Hank said, “Blofeld’s lair in ‘You Only Live Twice.’”
Conrad stared at Hank. His deadpan humor seemed to come out at the strangest moments. “You sure you have a PhD?”
“I’m sure,” Hank said. “Let’s go.”
Hank never expected to march into the Queen of Sheba’s city through a giant “gate of the gods” like those in Nimrod or Babylon with winged griffins. But he also didn’t think that he and Conrad would have to slither on their stomachs through a culvert into the pit of hell.
Hank dropped through the pitch black into a much larger space beneath the crater than he had imagined. Rappelling down his line, he looked up at the tiny hole he and Conrad had squeezed through. It was a pinprick of light now, a remote star in a cold universe.
“This is humongous,” Conrad whispered from the void. “It would take a massive amount of water to hollow out this much earth. Billions upon billions of gallons over many years. I’d hate to be down here in a monsoon.”
“Why?” Hank asked.
“Because this probably functions like some gigantic underground reservoir. You know, like the man-made ones under Hong Kong that collect all the runoff when hurricanes hit. That’s how they fare better with storm surges than Manhattan, which doesn’t have any. Can you imagine what’s collected at the bottom of this?”
“Yeah,” said Hank. “All the sins of the world, if your antediluvian theories are true.”
All the way down to the bottom of the pit, Hank scanned for any signs of Strategic Explorations’ men. But he found nothing.
“Where do you think they went?” Conrad said, as if reading his mind.
“Probably deeper into the mine,” Hank said, switching on his brights.
Metallic stalactites hung from everywhere in perfect natural elegance. It was like they were standing in the St. Peter’s Basilica of Nature, all the way down to the gilding on the columns. The black rock and gold ore together made the cavern a magnificent shrine.
“Rare earth minerals,” Conrad said in awe as he studied the protuberances.
“Something transmuted the living rock into liquid metal. I’m entering this as a prime candidate for the Queen of Sheba’s gold mines, AKA what history commonly mislabels King Solomon’s mines.”
“Or the inspiration for hell.” Conrad was pointing to a metal-splattered petro-form, just like the pile of anthropomorphic stones they had seen at the bottom of the gorge. “Maybe what transmutes this black ore into gold also transmutes humans.”
That would be unfortunate, Hank thought. But it could explain a lot about the Queen of Sheba.
Hank and Conrad unclipped from their rappelling rigs and set out on foot to search the cavern. The walls were far beyond the reach of their puny lights, and all Hank could hear besides their steps was something like a whisper in the still air. It almost felt like the crater itself was breathing.
“Over here,” Conrad’s voice called out, breaking the silence.
“Keep it down,” Hank told him when he found him by a cavern wall. The wall was blackened with some sort of dank substance, sticky and decaying, refusing to reflect almost any light at all.
Conrad lowered his voice and said, “I’ve been in a lot of tombs and caves in my time, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Hank looked closely at the blackened goo that coated everything down here. It wasn’t oil or soot. It was something else, and it was trickling down the walls and seeping up from the rock floor.
“Eureka, Hank.” Conrad’s light hit on something further down the wall — a temple façade carved right into the rock.
Hank followed the wall to two thick and brooding pillars. The pillars held up a massive arch, through which he could see a small rotunda and two tunnels that presumably led to the mines.
“Your Pillars of Creation, Conrad?”
“No,” Conrad said, bathing the ebony columns with light. “These have no inscriptions. But maybe we’ll find them down below. I think we’ve found your ingress to the Queen of Sheba’s mines.”
Hank noticed huge gold hinges along the sides of the arch. “You see this, Conrad? I think there were doors here once.”
“Giant doors.” Conrad pointed his light to a massive bronze bolt on the ground just beyond the pillars. “Look at the size of that thing. It’s as thick as a tree. Must have been used to the lock the doors, to keep people out of the mines.”
Bending down, Hank wrapped both hands around the bolt as best he could and tried to lift it. But it wouldn’t budge. “This thing weighs a ton. I can only imagine the doors.” Hank then stood up and looked at the big bolt slider hole in the wall. An epiphany hit him, and it wasn’t a terribly pleasant one.
The doors that once stood here weren’t designed to keep something out. They were here to keep something in.
Conrad had already passed under the archway into the small rotunda beyond, and Hank decided to keep his epiphany to himself for now as they confronted the choice of two tunnels before them.
“Lady or the tiger, Hank?”
Hank looked at the tunnel to their left. It was a jagged crack, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through. The tunnel to their right, on the other hand, was wide and smooth, the dirt packed with fresh bootprints.
The choice had been made for them.
“They beat us to the mines, Conrad.”
“The Queen of Sheba’s miners, or your friends Smith and Chen from Strategic Explorations?”
“Probably both. They’ll be waiting. It’s going to be ugly. Check your weapons.”
“Wait,” Conrad told him, and pointed his light up at a carving above the tunnel. “Hebrew inscriptions.”
“Can you read them, or do we need your girlfriend Sister Serghetti?”
“I don’t need her for this.” Conrad frowned. “It’s from Solomon, King of Israel.”
“What does it say?”
Conrad read it aloud. “Let us search out and examine ourselves, and turn back to the Lord.”
Hank saw something wrong on Conrad’s face. “What is it?”
“This is a verse in the Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple,” Conrad said. “But Lamentations was written more than three centuries after the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. So this warning here is either lamenting something that won’t happen for hundreds of years, or it’s referring to something in the past that we don’t know about. Something that happened to the Queen of Sheba and her people.”
“Whatever, it’s a warning,” Hank said, unconcerned. “A monster myth. Like that sign over the gates of hell in Dante’s poem that says ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”
“Something like that, Hank.”
Hank put on a brave face and grinned. “Then what are we waiting for? If we’re lucky, Smith and his goons are already extra crispy, and all the gold and XM here are ours for the taking.”
CHAPTER 15
As they made their way down the big tunnel, weapons at the ready, Conrad could practically hear the sweet, soothing voice of Serena Serghetti in his head, as if she were teaching a school of African children in God’s great outdoors.
Enter through the narrow gate, little ones. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
“Hank, maybe we’ve made a mistake,” he started to say when Hank cut him off.
“Shhh. Listen.”
There was a woman’s shriek in the distance, from somewhere deep and far below.
Hank bolted, and Conrad had to run to keep up with him, slaloming through shiny metal stalagmites to the lip of a gallery that spiraled down the side wall of an even larger subterranean structure.