“I guess the bottom’s not so mythical after all,” Tom said.
Sam glanced at his depth gauge. It read 405 feet. “It looks like whoever took that photo either was a really good guesser, or they actually were the first to ever reach the lake’s floor.”
“Yeah, and if that’s true, then hopefully they were telling the truth about the pyramid, too.”
“Let’s go find out.”
They swam to the closest wall of dolomite. The bottom of the inland abyss wasn’t quite round. Instead it was more like an uneven oval. Sam shined his flashlight against the wall. There was relatively little silt built up on the wall. If there were any hand drawings on it, they would have seen them. He scratched his hands along the wall, removing the little silt, until it he was confident he would identify the same part of the wall when he reached it again.
Sam then started moving in a clockwise direction, constantly keeping his flashlight pointed at the wall along the way. Directly behind him, Tom made a second sweep of the same spot. They moved quickly. The deeper you go, the greater the pressure exerted on all gasses, which means the Trimix becomes compressed. At a depth of 410 feet, they were diving at twelve atmospheres, which meant they were using their gas twelve times faster than they would if they were on the surface and their bottom time wouldn’t be very long at all.
It took less than five minutes to make a complete circuit of the bottom of the lake and return to the initial spot where Sam had made his mark.
Tom looked at him. “Where’s the damned hand drawings?”
Sam shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“Did we miss something?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe it goes deep at the center.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “But we may as well have a look before we start our ascent.”
They swam toward the middle of the oval-shaped bottom of the lake. The lake definitely didn’t descend any further. Sam was about to suggest they start making their long ascent to the surface, when he spotted the boulder. It was probably originally at least eight or more feet tall, but a lot of it had sunk into the surrounding floor of the lake.
“I just had an idea,” Sam said. “What if that boulder was once well above the lake inside the main cave in 1655?”
“Of course!” Tom kicked his fins and swam toward the boulder. “They documented their loss on the stone. Sometime since then, the dolomite weakened and the rock fell into the lake, hiding with it any evidence of a pyramid in the region.”
Sam shined his light on the boulder. There was nothing. He swam to the opposite side and there in front of him was a hand drawn picture of a pyramid. Next to it, was a ship with three masts fighting a losing battle with a terrible storm. Wisps of dark smoke ran through the legs of the stick figures who stared up at the pyramid. In between the two pictures was a note written in modern English with some sort of red ink. Sam stared at the message.
Don’t let the Third Temple rise!
“What the hell does that mean?” Tom asked.
“I have no idea. It looks like whoever took that first picture was sending us a message.”
“Or someone else.”
“The question is, who?” Sam took several digital photos of the pictures on the rock.
“Famine?”
“Maybe. But I don’t see why someone would be trying to leave him a message. Besides, he didn’t look fit enough to make it here.” Sam put his camera away. “One thing’s for certain, there was a pyramid in Namibia at some time and I’m pretty confident that’s the Emerald Star being sunk off the Namibian coast.”
“Not sunk,” Tom said. “Judging by this image, it was swallowed by the sand.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It took more than four hours to reach the surface by the time they had completed the necessary decompression stops along the way. Sam thought about the Emerald Star for a moment. The discovery was irrefutable evidence the ship had been lost along the shallow waters of the Namibian Coast. If that was true, it was also likely the second part of the note found in the hidden chamber below Derinkuyu was as well — inside the ship was the key to the Third Temple, and their only chance of finding Billie. He also equally knew that it would likely be impossible to find her after all these years.
At Malcom’s insistence, they completed a mandatory three hour sit time on the raft before making their way to the surface. It then took nearly an hour to make the slow climb to the surface. One of the guides had a hot dinner waiting for them.
Tom studied the photos taken on the digital camera. His eyes leveled at the ship and then glanced at Sam. “You’re certain that’s the Emerald Star?”
“Yes.”
“So why don’t we head to the Skeleton Coast and go find her?”
Sam shook his head. He knew the constantly changing coastline would make it impossible to locate. “We’re better off trying to locate the pyramid instead, now that we know it was here.”
“Why? We already know the Emerald Star was carrying the key to the Third Temple?”
“Because it’s been lost for just over three hundred and sixty years.”
Tom shrugged indifferently. “And you think that’s too long?”
“It is along the Namibian coast.”
“Why?” Tom asked. “With the introduction of ground penetrating LIDAR, we can survey the area by air. It can’t take too long. We’ve found ships buried in harder to find places.”
“It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because at last estimate, the Namibian government predicted approximately four thousand shipwrecks were buried beneath the sands of the Skeleton Coast. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict that number might actually be much higher.”
“We’ve overcome worse odds before. Besides, we have nothing to go on with the pyramid — if that is even the same pyramid where Billie has been taken.”
Sam said, “The problem is the Namibian and Angolan coast isn’t static. With its massive sand dunes dropping directly into the cool waters of the Atlantic, the Skeleton Coast has no set lines. It’s constantly changing shape and location. The prevailing southwest wind is cooled down by the cold Benguela Current to the extent that no cloud formation can take place, but instead a thick fog bank develops and penetrates miles deep into the Namib Desert. Every so often — maybe once every few decades — a powerful storm causes the winds to change direction. When this happens, a powerful eastern wind races across the desert and dumps millions of tons of sand into the Atlantic, moving the beach hundreds of feet further westward.”
“The sands are reclaiming land from the sea?” Tom thought about it for a moment. “The image of the Emerald Star that we found inside the Dragon’s Breath Cave shows the ship being swallowed by a sea of sand. There must have been a massive storm coming from the east.”
“Yes.”
“Then could we calculate backwards?”
“You mean, work out the known movement over a decade and then work backwards until we have the shape of the coast in 1655?”
Tom nodded. “Why not. It might work?”
Sam shook his head. “Unfortunately, while the eastern winds like to move the sand further west, the powerful and destructive force of the Atlantic Ocean often tried to reclaim its coast. The subsequent tug a war means there is no way of predicting where the coast was when the Emerald Star sank.”
“What we need, is a survey of the coast.”
Sam nodded. “Yes. But where are we going to find one taken on the year of the great storm?”
Tom paused. “There must be historical archives from the Portuguese expeditions into Southwest Africa? Surely they must have some sort of survey of the coast?”