caverns.”
Mark tapped Eric on the arm and pointed to a spot across the dry wash. “What do you think?”
It was an area where a landslide had torn away some of the bank and dumped untold tons of rubble into the riverbed. The slide stretched for a hundred and fifty feet, and behind it the riverbank was significantly taller than anywhere else they had seen.
“Bingo,” Stone said, and high-fived Murph. “The cave’s riverine entrance was blasted and the cavern sealed. Behind that mess is Suleiman Al-Jama’s corsair, the
The initial excitement of finding the tomb’s location faded quickly.
Alana voiced the concern. “There’s no way we can move that much debris without heavy construction equipment and several weeks’ time.”
“Don’t you get us yet?” Mark asked her seriously.
“What do you mean?”
“Back door,” Stone and Murphy said in perfect sync.
It took ten minutes to climb down to the riverbed and cross the river before they were standing atop the crushed section of bank. The backside of the hill facing the western desert was a folded warren of gullies and ravines that had been eroded when the Sahara had been a lush, subtropical jungle. They found the first cave entrance only moments after splitting up into pairs and starting their systematic search.
Eric pulled a small halogen flashlight from a pocket on his upper sleeve and stepped into the man-sized aperture. Ten feet in, the cave turned ninety degrees and petered out into a solid wall of rock.
Linda and Alana found a second cave that went a little deeper before it, too, came to an abrupt end. The third cave was smaller than the others, forcing Eric and Mark to crawl on their hands and knees. It ran deep into the hillside, twisting with the vagaries of the matrix stone. At times, they could stand and walk upright, and then the next moment they were forced to slither through the dust on their bellies. Stone used a piece of chalk to mark the walls when the cave began to branch off.
“What do you think?” Eric asked after they’d been underground for fifteen minutes. He was pointing to a carving on one wall. It was crude, done with a knifepoint or awl, and neither man could read it, but they recognized the looping Arabic script. “Al-Jama’s version of ‘Kilroy was here’?”
“This has got to be it,” Murph replied. “We’re going to need help exploring all these side tunnels.” He tried radioing Linda but couldn’t get reception this deep into the earth. “Rock, paper, scissors?”
The two men made their choices, paper-covered rock, so Mark turned himself around for the laborious climb back to the surface, his echoing grumbles diminishing as he retreated.
Eric Stone shut off his light to conserve batteries, but when the weight of darkness pressed in on him like a palpable sensation he quickly flicked it back on. He took a few calming breaths to steel himself, shut his eyes, and killed the light again.
It was a long thirty-minute wait until he heard the others crawling down the tunnel.
When Mark’s light swept Eric’s face, Murph chuckled. “Man, you are as white as a ghost.”
“I’ve never been fond of tight spaces,” Stone admitted. “It’s okay with the lights on. Not so much in the dark.”
Normally, Mark would have ribbed him more, but considering their situation all he said was, “Don’t sweat it, dude.”
Linda quickly drew up a plan of attack to survey the subterranean warren of interconnected tunnels and caves. Whenever they came to a fork, one team would check the left tunnel, the other would head right. They would meet back at the branch after ten minutes no matter what. Whichever option looked the most promising was the way they would all go.
Another hour passed as they laboriously checked each section. It was all the more difficult because of the weapons and extra ammunition the three Corporation people carried. Knees and palms were scraped raw from contact with the rough stone, and without proper equipment each one of them had struck his or her head at least once. Eric had a piece of gauze taped near his hairline where he’d gashed his skin. Blood had dried coppery brown in the furrows of his forehead.
The four of them were together walking down a long gallery with heaps of shattered stones on the floor when Eric happened to play his flashlight on the ceiling ten feet over their heads. At first he thought the hundreds of projections hanging down were stalactites formed from mineral-rich water seeping into the cavern, but then he saw one was wearing pants.
Horror crept up his spine. “Oh my God.”
Alana looked up and gasped.
Hanging from the ceiling were dozens of pairs of mummified legs, some showing just the foot from the ankle down, others hanging from the upper thighs as if materializing from the living rock. One person was suspended on his side, half of the corpse contained within the matrix stone while the other half dangled grotesquely. The neck was bent at such an angle that the back of the skull was hidden, and the cadaverous face leered down at them through sight-less eye sockets.
There were animal legs, too, long, awkward camel legs ending in big skeletal feet and horses’ limbs with their distinctive fused hoofs. The dry air had retarded putrefaction, so skin hung from the bones as brittle as parchment and clothing remained intact.
Mark studied the uneven floor, stooped, and came back up holding a leather sandal that began to crumble almost immediately.
Linda asked, “What happened to them? How did they get fused in the rock?”
Over his initial shock, Eric studied the ceiling more carefully. Unlike the rest of the cave system, the ceiling here was black and glossy under a coat of dust.
