The Voynich Cypher

CHAPTER 36

The helicopter lifted off from the river bed and the little group watched as it ascended to the top of the canyon and sailed out of range. After ten days of digging, they’d established a routine. Up at dawn, begin the day’s work by seven-thirty, shut down in the heat of the day at two, and prepare for the next-day’s excavation while hiding from the devastating effect of the sun until dusk arrived.

The polite courtesy of the first week had gradually been replaced by a kind of curt brevity, as the constant demands of the environment caused tempers to shorten and patience to wane. The unspoken pressure on Steven to perform mounted with each passing day, and the northern horizon was peppered with unproductive excavations, even now fading back into the canyon sides as the relentless winds continued unabated.

They were down to the final few possible sites from the second set of calculations, using Stadium length assumptions of 606.8 feet and 577.28 feet. The longer Stadium had come up dry, and at day six they’d moved down the creek 350 yards and shortened the elevation appropriately, to factor in the shorter unit of measurement. That had yielded another area to be dug up, which, allowing for a margin of error, would take another five or six days. They were nearing the end of that run, and Steven was becoming obsessive about checking and rechecking every aspect of the translation.

That morning, as he sighted with the rangefinder and studied the canyon with his binoculars, watching as Arturo and Francois toiled diligently at their task, he’d had a breakthrough thought — one of the flashes of inspiration that seemed to have deserted him since Antonia’s death. What if the calculations, the Stadium length, had been written with a different, more obscure length than what he’d assumed? The logical unit would have been the Italic, given the document, with the more distant possibility the shorter Olympic. But what if they’d used the Egyptian? Given the location in Jordan, it wasn’t impossible, but it hinted at a far more ancient burial. He did a quick calculation and figured that it would put the starting point for the ascent roughly a thousand yards further east of their original position.

Steven grabbed his binoculars, and Natalie, spying him from where she was working on the computer near the kitchen, wandered over to join him.

“We going sightseeing?” she asked.

“I want to check something out.”

He explained his new theory as they trudged up the river bed to the new point, Steven watching the GPS screen as they walked.

“We’re here,” he announced.

They both looked up the side of the canyon, to see a steep slope interrupted by a ravine leading to the top; evidence of a minor runoff tributary that had etched its way through the rock over the eons. Steven studied the area around the summit with his binoculars, then did a quick mental calculation using the new assumption.

“It’s at the top of this ravine?” Natalie asked.

“That would be the instinct, but not what the Scroll said. It said north. That’s north-east. The river turned south back there. By my calculations, if we adjust for everything, the new spot would be…there.” Steven swung his binoculars back in the direction of the current dig. The new spot was a quarter mile from the original excavation they’d started on the first day. He pointed the rangefinder at it and adjusted a little. Peering back up to the new area, he scrutinized the landscape for any clues. None were forthcoming. Only…

“What?” Natalie asked, hearing his sharp intake of breath.

“There’s a rise there that looks promising. I want to take a closer look,” Steven said and began striding back along the river bed to the camp. Natalie quickly caught up.

“You seem optimistic. For the first time in days.”

“I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, Natalie. This is still needle in haystack territory. I’m just going stir crazy from doing nothing, so maybe I’ll go for a little hike and poke around some.”

“Cool. I’ll go with you.”

Steven glanced at her. “Sure. Wear sunscreen,” he said.

Back at the camp, Natalie ducked into their tent and emerged a few moments later. They both grabbed shovels and he slung a thermal bag with water in it over his shoulder. Steven entered in the new coordinates he’d calculated and created a waypoint on the GPS. They looked up the canyon face.

Steven shook his head. “That’s right along the path up that smaller ravine we’ve been using to get to the other dig. It’s along the natural route we selected to hike up the canyon — the obvious and easiest way to the top.”

“What are you waiting for?” Natalie stepped across the shallow river water and was at the base of the canyon within thirty seconds. Steven noted that the outdoors agreed with her — the cargo shorts and army green tank top demanded his attention, even in the heat.

It took twenty-five minutes for them to reach the waypoint, climbing at a moderate pace, by which time they were both soaked in sweat. They stopped, having ascended almost seven hundred feet, and caught their breath. Steven kicked absently at the dirt.

“This seemed a lot easier back at the river. There’s a whole lot of nothing here,” he commented, studying the ground for a sign of…something.

“Where do we start?” Natalie asked, panting slightly.

“Let’s drink some water and take a few minutes. Last thing we need to do is faint. We can begin…here.” Steven tossed the shovel a few feet and dropped the thermal bag on the ground, fishing out two water bottles.

Once they were hydrated, they began digging. It was fairly easy for the first foot. By the second foot it became difficult, and by the third they were unable to keep going. They’d hit rock. Steven moved to the side and continued a trench, widening it until it was ten feet long by three feet wide. Natalie worked the other end of it, and when they took another break, they noticed Arturo and Francois waving at them from above. They waved back and then resumed their excavation. Natalie was ready to call it quits after two hours, when her shovel hit something…different. She scraped at it and saw that it was rock, but with primitive mortar bonding it in place. Afraid to be wrong, she continued scraping stone and dirt out of the way, until she was sure.

“Steven.”

He turned.

“What is it?”

“Tell me again what we’re looking for?”

“I’m not sure. Something man-made,” Steven said, wiping trickles of sweat off his face with his arm.

Natalie looked up at him, broiled by the sun, red, in spite of the liberally-applied sunscreen and the baseball hat, giving it a game try on the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere. She felt a sudden and unexpected surge of emotion, a combination of attraction, sympathy, admiration and heartache, and she realized with a twinge that what she was feeling was probably love, for the first time in her life. Different than the love for her father, or the lust she’d felt for sexual partners. This felt altogether…right.

None of which she shared with Steven. Instead, she smiled and said, “I think I found it.”

An hour and a half later, Arturo and Francois had joined them in clearing the area of sediment, revealing a crudely-mortared wall, erected from medium sized stones from the river.

“Can you imagine hauling those rocks all the way up here?” Natalie wondered.

“Whoever did this wanted to make sure this stayed in place for a long time. It must have taken a week to build, even though it’s not that big,” Steven said.

He watched as Luca and Moody arrived from the camp with the sledgehammer and a crowbar, Moody also toting a flashlight.

“What have we got?” Luca asked, puffing from exertions of the climb.

“A wall. Very old, by the looks of it,” Steven reported.

“A wall?”

“Yes. Question is what’s behind door number one…” Natalie said.

“What’s the plan?” Moody asked.

“I’m going to go with: knock down the wall,” Steven said.

He took the sledgehammer from Moody and swung it against the upper reach. A rock gave way, falling inward, revealing a dark space behind it.

“Arturo, Francois. Go get more water, and a camera. We’re going to be here for a while,” Luca instructed the two younger men, who reluctantly gathered their gear and began the hike back to the camp. “I’d prefer to keep this between us for now. I don’t know what we’re going to find, but I’d rather not have more eyes on it than necessary,” Luca said in a low voice.

“It’s your ride. You can decide who gets on,” Steven said, swinging the hammer again. A rock shifted, but other than that, nothing. He hit it again, and another rock fell in. Moody moved in to help by manning the crowbar in a somewhat practiced fashion.

Twenty minutes went by, and they’d cleared most of the man-made barrier away, revealing a cave behind it — a depression in the limestone that had been there for millennia. Natalie looked back down the canyon at the camp and saw Arturo and Francois loading up a rucksack with supplies. She turned back to the cave and caught Steven’s eye.

“Who wants to do the honors?” Steven asked.

Luca gestured with his hand for them to go in.

“Ladies first,” Moody said, handing the flashlight to Natalie.

After taking it, Natalie hesitated, then drew a deep breath and stepped into the gloomy cavity. She took a few small steps and waited for her eyes to adjust, enjoying the substantially cooler, if musty, temperature. Steven stepped in after her, carrying the hammer, followed by Moody. Luca brought up the rear. The cave was surprisingly large and deep, stretching for twenty-five feet from the newly-created entry. The walls were the same light limestone as the canyon. Steven realized that his pupils had widened to accommodate the darkness and he could see fairly well.

A crudely fashioned circle of thorned vines sat on top of an ancient stone tablet, atop a primitive pedestal that had been hewn from the soft rock at one side of the chamber, and the group approached it with hopeful trepidation. Natalie shone a beam of light on the coarsely engraved inscription on the rock — they all heard Luca’s sharp intake of breath.

“It’s…it’s beyond belief,” he murmured reverently.

“Is that what I think it is?” Steven said.

Luca didn’t respond. Steven turned to face him.

“Is it?”