Lost Temple

Five

Red rock walls rose stark above them, glowing in the sun, but in the cleft of the gorge a tangle of plane trees and oleanders shaded the valley floor. Grant peered up through the leaves, shading his eyes against the brightness. They were in a vast canyon, curving gradually towards the sea. High above, a series of dark holes riddled the cliffs.

'Those are tombs.' Marina's black dress was gone, traded in a village they'd passed for a pair of surplus green military trousers and a short-sleeved blouse, unbuttoned just far enough to draw Grant's eyes when he thought she wasn't looking. Her dark hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and, though she wore no make-up, three days walking across the mountains had burnished her skin to a lustrous brown. A coil of rope was looped over her shoulder.

'People have been buried in those caves since Minoan times,' she continued. 'So, the Valley of the Dead.'

'Doesn't look too frightening to me. Sun's shining, wildflowers are out, birds are singing.'

'Actually, to the Greeks, birds were often seen as harbingers of death, messengers to and from the underworld.'

'Oh.' A sinister note suddenly crept into the trill chirruping around them. 'Has anyone ever explored the caves?'

'Always.' She wrinkled her nose. 'It doesn't take long for the sacred relics of one generation to become pickings for another. Archaeologists have found a few ancient burials, but most of them disappeared a long time ago.'

'Then why…'

"We're not here for the tombs.' She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, a copy she had sketched of Pemberton's drawing. 'You see the horns? We're looking for a shrine.'

'Not the same thing?'

'The Minoans didn't bury their dead in their temples. No one did until the Christians came along. The ancients would have been shocked by the idea of bringing the dead into the places of the living. They put them in the cities of the dead — necropolises. Like those caves.'

'So where do we look for the temple?'

Marina considered it for a moment. 'Hogarth — another archaeologist — excavated at the mouth of the gorge in 1901. He found a few Minoan houses, but no shrine.'

'Maybe Pemberton found something he missed.' Grant took the drawing from Marina and squinted at it. 'You said these zigzag lines might represent water?'

'Or they might be purely decorative. There's no way

'Look.' Grant held the paper upright, looking straight down the valley. 'These two triangles on each side — those are the sides of the gorge. You've got the sea in front of them. And here' — he jabbed a finger in the centre of the picture — 'the temple.'

Marina looked doubtful. 'I don't think you can assume that the Minoans used spatial relationships in their art like that.'

'Bollocks. They drew it as they saw it.'

'Really?' Her tone hardened. 'And how do you know how they saw the world, so many thousand years ago? For that matter, how do you explain the lion floating in mid air? Did they draw that as they saw it?'

'Perhaps it's a cloud.'

'And the dome underneath it? A rainbow, perhaps?'

'Well, have you got a better idea?'

She sighed. 'No.'

But Grant's victory was short-lived. The canyon ended almost half a mile from the coast, spilling out into a few dusty farm fields.

'The ruins Hogarth found must be somewhere here,' said Marina, exasperated. She looked at the sketch again. 'What did Pemberton see here that made him think of the Valley of the Dead?'

In one of the fields a gaunt ox was dragging a plough through the dry earth. A farmer in a tweed jacket stood beside it, swatting its flank with a cane, while a stout woman in a headscarf looked on. They watched silently as Grant and Marina approached.

'Kalimera sas,' Marina called.

'Kalimera.'

The farmer leaned on his stick and stared at her. Beside him, his wife looked at Marina as if she'd stepped off the stage of a Paris revue.

Stammering slightly, Marina launched into her question. Grant's Greek was probably good enough for him to have followed it if he'd paid attention, but he didn't bother. Something was troubling him. Pemberton had written 'Valley of the Dead' in the margin of his notebook, but this wasn't the valley. He turned and looked back up into the gorge. It curved away to the left, so that from where Grant stood it looked as though the valley ended abruptly in a sheer rock face where the wall swept round. And there, seeming to rise straight over the middle of the gorge, stood a domed hill.

'He says they never saw anyone.'

'What?'

Snatched out of his thoughts, Grant turned back. Across the field the farmer still stood impassively and watched them. His wife had turned away and was ostentatiously driving the ox forward.

'The farmer. He says they never saw a British archaeologist. He might be lying — the British aren't so popular here since you started propping up the puppet government in Athens.'

'Nothing to do with me,' demurred Grant. 'But look behind you.'

Marina looked round. 'What?'

'That's the view.' The paper flapped in the breeze as Grant held it up, transposing it over the landscape. 'The cliffs on either side, the sea at this end and the hill in the middle of the valley.' High above the domed summit a hawk hovered lazily in the sky. 'You've even got the birds.'

'And the flying lion?'

'Sleeping.' Grant grinned. 'Let's see if we can wake him up.'

They threaded their way through the trees and fallen boulders that littered the dry stream bed. Inside the gorge, with the cliffs looming over them, they quickly lost sight of the summit, but they pushed on, trying to keep as straight a path as possible.

'The Minoans often put their shrines on hilltops,' said Marina, breathing hard. It was almost noon and her shirt clung to her skin. 'Perhaps we should try the top of the cliffs.'

'It wouldn't look the same from up there,' said Grant stubbornly. 'And in the picture, the temple's under the summit.'

'I told you, you can't…' Marina broke off with a cry of surprise. She pushed past Grant towards a boulder at the edge of the path. On top of it, almost hidden by the fronds of an oleander, four rocks were arranged in a small cairn. She pulled them apart. A smoothed-out square of thinly beaten silver glittered underneath.

'Minoan treasure?' asked Grant.

'Fry's Turkish Delight.' She turned over the foil to show him the wrapper. 'Pemberton loved it. Every time he went to England he came back with some.'

'Full of eastern promise,' Grant muttered, astonished. 'I wonder what other surprises he left for us.'

Marina scrambled over the rock and vanished into the undergrowth. With a rueful shake of his head, Grant followed her through the trees until they gave way to a bare hillside. A few yards away Marina was kneeling beside a rocky overhang.

'Is that the temple?' The rock looked too low for anyone to be able to crawl under it.

'See for yourself.'

Grant crouched down. Laid out on a piece of sacking under the rock were a pickaxe, a spade and a paraffin lantern. All were coated in rust, but he could still read the letters stencilled on the wooden handles: B.S.A.

'The British School at Athens,' Marina explained. 'They ran the excavations at Knossos. They were Pemberton's employer.'

Grant pulled out the spade and banged it against the rock. A few flakes of rust fluttered to the ground and a mournful clang echoed through the valley. Grant looked around guiltily.

'I thought we were trying to be secret,' said Marina, cocking an eyebrow at him.

'We haven't found anything worth keeping secret yet.'

Marina slipped the coil of rope from her shoulder, lashed one end to the pickaxe's handle and began clambering up over the fallen boulders. Grant waited long enough to be sure that the stones she loosened wouldn't come tumbling down on his head, then followed.

At first it was easy enough, scrambling from one boulder to the next. But soon the large rocks gave way to small pebbles, which slid away underfoot the moment Grant trod on them. Climbing the slope became a race, a frantic effort to keep lunging forward faster than the clattering pebbles could drag him back. Then that too ended, in a sheer red cliff face, and Grant had to grab on to an exposed tree root to stop himself sliding all the way back down the hill. Just to his right the rope end dangled down. Grant snatched it and hauled himself up hand over hand until, in a torrent of sweat and curses, he heaved himself over the cliff.

'Is this what you used to do with Pemberton?' he asked, breathing hard.

'No. But he obviously did it himself.'

Grant pushed himself to his feet, raised an arm to brush the dust off his shirt — and stopped in astonishment. They had climbed higher than he thought and arrived on a rock shelf almost halfway up the thousand-foot cliffs. They loomed above, so dizzyingly steep that Grant didn't dare look up for fear of losing his balance. Below, the green ribbon at the bottom of the gorge wound its way towards the sea sparkling in the distance. But in front of him, where the cliffs met the shelf, a dark crack split open the rock, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through.

Above it, almost invisible in the shade of an overhang, a stone plaque sat in a recess cut into the rock.

Grant edged towards it. Three thousand years had ground down the carving; what remained was only a faint impression of the original proud design. The claws and teeth had lost their sharpness, the mane wilted, the crouched muscles wasted away. Even so, Grant recognised it at once. He pulled the crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and held it up. 'There's your flying lion.'

Marina shook her head, though Grant couldn't tell if it was wonder or exasperation. She picked up Pemberton's lantern and shook it. A few drops of ancient paraffin sloshed inside.

'There's no wick.'

Marina took a knife from her hip pocket, unclasped it and sliced a thin band of cloth from the sleeve of her blouse. She twisted it between her fingers and threaded it into the lamp.

Grant held out his lighter. 'Allow me.'

Flame licked along the cotton wick, almost invisible in the harsh sunlight. Marina moved towards the crack in the cliff, but Grant was faster. He twisted the lantern out of her hands and stepped in front of her, then pulled the Webley from its holster. 'I'll go first.'

Grant pushed through the crack. After about ten yards the passage widened. He paused, holding up the lamp to guard against nasty surprises — and barely had time to adjust his eyes when a sharp elbow dug into his back, pitching him forward. He stumbled into the room, flailing the lamp so as not to dash it to pieces on the floor. When he had managed to stop himself he turned round.

Marina stood in the doorway, a half-guilty expression spreading across her face. 'Sorry. I didn't see you stop.'

'Lucky there wasn't a bottomless pit waiting to swallow me.'

But Grant had no time to nurse his anger. The cleft had opened into a chamber, whose walls were still pocked with the millennia-old scars of the copper chisels that had carved it out of the rock. A stone bench ran across the far end, above which an upturned vase sat in a deep niche. A wood-framed sieve leaned against the bench, together with a trowel, a plumb line, a brush and another chocolate wrapper. On top, laid out almost as if in a museum, sat a row of figurines and artefacts. Grant and Marina crouched in front of them — perhaps in the same way as worshippers had knelt there all those thousands of years ago.

'This must be some kind of lustral bowl,' said Marina, picking up a shallow dish carved from purple stone. Her voice was low with awe. She put the piece down reverently and picked up another. This was a painted figurine, wasp-waisted, with ruffled skirts and its arms held aloft like wings. It looked almost like an angel. Except, Grant noticed, that the cropped jacket it wore had been pulled apart to reveal a pair of breasts thrusting out, squeezed almost perpendicular to the body.

'Nice tits.'

Marina scowled. 'It's a Minoan goddess figure. She was their principal deity- the source of all fertility and power. These sorts of idols are quite common.'

Grant leaned closer, affecting to examine it. 'What are those wavy lines on her arms?'

'Snakes.' Marina held it up to the lamp. Close to, Grant could see it clearly: a writhing serpent running up one arm, across her bare shoulders and down to the other wrist. The lines on her chest that he had taken to be the hem of the jacket turned out to be two more snakes, one coiled round her breasts, the other hanging down over her hips and between her skirts.

'A dangerous woman,' said Marina tartly. 'You wouldn't stand a chance.'

'Goddesses aren't my type.'

Marina put down the figurine and surveyed the rest of the hoard. Most of it was in fragments, which Pemberton had sorted according to type: pieces of ivory, half a dozen seal stones with miniature engravings; two double-headed axes and lots of pottery shards arranged in different piles.

'This is interesting.' Marina took two of the pieces from the furthermost pile and held them together. 'Most of the finds are mid-period Minoan — say three and a half thousand years ago — but these are much more recent. It's almost as though the shrine was abandoned, then rediscovered later.'

'How much later?'

'Say three thousand years ago.'

Grant yawned. 'It's all old news to me, sweetheart.' He cast his eye over the assorted artefacts laid out on the bench. 'How much is this lot worth, anyway?'

'From an archaeological point of view, this could be quite significant. The goddess statue is hardly unique, but it's a very fine example. The pottery's probably most valuable — if we can get a good chronology it will tell us a lot about settlement patterns in this part of the island.' She frowned. 'It would be useful to know its stratification. I'm surprised Pemberton didn't…' She trailed off as she noticed the bored scowl on Grant's face. 'What?'

'I don't give a damn how fascinating it is to archaeologists. I want to know how much it's worth.'

'Is that all you care about?' Her voice was bitter. 'Half the world is lying in ruins and the other half can't even afford to feed itself. You won't get rich peddling the crumbs of a civilisation most people have never heard of. If you want to make your fortune, go back to your guns. Men always find money for killing.'

She turned away, but Grant reached out and spun her round. 'Do you really think I'm interested in carting this junk down to some pawnshop to get my sixpence for it? Think. That nice man from Secret Intelligence came all the way to Palestine to see if I had Pemberton's book and I don't think it was because he's collecting for the British Museum. They think there's something valuable in the book — valuable to the sort of men who deal in steel and oil and guns and lives. So I'm asking you: is this valuable? Because if it isn't, either they've got the wrong end of the stick, or we've come to the wrong place.'

He stepped back. Despite the stifling air in the cave, Marina was shivering.

'There are a few things here that would be interesting to scholars,' she said flatly. 'Otherwise… I don't see anything.'

'How about that?'

Grant turned the lantern towards the alcove in the back wall. At first he had taken the object inside for an upturned vase, but looking closer he could see it was a piece of stone, about two feet high and vaguely bullet-shaped, with a web of criss-crossed lines carved in relief out of its sides. A shallow impression dented its top.

'This…' Marina stared. 'This is very unusual. Not valuable, of course,' she added acidly, 'but very rare. I think it must be a baetyl.'

'A beetle?' asked Grant, confused.

'A baetyl. A sacred stone. Possibly a meteorite originally, though this is obviously a copy. Perhaps that indentation in the top held a fragment of the original rock — or maybe some sort of cult idol.' She ran her hands over the cold stone, almost caressing it. 'Have you been to the oracle at Delphi?'

'I blew up a train near there once. Didn't have time to see the sights.'

'There's something similar there. The omphalos, they call it — the navel of the world. As far as Crete goes, there are frescoes that show equivalent objects, but no one's ever found anything like this.'

'But I still don't see why… What was that?'

Grant swung around. The Webley gleamed in his hand — until, with a deft movement, he reached inside the lantern and pinched out the wick. Instantly the room was plunged in darkness.

'Stay back.' Grant swept out an arm and pushed Marina into the corner of the chamber, taking two silent steps to his left so as to be out of the line of the door.

'What is it?'

Grant didn't need to answer. From outside, drifting down the passage, came the clatter of falling rocks — then the unmistakable sound of a voice cursing in English. Grant trained the Webley on the door. He heard scrapes and muffled curses as someone tried to squeeze through the narrow aperture, then soft footsteps. His finger curled round the trigger.

The wan beam of an electric torch pierced the darkness in the room, flitted like a moth from floor to wall to ceiling and came to rest on the barrel of Grant's revolver.

'I hope you're not fucking thinking of shooting me.'