The Sunbird Page 19

  ‘What precautions are you going to take, Ben?’ Louren asked.

  ‘The first party in will be protected by respirators.’ I explained. ‘I will take air and dust samples for microscopic examination.’

  Louren nodded, and smiled at Tinus.

  ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘What will you do if you don’t find it - but it’s sort of lurking there? Like, ready to pounce, you know. Like in those science fiction books,’ Tinus hedged.

  ‘If it’s there, it will be thick. Every dust sample will be full of it. You can’t miss it under the microscope. A black, three-ball structure like a pawnbroker’s sign.’

  ‘Are you sure, Doc?’

  ‘I’m sure, Tinus.’

  He took a deep breath, hesitated a moment longer, then nodded, ‘Okay, Doc. I’ll trust you,’ he said.

  The buffeting, fluttering roar of the rock drills chased my agonized brain into a corner of my skull and started kicking it to a jelly. The party had ended in the early hours.

  ‘How are you feeling, Doc?’ Tinus van Vuuren came across to where I stood watching the work and shouted above the din. My nerves vibrated like guitar strings. Tinus looked as fresh and baby-faced as though his night cap had been hot milk and honey and he had slept twelve hours. I knew the type - Louren was one of them.

  ‘I feel bloody awful, thanks,’ I shouted back.

  ‘There won’t be anything to see here for a couple of days,’ Tinus told me. ‘Why don’t you go lie down for a bit, Doc.’

  ‘I’ll stick around,’ I said, which seemed to be the general sentiment. Louren piloted the course of the Sturvesant empire from the radio shack, unable to tear himself away from the City of the Moon. Sally made a few desultory attempts at cataloguing and filing, but these never lasted more than an hour or two and then she was back at the cavern. Ral and Leslie made no pretence, and spent all day in the cavern, except for brief simultaneous absences which Louren and I guessed were exercise periods.

  Tinus was a top man in his trade, and his team cut the tunnel swiftly and skilfully. The walls were shaped smoothly and precisely. They were shored with heavy timbers baulks, and electric lights were strung along the roof. Thirty feet in, Tinus constructed a large chamber from which a new drive was made, aimed at the area behind the painting of the white king.

  Tinus and I had made careful measurements and calculations, and we had decided exactly where we could expect to strike whatever the wall of masonry concealed.

  The Bantu drill-men were warned of the need for respirators, and Tinus and I crouched behind them in the cramped rock tunnel as they began the assault on the last few feet of rock. Their backs were naked glistening bunches of black muscles as they worked the heavy drills. The noise in the confined space was thunderous, and despite the ventilation fans circulating air, the heat was appalling. The sweat poured down inside the face mask of my respirator, and the eye goggles were fogged and blurry.

  The tension was becoming almost painful as the long steel bit of the drill hammered itself into the rock, sinking in inch by inch, the muddy lubricating water running back from the drill hole. I glanced sideways at Tinus. He appeared monstrous in the black rubber mask, but the blue eyes twinkled out of the eye glasses and he winked and held up a thumb in a gesture of assurance.

  Suddenly the drill-man was thrown off balance, as the drill ran away with him. It slid, unresisted, into its hole, and he staggered wildly as he tried to control the enormous weight of steel. Tinus slapped his shoulder, and he slammed the valve of the drill closed. The silence was almost painful, and our laboured breathing was the only sound.

  Through, I thought, we’ve holed through into God knows what.

  I saw my own excitement reflected in Tinus’s blue eyes. I nodded at him, and he turned and tapped the drill-men’s shoulders and jerked his thumb in a gesture of dismissal. They shuffled back, bowed in the low tunnel, and disappeared around the bend.

  The two of us went forward and crouched at the face. Gingerly we withdrew the drill steel from its hole, and a wisp of fine dust followed it out, smoking in the harsh glare of the electric lights. Tinus and I exchanged glances. Then I jerked my head at Tinus. He nodded, and followed his gang back along the tunnel. I worked on alone at the face.

  I used the long plastic rod, with a piece of sterile white cloth attached to the end of it, to probe the drill hole to its limit. It ran fourteen feet into the rock before meeting resistance, and when I withdrew it the cloth was thick with grey floury dust. I dropped it into the sample bottle, and attached another cloth to the rod. In all I collected six separate samples, before I followed Tinus back along the passage. There was a bench and an angle-poise lamp set up ready for me in the rock chamber. The microscope was under the light, with its mirror adjusted and it was the work of only a few minutes to smear my dust samples onto the slides and spread the red dye over them.

  It was difficult to get a view into the eyepiece of the micro-scope through my befogged goggles. One quick scrutiny was sufficient, but I doggedly inspected all six samples before I ripped off my respirator and sucked big relieved breaths. Then I scampered down the passage and out into the cavern. They were all waiting for me, crowding around me eagerly. ‘We’ve drilled into a cavity,’ I shouted, ‘and it’s clean!’ Then they were on me, pounding my back and shaking my hand, laughing and chattering excitedly.

  Louren would let no one else work with me at the face, though Ral and Sally were clearly breaking their hearts to do so.

  The two of us worked carefully, slowly chipping away at the drill hole with chisel and four-pound hammer, enlarging it gradually until we had exposed a slab of dressed masonry. It was a massive slab of red sandstone which blocked off the end of our tunnel from floor to roof, and from wall to wall. It was obviously the lining of the cavity into which the drill had bored.

  The drill hole cut through the centre of it like a single black eye-socket. All our efforts to peer through it were rewarded with a vista of impenetrable blackness and we had to content ourselves with the slower painstaking approach.

  For three days we worked shoulder to shoulder, stripped to the waist, chipping steadily at the living rock until, despite our gloves, our hands were mushy with blisters and smeared skin. Slowly we exposed the massive slab over its full width and height, to find that it butted on either side against identical slabs and that it appeared to carry across its summit the cross-pieces of an equally massive stone lintel.

  We used two fifty-ton hydraulic jacks to take the strain of the lintel off the slab. Then we drilled and attached ring bolts to the slab itself and hooked steel chains to them. We jammed a brace of steel H-sections across the tunnel to anchor the chains and with two heavy ratchet winches we began to haul the slab bodily out of its seating.

  We knelt side by side, each of us straining against one of the winches, taking up the pull one pawl at a time. With each click of the ratchet the strain on the chains increased until they were as rigid as solid steel bars. Now the handles of the winches were almost immovable.

  ‘Okay, Ben. Let’s both get onto one of them,’ Louren panted. His golden curls were dark and heavy with sweat and dirt, plastered against his skull, and the sweat highlighted his great shoulder muscles and the straining, swollen biceps as we heaved together at the winch.

  ‘Clank! ’ went the rachet and the chain moved a sixteenth of an inch.

  ‘Clank!’ Again she moved. Our breathing hissed and whistled in the silence.

  ‘All the way, partner,’ Louren gasped beside me.

  ‘All the way, Lo.’ And my body arched like a drawn bow, I felt the muscles in my back begin to tear, my eyes strained from their sockets.

  Then with a soft grating sound the great slab of sandstone swung slowly out of the face, and then fell with a heavy thump to the floor of the tunnel, and beyond it we saw the square black opening.

  We lay together side by side, fighting for breath, sweat trickling down our faces and bodies, our muscles still quivering and twitching fr
om our exertions and we stared into that sinister hole.

  There was a smell; a stale, long-dead, dry smell as the air that had been trapped in there for 2,000 years gushed out.

  ‘Come!’ Louren was the first to move, he scrambled to his feet and snatched up one of the electric bulbs in its little wire cage, the extension cable slithered after him like a snake as he went forward. I followed him quickly, and we crawled through the opening.

  It was a jump of four feet down to the floor of the chamber beyond. We stood side by side, Louren holding the light above his head, and we peered around us into the moving mysterious shadows.

  We were in a long commodious passage that ran straight and undeviatingly 155 feet from the cavern end to terminate against a blank wall of stone. The passage was eight foot six inches high, and ten foot wide.

  The roof was lined with lintels of sandstone laid horizontally from wall to wall, and the walls themselves were tiled with blocks similar to the one we had removed from its seating. The floor was paved with square flags of sandstone.

  Let into the walls on each side of the passage were stone-lined cupboards. These were seven feet wide and five feet deep and reached from floor to roof height. Each of these recesses was fitted with shelves of stone slab, rank upon rank of them, three feet apart and upon the shelves stood hundreds upon hundreds of pottery jars.

  ‘It’s some sort of store room,’ Louren said, holding the light high and moving slowly down the passage.

  ‘Yes, probably wine or corn in the jars.’ I have never learned not to guess aloud. My heart was hammering with excitement and my head swivelled from side to side, as I tried to take in every detail.

  There were twenty of these recesses, ten on each side of the passage, and I guessed again.

  ‘Must be two or three thousand pots,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s open one,’ Louren was consumed by a layman’s impatience.

  ‘No, Lo, we can’t do that until we are ready to work properly.’

  There was a thick soft shroud of pale dust over everything, it softened the outlines and edges of all shapes. It rose lazily around our legs like a sea mist as our movements stirred it.

  ‘We will have to clean up before we can do anything else,’ I said, and sneezed as the dust found its way into my nostrils.

  ‘Move slowly,’ Louren told me. ‘Don’t stir it up.’ He took a further pace and then stopped.

  ‘What’s this?’ Scattered along the passage floor were dozens of large shapeless objects, their identity concealed by the blanketing dust. They were lying singly, or in heaps, strange fluid shapes that teased my memory. Compared with the orderly ranks of jars on their shelves, the objects were strewn with a careless abandon.

  ‘Hold the lamp,’ I told Louren, and crouched over one of them. I touched it gently, running my fingers through the velvety dust, brushing it softly aside until I recognized what it was and I drew back with an involuntary exclamation of surprise.

  Through the soft mist of dust and ages a face stared up at me. A long-dead, mummified face over which was stretched dry tobacco-brown skin. The eyes were empty dark holes, and the lips had dried and shrunken to expose the grinning yellow teeth.

  ‘Dead men,’ Louren said. ‘Dozens of them.’

  ‘Sacrifices?’ I pondered. ‘No, this is something else.’

  ‘It looks like a battle As though they have been killed in a fight.’

  Now that we knew what they were, it was possible to make out the way the bodies were piled upon each other like the debris of a hurricane, or were thrown loosely about the stone floor. A corpse in a mantle of grey dust sat with his back to the wall, his head sagged forward on his chest, and one out-flung arm had knocked four of the jars from their shelf - they lay on the floor beside him like fat rolls of French bread.

  ‘It must have been a hell of a fight,’ I said with awe.

  ‘It was,’ said Louren softly, and I turned to him with surprise. His eyes glowed with some intense inner excitement, and his lips were parted, a reckless half smile on his lips.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘How do you know that?’

  Louren looked at me For a second or two he did not see me, then his eyes focused.

  ‘Hey?’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘Why did you say that, as though you knew?’

  ‘Did I?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. I meant - it must have been.’

  He moved on slowly down the passage, stepping over the wind-rows of dead men, peering in each recess as he passed, and I followed him slowly. My mind was thrashing around like a corralled bull, charging madly at each fleeting idea that crossed its path, spinning back on its track and charging again. I knew there was no chance of it being capable of calm, logical thought until this first surging excitement waned.

  Of one thing, and one thing only, I was certain. This was big. This was something to rank with Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, something to startle and dazzle the world of archaeology. Something that I had prayed for and dreamed about for twenty years.

  We had reached the end of the passage. The end wall was another panel of sandstone, but this was decorated. A swirling, stylized engraving of the sun image. Three feet in diameter, it looked like a Catherine wheel with the rays radiating from its circumference. The image evoked in me a strange sense of reverential awe, a hushed feeling of the spirit such as I experience sometimes in a synagogue or the cloisters of a Christian cathedral. Louren and I stood and stared at the image for a long time, then suddenly he turned and looked back to the bricked-in wall 155 feet away.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked, and there was an irritable tone to his voice. ‘Just this passage and pots and old bones? There must be something more!’

  It came as a shock to me to realize that he was actually disappointed. For me the universe could hold no richer prize, this was the culminating moment of my life - and Louren was disappointed. I felt anger start to hiss and bubble within me.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ I demanded, ‘Gold and diamonds and ivory sarcophagi and—’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You don’t even know what we’ve got here yet, and already it’s not enough.’

  ‘Ben, I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Louren Sturvesant? You’re bloody well spoiled. You’ve got everything, so nothing is good enough for you.’

  ‘Now, listen here!’ I saw my own anger reflected in his eyes, but I rushed on regardlessly.

  ‘I’ve planned and saved and worked for this all my life. And now I achieve it, and what do you do?’

  ‘Hey, Ben!’ I saw comprehension in his eyes suddenly, ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not knocking your achievement. I really think it’s the most incredible discovery ever made in Africa, I was just—’

  It took him a few minutes of hard talking to mollify me, but at last I grinned reluctantly.

  ‘Okay.’ I relented, ‘just don’t go saying things like that, Lo. All my life the bastards have been putting down my discoveries and theories, so don’t you start!’

  ‘One thing they’ll never be able to say about you is that you’re frightened to speak your mind!’ He punched my shoulder lightly. ‘Come on, Ben, let’s see what we’ve got in these pots.’

  ‘We shouldn’t disturb them, Lo.’ I was ashamed of my outburst now, and eager to make it up to him. ‘Not until we have mapped and charted—’

  ‘A couple of them are lying on the floor, knocked off the shelves,’ Louren pointed. ‘There are thousands of the bloody things. We will just snaffle one of them. Hell, Ben, it won’t do that much harm!’

  He was not asking permission, not Louren Sturvesant, he was merely giving an order in the pleasantest possible fashion. Already he was making his way back to where the jars were lying beside the dusty bowed corpse, and I hurried after him.

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed unnecessarily, in an attempt to keep nominal control of my find. ‘We will remove one of them only ’ I felt a sneaking
sense of relief that the wrong decision had been made for me. I was also in a fever of impatience to find out what was in the jars.

  The jar stood in the centre of the workshop bench in our prefabricated warehouse. Night had fallen outside, but the overhead lights were all on. We stood around the bench, Sally, Ral, Leslie and I. Tinus van Vuuren was still up at the cavern, his status having changed from mine captain to night-watchman. Louren had decided to place a twenty-four-hour armed guard over the entrance to the tunnel, and Tinus was it - until we could get others.

  Through the thin partition walls of the hut I could hear Louren’s voice as he shouted into the microphone of the radio.

  ‘A vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner. VACUUM CLEANER! V for Venereal, A for Alcoholic - that’s right. Vacuum cleaner. You know the heavy-duty model for cleaning factories. Two of them. Have you got that? Good! Now I want you to get on to Robeson, Head of Security at Sturvesant Diamond Mines. He is to send me his two best men, with half a dozen Bantu guards. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I want them armed.’

  None of us paid attention to Louren’s voice, we were all staring in mesmerized fascination at the earthenware jar.

  ‘Well, it’s not filled with gold.’ Ral was certain. ‘Not heavy enough.’

  ‘Nor is it liquid - not wine or oil,’ Leslie agreed. And we relapsed into silence. The pot was about eighteen inches high, and thick around as a pickle jar. It was of unglazed red pottery, without inscription or ornamentation, and the lid was like that of a teapot with a small knob for a handle. It was sealed with a layer of black substance, probably gum or wax.

  ‘Get that lot on the Dakota first thing tomorrow morning, do you hear?’ Louren was still busy next door.

  ‘I wish he’d hurry up!’ Sally stirred impatiently. ‘I’m dying to find out what it is.’