The Sunbird Read online

  ‘Do you know that we haven’t got proof, Ben! Do you realize there is nothing we have found here that can’t be discredited by the old arguments.’ She leaned closer towards me. ‘We have a symbol on a scrap of pottery. Imported in the course of trade, they will say. We have the golden chalice, the work of native goldsmiths using the Ankh motif by chance, they will say. We have the paintings - heresay is not evidence, they will say.’

  She sat back on her haunches and stared at me.

  ‘Do you know what we’ve got, Ben, after it’s all been sifted and sorted? We’ve got a big fat nothing.’

  ‘I know,’ I said miserably.

  ‘We haven’t even a single fact to knock them off their smug little perch. Our City of the Moon - our beautiful city -will be simply another culture of obscure Bantu origin, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. We will never know what happened to the great walls and towers, and we will never know where our white king lies buried.’

  I planned to shut down the dig on the 1st of August, and we spent the last weeks of July tidying it all, leaving the foundations exposed for others who might follow us, packing our treasures with loving care, making the last entries in the piles of notebooks, typing the long lists of catalogues and attending to the hundreds of other finicky details.

  The field investigation was over, but ahead of me lay months of work, filing and correlating everything we had discovered, fitting each fact into its niche and comparing it with evidence gathered by others at other sites and finally there would be the summation and the book. Months before, I had hoped I might be able to entitle my book The Phoenicians in Southern Africa. Now I would have to find another title.

  The Dakota arrived to take away the first load of crates, and with it went Peter and Heather Willcox. They would still have two or three months of their European holiday, but we were sorry to see them go, for we had been a happy group.

  That evening Louren spoke to me over the radio.

  ‘We have got hold of Cousteau at last, Ben. He’s been cruising in the Pacific but my office in San Francisco spoke with him. He thinks he may be able to help, but there is no chance that he will be able to come before next year. He has a full schedule for the next eight months.’

  That was my last excuse for staying on at the City of the Moon, and I began packing my own private papers. Sally offered to help me. We worked late, sorting through the thousands of photographs. Now and then we would pause to examine a print of particular interest, or laugh over one that had been taken in fun, remembering the good times we had spent together over the months.

  Finally we came to the file of prints of the white king.

  ‘My beautiful mysterious king,’ Sally sighed. ‘Isn’t there anything more you can tell us? Where did you come from? Who did you love? Into what battles did you carry your war shield, and who wept over your wounds when they carried you home from the field?’

  We went slowly through the thick pile of prints. They were taken from every angle, with every type of variation in lighting, exposure and printing technique.

  A detail of one of the prints caught my eye. I suppose that subconsciously I was alerted to pick it up. I stared at it, with eyes that began to see for the first time. I felt something fluttering inside of me like a trapped bird, felt the electric tickle run up my arms.

  ‘Sal,’ I said and then stopped.

  ‘What is it. Ben?’ She picked up the quaver of suppressed excitement in my voice.

  ‘The light!’ I said. ‘Do you remember how we found the city in the moonlight? The angle and the intensity of the light?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded eagerly.

  ‘Do you see it, Sal?’ I touched the white king’s face. ‘Do you remember the print I gave to Lo? Do you remember the mark on it?’

  She stared at the photograph. It was fainter than on Louren’s print, but it was there, the same shadowy cross shape superimposed upon the death-white face.

  ‘What is it?’ Sally puzzled, turning the photograph in her hands to catch the light.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I said as I hurried across the room to the equipment cupboard, and began scratching around in it, ‘but I’m damned well going to find out.’

  I came out of the cupboard and handed her one of the four-cell torches. ‘Take this and follow me, Watson.’

  ‘We always seem to do our best work at night,’ Sally began, and then realized what she had said. ‘I didn’t mean it that way!’ She forestalled any ribald comment.

  The cavern was as still as an ancient tomb, and our footsteps echoed loudly off the paving as we skirted the pool and went to the portrait of the white king. The beams of our torches danced upon him and he stared down at us, regal and aloof.

  ‘There’s no mark on his face,’ Sally said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

  ‘Wait.’ I took my handkerchief from my pocket. Folding it in half, and in half again, I masked the glass of my torch. The bright beam was reduced to a steady glow through the cloth. I climbed up onto the timber framework that had been left in position.

  ‘Switch yours off,’ I ordered Sally, and in the semi-darkness I stepped up to the portrait and began examining the face with the dimmer light.

  The cheek was white, flawless. Slowly I moved the light, lifting higher, lowering it, moving it in a wide circle around the king’s head.

  ‘There!’ we cried together, as suddenly the hazy mark of the cross appeared over the pale features. I steadied the light in its correct position and examined the mark.

  ‘It’s a shadow, Sal,’ I said. ‘I think there must be an irregularity beneath the paint. A sort of groove, or rather two grooves intersecting each other at right angles to form a cross.’

  ‘Cracks in the rock?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But they seem to be too straight, the angles too precise to be natural.’

  I unmasked my torch, and turned to her.

  ‘Sal, have you an article of silk with you?’

  ‘Silk?’ She looked stunned, but recovered quickly, ‘My scarf.’ Her ringers went to her throat.

  ‘Lend it to me, please.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she demanded, holding her hand protectively over the scrap of pretty cloth that showed in the neck of her blouse. ‘It’s genuine Cardin. Cost me a ruddy king’s ransom.’

  ‘I won’t spoil it,’ I promised.

  ‘You’ll buy me a new one if you do,’ she warned me, as she unknotted the scarf and passed it up to me.

  ‘Give a light,’ I requested and she directed her torch onto the king. I spread the scarf over the king’s head, holding it in position with the fingers of my left hand.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘If you are ever buying a second-hand car, and you want to be sure it has never been in a smash, then this is the way you feel for blemishes that the eye can’t see.’

  With the fingertips of my right hand I began feeling the surface of the painting through the silk. The cloth allowed my fingertips to slip easily over the rock, and seemed to magnify the feel of the texture. I found a faint groove, followed it to a crossroads, moved down the south axis to another crossroads, moved east, north, and back to my starting point. My finger-tips had traced a regular oblong shape, measuring about nine by six inches.

  ‘Do you feel anything?’ Sally could not contain her impatience. I did not answer her for my heart was in my mouth, and my fingers were busy, running all over the rock beneath the silk, moving well away from the portrait, down almost to floor level, and up as high as I could reach.

  ‘Oh, Ben. Do tell me! What is it?’

  ‘Wait!’ My heart was drumming like the flight of a startled pheasant, and the track of my fingertips trembled with excitement.

  ‘I will not wait, damn you,’ she shouted. ‘Tell me!’

  I jumped down off the framework and grabbed her hand. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ she demanded as I dragged h
er across the cavern.

  ‘To get the camera.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘We are going to take some photographs.’

  I had two rolls of Kodak Ektachrome Aero-film type 8443 in the small refrigerated cabinet which housed my stock of films. I had ordered this infra-red film to experiment with photographing the unexcavated foundations of the city from the top of the cliffs, but the results had not been encouraging. There were too many rock strata and too much vegetation confusing the prints.

  I filled my Rolleiflex with a roll of the infra-red film, and I fitted a Kodak No 12 Wratten filter over the lens. Sally pestered me while I worked, but I replied to all her queries with, ‘Wait and see!’

  I took up two arc-lights, and we arrived back at the cavern a little alter midnight.

  I used a direct frontal lighting, plugging the arc-lights into the switchboard of the electric water-pump beside the pool. I set the Rolleiflex on a tripod and made twenty exposures at varying speeds and aperture-settings. By this time Sally was on the point of expiring with curiosity, and I took mercy on her.

  ‘This is the technique they use for photographing canvases and picking out the signatures and details overlaid by layers of other paints, for aerial photography through cloud, for photographing the currents of the sea, things which are invisible to the human eye.’

  ‘It sounds like magic.’

  ‘It is,’ I said, clicking away busily. The filter takes out everything but the infra-red rays, and the film is sensitive to it. It will reflect any temperature or texture differences in the subject and show them in differing colours.‘

  There was an hour’s work in the dark room before I could project the images onto our viewing screen. All colours were altered, becoming weird and hellish. The king’s face was a virulent green and his beard purple. There were strange dapplings, speckles, and spots which we had never noticed before. These were irregularities in the surface, extraneous materials in the paint pigments, colonies of lichens and other imperfections. They glowed like outlandish jewels.

  I hardly noticed these. What held all my attention, and set my pulses pounding, was the grid of regular oblong shapes that underlaid the entire image. An irregular chequer-board effect; they showed in lines of pale blue.

  ‘We’ve got to get Louren here immediately,’ I blurted.

  ‘What is it? I still don’t understand. What does it mean?’ Sally pleaded, and I turned to her with surprise. It was so clear to me that I had expected her to understand readily.

  ‘It means, Sal, that beyond our white king is an opening in the rock wall which has been closed off by a master mason with perfectly laid blocks of sandstone The white king has been painted over it.’

  Louren Sturvesant stood before the rock wall in the cavern and stared angrily at the white king. His hands were clasped behind his back. He was balanced on the balls of his feet, with his jaw thrust out aggressively. We stood around him in a semicircle, Ral, Sally, Leslie and I, and we watched his face anxiously.

  Suddenly Louren tore the cigar out of his own mouth and hurled it onto the paved floor. Savagely he ground the stub to powder, then he swung away and went to the edge of the emerald pool and stared down into its shadowy depths. We waited in silence.

  He came back, drawn to the painting like a moth to the candle.

  ‘That thing,’ he said, ‘is one of the world’s great works of art. It’s two thousand years old. It’s irreplaceable. Invaluable.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t belong to us. It’s part of our heritage. It belongs to our children, to generations not yet born.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, but I knew more than that. I had watched Louren over the months as his feelings towards the portrait grew. It had developed some deep significance for him, which I could only guess at.

  ‘Now you want me to destroy it,’ he said.

  We were all silent. Louren swung away and began pacing, back and forth, in front of the portrait. All our heads swung to watch him, like spectators at a tennis match. He stopped abruptly, in front of me.

  ‘You and your fancy bloody photographs,’ he said, and began pacing again.

  ‘Couldn’t we—’ Leslie began timidly, but her voice faded out as Louren spun around and glared at her.

  ‘Yes?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well, could you sort of go round behind it, I mean, well—’ Her voice faded and then grew stronger again. ‘Drill a passage in the wall off to one side, and then turn back behind the king?’

  For the first time in my life I felt like throwing my arms around her neck and kissing her.

  Louren flew up one of his mine captains with a crack team of five Mashona rock-breakers from the Little Sister gold mine near Welcome. They brought with them an air-compressor, pneumatic drills, jumper bars, and all the other paraphernalia of their trade. The mine captain was a big, ginger-haired man, with cheerful cornflower-blue eyes, and a freckled baby face. His name was Tinus van Vuuren, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the project.

  ‘Reckon we will be able to cut her fairly easy. Doctor, This sandstone is like cheese, after the serpentine and quartz that I am used to.’

  ‘I want the smallest opening you can work in,’ Sally told him sternly. ‘I want as little damage as possible done to the paintings.’

  ‘Man,’ Tinus turned to her earnestly. ‘I’ll cut you one no bigger than a mouse’s—’ he cut the word off, and substituted another, ‘—ear-hole.’

  Sally and I taped the outline of the mouth of the shaft on the wall of the cavern. We positioned it carefully to avoid the most beautiful and significant paintings. Though we took Tinus at his word and made the opening a mere two feet wide by four high - yet we would destroy part of a lovely group of giraffe, and a dainty little gazelle with big listening ears.

  We kept thirty feet away from the white king, to avoid undue vibrations from the drills which may have loosened flakes of stone or paint pigments. Tinus would go in for thirty feet, then turn his shaft at right angles to the face and cut in behind the king. Tinus was set to begin first thing the following morning, but that night we entertained him in the common room. The atmosphere was similar to that of a fighter squadron mess on the eve of a dangerous sortie. We were all voluble and tense, and all of us were drinking a little too much.

  To begin with, Tinus was very reserved, clearly overawed by the company of the legendary Louren Sturvesant, but the brandy loosened him up and he joined in the conversation.

  ‘What do you want the respirators for, Doc?’ he asked. ‘You expecting gas or a fire?’

  ‘Respirators?’ Louren broke off a private conversation with Sally. ‘Who ordered respirators?’

  ‘They specially told me six respirators.’ Tinus looked dismayed at Louren’s direct questioning. ‘They told me that, sir.’

  ‘That’s right, Lo.’ I rescued the poor man. ‘I asked for them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Lo. What we are all hoping to find is a passage, a—’ I was about to say tomb, but I did not want to tempt the gods,‘—cave of some sort.’

  He nodded. They were all watching me - and with a receptive audience I can seldom resist a touch of the theatrical.

  ‘That cave will have been sealed, airtight, for two thousand years or so, which means there could be a danger of—’

  ‘The Curse of the Pharaohs!’ Sally interjected. ‘Of course, do you remember what happened to the men who first entered Tutankhamen’s tomb?’ She drew a finger across her own throat and rolled her eyes horribly. She was onto her second Glen Grant.

  ‘Sally, you ought to know better,’ I cut in severely. ‘The Curse of the Pharaohs is of course a myth. But there is a danger of a peculiarly unpleasant lung disease.’

  ‘Well, I must say, I don’t believe in curses and all that sort of bulldust,’ Tinus laughed, a little too loudly. His inhibitions were way down around his ankles.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ agreed Ral Davidson.

&
nbsp; ‘It’s not a supernatural thing,’ Leslie told them primly. ‘It’s a fungus disease.’

  I seemed to have lost control of the situation completely, so I raised my voice.

  ‘If you are all finished, I’ll go on,’ which got their attention back to me. ‘The conditions would have been ideal for the development of cryptococcus newomyces, a fungoid saphrophitic growth whose airborne spores are the cause of a fatal disease.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Tinus asked.

  ‘The spores are breathed into the lungs, and in the warm moist conditions they germinate almost immediately and develop into dense granulitic colonies.’

  ‘Sies!’ said Tinus, which is an expression of the deepest disgust. ‘You mean it starts growing on your lungs like that green stuff on mouldy bread?’

  ‘What are the consequences?’ Louren asked

  I had it word perfect. ‘Primarily they are extensive lesions of the lung tissue, with haemorrhage, high temperature and rapidly painful breathing, but then the fungoid colonies begin generating wastes which are readily absorbed into the blood and carried to the brain and central nervous system.’

  ‘My God!’ Tinus was blanched and horrified, his blue eyes stared out of the white freckled face. ‘Then what happens?’

  ‘Well, the wastes act as a virulent neurotoxin and induce hallucination. There is inflammation of the meninges, and severe brain malfunction, similar to the effects of lysergic acid or mescalin.’

  ‘Groovy!’ said Ral, and Leslie kicked his shin.

  ‘You mean it drives you crazy?’ Tinus demanded.

  ‘Clean out of your little skull,’ Sally assured him.

  ‘Fatal?’ asked Louren.

  ‘Seventy-five per cent, depending on individual immunity and the rate of antibody formation.’

  ‘In the event of survival, is there permanent damage?’

  ‘Scarring of the lungs similar to healed tuberculosis.’

  ‘Brain damage?’

  ‘No,’ I shook my head.

  ‘Hell, man,’ said Tinus carefully, setting his glass down. ‘I don’t know that I am so keen on this deal. Rock falls, methane gas, pressure bursts - those don’t worry me. But this fungus thing,’ he shuddered, ‘it is creepy, man. Just plain bloody creepy.’