of socializing crowds, children playing in a field, and a pantheon of god-like figures, looking down on it all from sky-blue heavens above. Other than the artwork, the chamber was unadorned.

A stone stairwell led down from the edge of the floor.

“Let’s see where this leads,” Hunt said, wanting to keep things moving before Jayden’s torch ran out. To be down here in the dark would be tantamount to a death sentence, he knew, but it was a fear he left unspoken for the sake of group morale. Hunt moved to the top of the stairs and peered down. “It’s a long staircase,” he observed.

“Beats the vertical ladder,” Jayden pointed out. He and Maddy trailed Hunt down the stone steps, Jayden’s torch casting flickering shadows on the walls, which bore no artwork here. After many steps down they came to a landing with a torch holder mounted on the wall, a stout piece of wood still in it.

“Is it petrified?” Maddy asked. Hunt pulled it down from the mount, hefting its weight.

“Nope, just a nice, solid piece of wood.”

“That’s what she said,” Jayden quipped.

“Seriously, Jayden, is there ever a time when—”

“People, come on, this is not the time. “Hunt held the tip of the wooden staff to Jayden’s flame and waited while it lit. It took a few minutes of careful lighting, but the flame took hold and then they had a powerful torch. “This should last a while,” Hunt said, inwardly relieved. Jayden’s torch didn’t have that long to go.

The stairway continued down another flight in the opposite direction like a switchback trail. The three explorers took these down also, and by the time they reached another landing, Jayden’s torch had been extinguished. Another stout piece of wood was wall mounted here, and so he collected that and lit it from Hunt’s torch. “One more landing and I’ll have one, too!” Maddy said.

They took yet another flight of stairs down, but there were no more landings. Instead, at the bottom of this flight was a short arched hallway. The trio followed it to its end, where it branched off both to the left and to the right, as well as offering yet another stairway leading down. Both side passages were longer than the one they had just traversed, but they could still see that both opened up into rooms or chambers of some sort.

“Right, left, down, or do we split up and go one in each direction?” Jayden asked.

“I don’t want to be alone down here,” Maddy stated.

“Let’s all stick together for now,” Hunt decided. “And I don’t think we should go down yet. Let’s check out the side passages first. Right or left, Jayden — your call.”

“I’m closer to the right passage already, so…right it is, call me lazy.”

Hunt laughed as he crossed to Jayden’s side of the room, and then the three of them walked side by side through the right-hand passage. Murals decorated the walls here, depicting a theater of some type with an audience watching a play or show being performed. Another unlit torch was mounted in here and so Maddy took this one, lit it from Hunt’s and the three carried on with a decent amount of light. The passage opened into a spacious chamber with high, vaulted ceilings.

Right away they could see that this room was different.

“Oh. My. God.” Maddy whispered the words as the three of them stood just inside the entrance, awestruck.

“Is…is all this stuff real?” Jayden muttered, almost to himself.

The chamber was about the size of a large living room or great room. A series of stone pedestals placed throughout the space support a mind-boggling array of goods — piles and piles of gemstones, gold bars and ingots, silver and jade jewelry, statues made from precious metals, weapons fashioned from various materials including stone, metal and wood.

Treasure.

“I think we found it,” Hunt declared. “But hold on — before we get lost in all these treasures and artifacts, I think we should check out what’s in the other chamber, at the end of the other passage.”

Neither Jayden nor Maddy responded, they could only stand there and marvel at the sheer spectacle of it all.

“Guys?” Hunt prompted. He’d been in too many pyramids by now not to question what was in all parts of them.

“Okay, let’s make sure we didn’t set off some kind of booby-trap by coming in here, is that what’s on your mind?”

“Sort of, yeah. It seems to me like they disguised this pyramid as a living mountain, like that was the strategy, but who knows what it looked like 11,000 years ago?”

“Sea level was lower,” Maddy said, turning away from the heaps of incredible riches in order to leave. “This would have been the peak of a once truly massive island. The parts that are underwater now would have been dry land. This mountain would have been an extremely high peak.”

They exited the treasure chamber and walked back through the passage until they reached the intersection. This time, they took the left-hand passage. The same length as the other, it opened up into a chamber the same size and layout as the other.

And with the same amount of treasures. More gold, so much of it that the entire chamber was cast in a yellow light. There were also wondrous biological items here — massive ivory tusks, most likely from wooly mammoths. Huge shark jaws, even larger than what would be found in a great white shark. Massive hunks of amber, large pelts from various big cats, bears, otters and other unknown species. Peppered throughout, laying on the floor, were strings of pearls, gold coins, and necklaces made of various precious metals and strung with beads comprised of exotic gems. It was all so dazzling to look at that Maddy actually sat down on the floor, still holding her torch.

“My God, you guys! All my life, I’ve worked to uncover finds that shed some light on humanity’s past, but this…But this…” she trailed off, spellbound by the sheer magnitude of their discovery.

But Hunt had questions that overrode the grandiosity. He walked a few steps and bent down to pick up a gold coin. “Did Atlanteans have their own money?” he proffered.

“No one knows for sure,” Maddy said.

“I think we do now.” Hunt tossed her the coin. It featured a bust on one side of a man whom she did not recognize, with writing that was unknown to her. The reverse side featured a seaside scene similar to those depicted in the murals they had seen, presumably Atlantis itself, in its heyday.

Hunt continued to walk around the room, examining artifacts, picking things up now and then from the floor. Jayden did the same, and after she regained her composure, Maddy got back on her feet and also perused the astounding finds. While there was some variation in the types of things stockpiled and preserved here for the millennia, it was essentially more of the same — a hidden room full of mass riches.

After some time spent examining it all, Jayden walked over to Hunt and Maddy. “There’s all the money in the world in here, but there’s no food. Also, these treasures are great, but they’re not Cuban cigars, or even coffee. So we better work on getting out of here.”

Maddy was unable to look away from a group of golden bowls, but Hunt agreed. “We’ve seen all we need to here. It’s time to make sure we can get out of here alive so that we can tell the world that Atlantis was real. Come on, Maddy, let’s go. We still need to find a way out of here.”

She looked up from the sensational artifacts. “What do you mean, find a way out? Won’t we just go back the same way we came in?”

Hunt and Jayden exchanged knowing looks. Jayden said, “I think you’re forgetting about that ten foot drop from the rock ladder down to the first chamber. How would we get back up to the ladder?”

A few moments of silence passed while Maddy digested this. “I suppose you’re right. Unless we piled up stacks of mammoth tusks and stood on top of them or something silly like that…”

“Besides,” Hunt broke in, “We still haven’t seen what else is in this pyramid. If it takes up the entire mountain we climbed up outside to get here, then we can’t be all the way back down yet. It’s hard to judge, to be sure, but I’m guessing we’re at least half but not more than three-quarters of the way down.”

Maddy tore her gaze from the artifacts. “Okay. You’re right. Let’s go. This chamber appears to be constructed exactly the same as the other one, so I recommend starting in the middle space where the left and right passages branched off.”

Reluctantly, they exited the treasure-filled chamber and retreated back down the passage back to the central corridor that had led them to the pair of branching halls with the staircase leading down off the end of the straightaway. Hunt stood at the top of it, eyeing the way down. “Looks okay. Down we go.”

The stepped down in a single file line, Hunt in the lead and Maddy in the middle. The walls here were featureless slabs of stone, with no artwork. Down they went for what seemed like a very long time. Hunt was about to comment about an endless stairway when he saw a new space beckoning below at the bottom of the steps.

“Almost there.” He picked up his pace a little, his torch bouncing around as he descended the final steps.

Jayden and Maddy heard his voice before they reached the bottom. “Huh. That’s disappointing.”

“What is?” Maddy asked.

“Oh, wow! It’s not another treasure room. But You guys are going to love this!