Jane (43 page)

I could only imagine Tarzan’s fury at Ral Conrath, for he’d slaughtered many good people. He had stolen the chief and forced Waziri men—mightily fearful of Sumbula—to journey there.

The four peaks of the range and the small valleys between them were blanketed with trees of a size I had seen only on my climb up the slopes of Sumbula’s tallest mountain. Entering this forest was made all the more strange by the thick mist that rose about us and obscured even the sight of Ulu, if I did not follow closely enough behind him. It muted all sound, even the shrill cries of the birds that I could hear, but not see, flitting in the branches high above us. Danger might be lurking very near—
sheeta, histah
—but without sight or clear sound of them, there would be no warning.

Suddenly, Ulu called back for us to stop. He had led us off the main trail to the base of a monstrous tree, even its lowest branches too high to see, but by its bark it appeared to be a baobab. Its many thick roots seemed to grow as much out of the ground as within and formed a wildly braided wall before which Ulu now squatted.

The charm doctor uncovered from beneath a mattress of moss a pile of sturdy clubs and a pot of what looked like pitch. Without speaking, he went to work making a fire with the dry stick and leaves that had also been hidden below the moss. He took three clubs from the pile and dipped their ends into the pot, then held them to the fire.

They burst into flame. Ulu stood, his expression grave.

“
Umla hugar
Sumbula,” he said.

“Ulu says he fears taking us…” Tarzan translated, careful to refrain from uttering that sacred word, I thought.

“
M’boa kai
Waziri
ta
Ulu
don
.”

“Only the chief and he are permitted,” Tarzan said.

Then suddenly the earth—as if giving the charm doctor a sterner warning still—began to shake violently underfoot. All three of us were thrown forcibly to the ground. My imperative to follow Ral Conrath into the mine was forgotten in the upheaval. While the tree beside us was too mammoth to shake, the canopy overhead grew noisy with panicked animals. A vent nearby—one of those cracks in the ground I’d seen emitting the dense mist of the Sumbula foothills—tore open to discharge a massive plume of steam. Our torches abandoned, we scrambled away on hands and knees lest we be scalded to death. From below us in the earth I could hear the sound of great crashing and destruction.

Ulu had heard it as well, and even when the shaking stopped and we three regained our footing, he seemed poised with his ear angled to the ground, listening to the subterranean. His features took on a brutal cast.

“M’tolo!”
he cried.

“We must hurry,” Tarzan said. Ulu had returned to the base of the baobab and was kneeling at the tar pot, again coating the torch tips with pitch and lighting them.

Without another word, Ulu lifted a section of roots—a beautifully hidden doorway—and ushered us into Sumbula.

Underworld

It did give me pause when we began our descent—a steep one—into a steam-filled passage hewn from stone. We were belowground, ground that had been regularly shaking since my arrival in Eden. Boiling mud pots. A pool whose cool water had turned hot enough to cook fish. And what we saw up ahead did nothing to assuage my unease. The passage opened out into a vast cave. Even by the light of torches and in the misty air I could see that the rough-walled chamber was a mine. Ral Conrath’s damned gold mine. That for which he had lied, stolen, bribed, and murdered.

Ulu was staring at a giant wooden waterwheel that had toppled over and broken into jagged pieces, blocking the way. This, I surmised, had been the crashing sound we’d heard from above, the one that had troubled our guide. The channel that had moved the waterwheel, I now saw, was a noisy rushing river—the Mbele Ogowe tributary, gone underground. But the water was boiling hot, steaming. Father’s observation about the area’s volcanism had never seemed so obvious.

Are we mad to be heading into an underground cavern that could collapse and bury us alive?

I willed myself to rein in my fears, and it was easier than I expected, for the sights around me were strange and extraordinary. I was no expert, but even a child could see that the veins, the wavy ribbons of gold in the mine, were plentiful and thick. It was ingenious how the engineers had used the wooden waterwheel built into the underground river to power a kind of “conveyor belt” that brought from two wide shafts—like arms that disappeared into the black depths of the cave—tons of ore. Ore, I could see, that was so rich with the yellow metal that the raw quartzite rocks shimmered in our lamplight. At the back of the main chamber was what must have been a stone smelter. It was cold now, but I could see it must have produced prodigious heat.

We were forced to scramble over the fractured waterwheel to move ahead. Under my bare feet, the broken wood skeleton was no more difficult to traverse than the twisted branches of a tree.

Ulu was urging us on. As we left the gold mine behind, we entered a room housing what I vaguely recognized in the flickering torchlight as presses … coin presses. This was a mint—a find beyond all expectation! Here were sophisticated dies and screw presses that had clearly stamped the Waziri necklaces. The whole thing was mysterious, miraculous—a mining and coin-making operation in the depths of the Gabonese jungle so far from everything. And abandoned, as though all in a rush.
But abandoned by whom?

There was no time for pondering, as Ulu had not paused for even a moment. He was leading us through an archway into a further passage. Its walls, I could see, were constructed of stone blocks, more finely made than the rough-hewn ones in the mine and mint. But what we found at the end of the passage stopped me in my tracks and caused the hair on my arms to prickle.

It was a doorway, massive, with two polished marble columns on either side of it. The columns were deeply carved with hieroglyphs.

Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I stood unmoving. “Wait,” I said. I lifted my torch high and stared in astonishment at what I saw carved into the marble lintel. The flickering light left it in long shadows, distorting the image. But I could see enough of it to know that the symbol above the doorway depicted a square maze, the same design the Waziri used over and over in their village.

This was the symbol D’Arnot had spoken of before he died. The one that would make Ral Conrath “more famous than Petrie.”

I studied it, recalling the story of the pile of rubble Flinders Petrie had discovered near Fayum Oasis, all that was left, he believed, of the fabulous three-thousand-room ancient Egyptian labyrinth the historian Herodotus had visited and written about.

But this was anything but a pile of stone chips. It was all intact. And the hieroglyphs … I had nothing but the most rudimentary knowledge of Egyptology. But if what lay beyond these doors was what I suspected—what Ral Conrath believed he had found—we had just stumbled onto the greatest archaeological find in centuries.

A “New Egypt” near Africa’s west coast!

I was snatched from my musings by a deep sonorous droning and turned to find its source, the Waziri charm doctor. Ulu was stock-still in a seeming trance, eyes wide and staring at the closed door. Now the droning intensified, causing his lightly closed lips to vibrate, the sound reverberating eerily in the empty hall. Tarzan’s eyes were fixed on the man—confusedly, expectantly. I, too, found myself expectant. But of what?

In the next moment we understood.

As if a mechanism had been triggered by the vibrations emanating from Ulu’s body, the great doors swung silently open. I was dumbfounded and could only imagine the chaos in Tarzan’s mind. He had ventured into the taboo world of Sumbula and seen man-made wonders—wonders that were near to his home yet hidden all these years from his sight and knowledge. I wished I could speak to him, though I had no good explanation for any of it. But there was no time for talk. Ulu had moved through the doors and side by side Tarzan and I followed. Nothing that had come before prepared me for the staggering sight before us—a long, stately corridor lined with tall pillars of fine white marble.

Ulu stopped long enough only to extinguish his torch, gesturing for us to do the same, for the entire passageway was perfectly lit with sconces of filigreed glass, the flames behind them throwing off a soft, filtered light.
Light from what source? What was this place?!

But the dazzlement was just beginning.

The walls on both sides of the hallway had been covered, every inch, with brightly colored frescoes. Though we were moving quickly at Ulu’s urgings, I could see that the artistry was magnificent, but even more amazing was the content of the murals. Scenes of celestial bodies. The moon in its phases. The constellations of the zodiac. Strange, colorful billowing clouds set against the blackness of space. The rings and moons of Saturn! I lagged behind to gape at scenes of an erupting volcano, great waves towering over a coastal landscape, terrible winds flattening a forest. I was reminded again of Petrie’s description of his labyrinth—“paintings that showed the whole history of the world.” There were scenes familiar to Africa—mountain ranges, waterfalls, snaking rivers—but others that had no business existing in a place such as this—vast expanses of icy wasteland, a glacier cutting down through snow-covered peaks.

As we reached the end of the hallway, Ulu turned the sharp corner and disappeared. But Tarzan and I had stopped dead in our tracks. For here before us was a magnificent map that covered an entire wall. It vaguely resembled our world, though continents were somewhat shifted about, Antarctica was nowhere to be seen, and a great island was outlined between the coasts of West Africa and South America. But Ulu soon returned, shouting at us to follow. We ran down another corridor, this one lower ceilinged, though the walls here were similarly painted with frescoes.

These were neither celestial nor planetary features. What we were seeing was a spectacular
bestiary
. As I hurried past, I caught glimpses of gorgeously rendered paintings of every animal of the jungle—big cats, hyenas, crocodiles, elephants. There were herds of zebras, elephants, antelopes. Birds, snakes, the long-tusked boar. Families of great apes. Insects. Tarzan had run ahead of me, following Ulu, but now I could see he was standing still, staring hard at the wall. When I reached him he was slack-jawed.

“Look,” he said, reaching out and placing his palm on the painted surface.

Staring back at us was a perfect rendering of a Mangani female, male, and
balu.
The implications were stupefying. Whoever were the occupants of this complex, they had had knowledge of the missing link tribe!

“M’tolo!”
Ulu cried.

We dared not tarry, though the mysteries of this place were piling one atop another. I determined that when we had stopped Ral Conrath and rescued the captive Waziri, Tarzan and I would find a way to investigate it further.

But now we were moving through a dizzying maze of interlocking chambers, crypts, and corridors, some that followed one after another, others that dead-ended, then turned back in the opposite direction. It struck me then with the force of an Atlantic wave—
It is indeed a labyrinth—here, a continent away from Egypt.
This, then, was Sumbula! The secret that Waziri headmen kept from their people, the sacred and taboo, bringing out gold medallions and snatches of culture to be woven into the fabric of the tribe.
For how long, how many thousands of years,
I wondered,
had their ancestors been visitors to this inexplicable destination?

Ral Conrath, looking for a fortune in gold, had stumbled upon a far greater treasure: a “lost civilization.” It would have been the impossible dream of a boy’s lifetime—one he’d dared not imagine—vast riches outshone by the unimaginable promise of worldwide fame and prestige. Scholars, scientists, noblemen, even kings groveling before him.

Sure-footed and confident, Ulu led us deeper and deeper into the tangled stone edifice. Some rooms were no bigger than a closet; others, soaring temples. We passed through a chamber that with its scroll-stuffed shelves could only have been a library. Its sole living occupants, I found to my disgust, were large shaggy rats gnawing unmolested on the ancient codices. I wanted to scream, shoo the horrible beasts away, and salvage all the precious documents I could lay my hands on.

But there was no time!

I was still reeling from the thought that the library was perhaps as old as the one destroyed in Alexandria when I found myself alone—for Tarzan and Ulu had already run ahead—in a room at the center of which was a long wooden table. There were no seats around it, and I was certain it was not meant for dining. Along one wall were shelves stacked neatly with metal knives and probes and wooden-handled saws. On another wall I saw painted an image that took my breath away.

It was a human figure lying supine on the table in the center of the room—a Caucasian male, the skin of his limbs flayed and the muscles perfectly depicted, the torso laid open and the organs exposed.