Ziff joined her. ‘Very similar workmanship. But according to the inscriptions in the map room, this place pre-dates Solomon by centuries.’
Nina looked up the slope. Any path from the river to the plateau above was now completely overgrown. ‘The answers will be up there.’ A glance at the reddening western sky. ‘We don’t have much time before it gets dark.’ She started for the incline.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to make camp and see what’s up there in the morning?’ asked Lydia.
‘It might, but I’m not going to wait now that we’re this close,’ the redhead replied. ‘Steven, you’ll want to film all this.’ She pushed aside a bush and started to climb, then paused to look back. ‘Well, come on! This is why we’re here!’ She continued upwards, branches cracking as she bulldozed through the undergrowth.
‘I do love her, really,’ Eddie said to Fisher with a grin before starting after her. ‘Fortune, chuck me a machete — although the way she’s going, we might not need it!’
The climb to the top took several minutes, the combination of dense vegetation and the steep slope making it an arduous ascent. But Nina still made another discovery along the way: beneath the topsoil, her boots found a firmer surface. The route between the river and whatever lay above had once been paved.
By the time she and Eddie hacked their way to the summit, the documentary team had caught up. Lydia carried the boom microphone, her sound equipment hanging from her neck. The New Zealander had an aggrieved expression, but it was from more than the strain of the climb. ‘This is weird,’ she said, adjusting dials. ‘There’s some sort of interference on the audio, but I can’t figure out what it is.’
Rivero glanced at his camera’s mic. ‘I’m not getting anything.’
She pushed one of her headphone cups more firmly against her ear. ‘It’s really low-frequency, but… there’s definitely something. Kind of a background hum.’
Eddie stopped to listen. ‘I can’t hear anything either, but I know what you mean. Like when you go past an electricity substation and there’s that buzz you can feel.’
‘There’s something else I can’t hear,’ said Nina. ‘Anything. No birds, no insects. Listen.’ Everyone halted, silence falling unnervingly around them. ‘Maybe this place really is a dead zone. The only living things here are plants, and even they don’t look too healthy.’
‘Yeah, they’re definitely Tim Burton-y,’ Eddie noted, regarding a spindly and twisted tree. He whispered to Nina: ‘If there’s another source of eitr here, remember that we gave away most of the cure…’
‘I don’t think that’s what it is,’ she replied. ‘Eitr would have killed everything, including the vegetation. But it’s more like the animals and insects have been driven off. Maybe that hum Lydia’s picked up is scaring them away, like an ultrasonic repeller.’ She pressed onwards. ‘But we don’t scare that easily. Right?’
‘You get that?’ Fisher asked Rivero below. The cameraman nodded.
The ground levelled out. Eddie swept a machete through obstructing branches, then held them aside so Nina could pass through. She pushed clear — and stopped in amazement. ‘Okay, guys?’ she called. ‘You’ll definitely want to have the cameras rolling.’
‘What’ve you found?’ asked Fisher as the others reached the summit.
Nina looked into Rivero’s lens. ‘Welcome,’ she announced, ‘to Zhakana… City of the Damned.’
They had emerged on to a field of ruins.
There were dozens of structures, hundreds, disappearing into the shadows beneath the overhanging trees. The buildings were ancient, but even in a state of collapse there was something almost triumphal about them, a sense that they had been built to celebrate their civilisation. Even after being eroded by rain and cracked by creepers for multiple millennia, traces of elaborate carvings were still discernible on the walls.
Ziff gasped. ‘Magnificent! Oh, this is glorious.’
‘You’re not kidding,’ said Nina. ‘And I bet that if we compared each building to the model in the map room, they’d match perfectly.’
‘So Solomon was a model train nerd like my dad?’ Eddie chipped in. He held the bushes aside so Howie, Paris and finally Wemba could reach the top of the hill, the other Congolese having remained below to unload the boats. It occurred to him that Wemba should have helped them, but he forgot about the porter’s lax attitude when he glanced back at the top of the promontory — and saw something new. ‘Er, Nina?’
His wife was examining the carvings on one of the ruins. ‘Hold on, I just want to see this.’
‘I think you’d rather see this.’
His tone prompted her to look around — and her eyes went wide. ‘Yeah, you’re right!’
A building sat upon the jutting clifftop. Unlike the others, this was almost completely intact. It was a stout rectangular block, the sheer outer walls some thirty feet high and capped with ranks of square towers. Its bricks had the same precise, almost laser-cut appearance as those inside the First Temple in Jerusalem. The canopy of trees provided almost total cover, explaining how it had remained hidden from aerial observation — but these were the most sickly specimens yet, their deformed trunks seeming barely able to support their own weight.
Nina was not interested in the flora, though. She hurried towards the building. ‘No doors or windows,’ she said. ‘It really is the Palace Without Entrance!’
Ziff broke into a jog to catch up. ‘So the legend of Solomon is true! And according to the story, the way in is buried in sand on the west side.’
Nina glanced in the direction of the setting sun as she cleared the ruins. ‘We’re by the north wall, so… around that corner.’ She pointed.
‘Hey, can you wait for us?’ said Rivero, breathing heavily as he and the others caught up. ‘People running away from the camera only makes good TV on Cops.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘But according to the legends of King Solomon, the way in to the Palace Without Entrance should be over there.’
‘Wouldn’t that make it the Palace With Entrance?’ joked Eddie.
‘It’s hidden. In the legend, Solomon had to follow a trail of eagles to find one that told him where to find it. But the story already gave us the location.’ She approached the corner. ‘Around here.’
‘According to the legend, they had to dig in the sand,’ said Ziff. ‘Should we get a shovel from the boats?’
‘Let’s see what’s here first,’ Nina replied with rising excitement. ‘Which is…’ She stopped as she cleared the corner. ‘Oh.’
Rivero was right behind her. ‘Hey, cool,’ he said, with no little sarcasm. ‘Trees!’
Warped vegetation formed a dense wall along the palace’s western side. There was no sand on the ground, no convenient pits to be excavated. ‘Maybe the legend’s wrong,’ said Eddie.
With the camera fixed upon her, Nina tried not to let her frustration show. ‘But it corresponds to what we discovered in the First Temple. This is Zhakana, this is the Palace Without Entrance, it has to be. The legend is a clue telling us how to get in, so there must be a way!’
‘Nina, it will still be here in the morning,’ said Ziff gently. ‘We should make camp and start work again at first light.’
‘I know, I know. But it’s so annoying! We found the city exactly where the map room said, the palace is right here… but we can’t get in.’
‘Yet,’ the older archaeologist added. He smiled. ‘For someone who has found so many ancient wonders, you are very impatient to find more!’