Tom nodded. He was grinning like a kid at a theme park.
“All right, let’s go.”
Sam removed the stone block and the boat, free from its confines, leaped forward eagerly. The shallow water ran quickly, even though the angle of the tunnel appeared closer to horizontal than descending.
The weak glow from their DARPA suits barely allowed them to see what was ahead. They ran for nearly a hundred feet before the water began to speed up, even faster. It was like they were approaching a waterfall.
Tom grinned. “You get the feeling we’re approaching the fun part of the ride?”
Zara gripped the sides of the boat until her knuckles shined white. “Yeah, it’s great. Just like Disneyland, with the added benefit of not knowing whether or not you’re about to drown or just crash onto the rocks at the bottom.”
Sam said, “The Garamantes were obviously very good engineers. Do you really think they would have built a boat here to service the aqueduct if the tunnels were impassable?”
No one heard his words. Instead, the roar of the rapids ahead drowned out all sounds. Sam looked at the darkness ahead. The aqueduct looked like it was about to collide with a solid wall of stone. A reflective brass mirror, like the one seen at the top of the Duomo shined back at him.
He made a vicious oath and the boat dipped and dropped down a steep decline. The boat rushed downwards, falling thirty or more feet, before the slope balanced out and the boat shot out the bottom.
Chapter Seventy-Six
The water settled to a more natural flow and Sam turned to face his companions.
Tom’s eyes were wide and his mouth open. He said, “Who wants to help me pull the boat back up and do that again?”
“Not me,” Zara said. “If we ever make it out of this damned place alive, I never want to see either of you again.”
Sam shrugged. “Some people are never appreciative.”
The flow of the water settled into a comfortable meander.
Zara said, “Everything we know about the Garamantes suggest their success was based on their subterranean water-extraction system, a network of tunnels known as foggaras in Berber. It not only allowed their part of the Sahara to bloom again, it also triggered a political and social process that led to population expansion, urbanism, and conquest. But in order to retain and extend their newfound prosperity, they needed above all to maintain and expand the water-extraction tunnel systems — and that necessitated the acquisition of many slaves.”
Sam smiled. “Luckily for the Garamantes, but less so for their neighbors, the Garamantian population growth gave the new Saharan power a demographic and military advantage over other peoples in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, enabling them to expand their territory, conquer other peoples, and acquire vast numbers of slaves.”
“Thanks to their aggressive mentality and the slaves and water it produced, the Garamantes lived in planned towns and lived well.” Zara said, “Archeological digs, have shown they feasted on locally grown grapes, figs, sorghum, barley, and wheat, as well as imported luxuries such as wine and olive oil.” Zara looked at the perfectly formed tunnel, still working as intended nearly a thousand years after the demise of the Garamantes. “The combination of their slave-acquisition activities and their mastery of foggara irrigation technology enabled the Garamantes to enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society. Without slaves, they would not have had a kingdom, let alone even a whiff of the good life. They would have survived in conditions of relative poverty, as most desert dwellers have done before and since.”
Sam said, “In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability. Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.”
Zara said, “The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world. Like its more famous Roman neighbor, the once-great Saharan kingdom became, little by little, simply a thing of myth and memory.”
“Only their irrigation tunnels have remained.”
They continued along their strange journey in silence for the next two days. Intermittently taking turns to rest and sleep. In an attempt to conserve the few hours of battery power remaining to each DARPA suit, both Sam and Tom switched their machines off. For the time being, there was nothing they could do to adjust the direction of their movement, so they may as well do so in the dark, only occasionally powering up to check on their surroundings.
Sam drifted in that strange place, somewhere between conscious and unconscious. Comfortable and uncomfortable. He was close to sleep when the boat stopped its forward movement. There wasn’t much of a change. It must have been gradually slowing down.
“Everyone all right?” he asked.
Tom said, “Yeah, you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Where are we?” Zara asked.
Sam switched on his DARPA suit and the area glowed with the now familiar blue haze. He glanced in front of the boat. The tunnel appeared unchanged, but the shallow water was now missing. Behind, the water looked like it was flowing softly.
Sam turned to face Zara and Tom. “There must be a crack in the tunnel, where the water’s now flowing into a lower tunnel.”
Tom nodded. “I guess it’s time to walk.”
Zara asked, “Do you think this is going to get us anywhere? We might just be going deeper into the ancient irrigation tunnels!”
“We don’t know,” Sam said. “But there’s no way we’re going to swim all that way back to where we started, so all we can do is keep going forward.
Zara nodded in silent protest.
They walked along the dry aqueduct. A line, approximately three feet up along the bottom half of the tunnel, showed where the water once sat. Above it was approximately another four feet in height. If it was much lower, Tom would have struck his head on the ceiling.
It was about an hour before they took a break. There wasn’t any change in the tunnel. The ancient Garamantes, if nothing else, knew how to build a perfectly symmetrical tunnel for hundreds of miles. The air was cool, and a slight draft flowed past them, in the same direction as they were heading. The breeze was new and refreshing, and it gave them the impetus to keep going with a renewed vigor.
They continued again, walking faster. Ten minutes later, something changed. Sam hurried fifty feet ahead. The height of the tunnel lowered until it was obvious that all of them would need to bend to get through. It continued like that for about fifteen feet and then opened into a giant, vaulted room. The dry aqueduct ran through the center of the room like the rail platform of an old city, where a ghost train no longer delivered water to the entrance of a great city.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Sam stared at the massive dome above. It made the Roman Pantheon look like a toy. It had a diameter of at least a hundred feet. The dry irrigation channel split straight down the middle of the room, before continuing on through a dark tunnel on the opposite end. Inside the massive structure were the remains of an amphitheater. It was formed out of limestone steps, and stretched at least eighty feet into the air in a semi-circle. On the same side there were at least twenty buildings, all in a classical style as if Greek or Roman temples. On the opposite side of the channel another thirty similar buildings of various sizes. At least a hundred and eighty feet above, a giant oculus that showed no light reminded him that he was still buried deep underground.