The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (30 page)

T
he twins slept little that night. They had far too much to think about. John watched television in his room for several hours. Philippa wrote a letter to their mother, which she signed from both of them.

They were up at seven
A.M.
and somehow John managed to eat a large breakfast in the hotel’s spectacular dining room. Philippa had a cup of coffee. Groanin, who had already breakfasted, shimmied into the dining room carrying a picnic hamper.

“Just in case we have need of refreshment,” he said. “That’s the thing with climbing a mountain. It gives you an appetite without the means of satisfying it.”

“I don’t think I shall be wanting anything to eat, Groanin,” said Philippa.

“Me, neither,” said John. “Take it from me, the condemned man just ate a very hearty breakfast.” “I’m very glad to hear it,” said Groanin.

The Circumvesuviana train was, as Nimrod had supposed, not running; so they hired a Land Rover locally and drove north, around the bay, to the Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio. As before, this was closed and closely guarded by several dozen policemen and, this time, it was the professor who talked their way through. Which ought to have been a little easier now that he was no longer wearing a mask, but wasn’t; it was only when he pulled his black polo-neck sweater over his head and had Groanin cut him two eyeholes that the police finally recognized him.

They drove up the mountain to the end of the winding road, and then, leaving the Land Rover, set out to ascend the last thousand feet on foot.

The ground was warm underneath their boots. In other places, it was a lot more than warm. Steam poured out of fissures in the rocks in a way that reminded John of a New York hot dog stand on a cold day. A strong wind was carrying a plume of ash and smoke as tall as the Empire State Building away from them as they climbed. A couple of times Groanin stopped, almost out of breath, wiped his pink forehead, and looked up at the tumbling gray cloud and tried to contain his mounting fear for the sake of the twins.

“I feel like Pliny,” he said with a brave smile. “That Roman writer fellow who popped up here to take a look when Pompeii was first threatened with destruction. I think he was writing a book about natural history at the time and he thought that coming here might be good research, as they say.”

“What happened to him?” asked John.

“Er, I don’t know,” admitted Groanin. “But I do know he got married three times. And his book got published. So he must have done all right for himself. Anyone who writes a book seems to do all right for himself.” He pulled a face. “Can’t imagine it were a bestseller, though. There wasn’t much that was natural that them Romans liked.”

“It was Pliny the Younger who got married three times, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “You were thinking of Pliny the Elder. And in spite of the fact that his book was published without a final chapter, it was a great success. Indeed, it is one of the few works of Roman literature that have survived to the present day.”

“But why no last chapter?” asked Groanin. “Did he run out of inspiration, or ink, or what?”

Nimrod shrugged, pretending that he couldn’t remember. “I’ve forgotten,” he said. “It must have slipped my mind.” Changing the subject, he added, “You know, it’s lucky the cloud is blowing the other way, so that we can enjoy the view. Local people come and get married up here, you know. Because of this marvelous view.”

The professor, however, wasn’t much interested in the view; he’d seen it many times before. He was much more interested in Pliny the Elder.

“Pliny the Elder was killed,” said the professor bluntly. “Right here, on Vesuvius.” He also stopped on the narrow path for a breath, and stroked a beard that was now as bushy as Pliny’s own.

“I suppose the poisonous gas from the volcano got him, did it?” said Groanin. “Or the lava, perhaps?”
“No, he had a heart attack walking up the slope,” said the professor. “He was rather a fat man. And not very fit.”

“Oh,” said Groanin, who was quite fat himself. “I see.”

“But even today,” added the professor, “we volcanologists still use his name as a term for a very violent eruption of a volcano that is marked by columns of smoke and ash that extend high into the stratosphere. We talk of a Plinian eruption. Like this one.”

Groanin smiled thinly. “How very fascinating,” he said, although in truth, he was more horrified than fascinated. “Thank you for that. I say, thank you for that.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the professor, whose own thoughts were mostly of his poor wife. Despite what he had said the previous day, he still loved her. Love is like this, sometimes.

Noting Groanin’s obvious disquiet, Philippa said, “Don’t worry, Groanin. It’s not far to the top now. About half an hour.”

“That is a relief,” said Groanin as a jet of hot smoke and gas hissed out of a large hole in the ground next to him as if from the wheels of a waiting locomotive train. “I’m sure I’ll feel a lot more relaxed when we reach the top.” He opened the picnic hamper, took out a bottle of water, and poured the contents down his throat.

John reached the top first and, as before, the crater rim offered a sight worthy of Dante’s
Inferno
, at least that was what Nimrod — who arrived close behind him — said. John didn’t have much of an idea who Dante was, but he knew an inferno was a place of fiery heat or destruction where sinners were supposed to suffer eternal punishment, and that looked
like a pretty good description of the volcano, which was even more daunting to the eye and mind than the last time he had been there. Whereas before, the crater had been mostly filled with hot dust and gravel, now it was full of dull molten rock that, at any moment, might be blasted high into the air. John knew that he could no more have rappelled safely into the crater than he could have skied down a lava flow.

The professor, arriving a few minutes after Nimrod, let out a breath and a loud gasp at the horrid spectacle that met his expert eyes.

“Incredible,” he said. “I think we must be in the final volcanic phase before there is a violent eruption. Which makes me suppose that many other volcanoes in many other countries are about to blow, as well.”

“In which case, we have arrived in the nick of time,” said Nimrod. “Possibly these would already have erupted but for the fact that we were able to prevent Rashleigh Khan from adding yet more Hotaniya crystals to that borehole.”

Philippa and Groanin, still carrying the picnic hamper, brought up the rear.

Groanin sat down heavily on a rock and then stood up abruptly as the heat from the rock scorched his trousers.

“Flipping heck,” he yelled, rubbing his painful backside. “Fetch the sauce. I say, fetch the sauce. It’s like sitting on a barbecue up here.”

“Yes, do be careful, Groanin,” said Nimrod.

In response, Groanin muttered something about locking a stable door after the horse had bolted.

“So what do we do now?” Philippa asked her uncle. “Hold hands and wait for you to shove us into the crater like those Inca kids? Hey, Apu? Here we come. Look out, Catequil, you’ve got a couple of visitors.”

“Very amusing,” said Nimrod.

“Who are they?” asked Groanin. “Apu and thing-ummybob?”

“Inca gods,” said Philippa. “Apu was their god of mountains and volcanoes. And Catequil was the god of thunder and lightning. The Incas used to throw twins into an active crater, as a sacrifice.”

“As you do,” remarked John drily. “Now and then.”

Groanin’s jaw dropped and he looked at Nimrod and then at Philippa. There was a look of alarm on his face. “You’re not thinking of doing that, are you? Nimrod?”

“No, of course not,” said Nimrod. “What do you take me for?”

“I thought for a moment I must have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick,” admitted the butler. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“So what
do
we do now that we’re here?” John asked Nimrod.

“We already talked about this, John,” said Philippa.

“Yes, we did,” agreed John. “But what we haven’t yet talked about is if this can work or not. Maybe it’s a waste of time. Maybe what we’re doing will be done in vain.”

“Maybe,” said Philippa.

“But that’s what I want to know,” insisted John. “I mean, I really don’t mind making this sacrifice if it’s going to work,
but I can’t see the point if it’s done more in hope than expectation.”

“I don’t think anybody can tell that until you try,” said Nimrod. “We’re on uncertain ground here.”

Groanin glanced at his boots. A strong smell of burning rubber was coming off his soles. “You can say that again, sir.”

“At least we are as far as I’m concerned,” continued Nimrod.

“That makes three of us,” said John.

“Groanin? I shall require you to keep quiet from now on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You too, Professor.”

“Anything to help,” said the professor.

“Being ‘children of the lamp’ is one thing,” said Nimrod. “But ‘children of the sky’ is something else. It was often believed that the children of the sky could summon any wind by motions of their hands or by their breath, and that they could make fair or foul weather and could cause rain. But remember what makes you unique: You are both children of the sky and children of the lamp. So then. I suggest you stand on the rim of the crater and hold hands.”

John pulled a face and took his sister’s hand.

“This will, of course, help you to concentrate your djinn power,” said Nimrod. “And you should let the sound of my voice help you to shape your will. At least, in the beginning.”

Philippa looked at John and nodded.

“Ready?” she said.

“Let’s do it,” said John.

“I want you to concentrate every iota of your power and for as long as you can endure,” said Nimrod. “I want you to start to drag and drop the biggest rain clouds over this volcano. As many as you can until the sky is dark with them. You may have to keep uttering your focus words in order to do this. But as you bring rain clouds here, I want you to imagine doing the very same over every volcano in the world. Here, in Italy. In Iceland. And all along the Pacific Ring of Fire. And then I want you to make it rain like it never rained before. Right into every one of these craters.”

John and Philippa closed their eyes and began to think very, very hard of the many volcanoes the professor had told them about: the fifty most active, and the six or seven hundred volcanoes that had been active since the beginning of recorded time. They thought about the volcanoes of Hawaii. The volcanoes of Sumatra. The volcanoes on the Canary Islands. The volcanoes in Japan and Alaska. The volcanoes in Ecuador, Chile, and Peru.

They thought of thick rain clouds gathering immediately above the craters of these volcanoes. The biggest rain clouds anyone could have imagined. And all the time that they concentrated on drawing weather systems and small anticyclones directly onto these craters, they uttered their focus words and gathered their djinn power.

And as their concentration of mind and power increased, gradually they forgot about Nimrod, and Groanin, and the professor; they forgot about Axel, and Charlie, and Moby; they forgot about Rashleigh Khan; they forgot about Mr. Bilharzia and Genghis Khan; they forgot about their mother
and father; they almost forgot about each other. The only thing they did not forget was why they had come there.

It was, perhaps, the greatest concentration of power John and Philippa had ever felt. Certainly, it was the most power that either of them had ever used.

Or would ever use again.

Gradually, each twin lost all sense of time and place. There was just their awesome power, and the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Indeed, the longer they persevered with their collective thought process, the more their will came to resemble an elemental force itself so that there were four elements that were required to submit to the fifth element that was their two minds.

And after a while, it began to rain.

John and Philippa hardly seemed to notice. They just stood on the edge of the crater, hands locked together like two mythological twins’, staring at the sky, and making the rain fall.

And what rain it was.

For a while Groanin, Nimrod, and the professor gathered under the umbrellas they had brought with them from the supermarket in Sorrento, but as the day wore on they were forced to take shelter in the gift shop that occupied the beginning of the path around the crater rim.

“Do you think they’ll be all right, standing on the edge of the crater like that?” Groanin asked Nimrod.

“I don’t really know,” admitted Nimrod. “But I daren’t touch them now that they’re doing this. It might be dangerous for them, and it would certainly be dangerous for me.”

Seeing Groanin raise an eyebrow at that, he added, “Oh, yes. Together, they’re much more powerful than me. That’s rather the point, you see. There’s no djinn alive who could make rain like this. That is, apart from them.”

Groanin glanced out of the window of the gift shop. He had to admit there was something in what Nimrod had said. Coming from Manchester, on the western side of England, Groanin thought he knew a bit about rain. Manchester is surrounded by the Pennine Hills to the north and the east. When a southwesterly wind blows over England, it brings damp Atlantic air. The Atlantic air reaches Manchester, is forced up over the Pennines and, as it rises, it cools and turns into water droplets. This is what is known to climatologists and geographers as a rain shadow. Which is why Manchester has more than twenty-seven inches of rain a year, and rains, on average, for between fifteen and twenty days a month. Groanin knew rain like a Spanish orange grower knows sun. There was probably quite a bit of rain in Groanin’s soul. But he had never seen rain like the rain that fell on Vesuvius. It was almost a solid sheet of water.

“Look,” he said, pointing through the rain and down the slope at the Bay of Naples. “There’s blue sky down there. It seems to be clear in Naples and Sorrento. It’s only raining up here, directly into the crater.”

“That’s the whole idea,” said the professor.