he feared they would not find their way out before they had to breathe.
Then the pyrites stopped. All he could see ahead of him was solid wall. A dead end.
Sister Chantal's face was pale, her eyes bloodshot. She looked on the verge of death. Was this where they would die?
Then she smiled.
She took his torch and Zeb's, and, with her own, switched them off. In the sudden darkness, needing to breathe, he felt close to panic. Then a hand gripped his elbow, turning him. In the darkness, uncorrupted by torchbeams, he discerned a faint vertical line of light down the right-hand side of the apparently solid wall. He moved closer and saw that two separate walls ran parallel to each other, a thin gap between them forming a passageway. He moved into it and walked towards the light.
Outside, he gulped fresh air. When his eyes grew accustomed to the glare he saw he was in a place unlike any he had seen before. Where the air in the caves had been poisonous, it was now sweet, fresh and perfumed. If the toxic caves were Hell, this was Heaven on Earth. He turned to Sister Chantal, but before he could say anything, she nodded.
'Yes,' she said, with an ecstatic smile. 'This is the garden.'
Ross stood at one end of a deep elliptical basin, more than a thousand yards long and many hundreds wide, completely enclosed by a funnel of rock so deep that the sun's rays barely reached its verdant floor. He seemed to be inside a huge eye, the pupil a perfectly circular lake in the centre. At the far end, where the ground was higher, he could see another cave. A stream flowed from it to feed the limpid lake. The clear water had a green glow, as though fireflies were swimming in it.
Around the lake grasses were growing, with trees and exotic plants unlike anything in the jungle they had just walked through – unlike anything he had ever seen in nature.
'Look, Ross.' Zeb held open her photocopied pages of the Voynich with the illustrations, then waved at the trees, flowers and plants around them. 'They're just like in the book, and the descriptions of this place are spot- on.' She pointed to the far cave. 'That must lead to the forbidden caves Falcon wrote about, where the nymphs lived.'
And where the conquistadors died, thought Ross. To his left, at the base of the cliff, he saw a pile of perfectly spherical rocks, and more half-formed spheres emerging from the cliff. They reminded him of the Moeraki boulders on New Zealand's South Island. But it was the plants and the glowing water that captivated him.
And the air.
It had a subtle fragrance and taste, a delicious blend of floral, vanilla and citrus notes that was sweet yet not cloying.
The others were equally enraptured. Sister Chantal bent down beside the lake, cupped her hands in the water and drank, her face radiating joy. If she had been a cat she would have purred. Ross noticed that the water in her cupped palms contained microscopic glowing particles, similar to those he had spied in her leather pouch when they had first met.
Suddenly an eerie sound filled the air, like a choir singing. There were no discernible words or phrases, just a series of almost mechanically perfect notes. Beautiful yet soulless, it came from the cave at the end of the garden and made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.
'What was that?' he said.
Sister Chantal laid a hand on his arm. 'Wait, Ross,' she said. 'The caves at the far end of the garden, no one must go into them without me.'
Hackett rubbed his eyes. 'Why not?' he said.
'Because I'm the Keeper,' she said.
'The what?' said Mendoza.
'Just do as she says,' Ross told them.
'What is this place?' said Hackett.
Sister Chantal placed a finger over her lips. 'No more questions. It'll be dark soon.' She knelt by the lake, filled her cupped hands with the phosphorescent water and proffered it to them. 'Drink from the stream and the lake. Eat fruit from the trees. Get some sleep. You may see small creatures in the garden but they're harmless. Just don't go into the caves. Tomorrow everything will become clearer.' She smiled at Ross. 'Much clearer.'
She walked away from them to a raised area with a neat mound of small stones. Ross watched her kneel beside it to pray. He wanted to ask her more questions, but he knew better than to intrude now. Like the others, he knelt and drank from the lake. The water had a distinctive sodium taste that reminded him of a French mineral water he had never liked: Badoit. He ate strange fruit from the trees, which tasted better. Their flavours were familiar but hard to place – like packaged mixed-fruit juices. In one fruit, the size of an apple, he thought he could taste pomegranate, passion fruit and cherry.
As dusk closed the eye of the garden, he realized he was exhausted. He didn't bother with the hammock or the mosquito net, just rolled out his sleeping-bag on the soft grass and lay down. The others did the same, as if they understood that they were safe.
Before he closed his eyes he looked once more into the dark, still lake and saw countless stars reflected in it. Then he noticed that the night sky at the top of the funnel was cloudy. The bright spots in the water were shards of crystal lying at the bottom, their luminosity revealed by the darkness of the night. Their beauty filled his mind with more questions. Then, mercifully, he slept. Sister Chantal slept better than she could remember. Curled up beside the mound of stones, away from the others, she dreamt that she was free.
Released from her vow.
Recompensed for her sacrifice.
Reunited with the one she had lost.
She woke once during the night, when everyone was asleep, and wandered to the lake. As she drank she indulged her vanity for the first time since she had made her vow and inspected her reflection in the water. What she saw saddened her. Where once the face had been young, beautiful and full of hope, it was now old and spent.
Would he still care how she looked? The thought made her smile, and joy surfaced through the sadness. Her wait had been so long, but the hardest part was over. Soon she could surrender her burden and rejoin him.
She sighed. 'Soon,' she whispered, as she returned to her sleeping-bag. 'Soon.'
51
The next morning Osvaldo Mendoza woke first. He staggered to his feet and went to a corner of the garden, concealed by bushes. Before he had opened his fly, he realized that the constant pain in his head had gone. When he stopped peeing he noticed something even more remarkable. Something that made him stand rock-still for more than a minute, stunned. He fell to his knees and prayed. Ross woke during a dream he couldn't remember, except that it had involved Lauren and made him happy for the first time in weeks. He didn't want to wake, but Hackett was shaking him.
'Wake up, Ross.'
He blinked. 'Why? What's going on?'
'You've got to see this place. It's amazing.'
Ross rolled over. Why, when he was having the best sleep in ages, had Hackett chosen this moment to get overexcited? 'I know it's amazing. I'm here. I can see it.'
'But, Ross, I can see it, too.'
'Nigel, what the hell are you talking about?'
'Give me your hand.' Hackett grabbed at his broken wrist but instinctively Ross snatched it away. 'Give me your hand,' Hackett insisted. 'Trust me.' He began unwrapping the expertly applied bandage. 'How does it feel?'
'Okay.'
