Into The Deep (92 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryLabels: Ubermadness_IV
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Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2006-10-23 23:00:45 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
~I have set the world's greatest treasure herein and enclosed it behind portals protected by the Gods; For they know my struggle to protect this treasure from thieves and vandals and lesser men has been ordained by the Most High, and we all follow the will of Ra.~
A beetle trundled across parched earth intent on some unknowable task when it was plucked from the ground by a kestrel. As the bird carried the beetle aloft, beak crushed shell and the beetle was no more.
Alexander saw a shadow glide by his feet and looked up. All he saw was the sun, but he heard a flutter of wings and a faint but distinct crackling sound before Sturnman announced it was time for a toast.
"East of Luxor, north of the Kharga Oasis!"
Otto Sturnman reached into a bag at his feet and held up a dark bundle. He unrolled a strip of thick felt, and held up a bottle of scotch.
"Champagne would be more appropriate, but this thirty-year old single malt will do."
Sturnman grinned, his face flushed with excitement. He looked younger and more vital than his sixty years.
He cracked the seal on the bottle and retrieved heavy lead crystal shot glasses from pockets in the felt wrap.
"To those first cryptic directions, given to me in December of 1989!"
Sturnman faced no moral quandaries and had no illusions about what he did for a living. He was a tomb raider. He was at the top of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities watch list, and Dr. Mamdouh Mohamed Eldamaty, the current General Director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was quoted as saying that while he would never encourage anyone to engage in of acts of violence against Strunman, "If a gust of wind or fate or one of the Gods of the Pharaohs were to roll a great stone over the man I would not shed any tears."
He filled the glasses of the others on his team; Millot, Gelbman, Torrey, Antonini, and McAlister.
It was just after the fall of the Berlin wall that Sturnman met an impoverished East German scholar with a manuscript Sturnman would have killed to have in his possession. The manuscript mentioned the possible location of a tomb most Egyptologists conceded would never be found. He purchased it for three thousand American dollars. Six months ago another archeological opportunist had offered him six million dollars for it, and Sturnman denied ever having seen the manuscript.
"Since that time, we have all worked tirelessly, following long-lost leads and trails which took us back through the centuries, to this place."
Six men raised their glasses in the desert wastes of Egypt. They were standing on the edge of a dome of weathered limestone.
"To making history!" Sturnman said.
Jules Millot thought of the hidden structures below them, vaults and chambers unseen for thousands of years. As an archeological engineer he was less interested in amassing wealth than discovering the secrets of one of the great architectural pioneers of ancient Egypt.
"To the crafters of stone, and their master," Milliot said. "I long to see his final works."
"To tales lost to the ages," Edgar R. Gelbman said. His specialty was phonograms, hieroglyphics that represented sounds. Sturnman was quite accomplished in reading and interpreting the meaning behind ideograms, the simple picture signs present in every Egyptian tomb, but he needed Gelbman's expertise in sounding out the names of people and places found in virgin tombs.
Torrey flashed a wolfish smile. "To becoming as rich as Richard fucking Branson!"
Herbert George Torrey was the grandson of an old Scottish Baron who had recently passed away, leaving a dilapidated castle and five hundred acres of land in Ayrshire to George. The young man who had been educated at Eton and lived in London enraged the local Scots who loved the wild, undeveloped acreage by immediately selling the land to a European agricultural development corporation. Since the land was in one of Scotland's most fertile areas, young George made a small fortune. And he wanted more. He was one of Sturnman's financiers, and David was well aware that Sturnman put up with the young man only because of the money.
Dante Antonini was a geologist who had known Millot for many years. They had worked together on many digs in Europe, Antonini inspecting the sites for any risk of collapse or flooding before joining Millot in admiring ancient stonecraft. He always got on well with any local laborers, since he saw himself as a digger, just like them.
Alexander McAlister looked at the blond liquid in his glass and wished he was holding this wee dram at the Sheep Heid Inn back in Edinburgh, sitting and listening to the good natured arguments of the pub regulars. Of course, his local wasn't the quiet pub it used to be, and on any given night it could be full of tourists these days.
Alex was an authority on Senemut, the master builder who created Djeser-Djeseru, 'the Sublime of the Sublimes,' the empty Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut across the Nile from the city of Luxor, and many other grand constructs still standing today. Senemut was an architectural genius who placed tombs beyond long filled-in shafts and behind hidden doors. Alex did not take lightly the old warnings from Senemut, and he was wary of entering the tomb.
Fifty feet below them was a pristine staircase that rose to an ornate entrance which had been blocked by capstones until the day before. Once the stairway had been uncovered and the capstones hammered down and removed, another staircase had been revealed, this one descending down into darkness.
Sturnman was certain there was a tomb down there, carved into the limestone over thirty four hundred years ago. He was sure it was the tomb of Senemut, an engineer and master architect who lived during the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt, and the tomb of the lady pharaoh he loved.
"Below us is a tomb lost to the ages," Sturnman said. "It is a tomb that should never have been found. I am convinced it is the final resting place of Senemut, and if I am correct in assuming that he was not only steward to a great queen but also her lover, and that he would care for the great queen Hatshepset in death as he did in life, then I believe her remains, and all of her riches, lie somewhere below our feet."
All of the men were as dusty and tired as the lowliest laborer working the site below them. Most of them had been following Sturnman's dream for more than a decade now, and it seemed they had finally found what the archeological community swore had never existed; the tomb of a woman almost erased from history for having the unimaginable gall to rule Egypt as Pharaoh.
"To our fellowship," Sturnman said, "And the riches of a lost empire, and the genius who hid them away from history for so long."
The men drank.
In a short while they would follow the stairway down into the tomb. They had radios and flashlights and glow sticks. They had metal tools and explosives. They had GPS units and hand held ground-penetrating radar.
Senemut had hidden this place well, but no matter how deep he had dug his final resting place or how clever he tried to cover his tracks, these six men would uncover his secrets.
They were some of the best Egyptologists in Europe, known for embracing unorthodox ideas, and taking risks. They would ignore the naysayers, and reap the rewards. They would ignore the physical risks of entering an ancient and possibly fragile matrix of rock that could collapse on them at any moment. And they would ignore the superstitions of most of the local laborers they had hired to move sand and stone. On the capstone they had blown to pieces and dragged out of the way had been a warning, hieroglyphics carved into the stone and containing a few flecks of ancient sand-blasted paint. As the warning referred to the world's greatest treasure, most of them were willing to risk exploring what lay below.
"Not even Senemut can stop us now," Sturnman said.
They would gather their tools and equipment and go, and not even another warning placed beyond the destroyed capstone could stop them, a message carved into the polished marble floor around 1450 BC.
'Be a man of intellect and common sense,' read a translation of the warning written on a sheet of paper now folded into one of Sturnman's pockets. 'Enjoy the sun and the wind and return to the waters of the Nile. Leave this dry and lonely place. I have built a tomb, and there is room enough for all who would trespass. Leave this place and live like a man and sing and laugh. Enter the world I have made, and you will scream like a trapped hare before you are crushed underfoot like a beetle.'
Soon the six authorities on ancient Egypt, and ten skilled laborers, were walking up the stairs, grit crunching under their boots. The local men were able to overcome their superstitions when enticed by American cash placed in their hands by Sturnman, with the promise of more to come.
Sturnman gave his accomplices a final nod as they reached the broad floor beyond which were stairs leading down into darkness. All of their archeological specialties had brought them to this moment, their knowledge of geology and engineering and languages and the people on ancient Egypt. Sturnman stepped over an engraved piece of stone, part of the shattered warning he believed came from Senemut, and crossed the hieroglyphs carved into the polished floor. The others followed him.
"And so we go," Sturnman said. "Into the Deep."
*
The party moved down the stairs slowly, lead by Dante Antonini, Jules Milliot, and two laborers, older men who knew aged stone even if they did not have the education of the Italian and the Frenchmen.
There were forty stairs, at least twenty feet wide, all of them carved from the raw rock of the Earth and polished to a smooth gloss now hazy with a layer of dust which had not been disturbed in centuries. The effort to build the staircase alone, in a time of copper chisels and drills and granite hammers, left most of the party silent with awe.
Hearing the excited whispers of Dante and Jules as they descended, George Torry rolled his eyes and muttered quietly.
"It's just a row of stairs, you sorry bastards."
George glanced to one side and saw the Scot was almost trembling.
"Chin up, my good man. We'll soon be rich, and you can go back to the safety of picking thistles out of your kilt."
"I hope so," Alex replied. "But I wouldn't take Senemut's warning lightly, George. Even though he built great tombs for himself and Hatshepsut, his love, their bodies were never found, leading some to believe they were placed it the tomb of tombs, something constructed and disguised with such cleverness it remains hidden to this day."
"Which is why we are here, my ginger friend," Torrey said, grasping Alex's arm and giving it a shake. "Think of all the riches, never found, never pillaged, just waiting for us."
"Aye," the Scot said, "But why did Senemut's warning mention 'lesser men?' He mentioned thieves and those who would deface tombs and statuary and inscriptions, which is exactly what happened after he and Hatshepsut died, but what could he mean by lesser men?"
At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high.
Jules squatted and took a few quick measurements. "We have a ten degree upward grade," he called to the others."
"Upward?" George Torrey asked.
"And there is another inscription," Dante said. "A big one."
The men gathered at the base of the stairs. They all trained their flashlights down the corridor, but the light did not seem to penetrate the gloom.
The warning carved into the floor of the corridor was the biggest any of them had ever seen. Most of the glyphs were the size of an open hand. Beyond the warning were rows of lines etched into the floor, converging to a point a few feet away where a large circle had been etched into the smooth limestone.
Sturnman and Edgar Gelbman squatted and studied the hieroglyphics etched into the floor. In a moment they had a translation.
~Step back and thrive. Step forward and your fate is set in stone.~
"What is that glyph?" Sturnman asked, pointing to the line and circle symbol that appeared to be set apart from the warning.
Gelbman shrugged as they both stood up. "It's not a phonic. It must be an individualized pictogram. A ball radiating lines such as this usually indicates the sun."
They heard a crackling, sloshing sound, and then ducked as a green glow stick was tossed over their heads. The stick traveled about thirty feet, then bounced off of nothing and clattered to the floor inches from the ball carved into the limestone.
"George," Alexander said, "If you throw one more thing without permission of the group I will strangle you."
"Oh fuck off," Torrey said. "I just wanted to see what was there."
"Les Anglais," Jules said, shaking his head in wonder.
Dante aimed his flashlight at the nothingness the glow stick had hit. "My friend, you could bring down this entire construct on our heads. Please, be careful."
"That means use your goddamned head," Sturnman growled.
"All lights ahead," Dante said. "On my light."
They trained their flashlights on the same spot and one by one they realized what they were seeing.
"It's a wall," Torrey said. "A dead end."
"If it is a dead end," Alex asked, "Why has it been painted black?"
"You see?" Torrey said, smug again. "If I hadn't revealed that wall one of us would have walked head on into it and received a nasty surprise, and a broken nose to boot."
"I'd rather be tits up with a fractured skull than buried alive," Alexander said.
Most of the men took a moment to slip off their backpacks and set them by the stairs as they sipped water from canteens. They began to discuss how they should approach the black wall.
"Oh for God's sake," Torrey snapped. He looked at the laborers and pointed at a younger man. "You," he said, digging a coin out of his pocket. "American silver eagle! Worth many American dollars!"
Torrey gave the coin a gentle underhand throw and it rolled away from the group, coming to a stop against the black wall.
"Go on, you gippo bastard," Torrey said.
The young Egyptian overcame his fear and raced after the coin.
Gelbman was nearly bowled over "What the devil—"
Strurnman released a bullish roar, "NO, YOU FOOL!"
It was too late. The young laborer ran along the radiating lines, and the moment he set foot on the circle etched into the floor and paused there, reaching down toward a glint of silver.
There was the dry, hollow sound of grinding stone, and then a huge limestone block as wide as the corridor dropped from the high ceiling and crushed the young laborer.
The block was so heavy it was flush with the floor, despite the human form now trapped under it.
Most of the Egyptian laborers turned and ran back up the stairs. Only two young men remained with the Europeans.
The etched ball was now hidden from sight but blood began trickling out from under the limestone block, running along the radiating lines in the floor.
"Jesus Christ," Alex said.
Torrey had nothing to say now, his eyes wide with horror.
"Listen," Jules said.
They all held their breaths.
Deep in the rock around them, the grinding sounds continued.
Alex turned away, half dragging George with him. "We have to go. Now. NOW!"
"You are walking away from a fortune," Sturnman whispered harshly.
"I can't spend shite when I'm dead," the Scot replied.
Alexander took two long strides away from the others and toward the stairs, and then something made him rear back.
A wall dropped out of the ceiling between the stairs and the Scot. It slammed into the floor with such force that his cheek was peppered with limestone fragments.
Dante shouted a warning and the others backed away from the limestone block. Two massive plugs of stone slid out of the block on what appeared to be a burst of pressurized air. Once free they slid across the floor as the men danced out of their way, grains of sand popping and snapping underneath them.
The stone plugs stopped a few feet short of the wall.
Sturnman moved alongside Alexander and studied the wall.
"Solid bronze," he said. "Incredible."
"No," Alexander said. "What's incredible is that our packs are behind that wall."
His enter body was shaking. One more step and he would have been sliced in half. "Gi'us a hand. It's got my boot."
He leaned on Sturnman and pulled his right foot away from the wall. An eighth on an inch of rubber parted from the toe of his heavy work boot and he was free.
"Well," Sturnman said. "We aren't getting out that way."
With the plugs gone, the limestone block now held two arched entrances six feet high and three wide, doorways to whatever lay beyond.
"The lady or the tiger," Gelbman said, stepping forward. He raised his light. At the top of each arch was a glyph representing one of the gods. "That is Bastet on the left," he said, indicating a figure with the body of a woman and the head of a cat. "And on the right, the woman with the elaborate headdress is Seshat."
Dante was looking from the arches to the large plugs of stone with a mixture of amazement and appreciation. "So we have to choose?"
"It would appear so," Sturnman said.
"Well, what do the inscriptions mean?" Torrey asked. "There must be more written there, after all, Senemut has already proven himself to be a loquacious fellow."
"Seshat was the Goddess of writing and measurements," Edgar said. "And scribes."
Without another word, he entered Seshat's arch.
The others waited.
Gelbman's voice came back to them, a wavering echo. "There are stairs leading up and to the right," he called. "I must be beyond the black wall."
Jules and Dante looked at each other. Jules shrugged.
"My first discipline was engineering," the Frenchman said. "If I had to have a goddess, it would be a goddess of Measurements."
George Torrey pointed at the engraving of Bastet. "What was that cat woman's bailiwick?"
"Joy, music, and dance," Sturnman replied. "And she symbolized the moon and its role in making women fertile."
"That's my girl," Torrey said, taking a step toward the left-hand arch.
Edgar spoke up, his voice filled with dark amusement. "Some believe the name Bastet means 'devouring woman.'"
"Well she sounds like a randy little thing," George said, although he seemed to be unsure of himself and forcing his bravado. He slowed to a stop.
"Bastet was represented as a cat," Sturnman said, "because it could be argued that cats saved the riches of the kingdom. Cats ate the mice which were destroying the grain held in silos, grain which kept every Egyptian alive, slaves, pharaohs, and everyone in between."
"Yes, but the thing about cats," Alexander said, thinking of the nasty old tom that ruled his mother's sitting room, "Is that they protected the kingdom by viciously killing the threat to the riches you spoke of with tooth and claw, and not a trace of pity."
"For fuck sake," Torrey whispered.
Dante gestured at the bronze wall. "We could wait here, no? Wait for those who escaped to bring back help."
"Now there's a sound suggestion," Torrey said. "Good man!"
Sand began pouring from the ceiling like rain.
Flashlights turned upward revealed nothing, just shifting curtains of golden sand.
Sturnman clapped his hands together and asked, "Which path, gentlemen?"
Dante, Jules, George and Alex looked from one door to the other.
The sand was already up to their ankles, and the air was filled with a dust that made them choke and retch.
The two remaining laborers stood side by side and began to pray.
The sand began pouring down on them at an even faster rate and all of them staggered under its weight.
Jules, the engineer, walked into the right-hand arch, and after a moment Dante followed him.
"Bloody Christ," Torrey said, grabbing fistfuls of the Scot's shirt and shaking the man. "What do we do McAlistar? The gippos are praying to Mohammad and this sand is up to my fucking knees, so what do we do?"
Alex looked to one side and saw Sturnman watching him like a hawk.
Sturnman was smiling.
One of the laborers broke and ran through the right-hand arch, the arch of Seshat.
"It's obvious that the sensible, logical, and safe thing to do," Alex said over the constant hiss of falling sand, "would be to follow the right-hand arch. But no one has ever found the bodies of Hatshepsut or Senemut..."
"And we have searched all of the most obvious, sensible and logical locations," Sturnman bellowed. "Yes!"
He planted a hand against the backs of the Englishman and the Scot and shoved them toward the left-hand arch of Bastet. Then he grabbed the remaining laborer by the wrist and dragged the frightened man through the arch and up a short row of stairs as the sand continued to pile up behind them.
*
Edgar Gelbman was listening to his radio, hearing nothing but white noise. He looked back the way they had come and saw that the sand had finally stopped creeping up the stairs. He hoped the others had made it into the Bastet arch, otherwise they were very likely buried alive.
Jules was running his hands along the smooth walls of the corridor they were in. Following Edgar he and Dante had gone up a stairway that curved to the right, and now there was a dark corridor before them. "What do you hear?"
Edgar gave the Frenchman a shrug. "Nothing. These VLF radios are supposed to be able to transmit for a limited distance through stone, but I hear nothing."
They had done a quick inventory of their possessions since all of them had lost their packs. They had one radio, three canteens, three flashlights, some glow sticks, and a few simple tools.
Dante walked ahead of Jules, his flashlight sweeping across the floor. "There is a shaft over here!"
Edgar looked at the laborer who had followed them, now standing at the top of the stairs as if afraid to go further. "What is your name, boy?"
"I am Ali," the young man said.
"Très originale," Jules muttered as they all approached the shaft at the end of the corridor.
The shaft dropped away from them at a steep angle.
The bottom of the shaft was lined with alabaster, and the lightly dusted marble was so smooth that their breath sent rills of dust sliding down into darkness.
"Merde," Jules said. "You expect us to walk on this?"
"Unless you want to dig through thousands of pounds of sand," Edgar replied, "and batter down a wall of solid bronze, I don't see how we have a choice.
Dante held up a glow stick. "Should I?"
The others nodded. He twisted the stick and shook it, and when the chemicals inside began to glow he dropped it into the shaft. It slid out of sight, leaving a shrinking ball of green light in its wake.
The light winked out when the glow was very small, and very far away.
The archeological engineer and the geologist could only stare at each other.
"This tunnel is very long," Dante said. "We had better hope that if we slip and begin to slide, there is soft sand at the bottom."
They all took a moment to ignite some glowsticks with metal rings attached to them. They clipped the sticks onto their belts and backpacks.
Dante kicked as much dust off of the soles of his boots as he could, and then he stepped onto the smooth marble surface.
Jules followed close behind, walking as if the marble bottom of the shaft were thin glass that might shatter under him at any moment.
Edgar stood on the rim of the shaft and happened to look down. There was a strip of tarnished brass there. He bent and licked his fingers and wiped off some of the grime, revealing a long row of tiny glyphs. He tried to translate them, but they were nonsense, just odd groupings of herons and beetles and hawks. Just when he thought it was starting to make sense, he heard Jules left out a little grunt.
The Frenchman slipped and fell flat. He simultaneously kicked Dante's feet, and grabbed at Edgar.
Dante vomited a string of profanities in Italian as fell on his ass and began to slide on the smooth marble.
Edgar felt Jules grab his wrist. "Damn you," he said, as he spun around and clawed at the rim of the shaft. "Stop flailing about!"
Jules was desperately trying to get to his feet, but he lost his grip and slid out of sight.
A moment later the strip of brass popped out of the gap between the limestone floor of the corridor and the polished marble of the shaft, and Edgar was dropping into darkness.
Ali had no tools, and a single glow stick. He had left everything behind. He sat on the edge of the shaft and slipped off his boots, tying the laces together and tossing them over one shoulder. He shook the glow stick, setting one sweat dampened foot on the steep angle of the marble shaft, and then the other. Then he stood in the near dark and watched three balls of light drop away from him.
*
"Water, flashlights, pocket tools, glow sticks, and a useless radio," Sturnman said, taking stock.
They had gone up the stairs away from the sand, entered a corridor that veered off to the left, and then they took a long and narrow staircase downward.
"My fucking knees," George hissed as they continued to descend. "How many stairs did this Semenhut build?"
"Senemut," Alexander replied. He was in the lead, his flashlight showing nothing but more stairs. "These could go on forever. Senemut had all the slaves in Egypt at his disposal. He could build whatever his mind imagined."
The laborer with them followed quietly, at a distance.
They walked on, stopping once to rest their legs, and then continued downward until Alex told them the end was in sight.
"Oh my sweet backstabbing Christ," George Torrey said, his voice a soft moan.
When they reached the last stair Torrey sat down and put his head in his hands.
Alex fought down a growing feeling of claustrophobia.
The laborer stood and watched the Europeans.
Sturnman looked ahead, his brow creased in thought.
There were two more arches.
*
The sliding descent of Dante, Jules and Edgar was silent save for the occasional squeak when one of them tried to use his hands to slow down.
Dante leaned the hard way that they were moving too fast for that to work. Something snapped in his left wrist and he let out a shriek.
"Look," Jules called, "On either side!"
There appeared to be carved wooden rods projecting out from the walls in clusters aligned in straight rows along the length of the shaft. Edgar caught glimpses of polished animal forms grouped in varying numbers.
Jules reached for a pair of wooden herons, grabbed them, and stopped his slide.
Edgar reached out to him with one hand, still clutching the tarnished metal strip in the other and, and gaped in shock as Jules moved out of the way, letting Edgar slide by.
"Bastard!"
"Sorry, mon ami," Jules called from behind. "These old things might only be strong enough to support one!"
Edgar rolled onto his stomach, still sliding, and watched Jules stand up in the light of the glow sticks.
There was a metallic creaking sound and a long curved blade shaped like a scythe sprang out from the wall and cut the Frenchman in half at the waist.
Edgar turned away, knowing that somewhere above him the bisected Frenchman was sliding after him.
Ahead of Edgar, Dante had seen the wooden projections as well. There must have been thousands of them. Cradling his injured wrist, he reached out and grabbed a group of at least a half-dozen rods with beetles carved into the wood. The moment his descent abruptly stopped, he heard a grinding sound.
Edgar was only a few dozen feet ahead of the Italian when what looked like a hundred slender bronze spears lanced out from the walls and pierced Dante's body from both sides. The spears withdrew and a lifeless Dante slid on ahead of Edgar.
By the light of the glow sticks Edgar studied the bronze strip he was still holding. He shook his head, realizing what the message was.
"Equations!" he shouted into the darkness. "Simple mathematical equations!"
Among the herons and hawks and beetles was a sequence with nine herons, a squiggle, five herons, and a space. Hoping that the squiggle implied a minus sign, he began frantically looking for the projections he needed to grab, and then he saw them. Four herons.
Edgar grabbed the wooden projections and came to a dead stop.
This had to be right, he thought. The only other alternative would have been adding the five and the nine and looking for a cluster of fourteen herons.
"And that," he said, struggling to his feet, "would be ridic—"
He only had time for a glimpse of what was coming. It was a massive block of dark granite sliding down the shaft. The block had grooves on either side, and the carved wooden projections were disappearing into those groves.
The block, pushing two halves of Jules ahead of it, struck Edgar so hard his skull split apart.
The massive granite block continued its descent, pushing three dead men and three glowing green sticks down into the darkness.
At the top of the shaft, Ali had let time pass and watched the green light of the glow stick begin to fade. He had no idea what to do, so he had prayed.
He had nearly lost his footing when the entire shaft shook violently as a block of stone had fallen from the ceiling a few feet down the shaft from him. At the same time a bronze door had closed off the top of the shaft, and another door had opened as a slab of limestone swung away from him. As the massive block had slid rapidly away from him, Ali had carefully walked across the shaft and stepped beyond the limestone slab. As the light from his glow stick faded away, he saw stairs leading upward, and far away, the hazy light of day.
Thanking Allah for his good fortune, Ali began a slow climb.
*
Over one arch was Seth, the beast-headed God of chaos and confusion. Over the other was Sobek.
"I don't know what that thing is," Torrey said, pointing at the depiction of Seth, "But that other fellow has crocodile jaws, and that can't be a good sign."
Inside of each arch was a short and apparently empty corridor.
Sturnman raised empty hands and said, "I agree. I don't have a clue how to proceed. We need to apply the scientific method."
Alex watched the older man walk to the stairs and grab the wrist of the laborer whose name he did not know.
"Let's go then," Sturnman said, dragging the man toward Sobek's arch.
Alex stepped forward, but before he could speak Torrey grabbed him from behind.
"Sorry, mate," Torrey said, "But old Otto has the right idea. Survival of the fittest and all that."
Sturnman pushed the struggling laborer into the corridor and the entire thing instantly closed like the jaws of a crocodile, the roof dropping and the floor rising.
They heard a snippet of a scream and a horrific wet crunch, and then the floor sank and the roof rose and the corridor was as it had been before.
"Well that's an unappealing sight," George Torrey said, eyeing the soupy mess spreading across the floor and dripping from the ceiling.
"Yes," Sturnman said, "But what fascinates me is this. Would Senemut be clever enough to use this as a distraction? To scare us away from using the arch of Sobek once its only trap had been sprung it is now safe?"
Torrey gave Alex a shove toward the arch, and Sturnman backhanded the Scot, driving him to his knees.
"Not him, you buffoon," Sturnman said, stepping behind Torrey. He planted a raised foot against the Englishman's posterior and gave a mighty shove.
George staggered forward under the arch and screamed, "You fucking bast—"
The floor rose up and the roof came down. There was a terrible crunch. One of Torrey's legs and one of his arms was still outside the arch, and they flopped to the ground in front of Alexander.
"That's actually a little disappointing," Sturnman said. Leaving Alex behind, he entered the arch bearing Seth's mark.
Alex knew he had no choice now but to follow.
They walked.
They walked by the light of glow sticks and Sturnman's flashlight.
The floor sloped down, but not dramatically.
"How long do you think we've been walking?" Sturnman called over one shoulder. He sounded full of good cheer. "Twenty minutes? Thirty?"
Alexander was still in shock, and it took all his concentration to keep walking. "Go fuck yourself, you scatty cunt."
They heard their own footsteps echoing ahead of them just before they stepped through a narrow doorway into a great chamber hewn from the rock. There were two raised blocks of granite in the center of the open space, and shelves along the walls.
"Damn it," Sturnman whispered. "I thought this would have been it..."
Alexander sat down against one wall and caught his breath.
Sturnman walked back and forth along three walls, tapping the limestone with the butt of his flashlight.
"There has to be more. A hollow, a hidden panel."
Alexander stood and looked back the way they had come. He went to the end of the gently sloping corridor and got down on his hands and knees. To one side of the doorway was a tiny hole drilled into the limestone.
He patted down his pockets, realizing he had dropped his flashlight somewhere, and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. He extended the screwdriver and pushed it into the hole. He turned it one way, and then the other.
There was a minute click.
Rock slid to one side, and part of the corridor floor they had just crossed slid away.
"More stairs," the Scot said with a weary laugh.
Sturnman rushed past him and down into the dark.
When Alexander went down the stairs, ten of them, he saw two more arches, with doors of ancient dry wood.
"This must be it," Sturnman said, licking his lips. "One final choice."
Alexander looked above the arches. There was a single series of pictograms over each one.
The door on the left bore the sign of Ra among the glyphs, the sun god, the God of gods.
The door on the right was under the sign of Osiris, the god of the dead, the final judge in the afterlife.
Sturnman read the hieroglyphs beside the sign of Ra.
"Beyond is your greatest treasure."
Sturnman then read the inscription over the door under Osiris.
"Beyond lies my greatest treasure."
Among the glyphs over the Osiris arch Alex saw the sign of Senemut. Realizing he might have only one chance to act, he ran through the door bearing the sign of Ra, the old wood falling to pieces the moment he touched it.
Sturnman screamed some obscenity, but it was cut off by a slab of stone that fell from the ceiling and blocked the way back.
Walking forward and shaking his last glow stick, Alex looked up and saw a very long flight of stairs.
*
"I have it at last, old Senemut," Sturnman said. "Your greatest treasure."
He stepped through the door and instantly fell down a dark shaft, shattering his right leg when he hit bottom.
His bulb of his flashlight shattered as well, but he had plenty of glow sticks left. He ignited a stick and raised it up, and saw a sarcophagus in the center of a small musty chamber.
Sturnman limped across the floor and used the last of his strength to shove aside the heavy granite cover of the sarcophagus. It shattered on the floor.
Inside were the mummified remains of a woman. There was a bronze amulet around her neck, and nothing else. No riches, no gold, no jewels.
Sturnman lowered the glow stick so he could read the inscription engraved on discolored face of the amulet.
~My greatest treasure. My love. My Queen. Hatshepsut.~
"No," Sturnman said, slumping against the sarcophagus.
*
His glow stick was fading by the time Alexander reached the top of the long staircase. He had stopped to rest a number of times, but his rests were brief. He was afraid of losing his light.
There was a slab of stone in the shape of a door blocking the stairs.
In an alcove, propped up on a small circular dais was a mummified man.
For a moment Alexander thought it was Sturnman come for him at last, and he nearly fell down the stairs.
"Damn it, Alex," he said.
The mummified man was wearing a bronze medallion, and one arm was raised in the direction of the door.
Alexander stepped onto the dais to read the medallion, his light dying out, and as he strained to read the single symbol engraved on it the dais shifted underfoot and the slab blocking the stairway slid away.
The medallion seemed to burn as sunlight struck its face, and Alex saw that the symbol on it was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life.
Alex stepped out into blinding sunlight and saw that he was near the top of the dome where six men had toasted their good fortune not long ago.
Looking back at the mummified man, Alex said, "Rest in peace, Senemut," and then he walked away.
*
The next day, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities sealed access to the lost tomb of Senemut and Hatshepsut.
-
A note on character names
Otto Sturnman: In the famous novel, Professor Otto Lindenbrock leads an expedition on a Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jules Millot: Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Edgar R. Gelbman: Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, also wrote the Pellucidar series, set in a land at the earth's core.
Herbert George Torrey: H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, in which a time traveler in a distant future enters the underground lair of the cannibalistic Morlocks.
Dante Antonini: In The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri describes a descent into Purgatory.
Alexander McAlister: Alexander is the name of the time traveler in the 2002 movie version of the H.G. Wells story. George is the name of the traveler in the 1960 film version, based on the story by Herbert George Wells and created by producer director George Pal.
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Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-06-04 22:43:15 EDT (#)
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