on every side by the circular wall of the enormous crater. The fissure that they had just come through, it seemed, was the only entrance to this massive cylindrical chasm. A thin waterfall fell in a steady sheet on the far side of the crater, plunging fully four hundred feet into the shallow lake at the bottom of the wide, circular canyon.
But it was what stood in the centre of the canyon that commanded everyone's immediate attention.
Rising up out of the body of water—in the exact centre of the cylindrical crater—was an enormous rock formation.
It was about eighty feet wide and at least three hundred feet tall, a gigantic natural rock tower—easily the size of a medium-rise skyscraper—that soared up out of the glistening moonlit lake into the night sky. Against the backdrop of the light evening rain, the massive black monolith looked absolutely magnificent.
The ten of them just stood there gazing up at the enormous rock tower in awe.
'Jesus Christ…” Buzz Cochrane said.
Lauren showed Nash the reading on her digital compass.
“We've come exactly 600 metres from the village. If we take into account the elevation, I'd say it's a definite possibility
that our idol is sitting right on top of that rock tower.'
“Hey,' Copeland said from the left.
Everyone turned. Copeland was standing in front of a path of some sort that had been cut into the curved outer wall of the canyon.
The path appeared to rise steeply, winding its way up the canyon's circular outer wall in a spiral-like fashion, hugging the circumference of the cylinder encircling the giant rock tower in the centre of the crater, but separated from it by an enormous moat of empty space at least one hundred feet wide.
Lauren and Nash went first, stepping up out of the ankle- deep water at the base of the crater and onto the path.
The group made its way up the path.
The rain was lighter here, the clouds above the great canyon thinner, allowing shafts of blue moonlight to penetrate them more easily.
Up and up they went, following the narrow curving path, all of them staring in a kind of silent awe at the magnificent rock tower in the centre of the crater.
The sheer size of the tower was incredible. It was enormous. But it was curiously shaped: it was slightly wider at the top than it was at the bottom. The whole formation gradually tapered inward to the point where it met the lake at the bottom of the crater.
As they climbed higher and higher up the crater's spiralling pathway, Race began to make out the peak of the rock tower. It was rounded in shape—dome-like and it was completely covered in dense green foliage. Gnarled, waterlogged branches leaned out from its edges, unfazed by the vertiginous three-hundred-foot drop beneath them.
The group was nearing the top of the crater when they came to a bridge—-or rather the makings of a bridge that connected the outer, spiralling path to the rock tower.
It was situated just below the lip of the canyon, not far from the thin waterfall that cascaded out over the rim and plummeted down the western wall of the canyon.
Two flat stone ledges faced each other on opposite sides of the chasm, a hundred feet apart. On each ledge sat a pair of stone buttresses, presumably the foundations from which a rope bridge of some kind once hung.
The two buttresses on Race's side of the chasm were pitted and worn but they looked sturdy beyond belief. And they looked old. Really, really old. Race had no doubt that they easily dated back to Incan times.
It was then that he saw the rope bridge itself.
It was hanging from the ledge on the other side of the chasm, the tower side. It hung vertically from the two but tresses on the far ledge so that it fell flat against the tower's rocky wall. Attached to the bottom end of the rope bridge, however, was a long length of frayed yellow rope that drooped in a wide arc across the chasm, over to Race's ledge, where it had been tied to one of the buttresses.
Walter Chambers examined the frayed yellow rope.
'Dried grass rope. Interlocking braid formation. This is classic Incan rope construction. It was said that a whole Incan town, working together, could build an entire rope bridge in three days. The women picked the grass and braided it into long thin lengths of string. Then the men braided those lengths of string into thicker, more sturdy segments of rope like this.'
'But a rope bridge couldn't possibly survive the elements for four hundred years,” Race said.
'No… No, it couldn't,' Chambers said.
'Which means somebody else built this bridge,' Lauren said. 'And recently, too.'
'But why the elaborate set-up?' Race said, indicating the length of rope that stretched out across the ravine to the low est point of the rope bridge. 'Why attach a rope to this end of the bridge and drop the whole thing down on the other side?'
'I don't know,' Chambers said. 'You'd only do something like that if you wanted to keep something trapped on the tower top…'
Nash turned to Lauren. 'What do you think?'
Lauren peered over at the tower, partially obscured by the veil of lightly falling rain.
'It's high enough to match the angle on the NRI,' she looked at her digital compass. 'And we're exactly 632 metres horizontally from the village. Factoring in the elevation, I'd say it's a good bet the idol's over there.'
