Smoke.
Flames suddenly raced along the base of the wall. Indy slapped at them with his jacket, then finally found the coal and kicked it out the door. He stomped out the sparks, and flapped the cloth door to get out the smoke. But the rush of air ignited a spark he'd missed, and the wall was ablaze again.
"Aw. . ." He yelled, grabbed a gallon jug of water from the floor, and doused the fire. When he was sure every spark was out, he lowered the lantern and examined the damage. Several square feet of the wall were blackened and the hut smelled of smoke, but the structure still seemed sound. The last thing he wanted to do was end his watch by burning down the hut.
But on second thought, Dorian probably wouldn't mind.
The hut, which was made of branches, feathers, and beeswax, was an attempt to recreate the first temple of Delphi. It was part of a plan promoted by Stephanos Doumas to connect the present with the past and make the ruins more accessible and interesting to non-scientific visitors. It had been constructed outside the temple by Doumas and his assistants shortly before the earthquake, and had survived unscathed.
Upon their arrival, as Doumas led them over to the crevice, Dorian had stopped at the hut, looked it over, then asked Doumas what it was. She laughed when he finished his explanation. "So you're becoming a tourist promoter as well as an archaeologist. Is that what I taught you when you were my student?"
"Well, not exactly, but—"
"In fact, what I taught you, Stephanos, is that tourists are a costly nuisance. Tourist promotions take away money that might go for research, and if left to their own devices tourists destroy our work."
Doumas was taken aback by the criticism, but he quick ly recovered. "Well, a very important tourist is coming here, Dr. Belecamus. None other than the king, and I'm sure you'll agree it is a good idea to please him."
Dorian had turned away from the hut, and gazed toward the temple for several seconds. Indy was surprised by how well she hid her feelings. She must be thinking that the king's trip to Delphi was related to her family's tenuous political situation, and her return.
When she looked back toward them, she was smiling. "So everything is happening at once. The vapors are rising, and the king is coming."
"And you are here," Doumas added.
"Yes. I am here. Now, tell me more about these vapors."
Doumas said the vapors had risen three times that day, each eruption about two and a half to three hours apart.
"Okay, we'll transform the hut into a lookout station, and monitor the vapors," she said.
When Doumas protested that the hut wasn't built for occupation, she reminded him that he had called her about the earthquake damage and requested her assis tance. "As long as I have come all the way from Paris for that purpose, let me do my job the way I see fit, Stephanos. Is that understood?" Doumas quickly backed off, and from that moment on there was no question that while Dorian was in Delphi, she was in charge.
Indy put his hat on and stepped outside. Moonlight washed across the ruins, illuminating the columns of Apollo's Temple, the rubble and remains of ancient walls. Beyond the temple, the abrupt rise of the mountain face was hidden in shadow and left a sense of foreboding. He rubbed his hands together, fighting off the chill, and headed toward the temple.
He thought about what he'd read in recent days about Delphi, and tried to imagine what it had been like to visit the sacred shrine at its height of power. The temple had been built in the middle of the fourth century B.C. after an earlier temple was destroyed by an earthquake. In the decades and centuries that followed, a regular routine had been established. Visitors seeking knowledge of the future would first sacrifice a goat or a sheep, and if a reading of the entrails boded well, they were allowed inside the temple. If the person was wealthy, the entrails no doubt read very well, Indy figured.
Upon entering the portal, they first saw walls inscribed with bits of wisdom, such as "Know thyself" and
"Everything in moderation." Beyond the portal were statues of Poseidon, Apollo and the Fates. Other treasures of the interior included a statue of Homer and the iron chair in which Pindar sat when he came to Delphi to sing odes to Apollo.
Below ground level were the central chambers of the shrine. A huge gold statue of Apollo guarded the entrance
to the inner sanctuary, known as the adytum. In the inner sanctuary was the tomb of Dionysus and the tripod on which Pythia sat and inhaled the mephitic gases which supposedly rose from a fissure in the earth. Nearby was the Omphalos, a black, cone-shaped stone, which was regarded as the navel of the world, and was always near Pythia when she spoke.
But all that was gone, lost, stolen, or destroyed, he thought as he crossed the Sacred Way, a wide path which wound through the ruins. He stopped where a rope blocked entry to the temple. Until more was known about the vapors, no one was allowed to go beyond this point.
Before the rope had been put in place, Dorian had carefully measured the crevice. It was about nine feet across at the widest point, and about thirty feet long. The ground on either side of the fissure had buckled and thrust upward so that the crevice was bordered by mounds of dirt and rubble. But it was possible to approach the crevice only on the side nearest the temple entrance. A trench about twenty feet deep bordered the opposite side.
A wispy thread of vapor curled upward from the mound. He checked his watch. 8:39. Four hours and twenty-three minutes after the last rising, and right on time. Within seconds, the vapors thickened and billowed above the crevice.
What would it be like to inhale the gas? Most likely it was just water heated to a vapor by the molten earth below and forced up the chasm to the surface. Hell, he was fed up with vapor watching. He'd sample the gas, and prove that it was harmless. If he felt the least bit nauseat ed, he could just back away and inhale fresh air.
He glanced back across the ruins, then pushed down on the rope and stretched a leg over. The air around the top of the mound was a violet hue now. His heart beat faster as he raised his other leg. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it was a poisonous gas.
Get it over with. Do it.
"Jones, what're you doing there?"
He lowered his leg, straddling the rope, and looked back to see Dorian stepping out from the shadows of the hut. The moonlight fell across her, illuminating one side of her face. Awkwardly, he stepped back over the rope. He rubbed his hands together, and smiled as she approached.
"It started again. Right on time."
"So I see." She moved closer to him. "But you didn't answer my question. What were you going to do?"
He tried to think of an excuse. But there was no point. "I was going to take a closer look."
"I thought I made it clear to you that I don't want you or anyone going in there when the fumes are rising.
We don't know anything about the gases."
"Maybe it's ichor, Dorian."
He could see her face clearly now: she wasn't amused. Ichor was the ethereal fluid that flowed through the veins of the gods. "This is no time to be flippant," she snapped. "The pursuit of archaeology requires rational thought and a step-by-step process."
"If you want me talk rationally, that's fine. The fact is, we won't know anything until someone just goes in there and inhales the gas."
"And you'd like to be that person, I suppose."
"I'm willing to try it, because I think we're wasting our time."
"No," she said firmly. "That's not the way we're going to do it." Just then the vapors faded, turned wispy and vanished. Dorian noted the time. "Where's the clipboard? Aren't you keeping track of the time?"
"I left it in the hut, and I am keeping track." He told her the times the vapors had risen.