The light piercing the narrow crack they’d opened in front of the cave entrance did little to penetrate the gloom. Except for the thin beam of his flashlight reflecting off the basalt walls of the lava tube, Tyler could see nothing.
Although the Moai protecting the cave had done an admirable job of concealing the entrance, apparently the seal had not been tight enough to prevent moisture from entering. The cave surface felt damp to Tyler’s touch, and the air reeked of fungal decay. If mold had grown unchecked in here, whatever they were meant to find might have been destroyed centuries ago.
Jess guided Fay into the tight confines of the cave. Tyler instructed Polk to guard the entrance outside, but it was as much to keep him from seeing the results of their search as it was for protection. Not that he didn’t trust the guy. After all, Polk was the one with the gun. But Tyler saw the wisdom in following Morgan’s need-to-know rationale.
“Be careful,” Tyler said, his voice reverberating into the distance. “The floor’s slippery.”
“You watch your head,” Jess said. “Without hard hats, you could get a nasty bump.”
“It sounds like you have some caving experience.”
“Nana introduced me to it in New Zealand.”
Fay took a deep breath. “Do you smell that? It’s the aroma of history.”
She removed a state-of-the-art video camera from her knapsack and turned on its powerful floodlight. It provided as much illumination as the two flashlights put together.
When she saw Tyler’s appreciative look, she said, “I use this to record all my trips.”
“
“What does that mean?”
“Ready and able. It was my Army unit’s motto.” He showed Fay the Gordian camera he’d had delivered to the C-17 during the Sydney stopover. The equipment was only slightly more advanced than hers. “You would have fit in well. Especially with the way you handled that shotgun.”
Fay grinned. “Flatterer. Come on. I want to see what’s in here.”
She led the way into the darkness. No fear at all. Tyler was even more impressed.
Ten yards in, the path turned, and the echo effect increased. Tyler was shocked that he could now see light coming from the far end of the tunnel.
He exchanged glances with Jess. She was as surprised as he was. They continued on until they emerged into a massive chamber, its thirty-foot-high ceiling domed like a planetarium. Sunlight streamed through a one-foot- diameter hole in the ceiling, providing a weak supplement to the illumination cast by their flashlights. The tall grass must have hidden the hole from view when they were topside.
They all stopped, slack-jawed, as they laid eyes on what the Rapa Nui people had been hiding for more than a thousand years.
The ceiling was covered with images that were exact copies of the Nazca lines. Tyler took out his smart phone and brought up the map of the lines that he’d stored on it. Not only were the symbols identical to the geoglyphs on the Peruvian plain, but they were arranged in exactly the same locations and orientations. Each of the symbols was stippled with dots that didn’t appear on the Nazca plain. Straight lines connecting the symbols matched straight lines in Peru, but there were far fewer of them on the ceiling.
“My God,” Fay whispered as she focused the camera on the drawings.
“This is spectacular,” Jess said.
Tyler made his own recording as he gawked.
Jess took his phone and looked back and forth between it and the ceiling. “Some of them are missing.”
“What?”
“The ceiling isn’t a complete representation of the drawings in Peru. See? The whale is missing. And these two that look like flower pots aren’t here either.”
Fay and Tyler crowded around the phone and saw that she was right.
“What do you make of that, Fay?” Tyler said. After all, she was the expert here.
“Based on how the drawings were made and arranged, archaeologists theorize that some of them came much later. Perhaps hundreds of years.”
“Which ones are here?”
Jess counted them off. “The monkey, condor, dog, hummingbird, pelican, spider, lizard, parrot, tree, flower, iguana, and human.”
Tyler watched her as she tapped her fingers for each one. Twelve in all. Then he realized the significance of the dots.
“Twelve drawings,” he said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
Jess immediately got it. “One drawing for each lunar cycle in a year.”
Fay gaped at the ceiling. “Then the dots are—”
Jess nodded. “Stars. These are constellations. How come no one has ever figured that out before?”
“With all of the extraneous drawings added to the Nazca plain over the years since the original twelve were drawn, it was impossible to know that they represented constellations.”
“If those dots correspond to visible stars,” Jess said, “we should be able to figure out which parts of the sky they appear in.”
“What’s that?” Tyler asked, pointing at an image located away from the others and connected to the monkey drawing by a single line. Instead of a crude animal symbol, this image was a complex geometric pattern. A circle encompassed two perpendicular overlapping rectangles with a bright white starburst in the center. Girding the circle were two squares offset like the triangles in a Star of David.
Fay got closer. “That’s the Mandala. The drawing is on a high plateau north of the Nazca plain. No one knows what it means.”
Tyler made sure to get a good shot of each symbol, then photographed the path of each line connecting them. When he was done, he looked around to see if there were any other exits from the chamber.
That’s when he noticed the other drawings. He’d been so focused on craning his neck at the ceiling that he hadn’t seen the wealth of stone carvings decorating the walls.
“Guys,” he said, “take a look at these.”
The intricate artwork encircled the entire chamber. Primitive paint filled the grooves so that the lines glowed white under the beams of their flashlights. Rather than drawings of animals, each etching seemed to illustrate a scene. Tyler started taking pictures beginning with the first one to his left.
The first image showed a streak coming down from the sky, trailing fire in its wake. In the next drawing was a starburst matching the one inside the Mandala figure. Above the starburst rose the unmistakable profile of a mushroom cloud.
Whoever drew this had either witnessed a gigantic explosion or had been told what one looked like. The same as at Tunguska. And as with the event in Western Australia, there would have been no downed trees to record the blast in the arid Peruvian plateau.
“This tells a story,” Jess said.
Fay nodded. “The migrants from Nazca must have recorded their history in this cave so it wouldn’t be forgotten.”
“It’s funny that no one has ever found a drawing like this before,” Tyler said.
“Not at all,” Fay said. “Remember that for five thousand years no one could translate hieroglyphics. Then the Rosetta stone was discovered and revolutionized our understanding of the Egyptian language. A single artifact changed everything. This cave could be a pre-Columbian Rosetta stone for the Nazca culture.”
“Why haven’t they found drawings like this in Peru?”
“They might yet. An ancient city called Cahuachi lay hidden south of the Nazca plain until it was discovered in the 1950s. Only when further excavations started in the 1980s did archaeologists realize it was a ceremonial pilgrimage site for the Nazca people.”
“Would it be possible for something like this to be hidden there?”
“Of course. The site is huge. One and a half square kilometers. The largest pyramid is thirty meters high, a stepped structure built of adobe bricks. Somewhere in the complex, there might be an exact duplicate of this story, originally protected by the religious order that lived there and now buried in the city.”
They continued on with the story, with Fay interpreting the scenes.
