“Why east?” the pythia asked.
Erik kicked a stone aside with his shoe. “The direction of sunrise. You know, resurrection and all that.”
She gave him a skeptical look.
“What, you think Christians were the first ones to come up with that idea?” He laughed. “Nothing in Christianity is original. Not virgin birth or a dying and resurrected god. They got all that stuff from pagan lore. Sunrise as a symbol of rebirth too.”
“He’s quite right,” Griffin affirmed.
“Go figure,” Cassie murmured contemplatively. Switching her attention back to the remains of a tomb, she observed, “Must have gotten kind of crowded in there over time.”
“A single tholos was used by an extended family over the course of centuries.” Griffin warmed to his topic. “There may have been more than one burial chamber, and they used a round robin system until all the chambers were occupied. Then they’d begin the cycle again. Minoan coffins weren’t as large as the sort we use. They buried their dead in fetal positions in a terra cotta box called a larnax. After an appropriate interval, the bones would have been moved to an ossuary and the space cleaned for the next occupant.”
“Sort of like renting a funeral plot for fifty years?”
Erik smiled in spite of himself.
“Something like that, yes,” Griffin averred.
“But the tomb I saw in my vision was underground,” Cassie objected. “It didn’t look like what you just described.”
“I suspect what you were seeing was a Mycenaean tholos tomb,” Griffin explained. “The Mycenaeans preferred round, beehive-shaped burial chambers which they covered with a mound of dirt. There would be a long narrow ramp called a dromos leading down from the surface to the door of the crypt which was called a stomion. A stone retaining wall on either side of the ramp would keep the earth from collapsing and burying the entrance to the tomb.”
“That sounds like what I saw, but why would the Mycenaeans have been here?” the pythia countered.
“There was some archaeological evidence at Karfi suggesting that two ethnic groups shared the mountain refuge. After all, the Mycenaeans also needed to flee from the Dorians. It’s equally possible that the Minoans copied the style of the Mycenaeans. They’d been exposed to mainland culture for at least three hundred years. Some of it may have caught their fancy.”
Cassie surveyed the area around them. “Are there any tombs like that around here?”
“Several, I believe.”
While the two were talking, Erik had wandered a short distance away. “Here’s one,” he announced. His companions scurried over to take a look. The roof of the central chamber had collapsed, exposing the crypt to the sky but the lower half of the structure was still intact underground. Some attempt had been made to excavate the dromos because a dirt path led from the subterranean tomb entrance up to ground level. The path was overgrown with grass indicating the excavation had been abandoned decades before.
“There’s nothing in these graves,” Cassie noted.
“Archaeologists and graverobbers would have carried away anything of value long before this,” Griffin said wistfully. Then perking up, he said, “Well, down we go.” He jumped into the dromos trench and sauntered through the tomb entrance.
Erik shrugged and instead of following Griffin, he chose to leap down through the hole in the roof. Cassie struggled for a few moments with the notion of entering yet another creepy underground space. She took a deep breath and followed Griffin down the ramp.
The sun was sinking rapidly now. It barely provided enough light to illuminate the interior of the main chamber.
“How do you want to tackle this exactly?” the pythia asked.
Griffin held out his hand to Erik. “I think we’ll need torches again if you please.”
The security coordinator retrieved the items from his back pack and handed them around.
Griffin walked into a secondary burial chamber and trained the beam of his flashlight on the walls. “I imagine we should look at the walls of these structures. Ceilings too if they’re still intact. See if there are any key symbols carved into the stone. Remember the field journal said, ‘A message in stone waiting to be unlocked by one who holds the key.’”
“Sounds like a plan,” Erik agreed.
The three of them scoured every inch of the tholos but found none of the symbols from the key.
Erik went ahead and located the next underground tholos tomb. He scouted them out one by one as Cassie and Griffin searched their interiors.
The process was tedious and time-consuming. The sun had already set. They finished checking the tombs in the south cemetery and took the same approach with the crypts in the cemetery to the east of Karfi. None of them wanted to leave any tomb unchecked, so they worked feverishly to finish them all. Despite Erik’s earlier warning, it was apparent that it was already too late for them to make their way down the mountain without the use of their flashlights.
The evening air grew chilly and damp. Cassie was grateful that she had heeded Erik’s advice to bring along a jacket. Although the sky was lit with stars, there was no moon, making the landscape even harder to navigate. They were down to the last tholos that Erik had been able to discover. It was in worse shape than the others. The dome was still intact but cracked in many places. The mound of earth which had once covered it had eroded centuries ago exposing the top of the tomb to the elements. The retaining wall of the dromos had buckled and was on the verge of collapse. Rocks were piled along either side of the narrow ramp so that the trio had to crawl over heaps of stone to get to the stomion. The bottom half of it was clogged with loose rock.
The tomb itself consisted of a single round burial chamber. A search of it revealed nothing. The three of them squeezed back out the door and crawled disappointedly up
