“Think about how refreshing it’ll be once we hit this cool, crisp mountain lake water,” Hunt said, attaching a breathing regulator onto a scuba tank.
“I thought tears are supposed to be warm.”
“Wow, I’m impressed. I didn’t think you paid that much attention to the legend.”
“I like to surprise people now and then.”
The two finished setting up their gear and took a look around. The tranquil scene was just that; they were the only two people in sight for miles. During the hike from the nearest available parking spot to the bridge, they’d worried that there would be tourists here and they would draw too much attention. But right now, anyway, they were the only ones here.
“Let’s just drop down and have a look-see. Doesn’t have to take long,” Hunt said, climbing onto the bridge railing. He sat on the rail so that his back faced the water.
“Just like a backwards roll entry off a boat?” Jayden clarified.
“You got it. Put a little air in your vest so you don’t sink too fast, wouldn’t want to hit one of those rocks.”
“Got it.” Hunt heard the hiss of air as Jayden pressed a button to put air from his tank into his buoyancy compensator vest, inflating it.
Hunt flopped over backwards into the lake with a splash, and Jayden followed suit a minute later.
“So clear it makes me dizzy,” Jayden commented after lifting his face from the water.
“Let’s drop down,” Hunt said, releasing air from his vest with an escaping hiss. The pair began their descent into the lake. It was hard to say how deep it actually was since the bottom was a disorganized pile of boulders, sort of like the pyramid chamber, but on a flat plane rather than a steep incline.
The descent took only a few seconds before they reached the smooth tops of the highest-reaching boulders. A thin layer of green, slimy algae covered them, causing Hunt to lose his footing when trying to stand on one. Looking up, he could see the underside of the bridge in a distorted, watery view. He felt a tap on his leg and looked over to see Jayden pointing down at a gap between two large boulders.
Hunt nodded and he followed Jayden as they finned head first into the crevice. It opened into a small cavern. Jayden stopped a few feet inside the entrance, waiting for Hunt to catch up. A few startled fish darted out the way they came in. Aware that they were now in an overhead environment, where there was no direct access to the surface, Hunt checked his gauges, which told him he had plenty of air left and that they were only twenty feet underwater. Looking around the enclosed space, Hunt saw light streaming in from the opposite side of the cavern.
He and Jayden moved across the boulder cavern side by side, observing the floor and walls of the space as they passed. Nothing out of the ordinary was visible, only natural rock, and some leaf litter and tree branches from the surrounding lake vegetation. They emerged from the cavern only to see another opening between a group of boulders a few feet deeper.
Hunt pointed down to it and Jayden nodded before finning toward it. Again, they entered a cavern and swam through it. Like the last one, it also held nothing unusual. They continued to poke around the boulders, swimming over and through them for the next hour, without finding anything noteworthy. Hunt had begun to feel the chill of the mountain lake when he checked his air gauge and saw that he was getting low; it was time to head back up.
He flashed the face of his gauge to Jayden and jerked a thumb towards the surface, the signal to ascend. Jayden nodded and the two divers slowly made their way back up to the surface of the lake. Hunt immediately checked the bridge for signs of people but was relieved to see that it was empty. He’d periodically glanced up at it while underwater, since the water was clear enough to see people on it, but he hadn’t seen any. He and Jayden quietly made their way to the bridge on the shore closest to them, careful not to make loud splashes, which might carry far across the lake and draw attention.
“No sign of Atlantis,” Jayden quipped.
Hunt flipped over onto his back for the semi-long swim to shore. “Sure was a lot easier getting in than it is getting out, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s nice when gravity’s on your side.”
Hunt agreed as he stared up at the mountainside that towered above the lake while he kicked backwards toward shore. He admired the green vegetation lower down on the crater wall, and then a few bursts of color where wildflowers grew higher up — reds, yellow…and at the rim, near to where they had parked the car earlier — an explosion of cyan.
“Hey Jayden, how much do you think this place has changed since whoever it was put that statue here?”
“What do you mean, like this lake?”
“The lake, the crater, the wildlife — the trees and plants — you think they’re still the same kind, in about the same places?”
“You sure do wonder about some weird stuff. I suppose it’s mostly the same though, why?”
“On the way back into town to return the dive gear, I think we should stop off at the top of the crater one more time.”
Chapter 11
“You just like metal detecting, don’t you?” Jayden said as he pulled the two shovels from the rental SUV while Hunt took out the detectors.
“There are worse things to be doing, but I really think this is worth a try.”
Jayden wore a skeptical look. “So let me get this straight: you think there’s something up with the color blue-green, or cyan or whatever? Because the statue head contained a cyan rock, and these are cyan flowers…” He waved an arm at the riotous bush with its bluish-green blossoms a few feet away. “…that it means whoever planted that statue had some kind of color-coded secret message?”
Hunt put the metal detector headphones on. “It sounds pretty wild when you put it like that, I admit, but basically, yeah. And and kind of blue is extremely rare in plants, expecially flowers.”
“But these bushes might not have even been here back then.”
“But they might have. We don’t know, so we may as well take a few minutes and see if we get a signal.”
For the second time that day they set out with the metal detectors on the crater summit. Together they walked the perimeter of the large flowering bush without obtaining a signal. As they made their way around they suddenly heard light footsteps, and then breathing. Hunt tensed, but relaxed when he saw a mangy wild dog trot around the bush.
“Looks like a coyote,” Jayden assessed.
“Could be,” Hunt said, “because coyotes are pack animals, and here comes another one.” A second canine ran up to them, nose to the ground. It did not have a threatening demeanor, nor did it appear cagey or wary of the humans. Both animals sniffed around in the bushes, always maintaining a few feet distance from the humans without seeming to put too much effort into that positional awareness.
They stood and watched for a minute to see if more dogs were coming. When a third showed up but mimicked the behavior of the first, Hunt told Jayden they should get to work. “Maybe we should get this done before too many of them get here.” Jayden agreed.
Then Hunt made his way into the brambles, determined to cover the ground it hid beneath its thorny vines.
“You’re loony-tunes, Carter, you know that, right?” Jayden taunted from somewhere unseen inside the sprawling, cyan foliage. “I mean really, is this your idea of a vacation, because—”
But Hunt interrupted him with an excited shout. “Hey! I got something!”
“Yeah, I know, you got a case of the crazies, Hunt, because—”
“No, I’m serious. I’ve got a signal. Get over here and help me dig.”
By the time Jayden was able to hack his way through the bush to Hunt’s position, he’d already dug a six-inch deep hole, careful not to be too reckless about it lest he destroy something delicate if it was there.