Maddy was grinning. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but doesn’t this feel like we’re discovering something? This is so cool!’
‘Don’t be getting your hopes up, Mads,’ said Liam.
‘Don’t you see, Liam? Maybe the message in the Voynich Manuscript, the Holy Grail, was meant to lead us right here?’
He frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Maybe it’s all the other way round,’ she continued. ‘We came out here thinking there might be something more to help us decode the message, right? That the message itself was the key thing?’
‘Aye.’
Maddy nodded at the weak filtered light coming through the wall of vegetation. ‘When in fact the message in those documents was simply a way to tell us about this place. Whoever wrote the message wanted to lead us here?’
Bob wrenched a tangle of branches out of the way, and all of a sudden there was a clear view through the thick wall of undergrowth. Maddy stepped past Billy, pulled aside several low creepers and impatiently pushed forward through chest-high brambles and thorns that scratched at her skin.
She stopped where she was and shaded her eyes as the thick grey clouds in the sky finally began to tear like wet tissue paper, allowing through the piercing light of the sun, warming the jungle up to a steaming soup once more.
‘Oh – my – God!’ she uttered.
‘What? What can you see?’ called Adam.
She pushed her way a little further forward, angrily shaking the barbed tendrils of the brambles off her clothes. ‘It’s like … like … like something out of a movie.’
‘What?’
She turned round to face them. ‘You are going to love this!’
Chapter 38
1994, beyond the cave, Nicaraguan
They emerged into the sunlight, eyes grown accustomed to the dark now blinking, watering at the dazzling glare, the glistening reflection of sun on every rain-wet surface. Before them, stepping down like a giant bowl, like the caldera of a volcano, almost like a Roman amphitheatre, were the overgrown ruins of what could only be described as a long-lost city.
Adam’s face split wide with childlike delight: the joy of a chocolate glutton stepping into Willy Wonka’s factory. ‘My God! It’s … it’s incredible!’
On all sides of them masonry, finely joined with hairline precision, hewn from the same rust-coloured sandstone and assembled into an Escher landscape of stepped terraces and structures, broad paved causeways and narrow passageways, all radiating out from a central circular plaza at the bottom.
A grand circular man-made basin.
Stone stairways led up the basin sides to multi-layered pyramid-like buildings on which the very last flecks of faded paint hinted at once-upon-a-time elaborate, colourful decoration. Layered over everything, nature had taken possession of this long-since-abandoned city, stamped its right to be here, to reclaim this weather-worn monument to a vanished people. Vines and ivy hung like emerald drapery from every rooftop and spilled from every dark window. Spider lines of dark-green moss defined the joins and seams of masonry, like an architect’s pen proudly highlighting the hard-edged angles of precise geometry.
Across the crazy-paving of the causeways and narrow passages, and the vast football field-sized circular plaza at the bottom, ran the husks of long-dead vegetation, while mounds of dry leaves had gathered, windblown, against the base of walls in small crisp hummocks.
‘It reminds me of that legendary lost city,’ said Rashim. ‘The one that was supposed to be made of gold?’
‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘I know the place you mean. The Lost City of Eldorado. The one all them explorers and conquistadors went running around the Amazon looking for.’
‘Those ruins back down by the river,’ said Adam, ‘that must have been some outpost for this city. Could have been where their supplies were brought in. A marketplace or something servicing this place.’
He shook his head silently. ‘And then, Jesus, there’s all this … this … hidden from view, hidden from everyone. I can’t believe I missed this!’ He laughed. ‘And I thought I’d found something incredible.’
Maddy rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘But it was you who found it, Adam.’
He laughed at that. ‘No, no I didn’t. All I found was a bunch of writing. I didn’t have a clue what was right nearby.’ He looked back at the dark opening to the passage they’d emerged from. ‘I didn’t have a clue what was just a hundred yards away from me.’
Rashim wiped away beads of moisture from his forehead. ‘This city has been built in a natural crater?’
‘Crater, yes, but not a volcanic caldera,’ said Adam. ‘This is sandstone not basalt. It might of course have been an impact crater, like that one near Alamo, Nevada. More likely, I’d say this is a giant sinkhole.’ He gestured up at the fringe of the jungle, running round the outside of the very top of the city, like green velvet trim. ‘This was once a several-mile-wide plug of sandstone, pushed up out of the jungle by some tectonic activity. Then over hundreds of thousands of years it’s been eroded by water from the inside … hollowing it all out and making this basin.’
‘Creating a naturally walled area,’ added Maddy.
‘Exactly. The perfect place to build a secret city.’
They stared at the spectacle in silence for a long while before finally Sal spoke.
‘So, I hate to ruin this eureka moment, but what do we do now? If the Voynich message was all about bringing us here – what are we meant to do?’
Maddy shrugged. She looked at Sal and Liam. ‘What do you guys think?’
‘Explore it?’ said Liam. He grinned. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘All right, I guess that’s the first thing.’ She looked at her watch. ‘So, it’s just after one o’clock, which means we’ve got about four and a half hours of daylight left. Bob and Becks, would you be a good pair of pack mules and go grab the lights, the mini-generator, the diesel and bring it all here? We should probably set up some sort of base camp.’
Both support units nodded.
‘And food from the camp,’ said Liam. ‘They had some crates of tinned food and all sorts down there. We might be here for a few days?’
‘Good point. Forage for whatever you can find down there.’
‘Yes, Maddy,’ they both chorused before turning towards the entrance to the passage, pushing their way through the undergrowth and disappearing inside.
Adam clapped his hands together loudly. The echo bounced all the way around the city basin and returned back to them a second later. ‘Jesus! Get a load of the acoustics!’ He grinned.
Maddy looked at him. ‘You’re actually really getting off on this, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not going to lie … the last time I was this excited was when my parents bought me the Thunderbirds Tracy Island Playset.’
She laughed. ‘You’re so geek it hurts.’
‘Takes one to know one.’
She cuffed his head playfully and took several quick steps down towards the plaza. Adam followed after her, gesticulating at the things all around them. She laughed at something he said.
Liam watched them go, their receding playful voices echoing around the stonework. He turned to Sal, Rashim and Billy. ‘Aye, it’s an incredible sight, isn’t it?’
Billy and Rashim nodded and smiled.
He noticed, however, that Sal seemed distracted; she seemed not to hear him. He thought he saw something in her face though. A hint of sadness. No. Not that. Regret?
Envy, perhaps?
‘Sal? You OK?’
She was back with them now. She smiled quickly at Liam. ‘Yes. It’s incredible.’
Liam shone his torch around inside the building. It was one of the bigger structures that looked like it had once been a temple or some sort of communal gathering-place. The cavernous interior echoed with their footsteps. Flecks of sunlight that stole through the collapsed ceiling dappled the paved floor, coarse hardy grass was growing in sporadic waist-high tufts where the sun habitual
ly managed to reach. The high walls around them were decorated with a carved pattern: not glyphs or writing, but a simple repeated motif of three lines – a backwards ‘L’ with a third line radiating out forty-five degrees between the horizontal and the vertical. The roof to the building had caved in a long time ago; the thick branches of vines snaked across above them, from wall to far wall, replacing the fallen roof. Thick support beams of wood had rotted, given way and deposited an avalanche of clay tiles across the floor. The tiles now lay shattered, entwined, almost lost beneath a carpet of vegetation.
‘Is it me, or does it feel spooky in here?’ Liam whispered.
‘It is odd that there are no remains of the inhabitants left behind. None at all.’ Rashim panned the beam of his torch into the dark corners of the room where the sunlight wasn’t reaching.
‘You’re right. No skeletons. I was expecting some skeletons.’
‘Unless this city was left and the people migrated? It is possible that something caused this city to become abandoned.Environmental conditions?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye, that’s true.’
If the Green River, for example, had become impassable, or gone dry … if it had been the sole source of imported food for this city, it would have quickly rendered this place an unsustainable outpost. Perhaps the Green River had once been much bigger? A vital trade and resource artery for this long-forgotten kingdom, and for one reason or another the river had atrophied and shrunk to the lifeless algae-covered backwater it was now. It was quite possible that it wasn’t even a natural event but the result of human intervention. Perhaps the water upstream of the river had once long ago been diverted to irrigate farmland?
Liam was reminded of the story of the Polynesians of Easter Island. How they had got it into their minds to cut thousands of huge several-ton blocks of granite from the island’s central mountain, carve them into brooding faces and then transport them down to the edge of the island to stare menacingly out to sea.
It was the transporting of these huge heads that had seen to the downfall of those people. They had no carts. The wheel was an invention unknown to them, so the blocks were rolled down along ‘conveyor belts’ of logs. Thousands of trees hacked down to provide a route to the shoreline for each gigantic carved head. And with such sudden and ferocious deforestation occurring to this isolated, enclosed ecosystem it wasn’t long before soil erosion – caused by the lack of tree roots binding the soil to the island – had begun to render the place an infertile rock. Harvests soon began to fail, food became scarce and the inhabitants, fearing the gods were angry with them for not making enough brooding effigies of them, decided to ramp up the carved-head production. So they made more, many more, as quickly as they could; the exquisite carving of the earliest ones gave way to cruder, far simpler carvings as this dying civilization escalated production in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves. Irony exemplified: the more heads they carved and transported down to the shore to appease the gods, the faster their ecological doom approached.
When Captain Cook came across Easter Island in 1774, he had found the very last of these people, a handful of starving survivors of this culture, and had wondered how these pitiful and emaciated ‘savages’ could have constructed such a breath-taking spectacle round the perimeter of the island.
Liam picked his way through the weeds and coarse grass, the shattered clay roof tiles and snaking vine roots towards the entrance to another large room. Like this one, the ceiling had collapsed long ago, depositing shards of cracked tiles like eggshell on to the floor. As he stepped in, a brittle tile cracked and crunched beneath his shoe.
He shifted his foot, feeling vaguely guilty at his clumsiness. A proper archaeologist would have checked where he stepped before blundering in, for fear of crushing some fragile cultural artefact, some Mayan equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.
He looked down guiltily at what he’d just crushed.
It was certainly no roof tile. He knelt down and picked up the object – curved, smooth and vanilla-coloured – to inspect it more closely. ‘Oh Jay-zus!’ He dropped it.
Rashim turned from gazing at the flecked paint patterns high on the walls. ‘What is it?’
Liam found the rest of the skull poking out of a tuft of grass; dark empty eye sockets glared accusingly back at him for his feckless clumsiness. Liam spotted a ribcage lying right next to it.
And then very quickly he noticed the coarse grass was interwoven with many, many more bones. The entire floor of this room was littered with bleached yellow and brittle bare bones poking out of the grass. Skulls, a hundred or more of them – their dark sockets seemed to all be glaring his way, silently chastising him for disturbing their centuries-old slumber.
Chapter 39
1994, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
‘Here, Maddy, take a look at this,’ said Adam. He hunkered down low and squinted at the faint markings picked out by the light of his torch. ‘The carving on this one’s much more distinct. Do you see?’
Maddy had discovered the way down into this chamber beneath the central plaza. The plaza was where she, Sal and Adam had gravitated. It seemed to be the very heart of this remarkable ghost city, a large acre-sized and circular open space in which, Adam speculated, the inhabitants may have held rituals or ceremonies. The floor of the plaza was made of stone slabs, arranged in concentric circles round a central raised dais from where Adam suggested someone of importance – an elder, a shaman – would conduct his rituals.
They’d wandered across the plaza, in several places coming across sections of the floor where a number of the paving slabs had collapsed, revealing a dark space below. Curious about what lay beneath them, they had spread out and explored the perimeter of the plaza, and Maddy had been the one to come across an open trench running along the northern edge. A trench that descended several steps to an opening that led into the dark void beneath the plaza.
Maddy, Adam and Sal found themselves in a large circular chamber with a low ceiling – the underside of the plaza floor above them. The ceiling, only a foot and a half above their heads, was held up by countless squat stone pillars placed evenly every six feet or so. It reminded Maddy of a cut-away illustration of the Colosseum she’d once seen in a children’s history book. The sandy floor of the arena where the gladiators had fought each other to the death had been a false floor constructed of wooden planks, held up by a forest of stone columns. The space beneath this floor had effectively been the Colosseum’s ‘back stage’, where the gladiators, the wild animals, the chariots waited their turn to be brought up through a trap door to entertain the baying masses.
In this low-ceilinged chamber Adam had discovered a number of flagstones set in the floor that had faint carvings on them. Most of them were so worn by time and the elements that there was little to discern in the markings but the frustrating sense there’d once been an opportunity to know so much more.
Adam and Maddy had hurried from one flagstone to another like children at an Easter egg hunt, hoping to come across one with enough detail to pull some information from, until finally they found one worth hunkering down over and inspecting more closely.
‘See?’ Adam placed his torch on the floor beside the stone. The beam of light was shining at an acute angle across the slab of rock so that the faint lines of carving, little more than the shallowest of weather-worn grooves, cast enough of a defined shadow to allow them to see more clearly what had been carved there.
‘It’s a depiction of one of their rituals, at a guess.’
Maddy leaned forward, closer, to get a better look. She could barely make out any detail at all. She thought she could see the simplified depiction of a man with an arm held out before him, palm held outward towards a column of wavy lines.
Sal, meanwhile, had decided to stray a little further and explore the rest of this circular low-ceilinged void. The last thing she needed right now was to listen to those two lovebirds enthusing about this place together in hushed whispers.
F
or the last few minutes she’d walked round the perimeter of the chamber, relieved at putting some distance between her and them. The beam of her torch had probed the pitch black, showing endless squat columns of stone, to her left the endless curving wall of the chamber.
But now the beam picked out a narrow gap in the wall. She shone her torch into it. It appeared that there was another, smaller chamber beyond.
‘Hey, Maddy! I’m going to go check what’s in here!’
Between the receding rows of columns, she saw Maddy on the far side of the chamber, glancing left and right to see where Sal’s voice had come from.
‘Over here!’ Sal waggled her torch around until Maddy spotted it and waved back. ‘I’m going to take a look in here, Maddy! I think it’s another room!’
She nodded. ‘OK, but don’t go wandering too far!’
Sal returned a sarcastic smile – too far and too dim for Maddy to make that out.
Yes, Mama. I promise to be a very, very good girl.
She was tempted to call that out in reply, but Maddy had already returned to gazing at the floor and chatting with Adam in hushed tones.
Pfft. Sal sighed. Go get a room or something, you two.
She shook her head. It was embarrassingly obvious to her that Maddy and Adam had a thing for each other. Although neither of them would admit it, and both would scoff at the suggestion and turn pink if someone were to so much as hint there was something going on there.
Personally, Sal couldn’t see what Maddy thought was so great about the young man. With his pale freckled and spotty skin, scruffy ginger dreadlocks and wispy beard, and those awful, tie-dyed shorts and T-shirts he insisted on wearing.
Jahulla. Adam looked like a common bhikhari. A hobo, a tramp. So very different to the well-groomed, athletic, attractive man he would become in his early thirties. Maybe that’s what Maddy saw when she gazed lovingly at him – how he was going to look one day. Or maybe she was just desperate.