It took a while to remove the soil from the surface of the plateau. With their task complete, Justin enjoyed a welcome gulp of water in the tall shafts of corn at the edge of their handiwork.
He knew he was tired, he knew he needed more than a few hours of sleep, but something else was wrong. He rubbed his forehead and tried to keep his eyes focussed on a single spot to coalesce his thinking. This was not simply exhaustion. His mind was irritated. Something he needed to know was fretting at him.
The last time he felt like this was at university. Sitting in lectures, he would often have revelations about things other than what was being taught. Maths answers would present themselves in programming lectures, coding solutions would come to him when engaged in technical drawing classes, and queries from his forums would find voice whilst he was listening to theses on the evolution of computing. He knew a revelation about something overlooked was on its way, but its timing was awful. He needed to focus on the here and now.
“It’s a flat surface of rock.” said Chris, deflated. “There’s no way this is an entrance.”
“I’m telling you,” said Justin, pushing all other thoughts aside, “the anomaly is right here.”
“Where?” said Chris, throwing his hands into the air to portray his frustration.
Justin went over to the centre of the exposed area. “Right here!” he said, jumping up and down. “The sensor will return any thickness of rock over nine inches thick as solid white, but this area comes back as grey, it could mean that...”
As if on cue, the ground beneath Justin’s feet gave way with a dull crack, and he disappeared from sight.
“Justin!” said Carl, rising quickly.
A jagged, four-foot wide hole was now visible in the ground. Through it, lit up by the midday sun, a stone ramp descended deep into the earth.
“You see,” said Justin, surrounded by rubble a few feet down the slope, “it’s only about six inches thick. I was right.”
“Why would they not have taken the ramp all the way out?” asked Louisa, as Carl helped her into the darkness. “Why stop just before the surface?”
“I’m not sure they did. I’m really not sure this was originally closed off.” said Carl, studying the edges of the hole.
“There are no carvings of any kind on these walls.” said Justin. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“No, because writing is not something you would put on a labyrinth’s walls. You could tell where you were from what it said. I’m assuming the entire complex will be unadorned, other than certain, key chambers.”
“How are we going to do this?” asked Chris.
“We’re going to have to get creative. This place, at best estimates, is half a mile square. If all the corridors are five or six feet wide like this one, the labyrinth will be immensely complicated.” said Carl.
“No it won’t.” said Justin. “Because I’ve got a laptop and that gives me a technological edge the builders couldn’t have imagined. Hopefully, the power pack from the geophysics scanner will have some charge and so we’ll bleed that before we’re reduced to battery power. If I put this in extreme power saving mode and turn the brightness down, we might get enough hours out of it to map the place. Even Visio should be good enough.”
“You’re going to produce a flowchart of the labyrinth?” asked Chris, pouring scorn on the suggestion.
“It won’t be a flowchart as such; it will just be blocks of colour. If the walls are equally spaced at five feet as they are here, each block I place down as we walk will be a five-foot square. All we will have to do is walk around to build up a map of where we have been. Easy.”
“As long as you know what you’re doing, kid.” said Carl, not entirely convinced. “I don’t fancy our survival chances if we get trapped down here.”
“I don’t see another choice. You lead colonel, I’ll map.” said Justin.
Chris turned on his torch and began to walk into the unknown. The ramp descended for a hundred meters, before levelling out at a crossroads. They walked through corridor after corridor of beautifully carved stone, each passageway perfectly formed and smoothed. They traversed chambers small and large, with immaculately crafted pillars rising to enormous ceilings. After half an hour of hapless wandering, they stopped to catch a breath and look at the map.
“It would make sense the chamber we are looking for is at the centre of this thing. It would be the hardest point in the labyrinth to reach.” said Carl.
“I think that’s the likeliest.” said Louisa. “I play a lot of games on my DS in my off hours. I’m a dab hand at mazes in things like Zelda. If you want, I can give this a go.”
Carl looked at Chris, who shrugged, not knowing what to say.
“I say give her a shot.” said Justin, looking at the map. “No offence colonel, but we’re not getting anywhere with what you are doing.”
Louisa smiled and took a torch from Carl. She set off confidently, heading in a straight line as far as she could, before turning ninety degrees and travelling straight on again. This sequence repeated for a nearly two hours, until they arrived back in the chamber where they started. From that room, Louisa began to weave toward the centre of the box created, the limits of her map found.
Even though the process was laborious, it was effective. Justin knew their options were being systematically reduced at a pace random wandering could not have accomplished.
Another hour went by, before Justin informed Louisa their external power pack was dead and they were now on battery power alone, four hours at best. She quickened her pace, barely ten per cent of the structure mapped.
Even at the increased speed, Justin realised they would barely have plotted half the grid by the time they were out of power. He decided he would set an alarm, to let them know when only five per cent of its reserves remained. That way, they would have enough time to get back out.
As the remaining battery life ticked down, their search became ever more frantic, Justin watching their diminishing supply with increasing worry as Louisa’s method began to collapse into panic.
Finally, the group were jogging down a narrow corridor, which opened into an immense chamber. Its high, vaulted ceiling was a good sixty feet above their heads and the light of the torch barely filled the mammoth space. Twelve colossal statues, six either side of the doorway, flanked the room like emotionless guardians.
Carl grabbed a torch from Chris and ran over to the nearest statue. It was an incredibly intricate representation of the Goddess Hathor, the cow-headed God. On its base, below the same strange script from the Talpyiot tomb, the torch picked out a series of dots connected by lines. “Does anyone know what this is?”
“The representations are different to how they appear now, but it’s the star-sign Taurus.” said Justin, catching the strange look coming from Chris. “Yeah, I know it’s geeky, but that knowledge has just proven useful, hasn’t it?”
“How are they different?” asked Chris.
“Stars aren’t fixed in the sky, colonel. They move. In a few thousand years, the star signs we know today will look different. This must have been how they looked when the statues were created.”
“And this one?” said Carl, running to a statue of the goat headed God Khnemu.
“Capricorn.” Justin turned, looking at each of the statues on the wall; Isis, Ptah and Sekhmet, Thoth, Osiris, every one of the deities of Egypt cast with an astrological symbol. However, one was conspicuous by its absence. “Where’s Sobek?”
Carl shone torchlight to the far end of the room, as the heavily dispersed beam brushed against a doorway. As if calling them across the floor, a faint flicker of gold twinkled back from a room beyond.
Justin’s heart almost jumped from his mouth with the thought that struck him.
“Is that..?” said Chris.
“The thirteenth.” said Carl, as he began to sprint across the room.
Carl was at the doorway in no time, returning to a jog, and then to an unsure walk, as he moved insi
de.
Moments later Justin joined him, a wave of amazement crossing his face.
The chamber was a fifty-foot cube of solid granite, with no other exits. Stood against the back wall was an awe-inspiring statue of the God Sobek. The sheer delicacy of the carving put anything seen before to shame. In front of the statue, a raised dais of blue stone, its surface covered with concentric circles closing to a central point, emitted faint light. To the side of the dais, a stone throne contained the desiccated remains of a human. Dressed in regal finery, the bones were elongated and bore the tell-tale marks of age. The tunic covering the body was made of fine cloth, with intricate patterns woven around the hems in bright, vivid colours, and around its neck hung a large, golden brooch. However, everything paled before the sight of the object sat in the innermost circle.
Six feet long by a four wide and adorned with the most subtle and incredible works of gold, a magnificent golden chest dominated the room. It had a solid golden lid marked by two winged creatures, their wing tips pointed towards one another across its surface. Down its wonderfully sublime sides, rows of ideograms ran in straight lines to its fearsome feet. As light from the torches struck its surface, it seemed to magnify, and filled the chamber with an unholy, orange glow.
Justin’s mind was a blur. He was stood in front of the Ark of Ra. Here was final, clinching evidence the organised religions of the planet were nothing more than allegories to ancient stories handed down by mortals, not Gods.
As if attempting to break him from the Ark’s spell, the alarm began sounding on the laptop. Justin scrambled to shut it off; embarrassed he was breaking this once in a lifetime moment. All he wanted to do was ensure they left enough time to get out of the labyrinth. He remembered what it was like trying to escape their base, the air supplies dwindling, and their panic level high.
As if something were unplugged from his consciousness, the misplaced thought bothering him suddenly came into focus. It descended on their escape from the base, the details of that morning merging with his memories, the list of individual events washing over him in a stream: The compromised security systems, the external access to the computers, the clean-up crew not arriving. Individually each was insignificant, but together they represented a pattern. He thought about the planning needed to organise the stealing of the artefacts. Horridly, disgustingly, his thoughts resolved. Only one person could have managed such a feat.
Still dazed from the revelation, he turned slowly, almost drunkenly toward them. As he continued to gawp, his brain registered comprehension in their eyes. With a heavy swallow of fear, he saw them raise a gun, one all too close before, and point it at him.
Chapter 51