dangerous that they had to pick the most remote spot on earth. In any event, every machine needs fuel, and this one uses the planet’s core, I’m guessing. The black sun, perhaps.”
“But a machine for what?”
“For Vril.” Raeder took the brighter staff and passed it near one of the squat boxes. The black rectangle on its top began to glow. There was a clunk, a groan, and a hum as the huge machine began to start. Nothing moved, but some of its components gave that same ghostly green glow they’d seen at the top of the tunnel, and now the room was fully lit for the first time.
“It’s coming to life,” muttered Kranz.
They stepped back, unsure what the mechanism might do. It began to make a whirring sound. In the stone cradle before them, the crystalline staff began to glow.
“It’s a generator,” Raeder decided. “It’s transferring energy from the center of the earth, or energy we can’t detect, to these instruments or weapons. Look. Those pipes from the deep bring energy. The motors and gears transfer it to the horizontal pipes that extend into the tunnels. And they in turn feed power to that staff, charging it like a battery. But how could an ancient civilization master such a thing?”
“All their knowledge was lost,” Diels hazarded. “Or they left here for another world.”
“Left where? To prehistoric Germany, to our age of heroes? Did they give rise to the legends of the gods?”
Muller was looking about, peering into shadows. “Or they didn’t leave at all,” he said. “Look.” He pointed.
Kranz followed his finger. “Oh my God!”
The hangar door, they’d seen, had been almost knocked from its hinges. But what they hadn’t seen was that some blast or force from the machine had swept across the room and hurled everything against the far wall, in the shadow behind that door.
In that newly illuminated gloom there was a white shoal of bone, a bleached reef, including hundreds of blank-eyed human skulls. It was a ridge of bony remains.
It was a hurled heap of long-dead people.
30
The Lost Valley, Tibet
October 3, 1938
F or one terrifying moment, after Ben Hood pulled his ripcord during his fall toward Shambhala, nothing seemed to happen. Then the parachute opened with a bang and he snapped hard against its straps, gasping. He looked up. The silk had blossomed into a reassuring canopy. Beth’s biplane was a black dot against the dying light and then was gone, past the mountains.
Alone.
He looked down. The ground was coming fast.
He tensed for the shock until remembering to relax. The ground was dark and jumbled, ruined walls running in every direction and small canals descending from the mountains. Pools from ancient reservoirs were rectangles of gray. Nor did he have any idea how to control his direction. Obstacles rushed up, he lifted his knees reflexively, and then with a thud he was down, rolling, his chute snagging on some old parapet.
For a moment he lay still, stunned. Then he sat up to confirm nothing was broken.
There was no sign of Raeder or anyone else.
Hood unbuckled his parachute and let it sag over the wall, the strings trailing like long white worms in the gloom. Now what?
He had no food, no water, and no weaponry except the. 45 on his hip. But Raeder must be here, and with him Keyuri, unless the bastard had already tortured and killed her. There’d be other Germans, too.
His one advantage, he hoped, was surprise. Judging from the explosion, the Nazis expected they’d blocked his pursuit by dynamiting the canyon.
Hood began navigating over old rubble, the dusk continuing to deepen. Then he came upon a clearer path, an old road with ruptured paving. He stopped.
There was a low hum. Was the ground vibrating?
The sound seemed to come from where the road led. There was the faintest green glow in that direction. Keeping to the deepest shadows and wary of ambush, Ben hurried as fast as he dared. Walls, turrets, and huge statues rose all around. The statues were looking backward, in the direction he was going.
Shambhala looked very strange.
If only Roy Chapman Andrews and Agent Duncan Hale could see this.
The road led to a tunnel sloping down into the earth. It was from there that the humming emanated. There was a faint, sickly luminescence that seemed to emerge from the walls of the tunnel itself, as if the rock were alive with energy. How this could be, Hood had no idea. Then, a hundred yards in, a circular entrance with a narrow pocket to either side into which some kind of aperture door had slid. Beyond was darkness. Except not complete darkness, because far, far below a yellow light glimmered, like a candle at the end of the tunnel. In that direction, too, was the source of the noise, a whir like a turbine.
The ruin looked centuries or millennia old yet trembled like a powerhouse.
Hood took out his pistol, wary.
Then there was a new rumble. The tips of the door’s black petals began closing like an insect maw.
For just a moment he considered bolting. But then whatever he’d come for would be forever beyond his grasp, wouldn’t it? He’d be haunted by incompletion, like last time. He stepped through and watched, die cast, as the door slammed shut.
He was in Shambhala.
It was dark, except for that distant light.
He carefully began to walk downhill.
As Hood descended he occasionally felt currents of air from what he assumed were openings on both sides of the central tunnel, and felt like he was being watched by the spirits of what had once been here. No one challenged him, however. There was only the murmur of spoken German ahead.
The humming grew louder and he saw light slanting out from a hangar-sized opening. It spilled into a cavernous lobby, a great stone atrium with carved pillars branching across a rock ceiling. Various doors opened to all sides. Now he heard excited voices to the right. He trotted lightly to where a massive iron or steel door had been wrenched askew. Shielding his own body from view, he peered inside the next room.
And there was Raeder and his party! It was startling to see his quarry after four years, standing in a ballroom-sized stone chamber barren of all furniture or decoration. He was as Hood remembered him, tall, handsome, and carrying himself with that peculiar Teutonic poise. Raeder and three other men he assumed to be Nazis were dressed in mountain boots and heavy jackets, their packs on the floor. A smaller, slighter figure was Keyuri; when she moved his recognition was instant. Her slim grace was like a fingerprint. Each of the five people held a long staff, he saw. From the tips a light shone, like a gas wick. And beyond was some kind of vast machine, high as a cliff, glittery from metal and somber with black pipes and boilers. This contraption glowed and emitted a low whine. Pipes from the machine led into low tunnels at each end of the room. At the center of this behemoth was a cavity. In this cavity was a rack, and on that rack rested another staff, but this one translucent, like a piece of agate. It was not shining like a lantern but instead pulsed with a golden glow, like a beating heart. Beyond was a pit that appeared to descend into the earth, its mouth reflecting red.
What ancient civilization had built this thing?
“I think the machine is energizing the staff with a power we’ve no knowledge of, the power of Vril,” Raeder was saying to the others. “Something comes through those pipes in the long tunnel.”
“What’s the staff for?” one of the Germans asked.
“Think of legends and fairy stories. Remember the magic wand or wizard’s staff? What if they were true? I think our forebears wielded these rods of power.”
“It’s dangerous,” Keyuri warned.
