“How do you feel?”
“I’ve had better days.” She looked at the man who spoke, and recognized him. His voice was familiar, but it took her a moment to remember his name. “Sam Reilly.”
“At your service, Ma’am.”
She asked, “Where’s Tom?”
“I’m up here, Zara. There’s no room for the three of us.”
She nodded. The place felt cramped and confining as it was. “What happened?”
Sam said, “You were following Tom into the vaulted stairway, between the subterranean Duomo. It was a long swim, and you ran out of air. You almost made it. About twenty feet off, you must have lost consciousness. We dragged you up to the dry stairs and laid you with your head down, gallons of water drained from your lungs.”
“I followed you into a submerged, subterranean and narrow stairwell, vaulted between two masonry domes?”
“Afraid so,” he confirmed.
She smiled. “That doesn’t really sound like something I’d willingly do.”
“It wasn’t. We were kind of stuck. We’re in the process of finding a way out. Do you remember what we were doing here?”
Zara thought about it for a moment. “The Nostradamus Equation.”
“That’s right, you kicked over a real hornets nest, and an army of General Ngige’s men are topside in the Saharan desert searching for you. You said you knew where we have to go. Do you still remember?”
“Yes. But I can’t for the life of me recall what it means.”
“Where?”
“A place called Infinity Island.” She glanced up at Sam. “Does that make any sense to you?”
He nodded. “You had a medallion. Something your father gave to you. He said it would make sense and be important to you one day. There’s an island depicted on one side of it. The island is shaped like a lemniscate, the mathematical symbol for infinity.”
“Then we’d better go find that island. I had a lot of dreams while I was out. Most of them nightmares, but some were all right. One I am certain was real.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. But I woke up with the one thought fixed in my mind — we need to reach Infinity Island if we want it to be okay.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Can you walk?”
She asked, “Can you carry me up this narrow stairway?”
He shook his head.
Zara smiled. “Then I guess I’d better start walking.”
“Take your time.”
Zara carefully stood up. She felt a slight rush of blood to her head, like she was going to pass out. She paused. Took in a deep breath and then slowly exhaled until the feeling passed. She took a step forward and felt Sam take her hand for support.
She squeezed it, and then let go. “I’m okay.”
It took nearly forty minutes to reach the top of the Duomo. The stone stairs continued in a clockwise direction around the inner dome, gradually gaining height. The spacing between the internal and external dome curved inward the higher she went, meaning that as she approached the oculus she needed to lean toward the inner dome to continue. She lost track of how many times she must have traveled around the circumference of the massive dome before she crept into the main opening where the oculus opened to the cavern below.
The narrow stairway continued as a tunnel around the oculus, before looping back on itself and returning down the way they’d come. A separate tunnel turned to the left and allowed them to climb up to the top of the second dome. She followed Sam through the upward tunnel. The stone stairs now appeared more like a ladder, as the gradient increased to a near vertical position.
She climbed through and glanced around. They were now inside a horizontal tunnel, similar in size and shape to the one they’d found earlier, which had been blocked by a cave-in and flooded. In one direction, it traveled such a long way that she couldn’t see where the tunnel ended. In the opposite direction she saw a polished piece of brass on the edge of the ceiling. It was angled at forty-five degrees so that if she shined a flashlight on it, the light would reflect down the open oculus.
Zara asked, “Do you know how far this tunnel goes?”
Sam shook his head. “No. But I think it’s time we find out.”
Chapter Seventy-Five
Sam led the party down the tunnel. It continued for about a mile in a perfectly straight line before reaching a second tunnel, which ran perpendicular to theirs. Water ran down the tunnel. It was shallow and moved quickly. A crude dugout canoe floated in the middle of the aqueduct. A solid piece of stone, the length of the tunnel prohibited the boat from being carried away, down the tunnel. The term boat was used loosely. It was formed out of the trunk of a single acacia tree. The inside of which, had been carved out to make a small boat. It was similar to the hollow-log canoes of peoples all over the world. It was long enough to fit four or five people and the width was almost exactly equal to that of the aqueduct.
He recalled that Zara had told him the acacia raddiana was once prolific within the Sahara, and survived upwards of five hundred years. The hard wood must have been capable of surviving years in the water, but even so, it was impossible to imagine that such a structure would have survived since the time of the Garamantes, as much as fourteen hundred years ago.
Sam looked at Tom and asked, “What do you make of that?”
“Looks like an emergency boat,” Tom said. “Like the ancient Garamantes left it there so that a scout could quickly climb in and return to the main city.”
Zara stared at the boat. “I don’t know, but can you imagine any way for them to even bring their boats back up the tunnels after traveling down the aqueduct?”
“No,” Sam said. “Come to think of it. How did they bring the boat back up here?”
Zara said, “Maybe it’s because they were never built to go all the way to the bottom?”
Tom said, “Or perhaps it was an emergency trip?”
“A what?” she asked.
“An emergency boat trip. Think for instance, the ancient Garamantes posted scouts throughout the desert. One notices an advancing Roman army. He would be able to descend down the well, get on a boat and race back to their main citadel to warn of the impending battle.”
Sam said, “If that’s true, then where the hell is this citadel we’re apparently going to?”
Zara put her hand on the boat. The wood was dry and rigid. “It still floats.”
Sam nodded. “None of this makes sense to me. If the Garamantes died out in the sixth century, this boat would have rotted away to dust by now. Which means the boat was either of a much better construction than anything our shipwrights could construct today, or the boat’s a lot younger than we imagine.”
Zara asked, “You think someone else has been down here more recently than the sixth century?”
Sam said, “Either this boat was brought down by someone in the past hundred years, such as a smuggler, or…”
“What?” Tom asked.
“Or, the Garamantes are still alive!”
Tom shrugged, as though he didn’t care, either way. “The boat floats. The water runs in that direction. Let’s take it!”
Zara glanced at Sam. “Is that wise?”
Sam sat in the front section of the boat. It took his weight easily, and appeared sturdy in the water. He smiled. “Probably not. But I can’t see a better way of getting to the end of this aqueduct, so we may as well try.”
He waited until Zara and Tom climbed aboard. The boat appeared stable with all three of them aboard. Sam turned around. “Are we all ready?”
Zara swallowed hard. “Ready as we’re ever going to be.”