Sam said, “It’s nothing more than a dead-end!”
“It looks very similar to the hypogeum we explored in the Orvieto Underground,” Genevieve said.
Tom grinned. “It’s not just closely resembling, but exactly the same.”
“So what are you saying we do?” Sam asked.
Tom sighed. “We need to bring the black light wand down here.”
It took close to an hour to reach the dive boat.
Tom removed his fins, passing them to Henry, and then climbed the boarding ladder. He took three steps and sat down, removing his face-mask and rebreather. Billie and Genevieve were the next to climb up and Sam the last.
Henry helped remove Sam’s oxygen tank. “Did you find what you were after?”
Sam smiled. “Yes. We’ll need to make a second dive, using a black light to identify what we’re after, but we’re confident we’ve found the right place, thanks to you.”
“That’s great news.” Henry said, “You just missed a message from Elise on the radio by about half an hour.”
Sam wiped the saltwater from his face with a towel. “What was the message?”
“She has the fourth sacred stone and has chartered a flight to Indonesia to deliver it. Says for you to catch up with her once you’re done here. Said she couldn’t wait for you to complete your work here.”
“Elise has left?” Tom asked, puzzled. “Did she say why?”
Henry sighed. “She said it couldn’t wait any longer.”
Randy joined the conversation. “Whatever the heck all of you are involved in, the world is really copping a beating now.”
Tom tried to swallow the fear that rose in his throat. “What’s happened?”
“A whole bunch of stuff that shouldn’t have,” Randy said. “I’m starting to really believe we’re about to witness the end of the world, don’t you think?”
Sam said, “Not if we can do anything about it. What’s happened?”
“A cruise ship carrying 3,500 passengers and 1500 crew hit an iceberg and sunk. So far there’s still nearly thirty passengers unaccounted for.”
“That’s bad luck, where was the cruise ship traveling that she didn’t heed ice warnings?” Sam asked.
Randy sighed, his lips curled up in the anguish of a story that he knew no one would believe. “The Strait of Gibraltar.”
“It hit an iceberg in the Mediterranean?”
Randy nodded. “I said it was bad, didn’t I?”
“What else?”
“There are more than five class four hurricanes in the northern hemisphere and six class five cyclones in the southern. Each of them recording winds in excess of a hundred and eighty miles an hour, with three being the most powerful on record.” Randy took a breath and then continued. “A set of tornadoes ripped through Germany, atmospheric rains flooded Las Vegas, and icebergs washed up on Venice beach, too.”
“Atmospheric rains?” Billie asked.
Sam said, “Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere — like rivers in the sky — that transport water vapor from the ocean. These columns of vapor move with the weather, potentially moving as much water as the Amazon River. When they make landfall, they can release their entire contents in a very short period of time. They’re pretty common, but can be deadly depending on when and where they hit.”
“Back in 2011, for example,” Tom said. “There was a mass die off of oysters in San Francisco Bay after an atmospheric river overnight dumped so much fresh water that it reduced the salinity of the bay.”
“Sounds pretty bad,” Billie said. “But then so do earthquakes, wildfires, and icebergs where they don’t belong. So what are we going to do about it?”
Tom glanced at his dive computer. “We have another hour before our residual nitrogen levels are low enough to enter the water again.”
Sam said, “After that, we’ll return to the submerged hypogeum and place the third sacred stone — then we’re off to Sigiriya to help Elise deposit the fourth stone.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Elise took a Qantas flight from Lord Howe Island to Brisbane and then a commercial flight to Colombo Airport, Sri Lanka and from there she chartered a local single-engine aircraft into Sigiriya. All told, she’d been in the air nearly fourteen hours. She’d slept intermittently. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She glanced at the dark clouds in the sky, they appeared to be somehow getting closer no matter where she went.
Sigiriya was an anomaly in the Sri Lankan landscape. Rising 660 feet from the surrounding land, the monolith had been chosen by King Kasyapa in the fifth century of the Christian Era for the site of a new capital after he had wrested the throne from his father and an older half-brother who was the rightful heir. It was a good choice, eminently defensible. After the king’s death, it was used as a Buddhist monastery until the 14th century, and then fell into oblivion until its rediscovery in 1831 by a British army officer.
Archaeological evidence placed the earliest occupancy of the area around the rock in prehistoric times, and the hills surrounding it were filled with cave dwellings and crude rock shelters. When the rock itself had been selected as both fortress and citadel, it provided places for the uppermost palace, other palaces located behind lavish lower gardens, and a mid-level terrace into which had been carved a massive lion guarding a gate that led to the winding stairway providing the only modern access to the extensive ruins of the citadel palace.
She paid a local driver to take her to Sigiriya — which meant Lion’s Rock — and was a UNESCO listed World Heritage Site. As he pulled up to the entrance to the landscaped gardens she paid him the agreed price, giving him a gold-colored 5000 Sri Lankan Rupee banknote as a tip.
The man looked at her and shook his head. He tried to pass the note back to her. “I can not take this. It is too much. Thank you.”
Elise smiled at his honesty. She squeezed his hand closed on the banknote. “I have two more for you if you wait here until I get back. Can you wait for me?”
The driver’s eyes widened. “Yes. Very good. I will wait here.”
“Thank you.”
She walked up the main path where tourists and locals were funneled by two wire fences into a single gate. A small desk and two security guards checked her passport and her payment before she was allowed entrance onto the heritage site.
Elise moved briskly, meandering through the moats, bridges and stone paths that formed the water gardens. Artificial, rectangular lakes were symmetrically aligned on an east-west axis. Each one was connected to the outer moat on the west and the large artificial lake to the south of the Sigiriya rock. All the pools were also interlinked using an underground conduit network fed by the lake, and connected to the moats. A series of circular limestone fountains, fed by an underground aqueduct system, flowed freely — and was said to have done so for nearly fifteen hundred years.
At the end of the longest rectangular lake she followed a path of stone toward Sigiriya. After a few hundred feet she reached a pair of giant boulders that leaned in against one another to form a natural arch. A signpost said the boulders had once come from high up upon the main citadel, where the king’s warriors would roll them off at intruding armies. Elise smiled as she read the description and looking up at the main Lion’s Rock. It must have been an impossible task to try and overtake the ancient city.
She ducked under the twin boulders and into what was described as the boulder gardens. There, several large boulders were linked by winding pathways. The gardens extended from the northern slopes to the southern slopes of the hills at the foot of Sigiris rock. The pathway took her past eight caves, the walls of which were once adorned with beautiful frescoes. She glanced in each one, but there was nothing to suggest the caves had anything to do with the sacred stone she was carrying in her backpack. She read the note outside one of the caves, which said that the remains of meditation limestone seats, used by ancient monks, were found inside.