Oliver Lucas wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead and blinked to clear the sting of salt from his eyes. The back and underarms of his khaki shirt were stained with sweat and clung to him uncomfortably. Up on the surface, the trade winds continually swept across the island, carrying away the worst of the humidity, but here, a quarter mile into the side of a volcanic mountain, the air was still, hot, and thick with moisture.
Ahead of Oliver the gray stone took a sharp dip downwards, concealing the source of the rushing, gurgling sound that he had been following for the last ten minutes. The passage was illuminated by a flickering blue light, which emanated from notches cut into the right side of the tunnel at intervals of about a dozen feet. In each notch a short gout of flame burst forth from a narrow metal nozzle with a soft hissing sound.
“I’d kill to know how they did that,” Oliver muttered, pausing to examine the ancient gas lamp. The Chinese had used bamboo pipes to deliver naturally occurring gas to heat steam baths and forges for over a thousand years, but all of his research indicated that this tunnel had been cut into the side of the mountain by precursors of the Maori and other Pacific Island people, none of which had been known for their use of gas lighting.
Oliver shook his head in wonder and ran a hand through his mop of short red hair, pushing it back from his face before turning from the gas lamp and carrying on down the tunnel. He moved in a slight crouch, the tunnel was just barely too short for his six foot frame, sweeping a powerful flashlight back and forth across the floor of the tunnel in front of him. The gas lighting was nothing short of amazing, but it was far from perfect. Oliver knew from long and bitter experience that many an ancient designer of tombs and temples had used subtle tricks of light and shadow to conceal deadly traps. He might wonder at the ancient gas lamps, but he would not depend on them for lighting.
As he moved cautiously down the tunnel, Oliver never allowed his right hand to stray far from the gun hidden in a concealed pocket just inside his photographer’s vest. He hadn’t seen anyone else in the hours since he had departed the beachside resort, but that did not mean that he was alone under the mountain. Other treasure hunters might have followed the same trail of ancient legends to this underground passage or, even if no other humans were nearby, there was always the risk of encountering a wild animal or some sort of supernatural guardian.
The sound of rushing water grew louder as Oliver crept nearer to the downward slope, which he could now see descended in a series of wide steps chiseled into the gray stone. Thick sponges of green moss, speckled with bright red fronds, grew in the corners and hollows of the stairs. Shining the beam of his flashlight down the steps, Oliver watched it pierce through a dancing haze of water vapor, which boiled upwards from the base of the steps.
Oliver paused at the top of the steps and surveyed the mossy stone steps for a moment, then fixed his flashlight on a spot where the green moss had been scuffed aside, revealing the stone beneath.
“Damn it,” he breathed.
He slipped the gun from its hidden pocket and pulled the slide to chamber a round. “You’d better be a wild boar, or a monkey,” he muttered, gripping the gun firmly in his right hand and pointing his flashlight down the steps. “If I came all this way only to be beat by a few hours...”
The passage angled down for about fifty feet before flattening out again. As Oliver descended the steps the roar of the water grew continually louder until he could hardly hear himself breathing. About half way down, squinting through the boiling mist, he spotted the lintel of a narrow doorway set into the stone wall just below the angle of the ceiling.
Oliver paused. He stepped sideways and pressed himself against the wall, then slowly slipped down into a crouch, watching the doorway over the sights of the gun as he moved. His flashlight beam played across the interlocking spirals of Koru engraved in the stone surrounding the doorway. The ornate triple lines and fractal curves twisted around and through smaller symbols which Oliver recognized as the storytelling glyphs employed by the Maori people who had dwelled on this island in the sixteenth century. As his flashlight beam moved away from the carvings the flickering light of the gas jets played across them in an eerie dance of shadows and blue light. Through the doorway Oliver could just make out a narrow ledge, beyond which the clouds of water vapor churned up like steam from a boiling pot.
He took a deep breath and sighed with relief. He didn’t put his gun away, but lowered his hand and allowed himself to believe that he might be alone in this place.
Oliver turned his attention from the room beyond and looked to the steps as he picked his way down to the doorway, searching carefully above, to each side, and around the edge of the stair for any sign of a trap before setting his foot down. He reached the landing without incident and breathed a sigh of relief.
Beyond the carved stone frame of the doorway, clouds of mist continued to boil up from an unseen river, obscuring his vision. Oliver sidled up to the opening and darted his head out, then back again. Seeing no sign of other people, he stepped into the doorway and inspected the scene before him.
The noise of rushing water he had followed came from an underground waterfall, which spilled out of the shadows high above Oliver’s head on the left side of the cavern. The water tumbled down in a cacophonous sheet, bursting out into showers of heavy mist where the falling water struck against outcropping rocks, and disappeared into a wide cleft that cut across that cavern floor.
Oliver put his gun away and got a grip on the ornately carved frame of the doorway, then leaned out into the cavern to get a better view. The ledge on the other side of the door was only five feet wide. A hundred feet below, the waterfall thundered into a roiling stream of water, only barely visible through rising clouds of mist, and rushed out of the cavern through an opening somewhere under the wall to Oliver’s right. The entire scene was illuminated in a continually shifting flicker of refracted rainbows and moving shadows cast by the flickering gas lights set into the wall. The facing wall on the far side of the cavern, only about fifty feet away, was carved in a series of knotted shapes and twisting human figures surrounding a doorway, through which Oliver could see a solid wall of stone.
There was no sign of another person, living or otherwise.
“Alright. Let’s see about getting past this,” Oliver said.
Talking to himself while exploring ancient ruins was a habit left over from his first adventure into the jungles of South America. On that expedition he had been accompanied by his cousin Amber, who had continually pressed him to share his thoughts as they wound their way through the twisting mazes of a Mayan temple. These days Oliver tended to work alone, but he still felt the urge to talk through his discoveries. At times he would even share them with Amber, sending her encrypted e-mails or posting messages to a private Twitter stream so that she could both follow his adventures, and serve as an emergency backup if he disappeared while in the field.
Oliver ran the beam of his flashlight over the door frame, the floor, and the walls, searching for any sign of hidden triggers or tripwires. There were none. He slipped through the doorway into the cavern, eyes flicking to the dark corners of the open space, then turning upwards to search the darkness above for any sign of danger.
Again, nothing that he could see.
This was all feeling too simple. Sure, there was the matter of the forty foot wide hole in the floor, the bottom of which was certainly a swirling deathtrap, and the apparently blocked-up doorway, but such obstacles were little more than entertaining challenges to Oliver. He lived for solving puzzles like this, which was part of the reason he carried only a small charge of explosives tucked away in a hidden compartment of his vest, as a backup plan if he were trapped. Unlike some treasure hunters he had met online, Oliver didn’t believe in blasting his way through hidden doors. The way he saw it, if he couldn’t outwit the designers of this temple, then he didn’t believe that he deserved the prize that lay within.
Oliver pulled a ruggedized digital camera body from one of the large pockets on the front of his vest, then reached into a padded pocket to retrieve a compact zoom lens. Working quickly to avoid getting too much mist into the camera body, Oliver unscrewed the protective caps on both the camera and lens, then slotted the two parts together and locked the lens into place. He flicked the camera on and crouched down against the wall, using his knees to stabilize the camera and flashlight as he searched the shadows on the far side of the cleft.
On the camera screen, the wall on the far side of the cavern leapt into focus. The carved lines of stone stood out in sharp relief in the bright light of his flashlight, glistening with droplets of condensed mist, deep shadows flickering through the hollows each time he moved his hand or shifted his legs. This was far from the optimal situation for taking salable photographs, with poor lighting further complicated by the constantly shifting haze of mist, which played havoc with his camera’s image sensors, but the image was more than sufficient for him to pick out the threads of the story told in swirling lines, twisting bodies, and gaping faces.
Oliver sat on that ledge for nearly an hour, alternating between peering at the carvings though the camera lens and looking down to his phone, to consult the months of research notes that he had loaded into the phone before leaving his hotel room. He moved his lips, whispering the tale to himself in meandering fragments as the story of these people, progenitors of the Maori who had landed on this chain of islands east of New Zealand as a loosely knit band of fishermen and pirates, and two hundred years later emerged from it as the first recognizable members of a powerful people. It had taken him years to piece this together, working from scattered fragments of myth, obscure archaeological records, and more than a little guesswork. Even with all of his preparation, it took Oliver a long time to understand what he was looking at as he sat there, scanning the curving lines of Koru, attempting to first understand the meaning of the carvings, then place them in context of his research into the history and mythology of the Pacific Islanders.
Much of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that the symbols carved into the wall were not so much a language as a series of highly contextual icons representing characters, events, and emotions. They were not intended to represent spoken language in the way that the Roman alphabet did for European written languages. Instead, these symbols had been carved to serve as mnemonic aids for tribal elders and keepers of tales. Despite having a rich culture, this particular civilization had never developed a purely written language system. Rather, they had relied on a strong tradition of oral storytelling and songs, supplemented by ideographic totems carved into wood and stone, which served to remind the viewer of the sequence of events and characters in the story they depicted, but did not convey the full depth of the tale in themselves.
“Okay,” he finally said aloud. “I think I’ve got it.”
Oliver stood and stretched his back, then stepped through the doorway into the low passage to be away from the worst of the billowing mist as he removed the lens from his camera and stowed both away in his vest. After an hour sitting in the cavern his already damp clothes were now soaked through, but the waterproofing on the camera had kept it safe as he examined and photographed the carvings on the far wall of the cavern.
Oliver returned to the ledge and turned to face the wall. He searched the carved face of the wall to the left of the doorway until he found the symbol, vaguely human in shape but with a twisted, angry face, which represented the hero of the story he had just read on the far wall.
The story told of a boy named Māui who stole knowledge from the goddess Ro’e and delivered it to his tribe. Many of the symbols, and the names and concepts that they represented, were familiar to Oliver from the shared mythology of the Pacific Island peoples, but the specific details of this tale were new to him. That happened a lot when Oliver reached some hidden cavern or lost temple. Details that had been lost to time, or even intentionally erased from a tale, often awaited him at the heart of abandoned places.
Oliver touched a finger against the intricately carved stone and traced down from the carving that represented Māui about a foot until he found the depiction of Ro’e, here encircled with a knot of seven lizards, their tails and bodies braided together, which Oliver was reasonably certain represented her guardians. He felt bile rise up in his throat and his pulse quicken when he saw that the thin layer of moss covering the third lizard’s back had been brushed away.
Someone else had definitely been here.
A scuffed up bit of moss on a step could be the work of an animal or someone who had stumbled into the cave accidentally, as unlikely as that seemed after it had remained undisturbed for over fifteen hundred years. Someone had clearly brushed the back of this stone lizard clean some time in the last few days, recently enough that the moss had not grown back. That could only mean one of two things: First, that another relic hunter had beat Oliver to this ancient place, or second, that there was still an active cult, guardian order, or tribal religion focused around this place.
“Oh, no. No, no. Please, don’t be gone,” Oliver groaned.
He pulled out his phone and consulted his notes again.
Then he smiled.
To the best of his understanding, this place had been used exclusively for sacrifice and initiation rituals. It was unlikely that such elements of worship had survived over the centuries, and if they had, the people who came here for worship certainly would not have disturbed that particular glyph.
He pressed the third carved lizard.
The floor shook under Oliver’s feet. A thrumming vibration that was accompanied by the sound of rumbling stones and gushing water. A tongue of volcanic stone, so pitted with holes that Oliver judged it to weigh less than a quarter of what one might expect for a stone of its size, emerged from the cliff face before the doorway, spanning the cleft from side to side with a bridge nearly three feet wide. Looking across the cleft, Oliver saw that the doorway on the side of the cavern opposite from him was now open.
Oliver waited, patiently listening to the roar of the waterfall as he watched the stone bridge and counted.
After about five minutes the floor shook again and a gout of water spurted out from the cliff face below the bridge. The stone trembled, then slowly retracted back across the cleft to disappear into the cliff. On the far side of the cavern a heavy stone slab slid down to block the doorway again, coming to rest with a thud that reverberated throughout the cavern.
Oliver lay down on the stone floor and peered over the edge of the cliff. Only two feet down he saw the hole into which the stone bridge had disappeared and, several feet below that, a round opening from which water still trickled.
“Hydraulics. Seriously impressive stuff for any culture this old,” Oliver said. He nodded his head in appreciation and waited another minute to see if anything else would happen to the bridge.
Eventually, he arose and returned to the carving of Ro’e and her encircling lizards. He inspected them again, consulted his notes, and muttered, “It’s all about timing, isn’t it?”
In the story, Ro’e would have willingly granted Māui the knowledge he sought if he had been patient and waited until she deemed him ready to understand it. The impatient youth labored three years in the service of Ro’e until the opportunity arose to steal knowledge from her. As he fled from her island in a boat, the stolen knowledge clasped to his chest, she had stood on the shore weeping, for she knew that he had stolen only the knowledge, but would not have possessed the wisdom to understand it for another four years.
The story did not say what had become of Māui, but Oliver thought he got the point of it.
Oliver brushed his fingers across the rough surface of the stone, causing bits of lichen and moss that had grown on it over the centuries to flake away, and counted silently to himself. When he reached the head of the seventh lizard he paused and glanced around. There was no sign of anyone in the cavern. Whoever had been here before him had either turned back here, or crossed over and disappeared into the doorway on the far side of the cleft. If they had ever returned from that journey, and managed to pass the sealed stone door, they would have found the bridge gone.
“I hope I understand this,” he muttered, then pressed hard against the head of the seventh lizard.
The floor shook and the stone bridge eased out to span the gap once again.
Oliver stepped up to the ledge, knelt, and poked at the stone bridge. It felt solid enough. He sat on the ledge and pressed against the bridge with both feet, assuring himself that it was solid, then stood upright. The bridge held him without shifting. Oliver nodded, took a deep breath, and strode forward into the curtain of mist that wreathed the bridge. The black volcanic stone beneath his feet was so riddled with holes that the swirling mist did little to make it slick and Oliver had no difficulty keeping his balance as he crossed to the far side of the cleft.
Oliver couldn’t be certain how long the bridge would stay in place. If his interpretation of the story was correct, it would remain extended until he returned and pressed the tail of the seventh lizard, but there was an inherent danger in trusting interpretations of ancient myths to provide guidance through tombs and temples, especially when one’s understanding was assembled from a dozen different folktales passed down by tribal storytellers.
Though the stories drawn from oral traditions were often richer and more textured with human emotion, as far as Oliver was concerned, he had found that few things were more comforting in their accuracy that a coldly detailed and textually corroborated written account.
Stepping up onto the stone slab of the far side, Oliver pulled out his flashlight and gun, then slipped across the five feet of open cavern to press himself against the wall beside the doorway. He peeked one eye around the carved frame, not expecting to see anyone, but prepared to pull back and bring his gun up if any threat appeared in the dimly lit corridor.
The passageway was illuminated with flickering blue flames, just like the one which he had followed from the hidden entrance high on the mountainside, and tunneled into the rock only a dozen feet before taking a sharp turn to the left. Inspecting the door frame, Oliver found a groove carved into the inner sides of the frame, the stone within the groove polished to a slick sheen. Above, a wide slot was cut into the lintel, in which he could see the base of the wide gray stone that had blocked the doorway.
Oliver pulled back from the opening and leaned against the wall for a moment, breathing deeply, then swung around the corner and sprinted down the hall to the next corner, keeping his flashlight low and watching for the glint of a tripwire or any sign of trigger stone set into the otherwise solid floor of the passage. He reached the turn in the passage without incident and paused, back against the wall, to listen. The roar of the waterfall still echoed through the passage, but he was reasonably certain that he could not hear anyone around the corner. This was confirmed with a glance and Oliver rapidly covered the twenty feet to the next turn in the passage without incident. He continued moving in this manner for another five turns, twisting and turning through the heart of the mountain until the last turn revealed another doorway which opened into a vast dark space.
Oliver approached the doorway slowly, keeping his body pressed against the wall and his flashlight beam low. His entire journey thus far had been illuminated by the bluish glow of the gas lamps set into the wall, so his arrival at a place that was completely dark made him nervous. He slipped up to the corner of the doorway and glanced around, but the faint light of the tunnel lamps showed only a small patch of floor composed of tightly fitted blocks of stone. The remainder of the cavern was completely dark.
As long as there aren’t any undead, Oliver thought. I’ve had enough of them for a while.
He turned and dropped to one knee in the doorway, shining his light into the cavernous space and following the beam with the glowing sights of his gun.
“Oh, god. Why did it have to be you?” said a voice from the darkness. The accent was vaguely Swedish, by way of British English. “I’d almost rather have starved to death down here.”