‘You didn’t need the GPS to know that,’ said Vogler. Ahead, a crater had been gouged out of the ground, mangled metal scattered round it. A short distance away, more debris surrounded another hole - one that went much deeper into the towering mass of stone than anything a missile could have caused. ‘This is it. We’ve found Eden.’
‘In there?’ Callum said sceptically.
Vogler didn’t reply, instead climbing out and regarding the surroundings. The only sound was the wind, the plain desolate and lifeless. It didn’t seem possible that the end of their quest could be here. But then, he had never imagined that his missions for the Covenant would take him to a city frozen beneath the Antarctic ice either.
The doors of the other Humvees opened. Zamal emerged first, mood as black as ever. ‘No bodies? So much for the wonders of UCAVs.’ He made a disapproving sound, regarding Callum caustically. ‘War by remote control, using robots to do your killing? A cowardly way to fight. A true warrior of Allah looks his enemies in the eye.’ Issuing orders to his men, he started for the cave entrance.
‘Where are you going?’ Vogler called.
Zamal paused as the men went to the hole. ‘To look my enemies in the eye.’
‘We should wait for Ribbsley - he’ll be here in less than an hour.’
‘You should know by now, Killian,’ Zamal said with a thin smile, ‘I am not a patient man.’
One of his men reported that there was a wider tunnel behind the opening. ‘Wide enough to fit the Humvees?’ Vogler asked. The trooper nodded. ‘We should clear it. We don’t know what’s in there - they might be useful.’
‘I
‘We had an arrangement with Dr Wilde.’
‘Which was cancelled the moment she betrayed us.
Nina, Chase and Sophia emerged from the jungle on to the lake’s muddy shore. ‘There’s the statue,’ said Chase, seeing it towering over them to the east.
Nina looked up at it. ‘It’s bigger than I thought. Must be at least a hundred feet tall.’ It was higher than the small plateau behind it, the head rising above the edge of the steep cliff. The rockface itself, she now saw, was covered with a network of similar copper ‘branches’ to those they had seen atop the temple in Antarctica. And from this angle, she could see a feature behind the statue, seemingly cut out of the rock. ‘Eddie, give me the gun.’ She took a closer look through the rifle’s sights.
‘What is it?’ Chase asked.
‘It’s a path to the summit. Stairs, carved out of the stone.’
‘Like that spiral one in Antarctica?’
‘This is open on one side - it’s more of a zig-zag. A long zig-zag. There’s a hell of a lot of steps.’
Chase sighed. ‘Great. More climbing.’
‘At least it’s not covered in ice this time.’ She glanced across the lake. ‘Hello, what’s that?’
‘Another tunnel,’ said Sophia as Nina peered at it through the scope. ‘It looks flooded, though.’
‘It is,’ Nina confirmed. ‘Almost to the roof. And the water inside doesn’t look to be flowing - it must be blocked at the other end.’
‘Like the one we came in through,’ said Chase.
‘Yeah . . .’ She slowly turned clockwise, pointing across the lake at the near-submerged tunnel entrance. ‘One.’ Then to the waterfall falling into the chasm, and the opening beyond it. ‘Two.’ Further round, another stream running roughly northwest into the jungle - the one they had crossed earlier. ‘Three.’ And finally, turning back to face along the lakeside, a wider waterway between them and the statue. ‘And four. Four rivers, all fed from the same source - and I bet that at one time they flowed into the desert.’
‘Four rivers,’ echoed Sophia. ‘Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates . . .’
‘The four rivers that according to Genesis flowed from the Garden of Eden. But they don’t any more - because the Veteres blocked them off.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Chase. ‘The Tigris and the Euphrates are in bloody Iraq! That’s not even on the same continent.’
‘Names get re-used. Paris, Texas isn’t the same as Paris, France. It could be another case of a memory being passed down through generations.’ She looked back up at the plateau. ‘We need to get up there. If this place is anything like the temple in Antarctica, then whatever’s at the top of those stairs will be the place that we couldn’t get into because of the ice - the Source of Life.’
‘Or the Tree of Life, if you use the alternative meaning,’ Sophia said. ‘Another reference to Genesis.’
‘And if there’s another library, then we’ve got our Tree of Knowledge.’
‘If there’s an apple tree in there,’ Chase said, staring up at the statue’s impassive face, ‘I might have to apologise to Nan for skiving out of Sunday school.’
They headed along the lake. Crossing the fourth stream, they splashed over to the far bank close to the wall surrounding the statue. The high stone barricade at first appeared to have no entrances, but then they saw that a huge lump of rock had fallen from the ceiling, demolishing a section of it.
‘Good job that happened,’ said Chase as they approached. ‘We’d have had a job getting over that wall.’
‘It’s not just a temple,’ said Nina, realising its purpose. ‘It’s a
‘So did they block everything off from the outside . . . or the inside?’ Chase said. He pointed at the plateau behind the statue. ‘Are they still up there?’
‘Let’s go see.’ Nina led the way up the pile of broken stone to the damaged wall. She peered over it at what lay below. ‘Oh . . .’
It was another library, rank after rank of clay tablets and cylinders containing the knowledge of the Veteres. But unlike the carefully arranged archive in the Antarctic, this was chaotic, thrown together. Some of the tablets, those nearest the base of the statue, were carefully stacked, but the majority were simply piled up, increasingly randomly the closer they were to the outer wall. Some had fallen - or been knocked - over, smashed pieces littering the narrow pathways through the crammed collection. The whole place was covered with dirt, damp with dripping water, creeping plants laying claim to every surface.
‘God, what happened to it?’ Chase asked.
Nina felt a pang of sadness, recognising the growing desperation of the people who had made it. ‘It was their last stand,’ she said. ‘They wanted to preserve all of this, just like they did in Antarctica . . . but they were running out of time. They must have been building the wall around it even as they brought everything in.’ She indicated the stacks closest to the statue. ‘When they started, they tried to keep everything organised, but at the end, all they had time to do was just dump the tablets and hope not too many of them broke. Once they had as much as they could, they finished the wall. The knowledge of an entire civilisation, sealed in here . . . for ever.’
‘Presumably they took the most important records with them,’ said Sophia. ‘Like the audio cylinders, the voices of their prophets. As long as they had those, they knew they could eventually make copies.’
‘But they must still have lost so much.’ Nina contemplated the remains of the library for a long, quiet moment. Then she climbed through the wall.
Through binoculars, Zamal watched the three figures drop out of sight into the temple. After entering the vast cavern and overcoming his initial awe, the first thing he had done was get a sense of the topography of his new battle zone - and while surveying the landscape from a rise near the tunnel mouth, he had spotted the fugitives moving along a lake, heading for the enormous blasphemy that was the statue at its far end.
He and his men gave chase, running along the edge of the ravine splitting the chamber until they found a log bridge. Quickly traversing it, they moved as swiftly as they could through the jungle to the lakeshore - now only minutes behind Wilde and the others.
