Nina smiled. ‘I doubt even Blofeld would be dumb enough to build a base inside an active volcano…’ She stopped, frowning slightly.
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s another feeling, that there’s something…’ She slowly turned, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she looked across the hillside at a higher spot.
‘The rock?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel some kind of connection to this place…’ Almost absently, she headed up the slope.
‘Hey, hold on!’ Eddie hurriedly extracted the rucksack from the Land Rover, along with another bag of basic survival equipment, and went after her. ‘Take some bloody water, at least.’ He gave her the bag.
‘Sorry. But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s far away.’
They angled up the volcano’s side. While it was still active, the clumps of vegetation in the dirt, along with geological features that would require centuries, if not millennia, to erode, showed that it hadn’t erupted for a considerable time. ‘One less thing to worry about,’ said Eddie when Nina pointed this out. ‘I don’t want to be hopping over streams of molten lava like Lara bloody Croft.’
‘You don’t quite have her figure,’ Nina joked. ‘But I don’t think we’ll—’
She stopped as she cleared a rise — and saw something ahead.
‘Well, Christ,’ Eddie said, amazed. ‘There is something here.’
Part of the hillside had suffered a landslide, a swath of rock reduced to rubble. But among the debris were stones that very clearly had not been shaped by the random forces of nature. Straight edges and right angles stood out from the scattered scree. Nina broke into a jog towards the broken remains. ‘There must have been something built on the volcano!’
‘Or in it,’ said Eddie as he followed, pointing uphill.
About a hundred feet higher up was a dark opening in the scar where an earthquake had shaken loose the surface. Nina hesitated, wanting to investigate the stonework first, but then headed for the exposed passage. This expedition was not about archaeology.
The smashed masonry had come from a structure marking the way into the volcano, but the almost circular tunnel behind it appeared natural. ‘It must be a lava tube,’ she said as they approached.
‘So what’s all this?’ Eddie asked as they reached more debris on the ground. ‘Did someone build an entrance to it, like a gatehouse or something?’
‘I’ll make an archaeologist out of you yet,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I don’t think it was an entrance. Look how the stones are spread out — it’s an even distribution across the whole opening. This wasn’t built to mark the way in. It was built to block it.’
‘Until the landslide opened it up.’
‘Looks like it.’ They reached the opening. Even though little of the barricade was still intact, what remained had a distinctively harsh aesthetic that immediately suggested an Atlantean influence to Nina.
Eddie peered down the tunnel. It was about twelve feet in diameter, curling away into darkness like the trail of a monster earthworm. He sniffed for any tell-tale hints of sulphurous gases, but smelled only the desert air.
A feeling that something wasn’t as it should be made him move a few steps into the tunnel and sniff again. Still nothing — but now he realised why. ‘What is it?’ Nina asked.
‘This tunnel goes down into the volcano, right? And we know it’s still active because of the steam blowing out of the top.’
‘Yeah?’
‘So how come air’s getting sucked into the tunnel?’ He returned to the ruined wall and scraped up a handful of fine dust, then let the grains trickle out from his hand. They didn’t fall straight down, but instead curved away, drawn towards the shadows.
Nina joined him. He was correct; there was a definite flow of air down the lava tube, and it was at odds with the prevailing wind outside. But she had no clue how to explain it. ‘At least we won’t have to worry about being gassed if we go down there.’
‘If?’ said Eddie with a knowing smile.
‘Yeah, we’re going down there. I just wanted to, y’know, preserve the illusion of choice.’
His smile broadened. ‘That vanished the moment I married you.’
‘Hey!’
He winked, then became more serious. ‘There should be a couple of torches in that bag. Let’s have a look.’
Nina found the pair of flashlights and gave one to her husband as she switched on the other and shone it down the passage. The curving walls were slightly ridged, producing the unsettling impression of being inside the ribcage of a snake. The lava tube changed shape as it progressed, its cross-section undulating from a teardrop to a squashed ovoid, but the volume of molten rock that had formed it seemed consistent; the ceiling was never lower than eight feet high. ‘Do you think it’s safe?’
Eddie placed a fingertip to his forehead as if channelling psychic powers. ‘Lemme consult my massive knowledge of volcanoes and say… I don’t have a fucking clue.’ She stuck out her tongue, making him grin again. ‘There isn’t molten lava gushing up it, so that’s a good start. And so long as the wind’s blowing down into it, we should be able to breathe okay. If it changes, though… We should have brought a canary in a cage.’
‘Poor birdie.’ She aimed the light at where the tunnel coiled out of sight. ‘Should we get the rest of the gear?’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve got the basics, and I’ve got the bombs. If we need anything else, we can always go back for it.’
‘Let’s hope we don’t need anything else.’
‘You think we’re going to find this meteorite just lying there?’
‘It’d be a nice change, wouldn’t it?’ She started down the shaft.
Eddie walked alongside her. ‘So, let me get this straight. This priestess, Nantalas, basically sinks Atlantis when she cocks up how to use earth energy, and the meteorite shoots off like an ICBM. She convinces the king not to kill her, but instead uses the statues to find it.’
‘Right. So they could make sure nobody ever tried to use the power of the gods again.’
‘Well, we know they were here. But just blocking off the entrance doesn’t seem like their usual way of doing things. The other Atlantean places we’ve found… they were big on booby traps, weren’t they?’
Nina stopped suddenly. ‘Oh, you had to remind me, didn’t you?’
‘Better now than when there’s a giant scythe swinging at your head.’
More cautiously, using the torch to check the curved walls above as well as the floor, she set off again. The entrance disappeared round a bend, dropping them into darkness as they continued deeper into the mountain. ‘I don’t know how much effort the Atlanteans who came here would have put into building their defences, though. They would have had other things on their mind.’
‘Like getting back home to save their families before Atlantis went glug-glug-glug.’
‘Yeah. Still, they obviously put some work into sealing the entrance — they could have just filled the tunnel with rocks, but they went to the trouble of constructing a wall.’
‘If they thought the meteorite was sent by the gods, maybe they thought it’d piss them off even more if they didn’t show respect by building a proper barricade,’ Eddie suggested.
‘I really am rubbing off on you! That’s exactly what I was thinking. So, when are you going to enrol for a degree course?’
‘The twelfth of never.’ They continued their descent, Eddie licking a finger and holding it up to check that the breeze was still blowing from behind them. It was. ‘So, they built a wall — did they build anything else down here?’