Jones clapped him on the shoulder. “You got it, kid. That’s where were going.”
“Up there? Without any gear? Are you nuts?”
Jones strode toward his discarded satchel at the river’s edge. “Nobody else has to come. But that skull has to be returned.”
“Returned,” Oxley echoed.
Mutt trailed after him, bone-tired and a little scared. “Who cares? That thing’s brought us nothing but trouble.” He pointed to Oxley. “I mean, look at him!”
Jones shouldered his satchel. “I have to return it.”
His mother put her arm around Mutt. “But why you, Indy?”
He shrugged. “Because it asked me to.”
Mutt shook his head in disbelief. “It asked you to? A hunk of dead rock?”
Jones headed out. “What makes you think it’s dead?”
FORTY-SEVEN
INDY CLUNG TO THE DAMP ROCK, bathed in mist. He ached down to his bones. It had taken half the day to cross the jungle and scale the cliff to this point. The way grew steadily steeper and more treacherous; each toe- and foothold had to be tested. Slippery moss, leafy ferns, and crumbling stone threatened to toss them all back to the jungle below.
Gasping, Indy stared out toward the lowering sun. The angled light had turned the valley below into a world of shadow and emerald, split by the shining silver snake of the river. Low mists hung like ghosts, while the jungle cawed and howled and cried. Here was a world primeval.
“GET YOUR FOOT OFF MY HAND!”
Okay, maybe not completely primeval.
Indy looked down. Marion climbed directly below him, hugged tight to the wall. Beyond her, Mutt and Mac struggled. The kid was shaking his fingers, balanced on his toeholds.
Mac, red-faced and streaming with sweat, wore a wounded expression. “Sorry, mate, I slipped.”
“Quit bellyaching!” Indy called down with more verve than he felt. He pointed to Mutt’s precarious perch. “And remember, kid, three points of contact with the rock at all times. Safety first!”
Mutt gawked up at him. “How’s any of this safe, man?” The kid shook his head, but he did stabilize his grip and mumble under his breath, “You and your talking skull.”
“Just keep moving!”
Indy headed up again. Earlier, as they trekked through the jungle, the others had questioned him about his statement that the skull was more than rock crystal. But he didn’t elaborate—couldn’t elaborate. While the skull hadn’t actually talked to him, he had sensed something, a drive to come here, a compulsion instilled in him. Even now it felt like a pull at his sternum.
Return . . .
Indy also remembered staring into that skull, being lost in its light, a light that stirred as if it were living. If only he’d had more time . . .
Marion called down from below. “Indy! Look!”
She pointed higher.
Indy craned up. The final member of their party scaled the rock ahead of them all. Oxley moved up the cliff face as if he were on a morning stroll around the park. He’d even stopped to pull some extra feathers for his hat from the rocky nest of a harpy eagle.
Above the professor, a giant carved eye gazed out over the valley, solemn, stoic, but also melancholy, mostly because of the springwater gushing out of the tunnel that formed the eye. The stream tumbled in a sheer waterfall and trailed off into a series of silvery cataracts flowing down the stone face.
They’d been following those tears up the cliff. Indy had been matching Oxley’s toeholds and finger grips. The professor had been here before, and Indy was happy to give him the lead.
With Marion’s warning, Indy now watched Oxley leap from a small ledge and straight through the waterfall under the eye.
Mutt had been right!
Through the tears.
Invigorated by the revelation, Indy climbed faster. He reached the ledge and stared at the rush of water. He saw no opening, no sign of a passageway or cave. Still, Oxley had shown them the last step, one of faith.
Crouching, Indy dove through the water.
A shock of pounding cold jolted through him—then he half rolled into the mouth of a tunnel. He stood up, amazed and relieved.
“Indy!” Marion called through the roar of the falls. He could just make out her shadow through the screen of water.
“I’m fine!” Indy called back to her. “Just jump! I’ll catch you! All you have to—”
Before he could finish, Marion came flying through the falls, soaked to the skin, and right into his arms. She stared up at him, grinning, with water streaming over every surface. “What were you saying?”
“Never mind,” he said and shifted her deeper into the tunnel.
Mac yelled, “Here I come!”
With a few more shouts and leaps, they were soon all gathered at the mouth of the tunnel. Indy had prepared torches using sap from the copalli tree. The natives of the Amazon used it for wound healing and treating colds—but it was also rich in flammable hydrocarbons. With the touch of a match, flames burst from the ends of their torches. The smoke curled to the roof, smelling acrid and medicinal.
Indy raised his torch, lighting the tunnel.
“Where’s Oxley?” Marion asked.
Frowning, Indy swung his torch and searched around. The professor had been at his side a moment earlier. Now he was gone. Far down the passageway, a pinpoint of sunlight marked the end of the tunnel.
Indy pointed. “There.”
A figure danced in that light, waving an arm. “Hennnry Jonnnes Junnnior!”
“We’d better get going,” Indy said. “Before we lose him.”
Mutt had wandered off. He lifted his own torch high toward the wall. “Hey, you might want to see this.”
Indy crossed to the kid’s side.
Along the entire expanse of the wall, elaborate cave paintings covered the rocky surfaces, divided into panels, each with its own artwork.
“Over here!” Marion called from the opposite wall. She lifted her torch.
The wall on that side was also covered in ancient art. Indy had once visited caves in Lascaux, France, where prehistoric cave paintings dated back to 15,000 BC, depicting horses, bulls, rhinoceroses, and giant cats. Throughout human history, cultures had sought to capture and memorialize what was important in their lives through their art.
The same seemed to be true here.
Indy moved down the passageway, waving his torch from one wall to the other. The paintings continued all the way down the tunnel. They were perfectly symmetrical, intricate, detailed. The torchlight also revealed that the tunnel was in reality a series of adjoining chambers, lined up one after the other like a primitive art gallery.
Each chamber was elaborately decorated.
But by whom?
Spalko stood at the riverbank, her hands on her hips. She stared at the wreckage on the water’s edge. Though it was dented, crumpled, and waterlogged, she recognized one of the convoy’s ducks. According to her men, the vehicle had been used by the prisoners to escape into the river. She studied the drowned duck.
Had Dr. Jones and his party been killed?
She took a deep breath.
No matter. Her team would move on.
But to where?
Turning her back on the river, she inspected the men gathered there. Only a dozen of her original sixty were fit to carry on, and even these bore bandaged wounds or had faces and limbs swollen from ant bites. Not all would be able to make the climb. Still, those who could were the best of the best. They’d come through fire and terror to this place. Like her, they’d proven their worth. The soldiers were already dividing up the climbing harnesses and ropes. They’d had to leave the vehicles at the top of the last waterfall, but they’d brought all their gear with them.
Including their guns.
She prayed Dr. Jones was still alive because if he was . . .
A lancing flash of burning light exploded behind her eyes. Momentarily blinded, she fell to one knee on the riverbank. She felt agoni
zing pressure in her head, like diving deep underwater. She had never felt such force. It both frightened and exhilarated her.
Then it was gone.
No . . .
“Colonel Doctor?” her lieutenant asked, concerned.
Spalko shook her head and gained her feet. She recognized what she’d felt, a surge of power like a mental lightning strike. She stumbled away from the river. “They . . . they’ve found it! They’ve found Akator.”
She could not say how she knew it, but she did. Her lieutenant passed her a handheld transceiver. She studied it and slowly scanned in all directions, but the needle remained fixed and steady, pointing only one way.
She stared where the needle indicated, toward a stretch of misty cliffs.
Of course . . .
Across the jungle, a towering face had been subtly carved into the cliffs. She studied the stony countenance. The eyes seemed to be gazing at her alone, daring her, challenging her. With her head still pounding, she recognized what lay ahead, knew it in her heart.
At long last, she’d found it.
The gateway to Akator!
FORTY-EIGHT
TORCHLIGHT FLICKERED over the panel of artwork.
Mutt watched Jones lean toward the cave painting, so close his nose was almost touching. On the wall, six human figures knelt in a row, arms upraised to the sun. Jones lightly ran his fingertips over the surface. Then he sniffed his fingers.
“Ochre . . . charcoal . . . iron oxide.”
Mutt had been doing his own investigation. He’d found torch holders drilled into the wall. He jammed his flaming brand into one of the holes so he could examine the stone beneath it. It was black with soot. Following Jones’s lead, he ran his fingers across the oily stain. It came off easily. He sniffed and smelled the turpentine-like odor of the sap used to fuel their own torches.
“This is fresh,” Mutt muttered. “Someone’s used these holders. And not too long ago.”
No one paid him any attention.
Jones straightened from his observation of the art and stretched a kink from his back. “These must have been painted by the Ugha tribesmen, the original inhabitants of Akator.”
Mac leaned on another panel of artwork, looking unimpressed. “How old do you think they are?”
“Some may be Neolithic. Possibly going back six . . . maybe eight thousand years.”
As a group they moved down the tunnel, flashing their torches over the artwork. Jones stopped at another panel. This one depicted a larger group of humans, kneeling again, gazing upward. But here the sun had been replaced by a tall, thin figure floating in the sky, arms outstretched, radiating shafts of light.
“Somebody came,” Indy interpreted aloud.
They moved deeper. Flames cast flickering shadows over the walls. Mutt felt a prickling sense of dread.
The panels continued to reveal more of the strange, tall figures, but now the visitors mingled with the human figures, pointing their long arms. The tableaux varied, demonstrating advancements in their daily lives: the construction of homes, the pounding of metal, the tilling of fields. In the last panel one of the figures sat cross-legged in the center of a group of loincloth-draped humans and pointed to a detailed starscape overhead.
Indy touched one after the other. “The visitors taught the Ugha . . . architecture, metallurgy, irrigation and farming, astronomy . . .”
Mutt’s mother called out from farther ahead. She lifted her torch toward a large drawing. This one was life-sized. They all gathered around her. In subtle colors and shades, painted in loving detail, was a bust of one of the visitors, done in profile. The skin was smooth, painted in shades of white. The artistry captured the wisdom and sense of peace in the strange countenance. But it clearly wasn’t human.
Jones reached, traced a finger along the elongated cranium, then outlined the large eyes, narrowing at the corners. “Just like the skull,” he murmured.
In the next chamber every panel showed the strange tall figures. They were grouped together, robed and shining, among the populace. Each painting was a variation on the same theme.
Jones stepped along the wall, his eyes fixed on the artwork, one hand raised but not touching. “They’re always together now. Thirteen. Always depicted in a circle. Always in a group.”
“What could that mean?” Mutt asked.
Jones shrugged and pointed farther down the tunnel.
They continued into a larger adjoining chamber. Jones crossed to the center of the room. He turned in a circle, then waved the group over to join him. Mutt and the others gathered next to him. Shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle, they held their torches toward the walls.
In this chamber there was only one painting, encompassing the entire circumference of the cavern. No one spoke; they were awed and horrified at what was depicted here. Mutt had once seen a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Guernica. Picasso’s monumental artwork showed a Spanish village under attack. It was a visceral representation of the horrors of war: screaming, suffering, bloodshed, atrocities, all encompassing the raw brutality of man.
Here in this chamber was the same theme on a massive scale.
Across a painted village, figures ran, fleeing on foot. Splashes of crimson dripped, looking almost wet. One woman held up a baby to the heavens. Blood poured down the anguished woman’s arms. Everywhere across the village, bodies sprawled, piled one atop the other. More figures hung from ropes or were impaled on spikes. In the center of the bloody chaos stood the source of the bloodshed and horror, a shining figure in golden armor, surrounded by a cordon of warriors in breastplates and helmets.
“The conquistadores,” Mutt said.
Around the painted Spanish figures, Ugha tribesmen attacked with spears and bore aloft strange whirligigs spinning from upraised arms. But the invaders had muskets and powderhorns.
“The conquistadores came looking for El Dorado,” Jones said quietly. “They looted the city. Took whatever they could, including the skull.”
It was a humbling and horrific account. No one protested as Jones led them to the last chamber, glad to escape the bloodshed. Mutt could still hear the screaming in his head.
The final room was the largest of them all, a giant rotunda—with a dome so high their flames failed to do more than dance shadows around it. They crossed the chamber slowly. There were no paintings here.
Only bones.
Embedded in the walls, as if trying to push out, were the fossilized remains of ancient creatures. Along one wall, a pronged deer was caught in midflight, head thrown back in panic, while a skeleton of a saber-toothed panther chased behind it. It was a battle of predator and prey forever locked in stone.
Higher across the dome, skeletal birds soared and flapped; low to the ground, serpents coiled into and out of the rock. Beyond, buried deeper into the stone, lay hints of shadowy creatures, massive, suggested by only a bit of claw or the bony cavity of an eye.
But the most impressive feature of the chamber were the thirteen skeletal faces embedded eight feet above the floor. They circled the chamber on all sides, staring down at the intruders with a vague sense of menace.
Again a prickling of warning iced through Mutt.
As he stepped under one of the faces, he felt something trickle against his shoulder. He turned and held out his hand. It wasn’t water, but a stream of sand and bits of rock. He gaped up at the skeletal face—
—then the eyes moved.
Stumbling back toward the center of the room, Mutt screamed, half in warning, half in terror.
The face smashed apart, and something squirmed through from behind—damp, wriggling, slick with mud. Mutt heard crashes from all around the room. Other skulls shattered. More muddy figures wormed out, dropping to land on bare feet. Behind them, others followed, sliding and birthing out of the worm tunnels.
With a sting of terror, Mutt ran for the sunlit exit to the chamber.
From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the creatures rise up, whirling a length of cord thread
ed through fist-sized rocks. Mutt flashed to the cave painting, picturing the Ugha tribesmen attacking the conquistadores with whirligigs.
He immediately understood what the weapons were: bolas, primitive hunting tools. And when used skillfully—
The tribesman let fly. The deadly bola spun toward Mutt. He tried to duck away, but he was too slow. The bola struck and wrapped around his neck. The weight and impact threw him sprawling on the floor.
Panicked and choking, Mutt rolled to his back. One of the muddy attackers leaped high, a sharp rock raised over his head.
Mutt winced, knowing what was coming—then above him, a fist punched out like a piston and flattened the tribesman’s nose, knocking him back.
Jones dropped down and yanked Mutt to his feet. “Time to go, kid!”
FORTY-NINE
ALL AROUND, the chamber erupted into chaos.
Clutching the kid by the elbow, Indy turned. He caught a whirling flash, then ducked as a bola spun over his head. Ahead Marion and Mac sprinted for the exit. Oxley waved merrily to them, framed in sunlight, feathered hat in hand.
Oh brother . . .
“C’mon, kid. Stay low and follow my lead.”
Indy hunkered down and barreled toward the exit. Bolas flew past overhead and struck at his feet, casting up sparks as rock struck rock.
Indy danced and jigged across the chamber.
Mutt kept up with him step for step.
Ululating war cries chased after them.
A moment later they burst out into sunlight.
Indy blinked away the glare and saw that they were standing at the top of a long staircase.
Marion and Mac were already pounding down the stone steps that led to a green valley below, chased by more warriors. Oxley was being herded in front of them, hopping along with hardly a care. Indy shoved Mutt after them and turned to face the tunnel.
Reaching to his shoulder, he grabbed a leather handle and unfurled his bullwhip. With a flick, he draped its full length down the stairs, ready to make a dramatic stand, to protect the others so they could escape.