or nations or frontiers, the gaping cavities stood like air sacs within a great round lung.
'What's happening?' Ali gasped. 'It's coming alive.'
'Your eyes are still catching up,' Ike said. 'Just wait. It's three-dimensional.'
The flatness suddenly swelled with contours and depth. The color lines no longer overlapped but had levels all their own, dipping and rising among other lines.
'Oh,' Ali murmured, 'I feel like I'm falling.'
'I know. It opens and opens and opens. It's all in the art. Somehow, Himalayan cultures must have plagiarized it a long time ago. Now the Buddhists use it just to draw blueprints for Dharma palaces. Meditate long enough, and the geometries turn into an optical illusion of a building. But here you get the original intent. A map of the whole inner earth.'
Even the black blot of the sea had dimensions. Ali could see its flat surface and, underneath it, the jagged contours of its floor. The river lines looked suspended in midspace.
'I'm not sure how to read this thing. There's no north-south, no scale,' said Ike. 'But there's a definite logic here. Look at the coastline of our sea. You can pretty much see how we came.'
It was different from the way she had been drawing her own maps. Lacking compass bearings, the maps she continued to make were projections of her westward desire, essentially a straight line with bends. These lines were more languorous and full. Now she could see how tightly she had been disciplining her fear of this space. The subterranean world was practically infinite, more like the sky than the earth.
The sea was shaped like an elongated pear. Ali tried in vain to distinguish any features along the right-hand route Walker had taken. Other than extrapolating that rivers intersected his route, she couldn't read its hazards.
'This spire must represent the map's center, this fortress,' Ali said. 'An X to mark the spot. But it's not actually touching the sea. In fact the sea is some distance away.'
'That had me stumped, too,' Ike said. 'But you see how all the lines converge here, at the spire? We've all looked outside and there isn't that kind of convergence. The trail we came on continues following the shoreline. And one path leads down from the back, a single path. Now I'm thinking we're just a spot on one of many roads.' He pointed to where a single green line departed from the sea. 'That spot on that road.'
If Ike was right, and if the map's proportions were true, then their party had covered less than a fifth of the sea's circumference.
'Then what could this spire represent?' Ali asked.
'I've been thinking about it. You know the adage, all roads lead to...' He let her finish it.
'Rome?' she breathed. Could it be?
'Why not?' he said.
'The center of ancient hell?'
'Can you stand on top for a minute?' Ike asked her. 'I'll hold your legs.'
Ali worked her knees onto the meter-wide apex, and then got to her feet. From that extra height, she saw all the lines drawing in toward her feet. Abruptly she had the sensation of enormous power. It was as if, for a moment, the entire world fused in her. The center was here, and it could only be the one center, their destination. Now she understood why Ike had descended so shaken.
'While you're up there,' Ike said, his hands firm upon her legs, 'tell me if you see the map differently.'
'The lines are more distinct,' she said. With nothing to hold on to, nothing at her back or front, the panorama surged in toward her. The great web of lines seemed to be lifting higher. Suddenly it was as if she were not looking down, but up.
'Dear God,' she said.
The spire had become the pit.
She was seeing the world from deep within. Her head began spinning.
'Get me down,' she pleaded, 'before I fall.'
'I have something to show you,' Ike said to her that night. More? she thought. The afternoon's revelations had exhausted her. He seemed happy.
'Can't it wait until tomorrow?' she asked. She was tired. Hours had passed, and she was still reeling from the map's optical illusion. And she was hungry.
'Not really,' he said.
They had made camp within the colonnaded entry, where a stream of pure water
issued from an eroded spout. Their hunger was telling. Another day of explorations had weakened them. The ones who had climbed atop the spire were weakest. They lay on the ground, mostly curled around their empty stomachs. Pia was holding Spurrier, who suffered from migraines. Troy sat with Ike's pistol facing the sea, his head slumped, halfway to sleep. From here on, things were going to get no better.
Ali changed her mind. 'Lead on,' she said.
She took Ike's hand and got to her feet. He led her inside and to a secret passage. It contained its own flight of carved stairs.
'Go slow,' he said. 'Save your strength.'
They reached a tower jutting above the fortress. They had to crawl through another hidden duct to more stairs. As they climbed up the final stretch of narrow steps, she saw a rich, buttery light above. He let her go in first.
In a room overlooking the sea, Ike had lit scores of oil lamps. They were small clay leaves that cupped the oil and fed it along a groove to the flame at one tip.
'Where did you find these?' she asked. 'And where did the oil come from?'
In one corner stood three large earthenware amphorae that might well have been salvaged from an ancient Greek shipwreck.
'It was all buried in storage vaults under the floor. There's got to be fifty more of these jars down there,' he said. 'This must have been something like a lighthouse. Maybe there were others like it farther along the shore, a system of relay stations.'
A single lamp might have been enough to let her see her fingertips. In their hundreds, the lamps turned the room to gold. She wondered how it would have looked to hadal ships drifting upon the black sea twenty thousand years ago.
Ali sneaked a look at Ike. He had done this for her. The light was hurting his eyes a little, but he didn't shield them from her.
'We can't stay here,' he said, wiping at his tears. 'I want you to come with me.' He was trying not to squint. What was beautiful to her was painful to him. She was tempted to blow out some of the lamps to ease his discomfort, but decided he might be insulted.
'There's no way out,' she said. 'We can't go on.'
'We can.' He gestured at the endless sea. 'It's not hopeless, the paths go on.'
'And what about the others?'
'They can come, too. But they've given up. Ali, don't give up.' He was fervent. 'Come with me.'
This was for her alone, like the light.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You're different. I'm like them, though. I'm tired. I want to stay here.'
He twisted his head away.
'I know you think I'm being complacent,' she said.
'We don't have to die,' Ike said. 'No matter what happens to them, we don't have to die here.' He was adamant. It did not escape her that he spoke to her as 'we.'
'Ike,' she said, and stopped. She had fasted in her day, and knew it was too soon for the euphoria to be addling her. But her sense of contentment was rich.
'We can get out of here,' he urged.
'You've brought us as far as we can go,' she said. 'You've done everything we set out to do. We've made our discoveries. We know that a great empire once existed down here. Now it's over.'
'Come with me, Ali.'
'We have no food.'
