Raising Atlantis (15 page)

The look on Serena’s face told Yeats that she didn’t believe Conrad for a second. “Fine,” she said. “Go.”

Yeats nodded to Marcus and Kreigel, who took up positions at the doorway, and then he followed Conrad out of the chamber and down a low, square tunnel.

As they proceeded through the dark, Yeats worried that he had badly miscalculated in allowing Mother Earth to join the team. Not because there was anything wrong with her, but because something clearly was wrong with Conrad whenever she was around.

A little space, Yeats hoped, would clear the kid’s head.

The strategy paid off several minutes later when they reached a solid horizontal platform. It looked like some kind of altar. Conrad suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” Yeats asked.

“This lies exactly along the east-west axis of the pyramid,” Conrad explained. “It marks the point of transition between the northern and southern halves of the monument.”

“So?” Yeats was about to take another step when Conrad braced him with his arm. It was stronger than Yeats expected.

“Look.” Conrad aimed his flashlight into the darkness, revealing what looked like a gigantic subway tunnel plunging toward the center of the earth. Running down the middle of the shiny floor was a sunken channel about forty feet wide and twenty feet deep. It mirrored precisely the design of the vaulted ceiling at its apex three hundred feet overhead.

“This is the main corridor or Great Gallery.”

“Goddamn it, son.” Yeats stepped back from the ledge.

“You certainly know your way around this place. You sure you’ve never been here before?”

“Only in my dreams.”

“Looks like a nightmare to me,” Yeats said as he peered over the ledge. “Where does it go?”

“Only one way to find out.” Conrad unraveled rope from his pack. “The slope is about twenty-six degrees and the floors are slick. We’ll need to use lines. Just stick to the ramparts and try not to slide into the channel.”

They had descended about a thousand feet when Yeats suddenly lost all sense of direction. It was the same sort of vertigo he sometimes felt back at Ice Base Orion on the surface. He couldn’t tell which end of the tunnel was up or which was the floor or ceiling. Yeats rubbed his eyes, which stung from the salt of his cold sweat, and continued down the Great Gallery.

Conrad said, “You didn’t really bring Serena as an observer, did you?”

Yeats sensed that Conrad actually missed the nun. Good grief, he thought, they had only just left her. “Hell, no,”

Yeats said. “I want to see how much she knows about this thing. It’s more than she’s letting on.”

Conrad asked, “What makes you so suspicious?”

“My job description.”

“Then maybe Serena shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’ve got three good officers standing guard.”

“I just don’t think we needed to leave her behind.”

“Yes, we did. And now you can tell me whatever you couldn’t tell the good sister. Namely, what you’re really thinking.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Conrad said. “Pure coincidence.”

“No such thing in this place,” Yeats replied. “Talk.”

“Look around.” Conrad gestured across the vast, gleaming gallery. “No inscriptions, religious iconography, or any discernible symbolism in this gallery or the pyramid.”

“So?”

“So this isn’t a tomb. It’s not even a puzzle for initiates to wander through and solve like I proposed earlier.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“It feels like we’re inside some enormous machine.”

Yeats felt a deep and disturbing jolt inside his bowels.

The news was like some sort of prophecy, both expected and alarming. “Machine?”

“I think it’s supposed to do something.”

There was a heaviness in the air. Yeats cleared his throat. “Do what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe disaster struck the builders before they ever got a chance to turn it on.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe,” Conrad went on, “this machine caused the disaster.”

Yeats nodded slowly as the words sunk in. Somehow he had felt it all along. He wanted to tell Conrad more. But now was not the time. Conrad would hopefully figure it out on his own anyway.

Descending to the Great Gallery, Conrad was sorry he had left Serena behind in the upper chamber. And not just because he wanted her to see for herself how right he was about P4.

He could tell from her eyes how put out and excluded she felt. He knew the sensation well and felt a twinge of guilt for not sticking up for her with Yeats. But he wasn’t about to blow his own chance to explore the lower levels and lead the way to the greatest archaeological discovery in human history.

As soon as he reached the bottom of the gallery, however, Conrad’s mental map of the pyramid’s interior began to unravel. He faced a fork branching off into two smaller tunnels. There should have been three.

He could hear Yeats’s heavy breathing behind him. “Well?”

Yeats demanded impatiently. “Which way?”

Conrad studied the two “smaller” tunnels. Each was more than thirty feet high. One continued along the twenty-six-degree slope of the gallery. The other dropped ninety degrees into a vertical shaft. Neither satisfied him.

Conrad instinctively turned around and began to search for a third tunnel that would double back beneath the gallery. But he couldn’t find it.

“What are you doing?” Yeats asked.

Conrad patted the cold wall and said nothing. He was positive the central chamber he was looking for was on this level. And if the Great Pyramid in Giza was indeed modeled after P4, then the corridor leading to that central chamber should have been there at the bottom of the gallery.

But it wasn’t.

Perhaps he was assuming too much to think the ancient Egyptians got it right from the Atlanteans. Even if his initial hypothesis was correct, that didn’t mean the Egyptians had the knowledge or means to fashion an accurate copy of P4.

“The chamber we’re looking for is on this level,” he said. “But we’ll have to access it from below.”

“Fine,” Yeats said. “Which tunnel?”

“Theoretically, both corridors should lead to the burial chamber,” Conrad said, hesitating.

Yeats said, “As long as it isn’t ours.”

“You don’t understand,” Conrad said. “The burial chamber at the bottom of the pyramid serves as a kind of cosmic dressing chamber where the king can dance and celebrate the completion of life. At the top of the pyramid is the phoenix or benben stone, symbolizing resurrection. There’s an ascension to all this.”

“I get it,” said Yeats. “And somewhere in between, the hocus-pocus happens.”

“At the central chamber,” Conrad said. “That’s where we can expect to find a repository of texts or technology to unlock the meaning of P4.” Conrad took another look around.

“Since the access corridor isn’t here, I suspect the burial chamber will point the way.”

“So which tunnel leads to the burial chamber?”

Conrad could feel Yeats’s brooding stare. The reality was that he was still getting used to attacking this pyramid from the top down, when every previous experience in his life was from the bottom up.

Conrad looked down the first tunnel. It would be natural to continue along the slope of the gallery they had just passed through. But he suspected that tunnel led to the main entrance of P4. It was probably blocked at some point to keep outsiders from entering P4 at the ground level.

“Make up my mind, son.”

“Door number two,” Conrad said. “We’ll take the vertical shaft.”

“OK.” Yeats leaned over the shaft and dropped a new line.

Conrad emerged from the bottom of the vertical shaft a half hour later, dropping into a lower north-south corridor.

This, too, was more than thirty feet high. Yeats had just landed behind him when the alarm on Conrad’s watch started beeping.

“You’ve got an appointment somewhere?” Yeats asked.

“We’re under the base of P4.” Conrad pulled back his left glove and tilted his wrist to reveal the blue electrolu-minescent backlight of his multisensor watch face.

In addition to a built-in digital compass, barometer, thermometer, and GPS, it included an altimeter graph. “We’ve descended almost a mile and a half. I set the alarm for my target altitude.”

Yeats pulled out his own USAF standard-issue altimeter.

“You were off by more than a quarter mile,” Yeats said.

“We’re barely a mile down.”

Conrad looked at his altimeter doubtfully. His father wasn’t cutting him any slack now. Not an inch. Much less a quarter mile. This might as well be the first human landing on Mars as far as Yeats was concerned, Conrad realized, and NASA allowed no margin for error. As Conrad rolled it over in his head, he concluded Yeats was right. If anything, P4 was more significant to humanity than Mars. It was certainly closer. Palpably so.

“So which way now?” Yeats pressed. “North or south?”

Conrad cut his line and instinctively turned to the north. “This way.”

After about 1,200 feet, the floor sloped suddenly and almost doubled the height of the ceiling. Fifty yards ahead was the entrance Conrad was looking for. He could feel his blood starting to really pump.

“This is it,” he said.

They entered a vastly larger space. The beams of their headtorches disintegrated into nothingness as the floor beneath their boots sloped at a slight grade. Engulfed in darkness, and feeling very cold, Conrad sensed that this cavity was in some ways many times larger than the upper chamber they had left at the top of the Great Gallery. Yet the emptiness beyond the torchlight beams also felt compressed in some way. This was definitely uncharted territory, he realized, and could feel the tension in his gut.

“I’m tossing out a flare—thirty-second delay,” Yeats said. “Three, two, one.”

Conrad could hear Yeats heave the stick into the dark.

Mentally he counted down as he pulled out his digital camera to capture whatever image would burst forth. A few seconds later the chamber exploded with light.

Conrad shielded his eyes as he panned what fleetingly resembled a stone crater with his camera. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he began to see that’s exactly what they were standing in. They were on the rim of a titanic crater almost a mile in diameter. But it was only two hundred feet high.

The flare sputtered and died. Once again Conrad and Yeats were in darkness.

Yeats said, “Show me what you’ve got.”

“Right here.”

Conrad replayed the footage on the flat display screen on the back of his camera. It glowed bright in the darkness.

“Stop,” said Yeats.

Conrad paused the screen. There was something in the center of the crater. A circle or hub of some sort.

“Can you zoom?”

“A little.”

Conrad, fingers tingling with adrenaline, magnified the image until it filled the display. But the picture was still too blurred to make it out clearly.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Conrad and Yeats marched in unison toward the center, careful not to lose their balance on the sloping floor.

Conrad could feel his heart pounding. He’d never experienced any sort of chamber like this in Egypt or the Americas, nothing even remotely similar in size or configuration.

At the half-mile mark Yeats called a halt.

Conrad lowered his flashlight beam to the floor and found something about ten yards in front of them. Carved across the polished stone floor were four rings radiating from an oval cartouche in the center, like some magnificent seal.

Yeats let out a low whistle. “Finally, inscriptions for Mother Earth.”

“Not quite,” said Conrad, breathing hard. Part of him wanted to run back and get her. Another part refused to admit he couldn’t figure this out by himself. “It’s an icon or symbol.”

“Then even you should be able to decipher it.”

Conrad walked to the center of the floor, where a familiar-looking hieroglyphic was inscribed inside the oval cartouche. It was of a god or king seated inside some sort of mechanical device. He resembled a bearded Caucasian and wore what looked like an elaborate head ornament known as an Atef crown. And he held some sort of scepter in his hand. It looked like a small obelisk.

“This figure looks familiar,” Conrad heard himself saying, “but I can’t put my finger on why.”

Conrad looked again at the cartouche on the floor. The image inscribed inside was similar to the symbols he had seen depicting the gods of Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Central America. But this otherworldly symbol awakened something primeval and terrifying inside him, and suddenly he knew why.

“This pyramid is dedicated to Osiris.” Conrad’s voice wavered.

“So what?” said Yeats. “I thought most of these pyramids were dedicated to some god.”

“You don’t understand,” Conrad said excitedly. “This seal suggests P4 was built by the King of Eternity himself, the Lord of First Time.”

“First Time?”

“The Genesis epoch I told you about back at Ice Base Orion, the time when humanity emerged from the primordial darkness and was offered the gifts of civilization from the gods,” Conrad said. “Ancient Egyptian texts say these gifts or technologies were introduced through intermediaries or lesser divinities known as ‘The Watchers’ orUrshu.”

Yeats paused. “So you think theUrshu were the Atlanteans who built P4?”

“Maybe,” Conrad said. “I’m sure Serena has her own interpretation. But there’s no denying that we’ve found the mother lode.” Conrad could hear the triumph in his voice.

“The Mother Culture.”

“First Time,” Yeats said.

“First Time,” Conrad echoed and spoke the phrase in his best Ancient Egyptian:“Zep Tepi.”

As soon as the words fell out of his mouth, they seemed to swirl around the chamber, spinning out from the center of the crater floor like some centrifugal force. The floor started to shake.

Suddenly the cartouche split open and Conrad stumbled backward as a pillar of fire shot up from the floor and through a circular shaft in the ceiling.

“Whoa!” he shouted and slipped flat on his back. He started to slide across the bottom of the crater floor toward the fiery hole.

Yeats grabbed his arm and held him back. “Easy, easy, easy.”