The Barbary Pirates

point to the head of the sarcophagus where Cuvier was breathing.

“Ow!”

“Sorry. If you angle it this way…”

“Which way? I can’t see a damn thing.”

“Don’t poke my bagpipes.”

“Just hold still a moment. There we go, steady…aw. Careful, Georges, here comes the tip!”

I began scraping the weapon at the joint between the sides of the sarcophagus and the floor, feeling above it with my fingers. Wait, was there a mark? I felt a diamond shape inscribed in the stone, small and shallow, but eerily recognizable. A diamond, or was it an overlapping compass and square, ancient symbol of Freemasonry? My, that fraternity got around! I stabbed at the stone beneath it, looking for an opening. Suddenly there was a click.

And then, before I could cry warning, we were plunging into a void of utter blackness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was a miracle none of us were impaled by my sword. We hit a slope and slid in the dark, hardly knowing which way was up, weapons clattering, and Fulton’s theory about us having descended into hell seemed all too terrifyingly true. Yet at last we, sword, blunderbuss, longrifle, and bagpipes rolled to some kind of bottom—just how deep I never knew.

There was air, dusty but breathable. And it was hot, just like an entryway to Hades.

“Georges? William? Robert?”

“It just gets worse and worse,” one of them groaned.

“Is everyone still alive?”

“How do we tell?”

“Well, we’re here, I think. So the ring showed something after all. The sarcophagus wasn’t the treasure, it was only the trapdoor to it. All we have to do is keep our wits about us, discover whatever secrets are down here, and find a way back out.”

“Our wits! We can’t see a thing.” I think it was Cuvier.

“Ethan, we fell several seconds straight down before hitting that slope,” Fulton said. “I doubt we can climb back up to that tomb, and what good would it do us if we did?”

“When our enemies open it, they’ll see which way we’ve gone,” Smith added.

“Perhaps, or perhaps my sword tip triggered a spring,” I said. “The bottom opens, but then springs back. They may open the sarcophagus to find us and, instead of our corpses, it will be empty once more. They’ll think it a miracle or, more likely, that we were never in there in the first place and gave them the slip. Quite ingenious on our part, really.”

“Why should they care?” asked Fulton. “We’re doomed anyway. We’ve gone from one grave to a bigger one.”

“No, I run around in these underground places all the time,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “There’s something down here, maybe something that hasn’t been seen since medieval times. I think there was a Freemason mark where I triggered the collapse of the trapdoor. This may be a Templar tunnel, my friends.”

“Templars?” Smith groaned. “What are you talking about?”

“Apparently that group of Crusader knights was on the trail of some ancient mysteries and succeeded for a time in finding some. I discovered one in the Near East, in a lost city, and another in the American wilderness. They seem to have been systematically reassembling the past. After the Saracens drove the Christians from the Holy Land, the Knights set up strongholds in places like Cyprus and Malta. Perhaps they came here, too, and built that hidden door for later generations who never came. We may not be in peril, but in luck. We’re on the cusp of rediscovering what Napoleon and Fouche really sent us to find, some ancient weapon of a lost civilization. Maybe we’ll win a prize.”

There was a long silence in the dark. Then the Frenchman spoke again, slowly, carefully. “You realize that we are all completely insane?”

“If so, then Napoleon is, too. Think about it. He’s heard rumors of a weapon connected with Og and Atlantis, and takes a chance by sending us here. I didn’t much believe the legends myself, when we saw the poverty and rawness of this island, but a tomb with a trap? With a Masonic engraving? Come, my friends, there has to be a reason. We’ve tumbled into a pit, it’s true, but perhaps a pit with a reason for being. I know we’re bruised, bloody, without food or water, and lost in pitch blackness without a clue where to go, but fortune may actually be smiling on us.” I grinned in the dark. “I’m quite excited, actually.”

Silence, again. I hoped they hadn’t crept away.

“Before we can find buried treasure,” I continued briskly, “we have to decide which way to go. My hope is the slope we just tumbled down leads to a tunnel we can follow without any junctions, caverns, or drops. We can hold hands, taking turns groping through the dark.”

Groans. “I’m not holding your hand,” Fulton said. “We’ll light a candle.”

“Candle?”

“I kept one when we ignited my fire hose.”

“You had a taper?” Cuvier asked. “Why didn’t you light it in the sarcophagus?”

“There was hardly a point. There was nowhere to go and the flame would use up the oxygen.”

“All Americans are lunatics,” the zoologist muttered. “Not just Gage.”

“Well, I can make a flash in the pan of my longrifle,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s gather some lint to have something to better catch the wick.”

So we did, and some priming from my powder horn and a pull of the trigger produced what was in the darkness a blinding flash, which ignited a ball of lint we in turn used to light Fulton’s candle. With no holder, we stuck the wax shaft temporarily in the barrel of Smith’s blunderbuss. Then we inspected ourselves for damage. We were filthy, torn, and raw from scrapes in our tumbles, but surprisingly intact. The very tip of my rapier was bent slightly and our weapons knocked about, but nothing—including our bones—seemed to be seriously broken. The candle illuminated a steep dirt slope, down which we’d tumbled. The sarcophagus was far out of sight above. In the other direction was a narrow tunnel, just high enough to stoop in, that twisted through lava rock.

The tube led downward, toward Hades.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Our underground way twisted like a worm. At times the ceiling was high enough to stand freely and at other times we had to crawl, always fearing we’d come to a dead end. The walls bulged in and out irregularly, casting doubt that medieval knights had carved it.

“They apparently used nature’s casting,” Cuvier said. “It’s probably a lava tube. Volcanoes will sometimes have pipes through which molten rock flows. When this island was a volcano, this may have been a conduit from the central peak to the sea.”

“The island is still a volcano,” Smith corrected.

“Does that mean lava could flow through here now?” Fulton asked worriedly.

“Only if there were an eruption,” Smith said. “But if there were, we’d be suffocated by gas or cooked by heat long before any lava came.”

“I see.”

“Or earthquakes could collapse the tunnel on top of us,” added Cuvier.

“Heated water could boil us alive,” suggested Smith.

“Or scald us to death with steam,” agreed Cuvier.

“At Mount Etna, onlookers have been killed by flying rock.”