There were squat boxes at the base with blank screens. Diels passed his staff near one. It hummed, and then made a residual crackle when the staff lifted away. “Perhaps these boxes showed some kind of picture or signal,” the scientist hazarded. “They could be the controls.”
“But what does the machine do?” asked Kranz.
“I have no idea.”
“There are tunnels at either end of this big room,” Raeder said. “Let’s check them.”
These were more peculiar still. The hollow pipes near the crystal shaft became encased in larger pipes that ran through the tunnels, extending as far as their light would cast.
“Is it a pipeline?” asked Diels. “Is it to send some kind of oil or chemical from that machine, a refinery, to someplace else?”
“Or perhaps this is the refinery, and these tunnels conduct crude oil,” Kranz guessed.
“It must go to other parts of the city.” Raeder turned to Keyuri. “What do you know?”
“That to truly understand, we need wisdom.”
Nunnish nonsense, and he was tiring of it.
“Should we follow it?” Kranz asked.
“I think we need to figure out this big machine first,” said Diels.
“Look, more staffs,” said Muller. There was a rack of them near the squat boxes at the base of the machine, like a rack of arms. Some were dull and black, like carbon. Some were crystalline. Some were metal. When Muller took one, it flared brighter and whiter than the ones from above. They blinked in its illumination. “I can feel it vibrating,” the geophysicist said. “It’s like it’s a radio receiver for energy.”
“Are they more powerful light sticks?”
“I think they’re here to be charged in the machine’s cradle,” Raeder said. “I think they’re instruments of Vril. Weapons. Wands.”
The improved visibility from the new staff only deepened the mystery. Now they saw that some of the pipes at the ceiling had been torn and knocked askew. These walls, rough-hewn and undecorated, had black rays on them like blast marks from explosions. There had been some kind of accident.
And in the center of the machine, where pipes ran down into a circular well, was a high metal mesh to guard its perimeter.
Raeder took Muller’s staff and walked over to this, looking through the grill to peer down the shaft. Far, far below-impossible to say how far, but tremendously deep-was an eerie red glow. Heat wafted up. Stairways, pipes, and cables descended into the pit. On the sides of the shaft, gates led to new stone stairs that seemed to delve ever deeper.
“Perhaps I have led you to hell,” Raeder told the others. “Or a chute to the center of the earth.”
“What do you think the pit is for?” asked Kranz, looking down warily. It was dizzying how deep it delved.
“They’re getting energy from the earth,” Muller hazarded. “Heat energy, and perhaps electromagnetic energy as well. Or some new form of energy we can’t guess at. Perhaps they mined into this valley for this very connection, or went underground because their experiments would only work in places deep and dark. Maybe it was so dangerous that they had to pick the most remote spot on earth. In any event, every machine needs fuel, and this one uses the planet’s core, I’m guessing. The black sun, perhaps.”
“But a machine for what?”
“For Vril.” Raeder took the brighter staff and passed it near one of the squat boxes. The black rectangle on its top began to glow. There was a clunk, a groan, and a hum as the huge machine began to start. Nothing moved, but some of its components gave that same ghostly green glow they’d seen at the top of the tunnel, and now the room was fully lit for the first time.
“It’s coming to life,” muttered Kranz.
They stepped back, unsure what the mechanism might do. It began to make a whirring sound. In the stone cradle before them, the crystalline staff began to glow.
“It’s a generator,” Raeder decided. “It’s transferring energy from the center of the earth, or energy we can’t detect, to these instruments or weapons. Look. Those pipes from the deep bring energy. The motors and gears transfer it to the horizontal pipes that extend into the tunnels. And they in turn feed power to that staff, charging it like a battery. But how could an ancient civilization master such a thing?”
“All their knowledge was lost,” Diels hazarded. “Or they left here for another world.”
“Left where? To prehistoric Germany, to our age of heroes? Did they give rise to the legends of the gods?”
Muller was looking about, peering into shadows. “Or they didn’t leave at all,” he said. “Look.” He pointed.
Kranz followed his finger. “Oh my God!”
The hangar door, they’d seen, had been almost knocked from its hinges. But what they hadn’t seen was that some blast or force from the machine had swept across the room and hurled everything against the far wall, in the shadow behind that door.
In that newly illuminated gloom there was a white shoal of bone, a bleached reef, including hundreds of blank-eyed human skulls. It was a ridge of bony remains.
It was a hurled heap of long-dead people.
30
The Lost Valley, Tibet
October 3, 1938
F or one terrifying moment, after Ben Hood pulled his ripcord during his fall toward Shambhala, nothing seemed to happen. Then the parachute opened with a bang and he snapped hard against its straps, gasping. He looked up. The silk had blossomed into a reassuring canopy. Beth’s biplane was a black dot against the dying light and then was gone, past the mountains.
Alone.
He looked down. The ground was coming fast.
He tensed for the shock until remembering to relax. The ground was dark and jumbled, ruined walls running in every direction and small canals descending from the mountains. Pools from ancient reservoirs were rectangles of gray. Nor did he have any idea how to control his direction. Obstacles rushed up, he lifted his knees reflexively, and then with a thud he was down, rolling, his chute snagging on some old parapet.
For a moment he lay still, stunned. Then he sat up to confirm nothing was broken.
There was no sign of Raeder or anyone else.
Hood unbuckled his parachute and let it sag over the wall, the strings trailing like long white worms in the gloom. Now what?
He had no food, no water, and no weaponry except the. 45 on his hip. But Raeder must be here, and with him Keyuri, unless the bastard had already tortured and killed her. There’d be other Germans, too.
His one advantage, he hoped, was surprise. Judging from the explosion, the Nazis expected they’d blocked his pursuit by dynamiting the canyon.
Hood began navigating over old rubble, the dusk continuing to deepen. Then he came upon a clearer path, an old road with ruptured paving. He stopped.
There was a low hum. Was the ground vibrating?
The sound seemed to come from where the road led. There was the faintest green glow in that direction. Keeping to the deepest shadows and wary of ambush, Ben hurried as fast as he dared. Walls, turrets, and huge statues rose all around. The statues were looking backward, in the direction he was going.
Shambhala looked very strange.
If only Roy Chapman Andrews and Agent Duncan Hale could see this.
The road led to a tunnel sloping down into the earth. It was from there that the humming emanated. There was a faint, sickly luminescence that seemed to emerge from the walls of the tunnel itself, as if the rock were alive with energy. How this could be, Hood had no idea. Then, a hundred yards in, a circular entrance with a narrow pocket to either side into which some kind of aperture door had slid. Beyond was darkness. Except not complete darkness, because far, far below a yellow light glimmered, like a candle at the end of the tunnel. In that direction, too, was the source of the noise, a whir like a turbine.
The ruin looked centuries or millennia old yet trembled like a powerhouse.