Raiders Of the Lost Ark

Indians, and he swung round to see three of them running back along the trail, leaving the donkeys. Barranca had his pistol out and was leveling it to fire at the fleeing Indians, but Indy gripped the man's wrist, twisted it slightly, swung the Peruvian around to face him.

'No,' he said.

Barranca stared at Indy accusingly. 'They are cow­ards, Senor Jones.'

'We don't need them,' Indy said. 'And we don't need to kill them.'

The Peruvian brought the pistol to his side, glanced at his companion Satipo and looked back at Indy again. 'Without the Indians, Senor, who will carry the supplies? It was not part of our arrangement that Satipo and I do menial labor, no?'

Indy watched the Peruvian, the dark coldness at the heart of the man's eyes. He couldn't ever imagine this one smiling. He couldn't imagine daylight finding its way into Barranca's soul. Indy remembered seeing such dead eyes before: on a shark. 'We'll dump the supplies. As soon as we get what we came here for, we can make it back to the plane by dusk. We don't need supplies now.'

Barranca was fidgeting with his pistol.

A trigger-happy fellow, Indy thought. Three dead Indians wouldn't make a bit of difference to him.

'Put the gun away,' Indy told him. 'Pistols don't agree with me, Barranca, unless I'm the one with my finger on the trigger.'

Barranca shrugged and glanced at Satipo; some kind of silent communication passed between them. They'll choose their moment, Indy knew. They'll make their move at the right time.

'Just tuck it in your belt, okay?' Indy asked. He looked briefly at the two remaining Indians, herded into place by Satipo. They had trancelike expressions of fear on their faces; they might have been zombies.

Indy turned toward the Temple, gazing at it, savor­ing the moment. The mists were becoming denser around the place, a conspiracy of nature, as if the jungle intended to keep its secrets forever.

Satipo bent and pulled something out of the bark of a tree. He raised his hand to Indy. In the center of the palm lay a tiny dart.

'Hovitos,' Satipo said. 'The poison is still fresh- three days, Senor Jones. They must be following us.'

'If they knew we were here, they'd have killed us already,' Indy said calmly.

He took the dart. Crude but effective. He thought of the Hovitos, their legendary fierceness, their historic attachment to the Temple. They were superstitious enough to stay away from the Temple itself, but defi­nitely jealous enough to kill anybody else who went there.

'Let's go,' he said. 'Let's get it over with.'

They had to hack and slash again, cut and slice through the elaborately tangled vines, rip at the creep­ers that rose from underfoot like shackles lying in wait. Sweating, Indy paused; he let his knife dangle at his side. From the corner of his eye he was conscious of one of the Indians hauling back a thick branch.

It was the scream that made him swing abruptly round, his knife raised in the air now. It was the wild scream of the Indian that made him rush toward the branch just as the Quechua, still yelling, dashed off into the jungle. The other remaining Indian followed, crashing mindlessly, panicked, against the barbed branches and sharp creepers. And then they were both gone. Indy, knife poised, hauled back the branch that had so scared the Indians. He was ready to lunge at whatever had terrified them, ready to thrust his blade forward. He drew the branch aside.

It sat behind the swirling mist.

Carved out of stone, timeless, its face the figment of some bleak nightmare, it was a sculpture of a Chachapoyan demon. He watched it for a second, aware of the malevolence in its unchanging face, and he realized it had been placed here to guard the Tem­ple, to scare off anybody who might pass this way. A work of art, he thought, and he wondered briefly about its creators, their system of beliefs, about the kind of religious awe that 'might inspire something so dreadful as this statue. He forced himself to put out his hand and touch the demon lightly on the shoulder.

Then he was conscious of something else, something that was more disturbing than the stone face. More eerie.

The silence.

The weird silence.

Nothing. No birds. No insects. No breeze to shake sounds out of the trees. A zero, as if everything in this place were dead. As if everything had been stilled, si­lenced by an ungodly, destructive hand. He touched his forehead. Cold, cold sweat. Spooks, he thought. The place is filled with spooks. This was the kind of silence you might have imagined before creation.

He moved away from the stone figure, followed by the two Peruvians, who seemed remarkably subdued.

'What is it, in the name of God?' Barranca asked. Indy shrugged. 'Ah, some old trinket. What else? Every Chachapoyan household had to have one, didn't you know?'

Barranca looked grim. 'Sometimes you seem to take this very lightly, Senor Jones.'

'Is there another way?'

The mist crawled, rolled, clawed, seeming to press the three men back. Indy peered through the vapors, staring at the Temple entrance, the elaborately primi­tive friezes that had yielded to vegetation with the passage of time, the clutter of shrubs, leaves, wines; but what held him more was the dark entrance itself, round and open, like the mouth of a corpse. He thought of Forrestal passing into that dark mouth, crossing the entranceway to his death. Poor guy.

Barranca stared at the entranceway. 'How can we trust you, Senor Jones? No one has ever come out alive. Why should we put our faith in you?'

Indy smiled at the Peruvian. 'Barranca, Barranca

-you've got to learn that even a miserable gringo

sometimes tells the truth, huh?' And he pulled a piece

of folded parchment out of his shirt pocket. He stared

at the faces of the Peruvians. Their expressions were

transparent, such looks of greed. Indy wondered whose

throats had been cut so that these two villains had

managed to obtain the other half. 'This, Barranca,

should take care of your faith,' and he spread the

parchment on the ground. -

Satipo took a similar piece of parchment from his pocket and laid it alongside the one Indy had pro­duced. The two parts dovetailed neatly. For a time, nobody spoke; the threshold of caution had been reached, Indy knew- and he waited, tensely, for some­thing to happen.

'Well, amigos,' he said. 'We're partners. We have what you might call mutual needs. Between us we have a complete map of the floor plan of the Temple. We've got what nobody else ever had. Now, assuming that pillar there marks the corner-'

Before he could finish his sentence he saw, as if in a slowed reel of film, Barranca reach for his pistol. He saw the thin brown hand curl itself over the butt of the silver gun-and then he moved. Indiana Jones moved faster than the Peruvian could have followed; his motions a blur, a parody of vision, he moved back from Barranca and, reaching under the back of his leather jacket, produced a coiled bullwhip, his hand tight on the handle. His movements became liquid, one fluid and graceful display of muscle and poise and balance, arm and bullwhip seeming to be one thing, extensions of each other. He swung the whip, lashing the air, watching it twist itself tightly around Barranca's wrist. Then he jerked downward, tighter still, and the gun discharged itself into the ground. For a moment the