The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Our underground way twisted like a worm. At times the ceiling was high enough to stand freely and at other times we had to crawl, always fearing we’d come to a dead end. The walls bulged in and out irregularly, casting doubt that medieval knights had carved it.

“They apparently used nature’s casting,” Cuvier said. “It’s probably a lava tube. Volcanoes will sometimes have pipes through which molten rock flows. When this island was a volcano, this may have been a conduit from the central peak to the sea.”

“The island is still a volcano,” Smith corrected.

“Does that mean lava could flow through here now?” Fulton asked worriedly.

“Only if there were an eruption,” Smith said. “But if there were, we’d be suffocated by gas or cooked by heat long before any lava came.”

“I see.”

“Or earthquakes could collapse the tunnel on top of us,” added Cuvier.

“Heated water could boil us alive,” suggested Smith.

“Or scald us to death with steam,” agreed Cuvier.

“At Mount Etna, onlookers have been killed by flying rock.”

“At Vesuvius, they’ve found corpses petrified by the ash.”

The two savants seemed to be enjoying themselves. “I love science, don’t you Robert?” I asked Fulton.

“It’s much more sensible to work with things you can control, like machines.”

And so we explored, bunched up behind our little candle. It not only provided light but gave us assurance, by burning, that there was still breathable air.

“If we’re alive, there has to be an outlet drawing air somewhere, eh?” I asked the others.

“Yes,” said Cuvier. “Perhaps the size of a door. Or, the size of your finger.”

“Well, yes.”

Twice we slid down rubble chutes, seeming to creep closer and closer to some kind of hell. I was hot, but how much was my imagination? I wiped my sweat and noticed how dry my throat was. Then we crawled over a sill and our horizontal path momentarily ended. We had come to a vertical shaft that led both up and down, smooth and round like a well. I looked up, but the top was dark and presumably sealed. There was no easy way to climb up there. I ripped a scrap from my shirt, lit it with the candle, and dropped it down. There was a dirt floor twenty feet below, and the tunnel led on from that.

“The shaft isn’t wide,” I said. “If we jam ourselves across, we can inch our way down. I’ll go first, and when I get partway you can pass the blunderbuss and candle.” The wax had already burned halfway.

Somewhat awkwardly, we made our way to the bottom of this well and came upon a surprising discovery. The tunnel that continued on from the shaft was braced with timbers! It appeared to be an excavated mine instead of a natural passage. The wood looked very old, dry, and cracked, but protected from rot by the dryness of the warm passageway. There was a pile of excavated sand and crude rusted tools.

“Somebody’s been down here before us,” I said. “And not thousands of years ago, either. I think this shaft used to be an alternate entrance from the surface.” I looked up. “Too bad there’s no ladder.”

“Perhaps this foolishness is not altogether pointless,” Cuvier admitted.

“The bracing hardly looks strong enough to hold up tent fabric, let alone the earth,” Fulton warned. “This is crude engineering, very old and weak.”

“But I’m guessing it’s been here since medieval times,” I said. “Why would it fall down today after hundreds of years?”

“Because we’re here, causing vibration and noise,” Cuvier said.

“So let’s whisper, and not brush anything.”

And so we went cautiously on, and came upon the street.

It was not a normal street of course—we were somewhere under the surface of Thira—and yet it was. Some kind of miners—medieval knights was my guess, probably Templars—had dug down to the flat, sandal-worn flagstones of an ancient thoroughfare. The mine ceiling was overhead, and our light was pitiful until Cuvier took the gray, paper-dry wooden handle of a medieval shovel, wrapped our handkerchiefs on the end, and lit them with the candle, giving us the flare of a torch. With this new light we could see that a slope of volcanic ash and rubble made up one side of the street, still covering part of whatever city had been buried thousands of years ago when the island exploded. On the street’s other side, however, was the excavated stone wall of an ancient building, with a door and room beyond. Straight ahead, our flagstone lane dead-ended at a slope of sand and rubble that almost entirely plugged the tunnel, except for a small crevice at its top. Cool air blew through that crack.

“The men who uncovered this probably used the well shaft to lift the dirt they dug out,” Smith theorized. “Then they lidded it and, to hide any hint of the location, used that lava tube to connect this place to a very distant one, the church. Perhaps there was no church then, and the holy place was built around the entrance with the sarcophagus-turned-altar constructed to disguise it. It looks as if they were planning to come back, but didn’t.”

“Another eruption drove them away, perhaps,” Cuvier suggested. “Or some kind of attack or war.”

“The Templars were crushed and scattered in 1307,” I said. “Friday the thirteenth.”

“And this buried room—probably a buried city—was lost and forgotten,” Smith speculated.

“Until this race between you and the Egyptian Rite to uncover these old secrets,” said Fulton.

This was not a race of my choosing. I’d been dragged into this mess by winning a medallion in a Paris card game more than four years before, and my life has been uncomfortably tumultuous, and annoyingly unprofitable, ever since. Yet I also felt swept up in something historical. The Knights Templar had been annihilated by a king and a pope desperate to learn the secret of their power, and their discoveries were scattered. Now interest in the past had been revived. We lived in an age of revolution and reason, and yet legend and the occult are a respite from the headlong scientific rush of 1802. The modern world was changing so fast! And was there really something down here that could tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean?

“From experience, I’d say it best that we now poke around,” I announced. “Treasure tends to be found that way.”

So we stepped through a doorway into one of the excavated rooms and encountered not at all what I expected.

There were no machines here, and indeed no furniture of any kind. But instead of the austere whiteness I might expect of Greek architecture, we encountered a garden of blazing color. The walls were covered with murals, and murals of an ethereal beauty that seemed like a memory of a paradise long forgotten. The vines of flowers wound sensuously toward an implied sun, the petals glowing in gold, red, and purple. Antelopes and birds were drawn with sinuous lines as perfect as the fall of a river, prancing and flying across ocher meadows. Monkeys leaped from twisting trees. Galleys as graceful as racing shells were hung with garlands. A naked youth posed with a bundle of fish caught from a pristine sea. A graceful maiden lovely as a cameo, serene as a dove and with a waterfall of dark hair, gestured delicately while clad in a complex layered dress of lovely colors.

How different from the dramatic, stern stiffness of murals in Egyptian temples! Or even the angular, white grandeur in pictures I’d seen of the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens. In Egypt, warriors had marched and trod enemies underfoot. But these people were not just peaceful, they displayed a peace that suggested they’d never known war at all. It reminded me of Magnus Bloodhammer’s dreams of an Eden not yet poisoned by the apple and the Fall.

“If we’re looking for ancient war machines, I think we’ve got the wrong address,” I murmured. “This looks like a pacifist arcadia.”

“Gorgeous, aren’t they?” Cuvier said. “The life in these murals! How many modern painters could capture that?”

“Our portraits are darker,” Smith agreed. “Northern Europeans overdressed and overfed, with moody skies and harnessed horses. What a little heaven these people must have had in contrast, before the volcano blew.”

“Is this Atlantis, then?” asked Fulton.

“It’s something very old and very different from Greece or Egypt,” I said. “I have no idea what it is. They don’t just look happy, they look confident. But they don’t look warlike at all. Why would the Egyptian Rite expect to find a weapon down here?”

“We still don’t know we’re in the right place.”

“But that tomb, that trapdoor, that tunnel? It’s all very deliberate.”

“Maybe whatever we hoped to find has already been moved.”

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure anyone has been down here since medieval times.”

“There are more doorways. Let’s keep looking.”

The building seemed mazelike, as illogical in its organization as it was beautiful in its décor. Room opened to room with no organizing hallway or unifying atrium. It was hivelike. We passed painted ships with oars splayed like the legs of water bugs, papyrus reeds clumped in the sun, athletes boxing, and girls running. And we were going in our little cone of flickering light from one room to another when suddenly Fulton called, “Wait!”

We stopped.

“I think I saw something peculiar in the last room.”

We went back. The inventor pointed to a frieze near the ceiling. It was a horizontal, scrolling picture of a flotilla of ships, not very different from others we’d seen before. It suggested that whoever built this now-buried place had been sailors, which was logical for island dwellers. Had they been able to sail away when the volcano blew? Had they founded new civilizations elsewhere, even in America?

“There’s something odd up there,” Fulton said, pointing.

There was a shape like a crescent moon painted to one side of the gliding ships, and beams of sunlight or moonlight emanating from its concave side to illuminate the little navy.

“It’s the moon, don’t you think?” I proposed.

The inventor shook his head. “Look, it’s attached to an elegant curved frame of some kind, as graceful as their murals of flowers, but attended by small figures. This isn’t a celestial object, gentlemen. It’s some kind of machine.” His finger traced the rays emanating from the crescent and followed them to one of the ships. There was a blossom of color above the vessel that I’d assumed was a representation of a dyed sail, but Fulton, perhaps mindful of his peculiar use of his bagpipes, had discerned something else. “I think it’s setting these ships on fire.”

I felt a chill then, as if I’d seen the snake undergirding Eden. People had lived here in peace, yes. But perhaps their peace was sustained behind the shield of some kind of weapon so terrible that it could ignite any enemy vessel that approached too close.

“But this idea has been attributed to the great Archimedes,” Fulton said. “Surely this is much too early for the burning mirrors.”

“The burning mirrors? What are you talking about, Robert?”

“There are accounts from ancient history, originally written by Lucian two centuries after Christ and later relayed to us by medieval writers. Lucian wrote that during the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 B.C., the Greek mathematician Archimedes constructed a mirror, or lens, that could focus the sun’s heat on enemy ships. The Greek was a mechanical genius who also devised a giant pincer that could crush Roman ships like a monstrous claw. In the end the Romans prevailed and burst into the city, and Archimedes was killed by an ignorant soldier while he drew his mathematical figures in the sand. His genius was lost, but the legend of a heat ray persisted. Some called it Poseidon’s spear, or Neptune’s trident.”

I startled. Such words had also been inscribed in the gold foil I’d found in North America.

“Many have dismissed it as fable,” Fulton went on, “and nobody has attributed it to earlier times than Archimedes. But what if the brilliant Greek got the idea for his mirror from a place like this?”

“From Atlantis?”

“Perhaps.”

“Could it work?” said Smith.

“Who knows? But if it did, and if you could find it today, it might have the ability to ignite modern ships that are even more vulnerable, thanks to their dependence on sails and gunpowder. They’d light like a torch, and blow up like a magazine. Here is a weapon that never needs to be reloaded, and is tireless as the sun.”

“I barely escaped the French flagship L’Orient when she blew up at the Battle of the Nile,” I recounted. “The blast was so titanic that it actually halted the battle for a quarter of an hour. It was the most terrible thing I’ve experienced. Well, one of them, anyway.” I’d accumulated a lot of memories the past few years.

“So this could tip the domination of the Mediterranean, if it existed,” Fulton said. “But a mirror would have to be huge to have the power to burn a ship. There’s nothing like that in this hole, no room big enough, and no way to get it out if there were.”

“So what is down here?” Smith asked.

We proceeded to look. There were eight rooms in all, dirt cascading into the two at each end of the complex as indication this old city had been only partially excavated. Each was emptier than a cell. Except for the murals, there was nothing. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and search as we might we could find no more traps or hidden tunnels. The ceiling was earth braced by mining timbers. When we poked at it, all we got for our trouble was grit in our eyes. The street stopped at that slope of dirt. To go that way we’d have to be like worms, and I didn’t fancy getting wedged into some wormhole, wondering about hidden treasure as I slowly withered to a husk. Yet there was no way to retreat, either, unless we could levitate up the shaft. As my companions had complained, it appeared that I’d succeeded only in trapping us in a slightly bigger grave, as barren as the sarcophagus above.

“It’s already been robbed,” Cuvier theorized. “I suspect we’re centuries too late. These knights, or whoever they were, got the mirror first.”

“Then why is there no record of its being used?” Fulton asked. “And why are so many people after us? Are we all chasing a myth? That picture is of the burning mirror, gentlemen, and that is an ancient weapon. There has to be something to it.”

Our light kept burning lower. I tried to think, always a difficult task. Why the church, sarcophagus, trap, tunnel, excavation, and persistent pursuit if there was nothing down here?

Then it occurred to me.

“The fourth room,” I proposed.

I led them back to it and we shone our ebbing candle on the mural in there. At first glance it seemed no different from the others—flowers, birds, and brilliant color—except I realized the color was slightly too bright. The lines of the mural were less sinuous somehow, less assured, as if the artist who’d copied them had not shared the gaiety that comes from living in a sunny place of perpetual peace behind a death ray that warded off all enemies. A talented but sweating Knight Templar, perhaps, pressed into service to hide a critical clue in plain view. I thought of the stone tablet and rotting shield in the Dakota territory of North America that bore enigmatic references to this “Og.” Or the misleading signal in the City of Ghosts. Or mathematician Monge’s dismissal of my sacred medallion at the Great Pyramid. Always there was a distraction.

I took my tomahawk and swung at the mural. A crack appeared.

“Gage, no!” Cuvier cried. “This artwork is priceless!”

“On the contrary, Georges. This mural has no value at all. It’s a medieval façade, a fakery.” And I swung again and again, making a spider’s web of cracks, and then chipped at the edges to pry the stucco off the underlying stone. “It’s a ruse.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think this was painted by the ancient people who built this place. I think medieval knights, or someone else, put it here to cover something up.” I hoped I was right, because all I was uncovering was rough-looking stone.

But then I spied the edge of something leathery. There was a sheet of parchment sealed between stucco and rock! I fingered its edge and peeled it as much as I could.

Then we heard a murmur of sound, distant clanks and grunts, and Fulton darted out to listen from the buried street. “Someone’s coming!”

There was Latin writing on the parchment behind the mural.