"What is it?" Sam asked.
She looked up at him, not sure how to formulate her answer, "Uh, nothing really. I am just getting a case of the creeps."
"You? The level-headed scholar?"
"Yes, me. Sam," she whispered, while Purdue crouched to look at something near the coattails of the captain's uniform coat, "It feels as if the book had goose bumps."
"Okay, that is creepy. Can you tell me that again once we are safe and sound up top on the platform and not while we are draped in sixty-nine-year-old darkness?" Sam winced at her, noting how equally eerie her large dark eyes looked in the angle of his beam where the thick blackness around them twisted her features. It made his flesh crawl.
"I'm sorry," she said, with a hint of sarcasm, "I thought you inquired about what was creeping me out, old boy?" Then she smiled and looked down at Purdue's white grey hair in the faint light of his torch.
"Mr. Purdue?" she urged, "Shall we get out of here? I believe our oxygen is at a red factor."
"Just a moment," Purdue's voice came muffled from the confined space of the closet floor, as he fumbled with something that sounded like metal. Sam shone his beam on it. A small iron box, about the size of a toolbox, sat in Purdue's hands and he turned it from side to side as he examined the locks.
"Rusted, of course. But I can open this up later. Let's go. We can thoroughly scrutinize our finds up top. I don't mind telling you that this tomb is beginning to make me wish for the angry spray of the waves," Purdue said. "I have a feeling we are onto something huge here."
Chapter 12
Nina could not wait to have a look at the contents of the book they had recovered from the Nazi submarine. The lore surrounding these objects was astounding, not just in monetary value, but intrinsic in the pursuit of historical truth. Purdue, like a man possessed, had been fiddling with the iron box since they arrived back at the surface. He finally had the thing pried open by dislodging the hinges and found inside a handful of paper rolls, in waterproof packages. He carefully opened the packages and found the rolls etched in mystery and made almost illegible by time. They appeared to be plans of an architectural nature, perhaps designs, for the measurements included specific geometry, almost as if its creations would bear mathematical significance.
Purdue was cold. His body shook from the biting frigid temperature below, but he had no time for such pain. His eyes usurped the vague details of the rolls, the numbering and lines, but still he could not determine what the diagrams depicted. The book rested next to the rolls of plans, left for last. It would certainly take time and expertise to decipher and he anxiously awaited Nina's arrival.
"Sam, did you get footage of that last room?" he asked the journalist behind him who was checking his gear, piece by piece.
"Aye! The light was not the best, but I did also capture some infrared reels, just in case our normal footage was too difficult to clear up," Sam answered. He set up his computer links to transfer it all onto the hard drive for their records and for some reason he felt a twinge of excitement possess him. This was panning out to be quite the adventure, but not in the harrowing way like his previous near-death encounter with Purdue's itchy wallet and dangerous curiosity.
Nina came into the small office where the monitors mirrored the mayhem outside. She wondered secretly why the security cameras did not focus on the oil rig or the processing plant, but given her nonexistent knowledge of the oil business she figured she would make a fool of herself asking such dumb questions.
"Tea?" Sam asked. It was music to her ears and her chilly body begged for the warmth of a cup.
"Please and thank you," she nodded. Immediately her eyes fell on the book. "May I? Or are you busy with it?" she asked Purdue who was lurched over the plans with a painful scowl of frustration.
"Certainly, Nina, go ahead, please," he answered abruptly, hoping that, at least, they could make sense of one of the recovered artifacts. Her slender fingers were dressed in cut-off gloves, leaving her painted fingertips exposed. It made her look like a high maintenance hermit, a gypsy with style.
"How beautiful is this?!" she marveled, while the kettle whistled behind them. The book with the strangely bound leather and its clasps felt heavy in her palms, as if the gravity of the topside world had given it more substance. Now that it had been unearthed, so to speak, it gained weight to convey the importance of its contents. It was cold to her touch as she placed it on the desk to choose a small, strong implement to pry it open with. Purdue had already laid out his steel tools and she knew this was not something she could wriggle into with a ballpoint pen or a hairpin. The edge of the dark brown book had been withered by time, peeling away like filo pastry dough and threatening to chip off in places.
This is not the behavior of leather, as far as I know, she thought to herself. From both the spine and the edge of the cover two separate steel clasps secured it, carved on them some medieval pattern or insignia that snaked along to the tiny hinges and they met in the center of the cover. No name graced the outside of the book, nor any mention of an author, as manuscripts of this age normally omitted them. Sam placed her steaming cup a distance away from her busy hands, just in case they would slip under the force of her efforts and wipe the desk of all its strewn objects and splatter the place with hint of chamomile and green tea.
"Thanks, love," Nina said through her focused exertion, not realizing the impact of her choice of words. Sam stood still for a second, thinking about her response and smiled just a little. He waited for Nina to realize, but she never did, to his dismay. There was too much zealous curiosity dictating her actions and he eventually stopped waiting to tease her for it. Frustration overwhelmed her so that Purdue looked up from his fascinating sketches and Sam quickly butted in to help her wedge the lock before she lost a finger or started speaking in tongues, provoked by her simmering rage.
"Step aside, madam," he insisted, and took the little silvery tool from her. Using the same technique as she had, he employed his masculine strength to snap open the little hinge of the clasp on the edge of the book with a ting that sent bolts of adrenaline through Nina's body. It was finally open! She did not mean to, but she lunged forward eagerly and grabbed the book from Sam.
"You're welcome, Dr. Gould," he said in surprise.
"I'm sorry, Sam. It's just… it's… I am dying to see what is written inside. This artifact is ancient, you see?" she huffed with an innocence he simply could not judge harshly. He nodded in affirmation and was quickly joined now by Purdue who had to see what the book held. On the second page, the first was blank, a symbol, like the one in the captain's closet, adorned the yellow paper that was infested with rust stains. It was drawn in newer ink than the writings in the rest of the book, implying that the symbol was from the Second World War era. Nina knew full well that the swastika in all its guises had been used by many cultures long before the rise of the Third Reich, but in this capacity it represented just that — the Nazi regime.
"What does it say?" Purdue pressed impatiently.
"I will need some time to read through it. Most of this is in Latin, but I see other languages here too," Nina noted slowly, as her index finger found the obscure words written in different hands and slants that made it difficult to read. "Old Germanic dialects, Nepali and Old English phrases come to the fore among the Latin scriptures. My God, how far back does this thing go?" The three of them stood in mute wonderment at the various entries and the detailed symbols which looked, even to the laymen, like occult sigils.
"I see references to a supposed shrine built into a mountain," Nina reported in a low tone, her absolute attention arrested by the texts before them. She sat down without tearing her eyes from the pages. "Here, this says "Lumbini" a few times and then speaks of something holy. That's what I get from the shards of German here," she pointed to an old paragraph on the fifth page, dated 1709. "Then it is mentioned here in the Latin text too, where the date says '26 no… ' and continues with 'e83.' It is badly faded, see? Probably 26 November 1883? Then again it could be any century's eighty-third year, these pages are so old," she jousted wits with herself while the two men listened eagerly. Purdue smiled with every turn of the page, clamped his hands together excitedly with every revelation that Dr. Gould reported. Then Nina looked up at them with a questioning expression.