“Would make sense,” Sean agreed. Then he turned his attention to a couple of oddities on either side of the path.
Carved into the stone were two hollow spaces. Within each vacancy sat a stone bird. The two animals faced each other from across the corridor and both had a small inscription below it.
Ulrich was obviously irritated by their halt in progress. “Where is the chamber?”
“He always like this?” Sean jerked his thumb towards the blonde man.
“You have no idea,” Tommy chuckled in spite of himself.
“I’m glad you two are comfortable with the fact that you are about to die.” Ulrich threatened.
Sean’s smile disappeared for a moment as he turned to face the murderer’s blue-gray eyes. Then he turned back to his friend. “Still, I think those guys down in Peru were way worse.”
Tommy couldn’t help but outright laugh. “Yeah. Probably.”
“I knew it!” Allyson exclaimed as she gave Sean a chiding glare. “I knew you guys were up to something in Peru!”
Obviously tired of the little trip down memory lane, Ulrich forced the gun barrel to the back of her head.
Both friends’ faces turned somber.
Tommy spoke up. “Alright. Alright. Obviously, we can’t just move this wall. It’s got to be like two or three tons, easy.” His eyes scanned the smooth surface.
“What do these markings say? Can you translate it?” Ulrich urged.
“Basically, it’s a story of how the people came here. Apparently, there was one man who they believed to be some kind of a savior for their people, someone who would take them to a new land.”
“Sounds like the Moses story from the Bible.” Allyson final spoke up.
Glad to see she was no longer in shock, Sean turned to her. “Sort of like that. But this story predates that one. These hieroglyphs are from a much earlier Egyptian kingdom.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I wonder what they wanted to get away from?”
“Yeah,” Tommy continued. “You can tell from the construction of the characters, the lines, the way they have been carved, these are some of the more ancient forms of Egyptian writing.
“You see,” he went on, “eventually, the Egyptians went to a more abbreviated form of writing called Hieratic. It was much simpler and faster for their scribes to use than what you are looking at right now. This must come from the time around the first kingdom.”
While Tommy kept reading the wall, the guard’s attention had been distracted by the bird in the left wall. His right hand held the gun, but the man’s curiosity led his left hand to the smooth stone of the carving’s head.
He was just about to feel it when Tommy yelled, “Stop!”
The guard yanked his hand back, startled.
“Don’t touch anything,” Tommy ordered. “There is a riddle here. I think this whole place might be booby trapped.”
Ulrich cast the guard a warning glance.
“It says, “To find the way, the birds will guide you. The one that returns shall doom bring forth. The other shall lead you home.”
“Ok,” Sean said sarcastically. “That seems simple enough. To move the wall, we have to do something with one of these birds.” He looked at one and then the other.
“Yeah, but if we choose the wrong one, we may not get out of here alive,” Tommy added.
“How do you know which bird? They look the same to me.” Allyson asked.
“I’m not sure,” Tommy replied, scratching his head. “The one who returns…I wonder what that means.
“It must have something to do with the writing beneath the birds. But the language is different than on the wall. Looks a lot like the writing on the back of the stone I found at the Vann house.” Tommy pondered the problem.
“Can you read it?” Ulrich butted in.
“Not really. That was why I sent the stone to Frank to begin with.”
Sean reached into his pocket. “You mean this stone?”
He opened his palm, producing the medallion.
“Where did you get that?”
“Joe had it. I guess Frank mailed it to him before Blondie here could get his hands on it.”
Tommy took the stone and examined it closely, then looked at one of the stone birds. He stepped over to the sculpture and pointed to the word underneath it. “These birds must be the raven and the dove.”
“Which is which, though?”
Ulrich watched silently off to the side, keeping his gun on the hostages.
“We have to assume that this one here is the raven. It is the first one in the riddle and the word on the stone matches the writing below. But that is only half of the solution.”
“Which one returned?”
“I’m not sure.” Tommy stepped across the small space to the other bird. “Both of the birds look the same.”
Then he leaned down to look at something that appeared to be clutched in the bird’s claws. “Looks like some kind of branch.”
“That’s it!” Sean exclaimed.
“What’s it?”
“It’s an olive branch. In the flood story from the Bible, Noah released a raven and a dove from the ark. The raven came back. At first, the dove did as well, and when it did, it carried an olive branch. A week or so later, Noah sent the dove out again; the second time it did not return.”
Sean knelt down at the base of the stone dove, examining it closely. With both hands, he reached around the bird’s head and pulled. The sculpture gave way to the force of Wyatt’s hands and bent forward. A deep grinding sound reverberated through the ancient passageway and the dusty floor beneath them shook violently as the huge stone wall began to rise slowly. All five of the visitors could not help but stare at the site of the heavy door being lifted. Even Ulrich looked a little shocked by the power that must have surely been required to move such an enormous weight.
Not surprisingly, a tremendous amount of dust hung in the air after the huge stone’s journey had finished at the top of the portal. Ulrich motioned for the prisoners to go on through to the other side. Beyond the cloud of debris in front of them, more darkness awaited.
Sean stepped cautiously across the threshold, hoping there weren’t any crazy booby traps like he’d seen in so many movies. In his experience, he’d only come across a few things like that. For the most part, though, measures that were set up thousands of years ago to prevent intruders had long since rotted away or lost their effectiveness. Still, better to be safe than sorry.
“Move,” Ulrich insisted with a nod.
“It’s imperative that we be careful here. You don’t want to end up with a dart in your eye or something.” Sean said sardonically.
Ulrich wasn’t fazed by the comment, but the guard looked around, his eyes filled instantly with paranoia.
They were all safely on the other side of the wall when Allyson spoke up. “Do you guys smell that?”
“Yeah,” Tommy agreed. “It smells like some kind of gas.”
Flat Top’s head darted left to right, up and back, panic all over his face. It was easy to tell the man was not comfortable being in a place so far under the ground. It probably didn’t help that they had no idea what was waiting for them down there.
“Anyone got a match?” Sean requested.
“You’re not going to light a match down here are you? You guys just said you smelled gas. Are we going to just blow ourselves up?”
Sean smiled at her. “No one’s going to get blown up.” His light pointed to a torch hanging on the wall in a sconce that appeared to be carved from the same rock as the wall. “Why would someone put a torch there if something was going to explode?”
She supposed he had a point. Ulrich flicked a small book of matches at him, hitting Wyatt in the chest. Sean snatched it out of the air before it could fall to the ground.
A few moments later, the tightly wrapped rags on the piece of wood were burning brightly. Sean pocketed the matches, figuring the German wouldn’t care, and gave the flashlight to Tommy. He purposefully took a few more steps forward and stopped. The hallway where they’d been for the last ten minutes opened up into an enormous, square chamber. In the center, rising up from an inset lower floor, a pedestal stood as the only furniture in the room.