Atlantis Gold

Chapter 3

Carter Hunt dismounted the camel and looked around at the excavation site. A small tent city had been erected a stone’s throw from the pyramid, and now at mid-day under blistering desert sun, there was no one to be seen walking around.

“So where’s your friend?” Jayden asked, placing special emphasis on the word as he climbed down from his own dromedary. As if in response to the question, one of the tents suddenly opened and a short, attractive woman with long hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a khaki outfit, immediately made eye contact with them. She raised a hand and waved as she strode toward them.

“Carter! So glad you could make it!” She trotted up to them and gave Hunt a big hug while Jayden made suggestive expressions over her shoulder. Both men were single and he knew that Hunt had dated Madison in the past.

“Anything for a friend. Not going to lie, though, it helped that we were already in country. Flying out here for a scuba dive from the states might have been a bit more problematic.”

She smiled while shaking hands with Jayden. “Of course, that’s why when I remembered you said you were going to be here with Jayden, I called you straight away.” She looked over at the pyramid before looking back to Hunt. “This is so exciting! I can’t wait to show you what I found.” She waved toward the tent she’d emerged from. “Come on, let’s get you out of the sun.”

Hunt paid the man with the camels, who had also towed a cart behind one of the dromedaries with their scuba gear. Then they walked over to the tent, where Madison pulled the entrance flap aside, ushering them in.

Hunt gave her a lopsided grin while looking around at the tables stacked with computer gear and video monitors. “Wow, impressive setup. You really bring a lot of stuff when you go camping.” A ham radio station occupied one table, while the LiDAR equipment was laid out on another.

Madison laughed good naturedly. “You make it sound like we sleep in and have s’mores every night around a campfire singing Kumbaya.”

Hunt smiled in return. “I’m sure you manage to get some work done. You always were a workaholic. After all, that’s how you got to be a tenured professor and world-class researcher at the tender age of…what are you now, thirty?“

Jayden nodded, acknowledging Madison’s accomplishments while admiring the technical setup in the tent.

“Carter, really, a woman doesn’t discuss her age!” Madison said with mock indignation, moving to a laptop open on a table. “Thanks again for stopping by. The number of people willing to cart scuba gear across the desert by camel to help me on my dig was pretty small, so I’m very glad you’re here. Now take a look at this.”

Hunt and Jayden stood next to the archaeologist in front of the computer. On the screen was the LiDAR image depicting the previously undetected subterranean chambers off to one side of the pyramid.

She pointed to the space between the chambers and the pyramid. “These are connected by a series of multiple passageways, or tunnels, of which I explored one.”

“And you just found these yesterday?” Hunt asked.

Madison pointed to one of the chambers outlined in the LiDAR image. “Not the first two chambers — here — which we found last week, but this new one, here.” Her finger stabbed the screen over the chamber that was farthest from the pyramid itself. “It’s flooded with water.”

Hunt and Jayden exchanged puzzled glances. Hunt put it into words. “Water in a sealed Egyptian pyramid chamber?”

Jayden pointed to the image. “Could it be the result of some kind of excavation technique, where it was deliberately flooded with hoses for some reason?”

Madison shook her head firmly. “No. That’s not a technique I’ve ever heard of and I don’t see what good it would do anyway.”

Jayden shrugged. “I guess that’s why I’m not an archeologist.”

“So you want us to scuba dive in that flooded chamber and tell you what’s down there, is that about the gist of it?” Hunt asked, steering the conversation back on track.

Madison nodded enthusiastically. “That’s essentially it. Are there artifacts or hieroglyphics down there or is it just an empty chamber? How deep is it?”

“What’s the water temperature?” Jayden wanted to know.

“It was cool to the touch, but not cold. At the edge anyway. I didn’t go for a dip.”

Hunt looked to Jayden. “We should wear exposure suits. There could be an inversion layer, a thermocline, where it’s cold at the bottom.”

“Or who knows, even really hot!” Jayden said with a laugh.

Hunt made eye contact with Madison. “You want us to get wet today, then?”

Madison grinned broadly. “I thought you’d never ask. Let me get some of my team together to help with the gear and setting up some portable lights, and we’ll get underway right after lunch.”

Two hours later, Hunt, Jayden, Madison and half a dozen members of her archaeology team reached the chamber Madison had climbed through in order to access the flooded chamber. Battery powered utility lights were set up to light the space without the need for flashlights. Hunt and Jayden looked around, duly impressed by their new surroundings.

Jayden wore a mystified expression as he asked Madison, “So we’re like some of the first people to be in this room for thousands of years?”

The archaeologist nodded. “That’s right. This chamber was discovered only a few days ago, and is off limits to the public — to anyone without a permit from the Egyptian authorities, which I was lucky enough to have been granted.”

“It’s not luck, Maddy, it’s hard work.” Hunt pointed out.

“Speaking of hard work,” she replied, “there’s a fair bit of that in our future before we can get that scuba gear through to the new passage.” She nodded to the wall of jumbled stones she had climbed up and through in order to access the flooded chamber.

The team set to work displacing stones to allow enough space for them to transport gear through safely. When that was done, Hunt wheeled the cart full of scuba gear into the new passageway while Madison led the way toward the watery room. The rest of the team again set up utility lights in the new space. The light reflected off the water and cast moving shadows about the walls and ceiling.

“Kinda spooky in here,” Jayden said.

“Can’t wait to see what it looks like down there!” Hunt picked up a scuba tank and began setting it up. “Let’s do this.”

A few minutes later he and Jayden stood on the edge of the indoor body of water — what could be called either a large pool or a small artificial lake — adjusting their face masks.

Hunt looked to Jayden. “Would have been nice to have the full face masks with integrated intercoms like we had in the navy, right?”

“It’s okay, I can go without hearing your sweet voice for an hour or so.”

The laughter from the crew echoed throughout the chamber as the pair of divers walked out from the edge of the shore and then slipped beneath the water. They paused just beneath the surface, marveling at the crystal clear visibility. After a minute Hunt poked his head back above the surface and lifted his mask up on his forehead so he could talk to Madison and the crew.

“Even though the water’s super-clear, we still can’t see the bottom — it slopes down out of sight into what looks like a jumble of stone blocks. That’s all I can tell for sure from here. We’ll go down there and check it out.”

“Be careful, you two!” Maddy said.

Hunt gave her the okay sign before slipping back beneath the water. He caught up with Jayden, who was about ten feet below him, sinking slowly into the crystal grotto. So far it reminded him of a cavern dive — an enclosed space that was more wide open than a true cave, which tended to be narrower with branching passages. Without daylight deep inside the pyramid, it was nearly dark already even though they were still in shallow water. Hunt switched on his dive light and Jayden did the same. The two divers continued their descent into the flooded chamber. They went slowly, since it was so clear as to be vertigo-inducing — the sensation that they were suspended in air over a jumble of boulders was a strange one. Hunt kept a close eye on his depth gauge. When it indicated that there was 100 feet of water over their heads, he tapped Jayden on the shoulder and indicated they should pause and have a look around.

The deeper they went, the less the compressed air in the tanks on their backs would last, and so Hunt wanted to take stock of their surroundings and make sure that if they went deeper, that there was a reason to do so. Swimming around blindly was not the prudent thing to do.

So he and Jayden planted their fins on two flat slabs of rock. The entire way down was lined with them, like a never-ending hill comprised of massive rock slabs strewn about. Hunt could see nothing particularly interesting among them, though — no artifacts or anything, for that matter, other than the slabs themselves. To his untrained eye they looked like the same stone that was used to construct the rest of the great pyramid, and he supposed that’s what they were. Perhaps this was a quarry or dumping ground of some sort for extra rock when they were building the legendary tomb? He made a mental note to ask Madison. He took a few snapshots of the scene with an underwater camera so that Madison and her team would have a firsthand look later.

He suggested to Jayden that they swim laterally across the room at this same depth, but while looking down to see if they could spot anything of interest. Jayden gave him the okay sign and the two kicked off the slab and finned their way out toward the middle of the chamber. While not cold, Hunt was beginning to feel the chill of the water at this depth, and was glad to get moving again for the warmth his muscles would generate. The scenery was much the same as they swam across: a sloping pile of large rock slabs and boulders, stretching down to some unknown depth. They had almost reached the other side of the chamber when something far below caught Hunt’s eye.

He stopped kicking along and rested on one of the slabs while focusing his attention on what lay below. It was the color that had caught his attention. Brown or maybe tan. Either way, it stood in sharp contrast to the sandy shade of the building rocks. Hunt glanced at his air pressure gauge and indicated for Jayden to do the same. They both still had enough for a swim down to the mystery object. Hunt pointed down to it and watched Jayden raise his eyebrows.

Then Hunt released some air from his buoyancy vest so that he would sink, and started to swim down toward the object.