He climbed up into the cave itself.
Nina had guessed from the absence of water surging down the tunnel that Eddie had successfully avoided the flood trap. But as minutes passed with no sign of him, she became increasingly worried. Unable to endure the uncertainty any more, she went back through the opening. ‘Eddie!’ she called. ‘Eddie, can you hear me?’
No reply. Concern rising with each step, she peered up the vertical shaft – and Eddie dropped down in front of her, making her shriek in surprise. ‘Ay up, love.’
‘Jesus, Eddie!’ She recovered her composure. ‘Are you okay? What took you so long?’
‘I’m fine – I was just having a look round.’
‘What’s up there?’
He shrugged. ‘Bits and bobs.’
‘What?’ Disappointment washed over her, as cold as the waterfall outside. Had the site already been looted – or worse, was it nothing but a decoy, an Inca trick? ‘There’s no city? Nothing valuable?’
‘I dunno, I’m not the archaeologist, am I? Come on, I’ll help you up so you can see for yourself. Watch out for the spikes.’
He hoisted her up so she could climb on to the first ledge, then followed. Before long they were at the top of the shaft. ‘I’ll go first and pull you up,’ said Eddie. He climbed into the cave, then reached down for her. ‘Ready?’
She nodded and took hold of his arms, then he hoisted her up the final section of wall. Nina stood, eyes adjusting to the grey light as she looked into the cave.
For a moment, she was dumbstruck. Then she finally managed to speak. ‘Oh, you son of a bitch.’
Eddie shrugged again, this time with a grin. ‘Yeah, I was lying. Just wanted to see your face.’
Filling the great cave was a lost Inca city. El Dorado. The legend was real.
32
An hour later, the other members of the expedition had made their way into the cave.
‘Watch out for that,’ said Eddie, pointing, as Olmedo climbed up the rope he had secured round a boulder at the top of the shaft. Set into a nearby wall was a large square panel of silver that looked for all the world like an oversized cat flap. ‘That’s the trap. There’s a reservoir behind it – if you trip it, the flap opens and the water shoots down the hole and knocks you into the spikes.’
The trap was not foremost on the minds of the others, though. Instead, they stared, almost mesmerised, at the city before them. The cave floor sloped quite steeply, the Inca settlement constructed in tiers rising back into the shadows. The structures nearest the cavern’s entrance were small, like those in Paititi, but they became larger and more grand higher up the hill. Visible near the top was what appeared to be another Temple of the Sun, curved walls standing out amongst the rectilinear buildings around it. Behind it, rising above all else, loomed a palace.
‘I have to admit, Nina,’ said Mac, taking off his rain poncho, ‘this is far beyond anything I expected to see. Anything I imagined seeing, even. Pictures of the places you’ve discovered are one thing, but actually being here in the flesh . . . ’
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ she replied, still awed by the sheer scale of the find. ‘But it wasn’t only me who discovered it, though. If it wasn’t for Leonard’s knowledge of Inca history and culture, it would have taken years to put together all the clues – if we ever managed to at all.’
Osterhagen was equally effusive. ‘No, Nina, you did far more than I. You realised the importance of the khipu – and if not for the IHA, I would not even be here at all. And to think I was angry to be asked to meet you!’
‘We both owe a lot to Kit and Interpol as well,’ said Nina, turning to the Indian. ‘He came up with the connection between the artefacts on the black market and the statues.’ The case containing the two – and a half – stone figures was amongst the gear the team had ferried up through the waterfall.
Kit adopted a humble look. ‘I only made a suggestion. I had no idea whether or not it would be true.’
‘All right, can the mutual admiration society hold its annual meeting somewhere else?’ said Eddie as he helped the second of the two soldiers out of the shaft. ‘We’ve still got to explore this place yet.’ He noticed Macy’s somewhat pensive expression. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘I just thought of something,’ she replied, taking out the folder containing the photographs from Paititi. ‘On the map, this place is coloured in gold, yeah? Just like the sun disc we found.’
‘Yes?’ said Nina, wondering where she was leading.
Macy waved a hand towards the waiting buildings. ‘So . . . where’s all the gold?’
‘Maybe it was only symbolic.’
Osterhagen shook his head. ‘No, she has a point. The Incas really did put gold on their buildings – the most important ones, at least. The Temple of the Sun in Cuzco was covered in sheets of gold. They were among the first things the Spanish stole and melted down.’
All eyes turned to the silent settlement. Even in the low light, it was plain that the only building material was stone, not precious metal, without so much as a golden glint even from the temple or the palace.
‘Perhaps we are not the first to find this place,’ said Cruzado.
‘No,’ said Nina firmly. ‘Something this big, there’s no way it could have been kept quiet. The Conquistadors would have bragged about finding it to rub in their victory over the Incas, and there isn’t a treasure hunter in history who could have resisted the fame of revealing a find like this. Besides, look at it. The whole place is almost intact. If it’s been looted, they were very orderly about it.’
It was true. Unlike the ruins of Paititi, where the ceaseless growth of the jungle and the rot of climate and insects had left only broken shells, here the majority of the buildings still had roofs. The coverings of woven leaves had long since gone, but the skeletal wooden beams that had supported them remained in place. ‘Then,’ said Zender imperiously, ‘we must explore the city and find the treasures the Incas left behind.’ He paused, then continued more hesitantly: ‘What are we looking for?’
‘Riches beyond imagination,’ said Osterhagen in a portentous voice, sharing a smile with Nina. He pointed up the slope. ‘The map from Paititi showed the Punchaco in the Temple of the Sun – and the last piece of Dr Wilde’s statues in the royal palace. We start at the top.’
‘Ready when you are,’ said Nina.
The group set out up the hill. The limited space available to the city’s builders meant that the steep streets were even more narrow and twisting than those in Paititi. ‘I wish I’d brought my stick,’ Mac complained.
‘It’d probably be quicker to hop over the roofs,’ said Eddie, looking up at the buildings on each side. They splashed through a stream that ran across their path. ‘Keep our feet dry, too.’
‘I don’t think my feet could get any wetter,’ Nina complained. She looked back to see where the stream led, finding that it drained into the reservoir. The trap was self-sustaining.
Osterhagen halted beside a small, low structure. ‘What is it?’ Nina asked.
He shone a flashlight inside. ‘A tomb. Look.’ She peered through the entrance, seeing huddled shapes within. ‘Mummies.’
The sight gave Nina a small chill. Unlike the traditional image of an Egyptian mummy, lying flat and completely swathed in cloth, the bodies of Inca mummies were curled up tightly in their shrouds as if straitjacketed – but with their heads left exposed. The sunken eye sockets of a dead, parchment-yellow face stared back at her, shrivelled lips pulled away to expose its teeth almost with a sneer. Behind it, stacked like sacks of flour, were other bodies.
Macy looked over Nina’s shoulder, and wished she hadn’t. ‘Gross. That’s gonna be in my nightmares. How many of them are there?’
Nina looked up the hill, seeing that a whole section of the lost city seemed dedicated to the little mausoleums. ‘Dozens – hundreds, even.’
‘Is there treasure?’ called Zender. ‘Have you found any treasure?’
‘Depends how you define it,’ said Nina, using her own torch to pick out grubby metal inside the chamber. The object seemed like a cross between a knife and a small trowel, a fat blade with a decidedly unergonomic handle in the shape of a heavily stylised human figure.
‘It is a tumi,’ said Osterhagen. ‘A ceremonial knife – they have been found with many mummies. Some were made from gold, but this looks more like bronze.’
‘Only bronze?’ Zender tutted. ‘Then it can wait. But we can’t. Move along, move along!’
Even Juanita seemed exasperated by his impatience, but none of the Peruvian contingent raised a voice to object; he was, after all, technically their boss. Nina had no such concerns. ‘Archaeology isn’t like the Olympics,’ she chided. ‘Bronze isn’t the loser’s consolation prize.’
Mac chuckled. ‘I don’t think that’s quite what the symbolism of the medal ceremony means.’
They continued up the slope. Before long, the pathway became noticeably wider, the surrounding buildings larger. ‘Leonard, go right,’ said Nina when they reached a junction with a tower-like structure to their left. The route ahead continued uphill, but the alternative seemed to lead to a more open area. ‘If it’s like Paititi . . .’
It was. They soon emerged on a plaza, built up at the eastern end, dug out of the sloping rock floor at the west to keep the whole expanse flat. A broad stone stairway led to the higher levels. She looked towards the cave mouth, seeing the lower levels of the city spread out below. ‘God, they were on the run, and they still put in the effort to build all this. It’s incredible.’
‘And we haven’t even found the really awesome stuff yet,’ Macy reminded her, starting for the stairway.
‘All of this is awesome!’ Nina protested with pricked professional pride, looking to the other archaeologists for support. But even Osterhagen was moving with the rest of the group towards the steps, as if magnetically drawn. With a huff, she gave in and followed them.
‘This is how I feel when I’m trying to talk to you about footie,’ Eddie teased her.
They ascended through several steeply ranked tiers of buildings to the Temple of the Sun. As Osterhagen reached the top, Nina paused. ‘Hold on,’ she called. ‘I can hear water.’ Eddie jerked a thumb at the falls. ‘Ha ha,’ she said, with a very fake smile. ‘No, I mean ahead of us. And it’s bigger than that little stream we crossed.’
Osterhagen strode along the side of the temple. ‘I hear it too. I think . . . ah, of course!’ he said as the source came into view. ‘Ritual fountains. They have been found at several other Inca sites.’
Beyond the temple was a small square, overlooked by the shadowed palace on the tier above. Several jets of water gushed out of the paving slabs, falling back into rectangular pools to run off into drainage holes. ‘This must be what makes the stream,’ suggested Kit.
‘Yeah, but what’s making them?’ said Nina. As well as the tinkle and splash of the fountains, there was still the other noise she had heard, considerably deeper. Beyond the palace, at the very rear of the cavern. ‘Back there.’ She started for the next flight of steps.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Osterhagen, surprised. ‘This is the Temple of the Sun! The Punchaco could be inside.’
‘There’s something I want to check,’ she said. ‘This cave was originally carved out by water. I want to find out why there isn’t still a river running through it.’
‘And I thought you married an archaeologist, not a hydrologist,’ Mac said to Eddie with a wry smile.
Zender edged nearer to the temple’s entrance. ‘We don’t need to wait for her, do we?’ Eddie shot him a cold look. ‘Ah, okay, okay. We can wait. Just for a minute.’
Nina scurried up the steps and forced herself to bypass the waiting temple and whatever riches it might contain to see what lay behind it. Her ears had not deceived her. A jet of white water, so much pressure behind it that it appeared almost solid, blasted out of a six-inch hole in the cave’s back wall into a deep pond, from where channels carved in the rock floor sent it downhill to different parts of the city. It was a primitive water main, a simple but effective piece of Inca engineering.
What was considerably less simple was the way the jet had been created. Surrounding the torrent was not natural rock but a wall, as precisely and solidly built as the towering defence at the cave mouth. It was almost like a plug set into the stone, roughly twelve feet across.
She hurried back to the square. The other team members had put down their gear and were waiting for her impatiently. ‘So, find anything interesting?’ asked Eddie.
‘Yes – I worked out how the Incas built this place,’ she said excitedly. ‘They must have dammed up the river before it went underground. Then they plugged up all but a little hole at the back of the cave so they’d have a water supply, and after that they built all of this, then demolished the dam. But since the river couldn’t flow freely down into the cave any more, it went over the top of it . . . and formed the waterfall. A whole city to hide their treasure, and it’s completely invisible from outside.’
Osterhagen was suitably impressed, taking in the ancient buildings surrounding them. ‘The Spanish never gave them enough credit for their engineering skills. That they could build a place like this is amazing.’
‘Their treasures were amazing too,’ said Zender impatiently, once again edging towards the temple’s entrance. ‘Dr Wilde, are you ready see what is inside? Or is their plumbing more interesting to you?’
Nina was tempted to make everyone wait by exploring the smaller buildings around the square, but decided that since Zender was only here for the glory of finding a big prize, the sooner he saw one the sooner he might leave. ‘All right,’ she faux-grumbled. ‘Let’s give baby his bottle.’ The group laughed, to Zender’s annoyance.
She and Osterhagen led the way to the darkened opening. While the limited space in the cave had forced the Incas to compress most of their architecture, the Temple of the Sun was, if anything, larger than its counterpart at Paititi. A short passage followed the curve of the outer wall before opening into a chamber.
Even before she reached it, Nina saw there was something unusual about the interior. Through the roof’s skeletal remains, the light in the passage had the same diffuse twilight cast as the rest of the cave. But the room ahead was different. Not brighter, but somehow warmer, almost like a dawn.
Osterhagen had seen it too. He quickened his pace. They entered the chamber . . .
And were bathed in golden light reflected off the object on its western wall.
‘Mein Gott!’ gasped Osterhagen, gasping. Nina was equally staggered.
They had found the Punchaco.
It dwarfed its copy from Paititi. That had been four feet in diameter; the golden disc before them now was nearer nine, and at least twice as thick as its counterpart. It stood almost floor to ceiling, mounted on the wall to face the trapezoidal eastern window. Unlike the smaller sun disc, which while ornate had been fashioned only from gold, this was decorated with hundreds of precious stones around its rim and outlining the great face of Inti, the sun god, that stared from its centre. The greatest treasure of the Incas, weighing tons, had been transported across hundreds of miles to protect it from the Spaniards’ gold-lust; a monumental, almost unbelievable journey.
But here it was. And an entire city had been built to house it.
The others filed into the room. ‘Jesus!’ said Eddie. ‘De Quesada would have had a job fitting that into his loo.’
Zender’s mouth dropped open at the sight. He gabbled in Spanish to Juanita. ‘What’s he saying?’ Mac whispered to Macy.
‘He’s telling her to start arranging a press conference,’ she replied. The Scot made a sound of quiet amusement.
Nina regarded the relief of Inti, then turned to see where the Inca god was gazing. Through the window, she could see the waterfall – and, she remembered, there was a gap between two peaks on the opposite side of the valley. Even though the view would be obscured b
y the falls, the Incas had still made sure the temple faced the rising sun. ‘So what do you think, Mr Zender?’ she asked. The Peruvian official had a hand raised to the Punchaco’s rim, fingertips hovering just above its surface as if afraid to touch it. ‘Worth the trip?’
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ he said, so transfixed that he didn’t even turn his head to address her. He finally summoned the willpower to put his hand against the sun disc. Satisfied that it was indeed real, he looked round. ‘Dr Wilde, Dr Osterhagen, this is . . . ’ He struggled for the right words. ‘Amazing!’ was all he could manage. ‘You have found the greatest treasure in Peru’s history. You are both national heroes!’
‘Thank you,’ said Osterhagen, ‘but we are not heroes – simply scholars. The real heroes were here over four hundred years ago, preserving this place for the ages. They made an incredible journey and took great risks to protect their culture and its heritage.’