Chapter Twenty-Five
El Dorado!
Joseph turned toward Sharianna when he heard her scream, but she was gone.
“Sharianna…” he called, apprehensively. She couldn’t have gone out the doorway, I would have seen her, he thought.
He heard a muffled voice: “Here I am, behind the cabinet.” At the same time, he saw the cabinet begin to move. He grabbed onto it and helped swing it open.
The cabinet was easy to open but it was hung in such a way that when it was released, its own weight swung it back into place against the wall.
“The hinges must have been sticky when I first opened it,” deduced Sharianna, as she swung the cabinet back and forth, trying to figure out why it stayed open and then closed by itself. “It took a few seconds for gravity to overcome the sticky hinges and make it close.”
“Or maybe it was a ghost,” teased Joseph, as he rolled the stump over and propped the cabinet in the open position.
“Like there were ghosts on the wrecked steam ship?” she retorted calmly. Sharianna felt the same shiver she had felt on the ship, but she kept her feelings to herself. The last thing she wanted was for Joseph to think he could scare her.
Joseph went a few steps into the cave. “It looks like a natural cave – like a crack in the mountain.” The cave tapered from about three feet at the bottom to a thin crack in the ceiling. The light from the doorway penetrated the blackness only a few yards. “I wish we had some flashlights,” he commented.
“Or the piece of railing from the moon,” said Sharianna. “Hey, what about the old lanterns?”
“I’ll bet those old things don’t even work. Besides, we don’t have any matches.”
“I saw some in the cabinet,” Sharianna replied, as she stepped around the end of the cabinet and picked a box of old wooden stick matches off the shelf.
“There’s no way…” began Joseph.
Sharianna struck a match on the side of the box and a small trail of smoke rose from the match. “You were saying?”
He continued his thought: “…no way those are still good.”
She struck another match on the box and a small flame appeared momentarily but flickered out before it could ignite.
“Try two together,” suggested Joseph, as he found a lantern that still had oil in it and removed the glass top.
Sharianna did so, and the two matches flamed together. She touched the flame to the wick of the lantern and it sputtered and flared brightly, as Joseph replaced the glass top. She put the box of matches back on the shelf.
The other lantern was empty, so Joseph popped a small hole in the top of a can of lamp oil, using the tip of the old bowie knife, and filled the other lantern. They used the flame from the first lantern to light the other.
Percy returned from terrorizing the squirrel and sniffed the air at the entrance to the cave. He whined as his two friends entered the darkness of the world underground, armed only with their puny, temperamental, fragile, antique sources of light.
Sharianna thought about the mine they had escaped from on the moon. “I don’t think I want to do any more cave exploring.”
“At least we know there are no moon monsters in this cave,” replied Joseph. “Let’s go in a little, we ought to at least see if there is anything interesting.”
“I guess you’re right, there can’t be anything as dangerous as those creatures on the moon.”
“Come on boy, aren’t you coming?” called Sharianna, as she motioned for Percy to follow them. “Why do you think the entrance to this cave was hidden?” she asked.
“Whoever built the cabin must have been trying to hide something in this cave,” Joseph replied.
“I know, but what?” she insisted. “And what happened to him? It looks like he left all his stuff in the cabin.”
“Maybe he got eaten by a mountain lion, or a grizzly bear?”
The cave began to get narrower and shorter, until finally, Percy was the only one who could continue comfortably.
“I don’t want to go any further,” complained Sharianna, whose knees were getting sore from crawling on all fours.
Carrying the lamp made crawling even more tedious. As the ceiling got lower, Joseph began to reach out ahead and place the lantern down, and then he could use both hands to crawl with, instead of holding the lamp with one and hobbling along with the other.
“There must be something valuable in here for the trapper to conceal the entrance,” Joseph encouraged.
“What if he used it to hide his furs, or his food? It is pretty cool in here,” proposed Sharianna.
This thought hadn’t occurred to Joseph – he had assumed that the trapper must have found something worth concealing in this cave–treasure, perhaps.
“I’m going back,” Sharianna announced.
Joseph looked at the tunnel ahead, “I think someone else has been down here, there are tool marks on the ceiling. I’ll bet it will get bigger soon. It’s a long way back, crawling backwards. There is no way to turn around in this small space. I’m going forward.”
Sharianna reluctantly agreed, even though she was feeling a little bit claustrophobic. It did give her a little comfort knowing that Percy was bringing up the rear.
Joseph would never admit it, but he was feeling a little bit apprehensive also.
They continued on, it seemed like hours must have gone by. Joseph automatically reached out for the numberless time to place his light ahead. As he began to crawl forward, he looked up just in time to see the lamp teeter. He reached out to catch it, but it was too late. The lamp fell over, but to Joseph’s surprise, it toppled clear out of sight. The light from the falling lamp revealed a large cavern.
“We made it!” he exclaimed. At that moment, his lamp hit the rocks below and the glass chimney shattered on the rocks as the rusty metal split open and spilled the flammable liquid, erupting into a large, smoky flame that illuminated a large portion of the cavern.
The flame quickly burned down in a few minutes as the fuel was consumed.
While the flame was still burning, Joseph looked for a way down. To the right of the tunnel, and less than a couple feet away, was a tall stalagmite rising up from the floor, ever attempting to connect with its counterpart, the stalactite reaching down eternally from the ceiling. Geologically speaking, their meeting was imminent—a few thousand more years, give or take a few hundred.
Joseph looked at the glistening, conical pillar. He contorted his body, until he was crouching uncomfortably at the tunnel’s entrance, hanging onto a rusty old spike that had been driven into a crack in the stone sometime long ago. With Sharianna’s lamp on the floor behind him, he half leaned, half jumped out toward the stalagmite; wrapping his arms and legs around it, he slid down the moist, slick, yet bumpy pillar, all in one motion.
Sharianna stuck her head out from the tunnel entrance, holding her lamp, as the flame from Joseph’s broken lantern flickered and went out.
“Come down the way I did.”
“And how are we going to get back up?” retorted Sharianna. “And how do you propose to get Percy down?”
Joseph looked around at the pile of rubble he was standing on, “We could pile up this rubble against the base of the cliff.” Once Sharianna realized that his plan would work, she hung her lantern on the rusty spike and slid down the stalagmite to help him.
“Someone has definitely been here,” Sharianna said, pointing to a pile of rotten rope at the base of the small cliff, “an old rope ladder.”
“Looks like he is still here,” Joseph whispered as he suddenly saw, at the edge of the light, a skeleton curled up at the base of the cliff, with the remnants of an old trapper’s attire still clinging to his bones.
Sharianna gasped when she saw him.
Joseph took a step toward the hapless miner and interpreted the evidence to come to a conclusion as to what had taken place such a long time ago.
“The rope ladder broke, and
he fell, accidentally impaling himself on his pick,” Joseph deduced. “See, there are two broken rib bones and there is the pick, still lodged in his ribcage.”
Sharianna was full of compassion for the long dead trapper. “It must have been terrible to die here all alone.”
“Well, we better start piling up the rocks,” said Joseph, trying to change the subject.
Finally, their makeshift staircase was tall enough that Joseph could reach up and lift Percy down.
Joseph handed the remaining lamp down to Sharianna.
They proceeded to make their way through the seemingly endless cavern. Many of the stalactites and stalagmites had merged together to form pillars from floor to ceiling like some eerie subterranean cathedral of the underworld.
The floor of the cavern was an uneven maze of boulders and rocks intermixed with a few broken stalactites and stalagmites, evidence of long ago seismic activity.
As they explored the cavern, they came upon a large skele-ton, with the bones scattered around and a few even broken.
“From the skull, it looks like a giant bear – like the one on the steamship – except that this one is much larger and it has extra huge fangs.” Joseph remembered reading a book about prehistoric creatures. “I think it might be an extinct cave bear.”
A short distance from the bear skeleton, they came across an even more exciting skeleton; it was complete, and the bones weren’t scattered around like the first skeleton.
Sharianna recognized this new skeleton from the long, distinct fangs. “It’s a saber tooth tiger!” she exclaimed.
“Maybe the tiger was hunting the cave bear and they both got trapped in here,” speculated Joseph, as he imagined the saber tooth stalking the huge bear through primordial forests and the bear taking shelter in its cave, the giant tiger in pursuit. He imagined a rock slide closing up the entrance to the cave, leaving the two enemies to battle it out, both of them inevitably dying in the darkness of the cave.
“Look, a tunnel,” stated Sharianna.
“It is definitely man-made,” observed Joseph, as they entered the mineshaft.
The floor was smooth and flat and devoid of rubble and debris. The walking was quite easy. They passed several side tunnels; each time they chose to continue straight. Joseph assumed from the quartz filled cracks in the ceiling that the original miners must have been following veins of gold or some other precious mineral, since quartz and precious metals are often found together.
Without warning, they suddenly found themselves at the edge of a cavernous room. Their lantern barely penetrated into the darkness of the great expanse. The interior of the mountain had been excavated for several hundred feet, except for three foot pillars about every thirty feet.
While exploring the room, they found many artifacts made out of copper. The most interesting of these was a pick. There were also sledgehammers and chisels of various sizes. Joseph picked up one of the smaller chisels and put it in his pocket.
“Why would anyone make a pick out of copper?” wondered Joseph. “It’s a very soft metal, it wouldn’t hold up to continuous use digging in rock.”
After discovering that the tunnel which led them to this great room was only one of several tunnel entrances, Joseph began to worry about finding the right tunnel on their way back. They had not marked it, thinking that they could go straight back, but it turned out that the pillars were not all lined up as Joseph had originally assumed. As they progressed through the huge room they could not tell exactly which way they had come. Joseph’s worry was forgotten when he noticed that the quartz and granite of some of the pillars and one of the walls looked like it had golden wire woven throughout its structure. The gold veins on the back wall radiated from a central vein in the middle of the wall that was several inches wide and extended from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Using the ancient copper pick, Joseph began picking at the main vein. After a while, he was able to extract two large chunks about the size of apples.
“Hey, hold the light so I can see.”
“I am, I think it is running out of oil,” Sharianna replied apprehensively, as she swished the small amount of remaining oil in the lamp.
Joseph turned to see the lamp flickering. “We’d better get out of here before it quits.”
Joseph handed one of the chunks of gold to Sharianna and began to make his way quickly across the huge main room of the mine.
“There, there’s the tunnel.” They entered the tunnel quickly and hurried along; the floor began to slope up and they came to a Y.
“I don’t remember a Y in the tunnel.”
“Neither do I,” replied Joseph.
“The floor of the tunnel that we came through before was flat,” decried Sharianna.
The old lamp began to sputter more. Suddenly, they were enveloped in the utter darkness of the mine. Joseph felt a strange sense of despair grip him, as he felt helpless and completely lost. He reached out with one hand and grabbed onto Sharianna at the same time she was reaching for him. He put the chunk of gold in his pocket and with his other hand he reached out for the wall, in order to give himself some sense of location.
“What do we do now?” Sharianna cried, as the same feelings of foreboding and helplessness began to overwhelm her.
Sharianna set the lantern on the floor and reached for Percy’s collar. She rubbed his fur and somehow it gave her a little comfort to know that Percy was right there beside her.
“Let’s keep going – it is sloping upward – it must lead to the surface, eventually,” she suggested.
In the complete darkness, it did not matter whether they had their eyes closed or open, they still could see absolutely nothing. Time seemed to be lost as they slowly groped their way along the rough wall of the tunnel. Suddenly, Joseph stopped. “Your camera!” he exclaimed.
“What? You want to take a picture?” asked Sharianna incredulously.
“No, the flash will light up the tunnel.”
“Yeah, even the screen might give us some light.” She retrieved the camera from her pocket. “Smile,” she said, as a painfully blinding flash of light momentarily illuminated the tunnel.
“That didn’t do me much good,” said Joseph, rubbing his eyes.
“Look, the screen does emit light.” A feeble glow extended a few feet into the darkness.
“I guess it is better than nothing,” said Joseph gratefully.
They passed many side tunnels and each time they had to guess which way to go. They wandered their way around the labyrinth, while the battery on Sharianna’s camera slowly went dead.
Joseph couldn’t tell if they had been stumbling along in the darkness for minutes, hours or days – except that his hand began to feel raw and painful from touching the wall of the tunnel, and his legs were weak.
He was about to complain about his discomfort when Shari-anna said: “I’m tired and hungry, let’s rest.”
They sank to the floor, still holding tightly to the other’s hand, each fearful of becoming separated and left alone in the darkness and the silence. Sharianna put her arm around Percy’s neck and pulled him close. His warmth gave her the reassurance she needed.
The only sound they could hear was their own breathing.
In the darkness, Sharianna suddenly felt Percy stand up and face down the tunnel in the direction that they had come from. She moved her hand to his collar. “What is it boy?” she asked soothingly, as she felt the muscles of his body quiver slightly as he whined softly.
She began to fear more than the darkness and the silence, as she imagined what else might be living down there in the depths. “Do you think anything else could be down here?” she asked nervously.
Joseph’s imagination was conjuring up the spirits of long dead miners and other ghostly denizens of the darkness. He remembered the stories he had heard, that dogs could sense the spirits of the dead. He tried to shake off these disturbing thoughts.
“No, I doubt it,” he forced h
imself to say, but Sharianna could feel his hand begin to sweat and knew that he was scared, despite his attempt to sound strong, brave and optimistic.
“What about bears, mountain lions, or other wild animals?” she asked.
Joseph hadn’t even thought about the possibilities of these other dangers yet. He reached over and put his other hand on Percy’s back. It also gave him some courage, knowing that Percy was there and would protect them, no matter what might come down the tunnel in the darkness.
Joseph reached into his pocket and pulled out the ancient copper chisel that he had taken from the main chamber and held it like a weapon.
Sharianna heard the sound first. It was a low-volume high-pitched noise; she shuddered. “Could there be rats down here?” Moments later, she could hear a soft flurry of movement as well. She reached into her pocket for the lump of gold to use as a weapon, if need be, when her finger touched something else.
“My gecko,” she exclaimed softly.
“Your what?” Joseph whispered, as he tried to prepare his nerves for whatever was coming down the tunnel. I wish we still had the spacesuits, he thought, as he pictured them lying uselessly on the boulder by the lake where they left them. I’ll bet Mom and Dad have found them by now, he thought.
Sharianna pulled from her pocket the key chain Mom had bought her while they were in Hawaii; it had a small, silver gecko attached to it. She pushed the tiny button on the top of the gecko’s head and it seemed to Joseph that a huge spotlight burst forth from Sharianna’s hand, but in reality it was a small LED light. The light was so welcome that Joseph had to quickly suck back the sob of relief that nearly escaped his lips.
“I had forgotten all about it,” Sharianna exclaimed excitedly.
As their eyes followed the beam of light toward the ceiling, they suddenly saw the source of the strange noises.
“Bats.” Joseph’s voice was full of relief as he realized the implications. “It must be getting dark outside and they are headed out to feed!”
“Hurry, let’s follow them!” Sharianna jumped up and, holding her precious little light, led the way, but the bats were quickly out of sight.
As they hurried along, they came to a small side tunnel, barely big enough to stand up in.
“Which way now?” asked Joseph, as he strained his ears to hear the sound of the bats.
“Which way boy?” asked Sharianna, bending down close to Percy. Percy seemed confused as well; he sniffed around on the floor, but of course there was no trail left by the flying bats.
Suddenly, a single straggler appeared out of the darkness and fluttered down the side tunnel.
“This way!” ordered Joseph quickly, as they tried in vain to keep up with the bat.
The tunnel became smaller and they had to run half crouched down.
Unexpectedly, they ran into a dead end. Sharianna spun around, shining her dim light on the walls. “Where did it go?” she cried desperately.
Joseph looked up at the ceiling, and to his surprise, he could see at the end of a vertical shaft, a small, round patch of the night sky with a few stars shining like eternal beacons of hope. “Look! It must be a ventilation shaft,” he declared, with enormous relief.
“But how do we get up?” questioned Sharianna.
“Let me see the light.”
Joseph reached up into the shaft with Sharianna’s light: “It has handholds and footholds cut right into the walls of the shaft – I think we can climb up.”
“What about Percy? We can’t just leave him down here,” insisted Sharianna.
“I’ve got an idea.” Joseph handed the light back to Sharian-na, pulled off his shirt and began putting it on Percy, with his front legs through the armholes. “Give me your belt.”
Sharianna handed him the belt. Joseph looked at it; it was made of cheap vinyl. “I don’t think this will hold,” he said, as he handed it back to her. Removing Percy’s strong leather collar, Joseph squatted down over Percy and, putting the collar through the neck of the shirt that was now on Percy, he threaded it through his own belt and buckled it. He stood up and was able to pick Percy up. Joseph reached up and grabbed hold of the first handholds in the shaft and put his foot on one of the niches in the back wall. “Help me lift Percy.”
Sharianna helped lift Percy until Joseph was fully in the shaft with Percy dangling below. At first Percy didn’t seem to be that heavy but by the time they were halfway up the shaft, Joseph’s arms and legs were trembling from the strain; he stopped to rest.
“I don’t know if I can make it,” he said.
Sharianna was right below. Suddenly Joseph felt the weight lifted. He looked down; Sharianna had the key chain in her teeth and from the dim illumination he could see that she had followed him up the shaft and had Percy’s belly resting on her shoulders.
They continued to struggle up the shaft; luckily, Percy sensed that they were helping so he didn’t wiggle or struggle too much.
Finally, weak from hunger, stress and muscle fatigue they reached the top and Joseph crawled out of the hole with Percy and then reached down and helped Sharianna.
They sat on the ground trying to recoup their expended strength.
They were well over a mile from the lake; they could see the robot flying low around the shore of the lake with its lights illuminating the trees.
“They’re looking for us.” Sharianna flashed her little light in the direction of the robot, but there was no response.
“Do you still have any matches?” asked Joseph, as he put his shirt back on.
“No, I left them in the old cabin.”
By the moonlight they could see the lake and the small river that flowed into it and the small stream that flowed by the cabin.
“Look, there’s the stream that leads by the trapper’s cabin!” exclaimed Joseph jubilantly.
“And the cliff above it,” added Sharianna.
They carefully made their way down the mountain by the light of the moon – Sharianna’s little light was not producing very much light by this time. She carefully put it back in her pocket. I’m not going to lose this after it saved our lives, she thought.
Sharianna quickly got the matches from the cabinet while Joseph got another can of lamp oil.
“Grab those old rotten clothes too,” instructed Joseph.
Out in the clearing in front of the cabin, Joseph doused the rags with the fuel. By striking two matches at the same time on the side of the old box he was able to get the fire going.
The fire burned rapidly, creating an eerie light across the front of the old cabin and dancing shadows on the surrounding trees.
They could no longer see the robot in its search, but sudden-ly, it appeared above the trees and landed right in front of them. It bent down with its hand directly in front of the foot to create a step. Percy and his best friends bounded up the foot as the airlock opened with Mom and Dad standing in the doorway.
“Where have you been!” chastised Mom with a sob, as she embraced her children. “We have been frantic for hours.”
“We found an ancient gold mine,” explained Joseph.
Sharianna pulled the chunk of gold out of her pocket. “Look what we found.”
“Is it gold?” asked Mom.
“Sure looks like it,” commented Dad, as he hefted it in his hand. “Sure is heavy, like gold.”
“How much do you think it is worth?” inquired Sharianna.
“I don’t know, I guess it depends on how heavy it is and how pure it is, but I would suspect that it must be worth thousands of dollars,” replied Dad.
Joseph pulled the other chunk and the copper chisel out of his pocket. “We’ve got another one. And check this out Dad,” he said, as he handed him the chisel.
“It’s copper,” observed Dad.
“Yeah, but it’s as hard as steel,” replied Joseph. “There were picks and other tools made out of the same stuff.”
“I heard that the ancient Americans had some w
ay to harden copper—modern scientists still haven’t figured out how they did it.” Thomas examined the chisel with great interest. He pounded on the chunk of gold with the chisel. “It’s malleable, I’m sure it is gold.”
Joseph marked the GPS coordinates of the mine on his map.
“When you did not respond, we realized that you must have taken off your spacesuits,” said Dad.
“We found them right where you left them,” explained Mom.
“I guess if we had left them on, we would have been able to communicate with you,” Sharianna concluded. “We’re sorry we made you worry.”
They followed the railroad tracks all the way into Utah. Sharianna and Joseph told Mom and Dad all about their experience in the mine as they traveled.
The monotony of watching the shinny tracks and the rhythm of the railroad ties flash by in the moonlight forced Joseph’s weary eyes to droop as he laid his head back on the giant beanbag. Sharianna had already succumbed.
“I can’t stop thinking about all that has happened to us,” whispered Sophia. “Especially the obelisks. I wish we had some more batteries for Sharianna’s camera—I’d sure like to look at those alien symbols again. I think the strangest thing we have encountered—and it has been a strange few days—is the obelisk at the North Pole. What was it doing there? How long has it been there? Why in the world did it take off? Just because we touched it? Now, I’m kind of wishing we had followed it like Sharianna suggested. Where did it go? Could there have been aliens in it, or was it automated?”
“I think the moon monster was very strange, and completely unexpected—everyone knows there is not supposed to be any life on the moon,” replied Thomas.
He continued, “Did I tell you that both Joseph and I had a strong feeling of déjà vu?”
“No. When?”
“Out in the desert when we found the pictographs. There was some form of ancient writing on the rocks too.”
“You never mentioned that before,” chastised Sophia.
“Sorry, I guess I forgot in all the excitement of the robot. Anyway, I had the same feeling on the moon, except even stronger. For a moment, I could see in my mind the rock art perfectly. The robot was depicted on the rocks, you know.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me that,” replied Sophia.
“I think there was even an obelisk, and maybe a round circle that depicted the moon. Joseph thought that the human stick figures on the mural represent us.”
“Do you think it is possible?” replied Sophia.
“I don’t know, but if we had dug where I wanted to, we would never have found the robot.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sophia.
“I wanted to dig into the side of the gully, but Joseph wanted to dig right in the bottom—where he found the spearhead. He said maybe it was a good luck charm. Now that I mention it, I think there was also a spearhead in the pictograph,” commented Thomas.
“As soon as we get home and settled, I want to take a drive out there and see those pictographs and the writing—I did not think there was any written language among the ancient natives of North America,” said Sophia thoughtfully.
Suddenly, her face got very serious: “Do you think we were meant to have the robot?”
“What do you mean, meant, to have it?”
“You know, fate, destiny,” she replied.
“I don’t know; I’ve always thought that we could make our own destiny—we are free to choose, after all.”
“I guess you’re right, but I can’t help feeling like there is some meaning or reason for all of this,” agreed Sophia.
“I’m just grateful that we are all together and that we are almost safely home. Look, there is the Great Salt Lake.”
Thomas remembered hearing that the lake was very shallow, so he decided that they would fly slowly over the lake, skimming the surface, so that they might look to any observers on the shore to be simply one of the brine shrimp boats coming in late.
Once across the lake, they flew about a foot or two above the deserted back roads, traveling at the speed limit and finally arriving home at 3:30 in the morning.
“Let them sleep,” whispered Thomas, as he looked at Percy with Joseph and Sharianna on either side of him.
“Do you think the robot is safe here in the barn?” asked Sophia quietly.
“I think so, even if they were looking for the UFO, I’ll bet they weren’t looking for it on the back roads. With the lights of the robot turned down, we probably looked like a truck to any surveillance they might have had.”
“A very quiet truck,” Sophia added, as they entered the cargo area.
They surveyed the room. On the left was the kitchen. On the right was the living room with the sofas and chairs. In between the chairs, up against the curved wall were the treasures the kids and Thomas insisted on bringing home: the strange metal ball, the small asteroid from the asteroid field, Sharianna’s moon rock, the glowing piece of railing, the map from the Golden Alaskan bridge and the large bumpy but oddly uniform meteorite from the moon crater. On the counter were the smaller treasures: Mom’s chandeliers, Joseph’s shark teeth, the rusty old pearl handled pistol and the golden name plate, Sharianna’s piece of the shredded door from the mine on the moon, her shells from their island paradise, Joseph’s small copper chisel and their two chunks of gold from the Eldorado mine.
“I think I could handle one more night on the anti-gravity couch,” yawned Thomas, as he laid down on one of them.
“I wonder why there are no beds in the robot,” mused Sophia, as she took the other sofa.
Thomas sighed as he lost himself in the perfect comfort of the sofa. “Good night sweetheart.”
“Good night.”
As Thomas began to slip into sleep, he gazed at the meteor-ite. It seems to have changed color, he thought groggily to himself, but welcome sleep had already claimed him.