Raiders Of the Lost Ark

rumbling, filling the darkness. The Ark's power, the Ark's intense power. It moved in Belloq's blood, bewildering, demanding to be un­derstood. The power. The knowledge. He paused near the top of the steps, chanting still but unable to hear his own voice now. The humming, the humming -it was growing, slicing through the night, filling all the silences. Then he climbed more, reached the top, stared at the Ark. Despite the dust of centuries, de­spite neglect, it was the most beautiful thing Belloq had ever seen. And it glowed, it glowed, feebly at first and then more brightly, as he looked at it. He was filled with wonder, watching the angers, the shin­ing gold, the inner glow. The noise, too, rumbled through him, shook and surprised him. He felt him­self begin to vibrate, as if the tremor might cause him to disintegrate and go spinning out into space. But there wasn't space, there wasn't time: his entire being was defined by the Ark, delineated by this relic of man's communication with God.

Speak to me.

Tell me what you know, tell me what the secrets of existence are.

His own voice seemed to be issuing from every part of his body now, through mouth, pores, blood cells. And he was rising, floating, distinct from the rigid world of logic all around him, defying the laws of the universe. Speak to me. Tell me. He raised the ivory rod, placing it under the lid, then labored to pry the lid open. The humming was louder now, all-consuming. He didn't hear the klieg lights explode below, the showers of broken glass that fell like worthless diamonds into the darkness. The humming -the voice of God, he thought. Speak to me. Speak to me. And then, as he worked with the rod, he felt suddenly blank, as if he hadn't existed until this mo­ment, as if all memories had been erased, blank and strangely calm, at peace, undergoing a sense of one­ness with the night around him, linked by all kinds of connections to the universe. Bound to the cosmos, to all matter that floated and expanded and shrank in the farthest estuaries of space, to exploding stars, spinning planets, and even to the unknowable dark of infinity. He ceased to exist. Whoever Belloq had been, he was no longer. He was nothing now: he ex­isted only as the sound that came from the Ark. The sound of God.

'He's going to open it,' Indy said.

'The noise,' Marion said. 'I wish I could put my hands to my ears. What is that noise?'

'The Ark.'

'The Ark?'

Indy was thinking about something, an eclipsed memory, something that shifted loosely in his mind. What? What was it? Something he'd heard recently. What? The Ark. Something to do with the Ark. What what what?

The Ark, the Ark-try to remember!

Up on the slab, at the top of the crude steps, Belloq was trying to open the lid. Lamps were exploding in violent showers of sharded glass. Even the moon, vis­ible now in the night sky, seemed like an orb about to erupt and shatter. The night, the whole night, was like a great bomb attached to the end of a short fuse -a lit fuse, Indy thought. What is it? What am I try­ing to remember?

The lid was opening.

Belloq, sweating, perspiring in the heavy robes, ap­plied the ivory rod while he kept up the chant that was inaudible now under the noise of the Ark. The mo­ment. The moment of truth. Revelation. The mysteri­ous networks of the divine. He groaned and raised the lid. It sprung open all at once and the light that emanated from within blinded him. But he didn't step away, didn't step back, didn't move. The light hypno­tized him as surely as the sound mesmerized him. He was devoid of the capacity to move. Muscles froze. His body ceased to work. The lid.

It was the last thing he saw.

Because then the night was filled with fire rockets that screamed out of the Ark, pillars of flame that stunned the darkness, outreaches of fire searing the heavens. A white circle of light made a flashing ring around the island, a light that made the ocean glow and whipped up currents of spray, forcing a broken tide to rise upward in the dark. The light, it was the light of the first day of the universe, the light of new­ness, of things freshly born, it was the light that God made: the light of creation. And it pierced Belloq with the hard brightness of an inconceivable diamond, a light beyond the sorrowful limitations of any precious stone. It carved at his heart, shattered him. And it was more than a light-it was a weapon, a force, that drove through Belloq and lit him with the power of a billion candles: he was white, orange, blue, savaged by this electricity that stormed from the Ark.

And he smiled.

He smiled because, for a moment, he was the power. The power absorbed him. There was no distinction between the man and the force. Then the moment passed. Then his eyes disintegrated in the sockets, leaving black sightless holes, and his skin began to peel from the bone, curling back as if seized by a sud­den leprosy, rotting, burning, scorched, blackened. And still he smiled. He smiled even as he began to change from something human to something touched by God, touched by God's rage, something that turned, silently, to a layer of dust.

When the lights began to shaft the dark, when the en­tire sky was filling with the force of the Ark, Indy had involuntarily shut his eyes-blinded by the power. And then all at once he remembered, he remembered what had eluded him before, the night he'd spent in the bouse of Imam: Those who would open the Ark and release its force will die if they look upon it . . . And through the noise, the blinding white pil­lars that had made the stars fade, he'd called to Mar­ion: Don't look!

Keep your eyes closed!

She had twisted her face away from the first flare, the eruption of fire, and then, even if what he said puzzled her, she shut her eyes tight. She was afraid, afraid and overawed. And still she wanted to look. Still she was drawn to the great celestial flare» to the insane destruction of the night.

Don't look-he kept saying that even as she felt herself weaken.

He kept repeating it. Screaming it.

The night, like a dynamo, hummed, groaned, roared; the lights that seared the night seemed to howl.

Don't look don't look don't look!

The upraised tower of flame devastated. It hung in the sky like the shadow of a deity, a burning, shifting shadow composed not of darkness but of light, pure light. It hung there, both beautiful and monstrous, and it blinded those who looked upon it. It ripped eyes from the faces of the soldiers. It turned them from men into uniformed skeletons, covering the ground with bones, the black marks of scorches, covering every­thing with human debris. It burned the island, flattened trees, overturned boats, smashed the dock itself. It changed everything. Fire and light. It destroyed as though it were an anger that might never be appeased.

It broke the statue to which Indy and Marion were tied: the statue crumbled until it ceased to exist. And then the lid of the Ark slammed shut on the slab and the night became dark again and the ocean was silent. Indy waited for a long time before he looked.

The Ark was shining up there.

Shining with an intensity that suggested a contented silence; and a warning, a warning filled with menace.

Indy stared at Marion.

She was looking around speechlessly, staring at what the Ark had created. Wreckage, ruin, death. She opened her mouth, but she didn't speak.

There was nothing to say.

Nothing.

The earth around them hadn't been scorched. It was untouched.

She raised her face to the Ark.

She reached very slowly for Indy's hand and held it tight.

13: Epilogue: Washington, D.C.

Sun streamed through the windows of Colonel Mus-grove's office. Outside, across a thick lawn, was a stand of cherry trees, and the morning sky was clear, a pale blue. Musgrove was seated behind his desk. Eaton had a chair to the side of the desk. There was an­other man, a man who stood leaning against the wall and who hadn't uttered a word; he had the sinister an­onymity of a bureaucrat. He might have been rubber-stamped himself, Indy thought, Powerful Civil Servant in thick black letters on his brow.

'We appreciate your service,' Musgrove said. 'And the cash reimbursement-we assume it was satisfac­