Following the twists and turns in the tunnel caused him to lose his orientation. It grew increasingly dark. No brightness from the outside world reflected on the walls in here. Only the meager beam of his flashlight. The rock walls on either side were so narrow in places they seemed to fold in on him.
He trained his light toward the ceiling. Wavy curtains of stalactites pressed down from above, their bottom-most tips dripping with moisture. Looking up at them made him feel dizzy. He studied the walls for any evidence of the symbols from the key. The bare rock swirled and twisted into grotesque shapes. Daniel’s mind began to play tricks. He saw faces in the stone. Lost souls feeling the torments of hell. Their mouths gaping in endless screams of terror.
He continued moving down the gallery searching the walls and ceiling as he went, but all he found were unnerving images from hell. By now, he knew he was far beyond the reach of the world above. With no warning, his flashlight faltered and went out completely. He shook it to reseat the battery but accidentally dropped it. He could hear it rolling down the slope in the tunnel floor.
He fought the urge to scream as a surge of panic shot through him. He felt the darkness like a living thing. It was pressing into his eyes and ears and nose. He lost all sense of spacial orientation. Everything seemed to be tilted at an angle. Which way was up? Which was down? He couldn’t feel the dimensions of his own body. He tried guiding his fingers to reach for a wall, but his fingers weren’t where he expected them to be. Nor was the wall. He flailed around in an absolute void.
He didn’t like this underworld. He couldn’t understand why anyone would choose such a place to worship a god. He was used to divinities who lived in the sky. Worship was conducted from a pulpit by a minister who told him what laws God expected him to obey.
There was no law here. There was no reason here. That had been left behind in a world of light and order and the works of man. Here there was only feeling. What kind of god might one meet here? Nothing in Daniel’s religion had prepared him for an encounter with the deity of this place. He was sure it wasn’t Zeus. Something older than time itself lived in the silence here, and it marked his presence. He remembered a word he had discovered while researching the heathen religions. Chthonic. Primordial deities that presided over birth and death. Womb and tomb seemed to fuse together in this place. The combination unsettled him. Weren’t they supposed to be distinct? He felt his mind, his very identity, collapsing into the darkness.
He dropped to all fours. At least he could feel the ground. He knew which way was down. Groping around, he finally grasped the cold metal tube of the flashlight. He tapped it sharply against the stone and tried switching it on again. A feeble beam of light emerged.
Daniel scrambled to his feet and ran out of the gallery, afraid that the battery would fail for good if he lingered to complete his search. He shouted for Nikos and told him to come outside when he was done. Racing up the stairs toward the sky, he felt his legs trembling under him. He leaned heavily against a boulder at the cave entrance, commanding himself to calm down. For several minutes he did nothing but concentrate on breathing in and out. Slowly, by degrees, he felt the ordinary nature of the world returning. Even so, he couldn’t shake the sensation that something—a shadow of something—had glided across his soul. Was it evil? The devil? He didn’t think so. It hadn’t felt either good or bad. It was simply a presence. A something alive inside the darkness.
He felt the need to climb high to shake it off. He turned to look up at the altar stone several feet above where he stood. He scaled the boulders until he reached the top of the stone table. From here he could see the Nida plateau below where the earth was blanketed in summer green. Small white dots speckled the landscape - sheep grazing peacefully. He took comfort in those ordinary sights. His shallow breathing finally relaxed. He sank down heavily on the altar, his feet dangling over the edge.
From this vantage point, his began to reconsider his strategy for finding the relic. He realized it had been a mistake to search the cavern on the mountain and not simply because it unnerved him. He thought of the words of the riddle. “When the soul of the lady rises with the sun.” Surely, this referred to something in the sky and not in the ground. The eastern sky to be exact. This altar table where he sat faced east. From here he might see something dawning in the eastern sky. But what? The three clues were all a muddle that made no sense.
Daniel rubbed his forehead wearily as a disturbing thought struck him. How could he be sure he had the right translation of the riddle at all? He hadn’t actually looked at the symbols himself. He had relied on the interpretation of the strangers that Hunt had killed. What if they had been wrong? What if they had translated the glyphs incorrectly?
He knew what he had to do and the thought of it upset him even more than the idea of encountering that thing in the darkness again. He would have to go back to Karfi. The place where three bodies were buried under an avalanche of rock at the bottom of an underground tomb. He would have to look at the carvings on the stone stele and decipher what was written there for himself.
Chapter 17 – Father of Lies
Abraham strode purposefully through the door
