Alma nodded in agreement. “Yes, it’s like that.” She moved forward again. “We should go to the goddess gallery. That’s where your lily might be found.”
They passed beneath more overhangs completely covered with rock art images in shades of red, black, and white. Some of the shapes took advantage of the natural contours of the rock. A snake coiled around a small protrusion in the stone face, giving the reptile a three-dimensional appearance.
Eventually, Alma halted and pointed toward a rock painting unlike any the group had encountered before. It was a human stick figure with legs placed vertically parallel and arms bent upward at the elbows. The eyes were large dark hollows, but the rest of the features were obscured. From a headband hung a number of long strings terminating in rectangular shapes.
“This is Yingana,” Alma explained. “She’s the serpent goddess who created the world. Once she gave birth to the people of this country, she taught each tribe its proper language.”
“What are these?” Cassie pointed to the strings and rectangles.
“Dilly bags,” the scout replied. “They’re woven containers mainly used by women to gather plants, seeds, and the like. Sometimes men will carry one while they’re hunting, but this number of dilly bags would indicate a female. The legends say that Yingana filled these with yams which she planted and taught the people how to harvest.”
“She looks familiar,” Daniel remarked unexpectedly. “The pose. It looks like our latest artifact—the golden labrys with a figurine of a goddess as the axe handle. Her arms are extended exactly as in this painting.”
“The goddess with arms upraised in benediction is a very, very old image,” Griffin offered. “The Minoans employed it frequently in their statuary. Who knows? Perhaps they took their inspiration from rock art like this.”
Cassie studied the portrait of Yingana. “We’ve seen lots of places where a serpent goddess created the universe. In Africa, Mawu-Lisa. In China, Nu Kwa. In Mesopotamia, Tiamat. Maybe this myth goes all the way back to the python stone.”
The guide regarded her approvingly. “Yes, I heard you validated that site. Quite a lot of ancient rock art to be found in Botswana. When my ancestors walked across the land bridge from Africa seventy thousand years ago, they brought its earliest art form with them and its earliest mythology as well.”
“Still it’s hard to tell that the serpent goddess on this rock is female,” the scion said. “She has no obvious physical characteristics to indicate her gender.”
“Oh, everyone identifies this as a female figure,” Alma countered. “But the myth of the rainbow serpent varies among the tribes. Sometimes she’s an androgynous figure who can switch gender at will. In other places, she’s male. I suspect her gender change was the result of overlord contamination of local culture. It goes back thousands of years.”
Griffin turned to his colleagues to offer an explanation. “Alma’s area of expertise is the overlord footprint in Australia.”
“That’s right.” The scout nodded. “Overlords are a strange breed. They think everybody else is like them or ought to be. Consequently, whenever they encounter a new culture, they don’t know how to interpret what they’re looking at. Take, for example, the first European missionaries and explorers. Given their own patriarchal bias, they misunderstood gender relations in aboriginal society. All the male anthropologists who followed the first wave made the same mistake. When they noticed that women were excluded from certain rituals related to the Dreaming, they erroneously concluded that men controlled the religious realm and women carried out day-to-day chores. In other words, men were sacred, and women were profane.”
Alma rolled her eyes. “The fact is that men are responsible for some rituals and women for others. The overlords never bothered to ask what the women were doing during their secret gatherings from which men were excluded. They assumed it couldn’t be all that important and trivialized ‘women’s business’ as witchcraft and superstition. In reality, women wield significant power in aboriginal society. Their magic is considered stronger than men’s. Both men and women are charged with protecting and preserving the ancestral lands. They just use different rituals to do so.”
Daniel stared at Alma in astonishment.
Noting his reaction, she gave a wry smile. “So, Nephilim. You’ve never heard that version of the story before?”
He shook his head. “All the books I’ve read about aboriginal culture came from...” He hesitated uncomfortably. “Overlord sources.”
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Alma instructed. “You might learn something.” She transferred her attention back to the image of Yingana and sighed. “I don’t see anything that looks like a lily in this gallery.”
Griffin made a big show of scrutinizing the rock. “Nor do I.”
Of course, Cassie knew there was no lily to be found.
Alma gazed at her inquisitively. “Perhaps the pythia might like to try...”
Cassie’s eyes widened in alarm. “I wouldn’t dare!” She backed away from the wall. “This isn’t like validating a single artifact. That’s hard enough if it’s carrying a long history. This...” she paused to find the right words. “This would be like channeling a million voices all at once because the trace of so many lives has been left on these stones. I might never find my way back.”
Daniel was drinking in the interchange, obviously trying to process the strange notion that Cassie could touch an object and experience its history.
“We thought of another solution to the problem.” Griffin turned to the scion. “Daniel, might we have the artifact I asked you to bring?”
Daniel searched through his backpack and produced the original granite key.
“Our pythia might be able to detect the presence of the Minoans in this locale by using one of their own relics,” Griffin said to Alma.
Cassie hesitated before taking the cylinder, glancing at the rock art again. “Not here. There’s too much psychic static. Let’s find someplace else.”
Alma brightened. “I have just the spot. Follow me.”
They climbed upward through another maze of rock corridors. More sunlight broke through the gloom the higher they climbed.
