“No. This is something different,” she said, reaching for a pen inside her backpack. She rummaged around, found one, took a page from one of her father’s copies, and wrote down the symbols, beginning with the pod bearing the six symbols.
“Have you found something, Ms. Moore?” Hall joined them on the tier.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, and began to write down the characters.
€ ╥ ῴ ԋ ƾ ¤
And then the second set of four characters:
ῴ ԋ ῐ῟ ῴ
With careful consideration, she began the process of translation.
€ ╥ ῴ ԋ ƾ ¤
A D E I A M
And then the second set:
ῴ ԋ ῐ῟ ῴ
E I V E
And then she struggled for breath as her hands shook and her heart pounded.
Savage grabbed her the moment her knees began to buckle. “What’s the matter?”
She pointed to what she wrote: ADEIAM and EIVE.
Adam and Eve.
“The Chamber of the Primaries! The Chamber of the Firsts! Adeiam and Eive! Adam and Eve!” she exclaimed. “These are monuments to the Firsts!”
Having found her second wind, she broke from Savage’s hold and went to the pods. With the sleeve of her shirt she began to rub the dust away from the surface. The drifting patterns that appeared like wayward markings of veined marble she realized were not random designs all, but faded lettering resembling the archaic writing along the walls throughout the temple.
Although the symbols were severely faded, she could make out the inscription: In the Land of Edin is the Garden of God, the One True Paradise.
Her breath hitched from sudden awe.
“What is it, Ms. Moore. What do you see?” asked Hall.
She immediately went to the second pod and began to rub it clean, the veined markings taking on lettered formations. It also had the same inscription: In the Land of Edin is the Garden of God, the One True Paradise.
“It’s all right here,” she whispered. “In this one… simple… line.”
“What is?” asked Savage.
“The concept of the first religion where the three main branches of faith separated and evolved into religions of their own,” she answered. “‘In the Land of Edin,’ is in correlation to Catholicism; ‘the Garden of God,’ is aligned with Judaism; and the last verse of the line of the ‘One True Paradise,’ is Islam.” Then waving her arms openly in suggestion of the entire hall, she said, “And this is where it all started — the texts, the languages, the current-day religions, everything began from this point as a single model before branching out as mankind progressed.”
Her eyes seemed bigger and brighter, shining as tears surfaced. Her father should have been here, she thought. Holding the copies taken from his journal close to her was not enough. It wasn’t the same so she looked up at the countless number of crystals embedded within the ceiling that sparkled in numerous pinpricks of light against the dull shine of the lamps. Are you there, Dad?
She wanted to believe that he was.
And she continued to look skyward as Obsidian Hall traced his fingers over the surface of the pods, his fingers skimming over what appeared to be a hairline fissure. “Ms. Moore, I believe your little monument here is less than perfect,” he said. One thing Hall was completely obsessive about was perfection. Such a find as this would have been a perfect display beneath a set of track lighting aboard the Seafarer. But it had a flaw, and an unacceptable one at that.
He allowed his fingers to draw along the line of the fracture, examining its course as he did so. The line was not taking the route as fractures do, however, which was in wild and random patterns. This one was taking on the geometrical shape of an oval that was similar to the contours of the pod.
What is this? Everyone looked on, including Aussie who had decided to return to the tier. “You find something, mate?”
“A… crack?” But when he said this he did so in a form of a question because he wasn’t confident of his assessment.
Alyssa hunkered down next to the second pod, searching. And there it was — the hairline split that ran around the front of the pod like the seam of a doorway. She looked for a latch, a lever, a button, anything that might give her access it if was truly an opening of some kind. But she found nothing. The pods were without mechanisms of any kind.
“Well, Ms. Moore, for a moment I considered these to be the outlines of an access panel,” Hall said, sounding disappointed.
She thought the same. But when Aussie tapped the top of the shell with the butt end of his knife, it sounded as if the pod was hollow. “Well, get a load of that,” he said. “The bloody thing’s empty.”
“Open it,” Hall demanded of Aussie. “Use your knife to pry the edges.”
“You can’t do that!” Alyssa protested. “You’ll damage the surface.”
“I said, open it!”
Aussie rounded the pod and jimmied the point of his knife it into the seam and worked it until it was wedged deep. After a few more pumps of his hand, the panel pulled away. Air hissed into the pod as oxygen filled the vacuum of space that had been empty for twelve thousand years.
Placing a hand over the lip of the access panel, Hall opened the door to the pod. There was a collective gasp, which was followed by whispers of incredulity.
“Well, Ms. Moore,” Hall finally said. “It appears that your father was right after all. It is a burial chamber.”
The Megalania Prisca smashed its way through the floor at the cost of a few minor bones broken in its tail. It circled the hole excitedly. The scent of its prey was strong and delectable.
It shimmied through; the sharp edges of black silica, which was really a glass, scraping its thick hide. When it got more than halfway through, it dropped, landing hard in an unfamiliar corridor, one it had never seen in its fifty years of existence since there had never been a catalyst to upset the balance of the walls within the temple before. It was a land that was alien and familiar at the same time. It was a place that harbored abominations that did not belong.
Sending up its frill, its receptors were picking up the vibrations of motion. So its brain, no larger than a grapefruit, but with the majority of it in use unlike the human brain, processed the data of its quarry and centered in on their location. Having determined their position, the alpha predator moved through the warrens.
It was just moments away from the Chamber of the Primaries.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Well, Ms. Moore, tell me. Where is your faith now?” Hall asked.
Sitting inside the pod was a small being, perhaps four feet in height when standing. Its limbs were thin and wispy with the digits of its fingers long and tapered. Its head was elongated and bulbous, with the orbital bone structures surrounding its eyes large enough to fit a peach into each socket. Its mummified body was nude and sexless and at a stage of decomposition where its skin had browned to a slick and waxy appearance.
And then in a sound that was barely above a whisper, she said, “Adam.”
“Adam?” said Hall. “Take a good look at it, Ms. Moore. It’s an abhorrence that correlates to the pictograms along the walls. It’s hardly human.” But what an amazing addition it would be in my collection.
“It’s obviously a child,” she told him, “that had gone through the head-binding technique of ancient royalty, which makes sense here. They’re clearly the first monarchs of their time. The length of the fingers, its limbs, is a natural occurrence of decay. As soon as the body loses fluids and begins to dehydrate, the skin shrinks and pulls tight against the skeleton.”