“Are you safe to do that?” Zara asked.
“Sure. This is an air pocket, left over from when the Mediterranean flooded.”
“It was 3.5 million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean breached the mountain range joining Europe and Africa, flooding the Mediterranean basin and turning it into a Sea.”
Sam shrugged. “Okay, I don’t know how they built this pyramid under the water, but I’m with you, there’s no way it was 3.5 million years ago. And it doesn’t matter. What does matter, is that somewhere along the line, the pyramid flooded and air became trapped in the upper chambers. It’s stale, but should be breathable.”
Tom interrupted the debate. “Zara, perhaps you and I should keep our masks on for a few minutes. We’ll see if Sam shows any signs of hypoxia or poisoning. If he’s okay in five, we'll know it’s safe for us to remove our masks.”
“Suit yourself,” Sam said and he continued to climb the stairs.
At the end of the ascending passage the tunnel leveled out again and then opened into a large chamber. Presumably the king’s chamber, but there was no sarcophagus. Instead an ornamental pedestal stood at the center. He looked up. The ceiling was a large, rounded dome. The surface of which was covered with both writings and numbers.
Zara removed her dive mask and regulator. “The writings are a mixture of pictographs, hieroglyphs and symbols. It looks like an ancient divergence of Egyptian pictography, but I can’t make sense of any of it. I’ve never seen a written language anything like it, have you?”
Sam grinned. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Really?” Her eyes opened wide. “I studied ancient linguistics for five years and never came across anything like it.”
Sam met her eyes. His jaw set hard as he swallowed. “We call them the Master Builders and they’ve been around a very long time.”
Chapter Ninety-Five
Sam stared at the ceiling trying to make sense out of what appeared mostly as ancient gibberish. Although the domed ceiling was full of writing, none of the words were grouped together. Instead, it appeared as though a child had scribbled all over it at random. The more likely alternative was that the individual words meant something by themselves.
Zara asked, “What does it say?”
Sam said, “I don’t know. It can take hours to decipher a single word in the ancient language. I’ll need my notepad computer. It has all known shapes and images. We’ll have to retrieve it before I can make much sense out of any of it.”
He lowered his eyes and examined the rest of the room in silence. The king’s chamber had no sarcophagus. Perhaps the king was still alive before the pyramid had been flooded? Instead, a single pedestal stood at the center. On its top a small piece of glass or transparent stone stood glistening. It appeared ornamental and yet valuable, like an orb. It stuck out of the pedestal, with some sort of metallic material, like brass only more golden, blocked the surrounding sides and directed the light, reminding him of a microscope lens. Sam shined his torch at it. The light scattered throughout the small chamber like a prism.
At the top of the brass-like sidings, where the clear orb stood proudly were a series of markings, dividing the circle into fifty-eight equal portions. The first one was numbered with the Roman symbol for 43 and the very last one was 100.
Zara said, “At least we know we’re in the right place.”
Sam met her gaze, his eyes wide. “What makes you so certain?”
“The book of Nostradamus held the final fifty-eight quatrains. This device is somehow making reference to it. The question is, how do we use it?”
Sam tried to rotate the pedestal. The device didn’t move. He tried harder, but it may as well have been bolted to the stone flooring. Studying the markings in the brass, he tried to move the brass itself without any more success. He then moved along to the lower section of the pedestal where a series of pictographs surrounded a single, beveled dial of brass, shaped like a spear.
Tom was the first to recognize the image. “That’s a looking glass!”
“A what?” Zara asked.
Sam stepped closer to the pedestal and looked directly at the flawless orb. It was currently opaque, but he hoped to change that. “Tom found the first of the looking glasses in a pyramid nearly 500 feet below the Gulf of Mexico. The stone orb is harder than diamond and nearly two hundred times more translucent, meaning light and sound can travel through it much further and faster than any other known material on earth.”
Zara followed him and examined the stone. “Okay, so what’s its purpose?”
“To see other parts of the world,” Sam said. “Think of an ancient version of Facetime or Skype, before the internet.”
She smiled, without trying to hide her skepticism. “That’s great. So, where are we looking?”
Sam rotated the dial shaped like a warrior’s spear, waited, and then grinned like he’d just won the final hand of cards. “Here.”
She placed her eye up to the orb as though she were looking through the lens of a microscope. The opacity of the orb had dissipated, giving way to a very clear picture. “It’s quite dark, but looks like there’s another chamber below us?”
“You’re right, but it’s not below us.”
“It’s not?”
“No. The chamber you’re looking at is mostly from a completely different pyramid, possibly hundreds or even thousands of miles away.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “It’s not possible.”
“It is and what’s more, I’ll prove it to you.”
Sam bent forward until his eye was almost resting on the orb. He carefully rotated the dial until he heard the strange contraption click solidly into place. He stared at the image. It looked like somewhere deep in the ocean. The chamber glowed with fluorescence as though someone held a powerful ultraviolet black light. Under normal conditions, UV radiation is invisible to the human eye, but illuminating certain materials with UV radiation causes the emission of visible light, causing these substances to glow with various colors. There were rich purples, greens and blues that all glowed in the chamber giving it the impression of being filled with brilliant gem stones.
Zara smiled as she looked through the orb. “Okay, that one’s pretty. But I’m still not convinced we’re looking at somewhere hundreds of miles away.”
Sam rotated the dial again and the image changed to another darkened and empty chamber. The walls were made of blocks of limestone.
Sam asked, “Convinced?”
“No. These are all still pictures. This device might simply be an ancient version of a kaleidoscope?”
Sam took in a deep breath, and rotated the dial once more. The next vision depicted a top down view of a large chamber. It was almost identical to the king’s chamber they were standing in, but with two exceptions. One, the room was at least ten times larger. And two, there were people working inside. Constructing something.
“Tell me what you see here, and then let me know how they managed such a depiction with a kaleidoscope.”
Zara placed her eye right up to it and swore.
She said, “They’re tribal people. Quite dark skinned. Their faces are painted blue. They’re almost completely naked, with the exception of some kind of loincloth. Both women and men are bare breasted. And all of them are working vigorously to finish building the chamber.”
“Their faces are blue?” Sam asked. “Like the Tuareg nomads whose faces are tainted with dye that turns them blue?”
“Similar, but these people look very different than any Tuareg I’ve ever met. Their facial features aren’t at all like that. Angular, with strong jawlines. They could be a distant relative perhaps, but I doubt it. They’re taller, too. The women are maybe six foot while the men are closer to six foot, four.”