Beneath the Dark Ice

different personality to what I’m used to, she thought. He’s probably more worried about me than anything else. She released his hand, gave him a small nod and a smile.

“OK, you just let me know if I can help. Well, we’ve got work to do. And please, call me Adrian!” With that he turned and gave a friendly wave over his shoulder and headed briskly towards the main group.

Monica surveyed the giant hollow carefully. From her experience, caves could be anything from wet and slimy, to dry and dusty, and for the most part unless they were newly formed via earth movement, they were geologically very old. This cave bothered her — it was strange. It had to be millions of years old, but there appeared to be areas that looked recently gouged — although recent in geological terms could mean tens of thousands of years. The ceiling was what she expected, but the ground and walls of the cave looked like something had been dragged along them, abrading every protuberance smooth. Glacier pipes could do that — the heavy, dense ice moving underground and wearing away the rock over a period of thousands of years, but usually they needed more of a slope — strange.

The light from above coupled with their eyes now adjusting to the semi-darkness allowed the farther walls to be seen in more detail. To everyone else it just looked like more broken cave debris, but to Matt Kerns it was a magical impossibility.

“Can’t be, can it be? Not Mayan, no, no older, much, much older.” He scurried off from the group with Monica in pursuit, trying to slow him down.

Alex noticed the small commotion and called to Takeda, pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at Matt’s disappearing back. Takeda nodded and followed them. Once Matt was in among the fallen debris he stood for a few seconds, waving his torch back and forth so he could take it all in. Though heavily worn, two colossal stone heads, lips full, the noses wide and the faces flat and broad could be made out from the broken rocks. Both were about nine feet in height and looked to weigh close to twenty tons each. There also seemed to be a destroyed dwelling which was actually carved into the wall — not built onto it, but hewn from the very cave wall itself.

“Wow, are these the Mayan ruins you were so excited about back home?” asked Monica.

“Yes. I mean no. Looks a little like Mayan but so much older. Even older than Olmec, thousands of years older, but still with some similarities. Mayan statues are usually carved to represent their rulers as being benign and all-knowing. These look to be in pain or great fear and I don’t know what these coils are meant to represent wrapped around them; wait, there’s picture writing.”

Matt stuffed his torch into his pocket and rushed again to another section, trying to balance among the jumble of debris and take multiple photographs of the artifacts at the same time. The corner of the cave where they worked flared brightly and darkened in time with his camera motor drive.

“You can read that?” asked Monica.

“Pictoglyphs — picture symbols. It’s writing, but in a series of images — you don’t read it, you interpret it. I doubt anyone today could translate all of it. The problem is the symbols don’t represent letters; sometimes they’re syllables, words, sometimes sounds or even ideas. Primitive and complex at the same time, but still a whole phonetic language system. Looks like Mayan or Olmec, but the Olmecs had about two hundred characters, the Mayans even more. However, there are some images here I’ve never seen before. You know, there’s probably only two people in the entire world who could even attempt to read this, and one of them is in Central America right now.”

“OK, I’ll bite, who’s the other one?”

Matt had his torch back out. He shone it on his face and smiled. “Stand back, beautiful, this is where the magic happens. Ahhh, if I had more time I could probably draw out more of its meaning. The best I can do is to give you a guesslation, and at this point it’ll be heavy on the guessing part. Don’t blame me if I tell you it’s about a boy with a banana stuck in his ear though.”

Matt ran his hands over some of the glyphs, and then changed to another section looking for a place to start. “Interesting. Some of these symbols look Mesoamerican. This single glyph here of two identical kneeling warriors is very similar to one in Mayan that represents a pair of demi-god brothers, from their original creation myth. They were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque and spent their life annoying or outwitting troublesome gods.” Matt scanned ahead along the carvings, narrowing his eyes at an image, his lips moving as if working a new word around in his mouth before continuing.

Without turning he started to speak again. “OK, this might well be some sort of variation on one of the most ancient Mayan myths, but as there are so many different character sets I’m going to make a few pretty big leaps here. From what I can translate, it tells a story of a secret or hidden underworld.” Matt moved to the next row of symbols and continued. “Anyway, these monstrous underworld dwellers had a mixture of human, reptilian and other animal characteristics. That might mean bits of those animals or they chose to change themselves into all of them at once. It also tells how the king sent an army to journey into a realm of horrors beneath the earth to defeat the enemies of ‘All People.’ Hmm, don’t know what this next one means, or this… Strange symbols. You don’t have a spare Rosetta Stone, do you?”

Matt had turned around to shine the torch on Monica who mouthed the word magic and raised her eyebrows. He chuckled and went back to his translation.

“OK, before they reach their destination they’re attacked and nearly all the army is captured or decimated by the ruler of the underworld — the Qwotoan. The only people who returned to tell the story were the brothers. Wow, see this? It’s a little like the Mayan numbering system. There’s a base number, and the dot over it represents it being multiplied by ten.” Matt pointed to a symbol with dozens of dots pressed into the stonework above it. “I think this here represents thousands dead. No, that can’t be possible, I must be mistranslating.”

Matt paused and screwed up his face. “Odd, this last bit looks to have been written later. Even the glyph style is slightly different. I think it just says: ‘We are lost, Qwotoan comes!’ ”

Matt knelt down among the debris and sorted through flat pieces of stone that had onioned off the face of the wall. Discarding some and selecting others, his lips moved as he tried to tell himself the story of the ancient civilisation. He was running his hands over a piece of flat stone with faint upraised markings when Monica touched him on the shoulder. He turned and held the small stone tablet out for her to see. It showed a number of small symbols in the ancient icon-imagery of the long dead culture depicting what looked like a warrior tangled in some sort of rope or tentacles. Another smaller image showed an eye looking over a city surrounded by a lot of dots and squiggles.

“What’s it say?” said Monica, kneeling down next to him and squinting at the carved rock.

Matt was looking at the stone and hmmd to himself before speaking. “It’s a little more about the warrior brother’s descent to find Qwotoan and slay what looks like the ‘Devourer’ or ‘Deceiver.’ Why does that name Qwotoan ring a bell? Damn, I can’t make out all of these pictoglyphs without some more work. This language has some characters that could be Olmec, some Mayan, Aztec, even what looks like some Egyptian hieroglyphs; and this bit here could even be Sumerian. It’s all mixed together. This could be some form of root language. But why is it here? Why were they here?”

“And where are they now?” asked Monica. “They all seem to have disappeared.”

“This spot is probably just an outpost, but this symbol represents a reference to the ‘City’; and this here looks like the Mayan root word for water—‘Atl,’ and the Olmec word for surrounding land. No wait, that could be land surrounded by water.” He rocked back on his heels. “You know there are plenty of ancient stories with tales of a lost continent. Antarctica wasn’t always frozen under a mile of ice, you know, and many people speculate about what may lie undiscovered beneath this continent’s deep ice mantle. Like, just how did fifteenth-century cartographers manage to get hold of maps of the actual coastline of Antarctica which exists under the ice, when our modern cartographers could only achieve this a few decades ago by seismographic means? A lot of these ancient races have legends about their forefathers arriving from the sea after a great catastrophe in their homeland. Their legends talk about their homeland sinking, or ‘going below’ as it’s been interpreted; but what if that didn’t mean sinking under water, but going below ice?”

“Dr. Matthew Kerns, you are not going to tell me this is Atlantis, are you?” Monica asked incredulously.

“I didn’t say that. Atlantis was Plato’s allegorical story; however, in Mayan and Olmec and even Aztec legends, they directly refer to a place called ‘Aztlan.’ The Mayans originally believed they came to the Americas from an overseas paradise called Aztlan which sank away from sight.” Matt gathered his thoughts. “Look, hear me out, there’s a section of an ancient Mayan codex called the Troano Manuscript that to this day is still defying a full translation. However, in the 1800s a classical archaeologist by the name of Augustus le Plongeon attempted a