Raiders Of the Lost Ark

Indy went to the truck and took out a shovel. The diggers were already moving toward the spot. They had leathery faces, burned faces. Indy wondered if they managed to live beyond forty in a place like this.

Sallah, carrying a spade, walked alongside him. 'I believe they might come here only if Belloq realizes he's working in the wrong place. Otherwise, there would be no good reason.'

'Who ever heard of a Nazi needing a good rea­son?'

Sallah smiled. He turned and gazed across the dunes; miles of nothing stretched away. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'Even a Nazi would need a good reason to wander in this place.'

Indy struck the ground with the point of his spade. 'He'd still need a requisition and have it signed in triplicate in Berlin.' He looked at the diggers. 'Let's go,' he said. 'Let's get on with this.'

They began their dig, heaping sand, laboring hard, furiously, pausing only to drink water that had al­ready turned warm in the camel-skin bags. They dug until the light had gone from the sky; but the same heat remained, tethered to the sand.

Belloq sat in his tent, drumming his fingertips on the table that held maps, drawings of the Ark, sheets of paper covered with the hieroglyphics of his calculations. There was a dark mood of frustration inside him; he was edgy, nervous-and the presence of Die­trich, as well as Dietrich's lackey Gobler, didn't help his frame of mind much. Belloq rose, went to a wash­basin, splashed water across his face.

'A wasted day,' Dietrich said. 'A wasted day . . .'

Belloq toweled his face, then poured himself a small shot of cognac. He stared at the German, then at the underling Gobler, who seemed to exist only as a shadow of Dietrich.

Dietrich, undeterred, went on: 'My men have been digging all day-and for what? Tell me, for what?'

Belloq sipped his drink, then said, 'Based on the information in my possession, my calculations were correct. But archaeology is not the most exact of sci­ences, Dietrich. I don't think you entirely understand this fact. Perhaps the Ark will be found in an adjoin­ing chamber. Perhaps some vital piece of evidence still eludes us.' He shrugged and finished his drink. Usually he loathed the way the Germans nit-picked, the way they always seemed to hover around him as if they expected him to be a seer, a prophet. Now, however, he understood their change in mood.

'The Fuhrer demands constant reports of progress,' Dietrich said. 'He is not a patient man.'

'You may cast your mind back to my conversation with your Fuhrer, Dietrich. You may well recall I made no promises. I simply said that things looked favorable, nothing more.'

There was a silence. Gobler moved in front of the kerosene lamp, throwing a huge shadow that Belloq found curiously menacing. Gobler said, 'The girl could help us. After all, she was in possession of the original piece for years.'

'Indeed,' Dietrich said.

'I doubt if she knows anything,' Belloq said.

'It is worth a try,' Gobler said.

He wondered why he found their treatment of the girl so unsettling to him. They had used her barbarically- they had threatened her with a variety of tor­tures, but it seemed apparent to him that she had nothing to tell. Was this some soft spot, some awful weakness, he had toward her? The thought appalled him. He stared at Dietrich for a moment. How very badly they live in fear of their sorry little Fuhrer, he thought. He must strut through their dreams at night -if they dreamed at all, a prospect he couldn't quite believe. They were men stripped of imagination.

'If you don't want to be concerned with the girl, Belloq, I have someone who can undertake the task of discovering what she knows.'

It was no time to parade a weakness, a concern for the woman. Dietrich went to the opening of the tent and called out. After a moment the man named Arnold Toht appeared, extending his arm in a Nazi salute. In the center of his palm was the scar, burned-out tissue, in the perfect shape of the headpiece.

'The woman,' Dietrich said. 'I believe you know her, Toht.'

Toht said, 'There are old scores to settle.'

'And old scars,' Belloq said.

Tohtself-consciously lowered his hand.

When it was dark and a pale desert moon had come up over the horizon, a moon of muted blue, Indy and his Arabs stopped digging. They had lit torches, watching the moon begin slowly to darken as clouds passed in front of it; after that there was lightning in the sky, strange lightning that came in brief forks and flashes, an electric storm summoned, it seemed, out of nowhere.

The men had dug a hole that revealed a heavy stone door flush with the bottom of the pit. For a long time nobody said anything. Tools were produced from the truck and the diggers forced the stone door open, grunting as they labored with the weight of the thing.

The stone door was pulled back. Beneath the door was an underground chamber. The Well of the Souls. It was about thirty feet deep, a large chamber whose walls were covered with hieroglyphics and carvings. The roof of the place was supported by huge statues, guardians of the vault. It was an awesome construc­tion, and it created, in the light of the torches, a sense of bottomlessness, an abyss in which history itself was trapped. The men moved their torches as they peered down.

The far end of the chamber came into view, barely lit. There was a stone altar that held a stone chest; a floor covered with some form of strange dark carpeting.

'The chest must contain the Ark,' Indy said. 'I don't understand what that gray stuff is all over the floor.'

But then, in another flash of lightning, he saw; he shook, dropping his torch down into the Well, hearing the hiss of hundreds of snakes.

As the torch burned, the snakes moved away from the heart of the flame. More than hundreds, thou­sands of snakes, Egyptian asps, shivering and un­dulating and coiling across the floor as they answered the flame with their savage hissing. The floor seemed to move in the flicker of the torch-but it wasn't the floor, it was the snakes, striking backward from the flame. Only the altar was untouched by snakes. Only the stone altar seemed immune to the asps.

'Why did it have to be snakes?' Indy asked. 'Anything but snakes, anything else. I could have taken almost anything else.'

'Asps,' Sallah said. 'Very poisonous.'

'Thanks for that piece of news, Sallah.'

'They stay clear of the flame, you notice.'

Pull yourself together, Indy thought. You're so close to the Ark you can feel it, so you face your phobia head on and do something about it. A thou­sand snakes-so what? So what? The living floor was the embodiment of an old nightmare. Snakes pur­sued him in the darkest of his dreams, rooting around his innermost fears. He turned to the diggers and said, 'Okay. Okay. A few snakes. Big deal. I want lots of torches. And oil. I want a landing strip down there.'

After a time, lit torches were dropped into the Well.

Several canisters of oil were dropped into the spaces where the snakes had slithered away from the flames. The diggers then began to lower a large wooden crate, rope handles attached to each corner, into the hole. Indy watched, wondering if a phobia were something you could swallow, digest, something you could ig­nore as though it were the intense pain of a passing indigestion. Despite his resolve to go down there, he shuddered-and the asps, coiling and uncoiling, filled the darkness with their sibilant sound, a sound more menacing than any he'd ever heard. A rope was lowered now: he stood upright, swallowed hard, then swung out on the rope and down into the Well. A moment later Sallah followed him. Beyond the edges of the flames the snakes wriggled, slid, snakes piled on snakes, mountains of the reptiles, snake eggs hatching, shells breaking to reveal tiny asps, snakes devouring other snakes.

For a time he hung suspended, the rope swaying back and forth, Sallah hanging just above him.

'I guess this is it,' he said.

Marion watched as Belloq entered the tent. He came across the floor slowly and studied her for a while, but he made no move to untie her gag. What was it about this man? What was it that caused a sensation, something almost like panic, inside her? She could hear the sound of her heart beat. She stared at him, wishing she could just