Solomon's Throne (40 page)

“My butt’s sore from all that climbing. And I’m a little worried about water…” Rei said.

“We have enough for now. Hopefully we’ll find something tomorrow.” He kissed the top of her head. “Even though the floor is rock, I think I’m going to sleep very well.”

“Me too,” Rei said, and leaned her head back. She’d just started to doze when she heard Mac come back in.

“Good news, bad news,” he said.

The Quinns stared at him.

“Good news, there’s a good place for the privy just around the next bend, and more good news, I can hear water somewhere ahead.”

“And the bad news?” Rei asked.

“There are three tunnels up there, and I don’t see another mark.”

They all slept soundly, falling asleep not long after eight o’clock after telling funny stories about their childhoods. Rei woke up in the middle of the night and had to wake Gideon to accompany her to their latrine, but otherwise, they slept surprisingly well for being on solid rock, and woke refreshed. The realization of a day without coffee was depressing, but they ate a quick breakfast, brushed their teeth from the bottled water, and moved on to the cave Mac had found the night before.

“I didn’t look everywhere, obviously, but I didn’t see a mark at the mouth of any of the tunnels. This one in the middle is the one where you can hear water. I say we go down that one first for the water, even if we don’t think that’s the one the priest meant.”

“I agree,” said Gideon. “We drank a lot yesterday with all that hiking, and we lost a lot of fluid sweating out there by the river. We’ll mark this one, find the water, and come back to look for the X. I can’t believe Father Eduardo would leave us hanging… so it must be somewhere. We just have to uncover it.”

Gideon opened his backpack and removed a glow stick, which he snapped. The green glow made his face ghastly. He took his knife and made a hole in the plastic, and marked the wall at the entrance to the tunnel with the fluid. Every few feet he made another mark. The sound of the water got nearer, and they sped up without realizing it. Their flashlights shone ahead on an open space, and Mac’s long legs carried him ahead of the other two. He was looking straight in front of him, when his right foot stepped down on nothing but space.

He flailed his arms and tried to throw himself backwards, but he knew he was going to fall. His left foot slipped out from under him and he started to go down, when he felt a hand grab his backpack. He hadn’t buckled all the snaps when he put it on, but the one across his chest had helped balance it, so he knew that one was tight. The one at his waist was unhooked, and he could feel his arms starting to slip out. He crossed them over his chest and held the straps tightly. He could hear Gideon groaning with the effort of hauling him back.

“Keep holding my belt, Rei!” he heard Gideon yell, and Rei let out a scream of effort at holding the weight and inertia of the two much larger men. He was facing away from the wall, so there was nothing he could do to help himself, other than keep holding the straps.

“I got you!” Gideon yelled to Mac as he strained with the one handed grip on the backpack. The pack kept catching on the lip of the abyss. He was lying on his belly, one knee bent around a rock protruding from the floor, Rei trying to hold him by his belt with her right hand and holding another rock with her left. He had very little leverage, but he could feel the adrenaline coursing through him.

He gave one vast heave, which lifted Mac up enough for Gideon to grab the shoulder strap. One more pull, and Mac was scrambling on his side, holding Gideon’s wrist, pulling himself up.

They all lay on the floor, panting.

“Oh my God,” Rei finally said. “Oh my God.” She started to cry. “Oh my God!”

“I lost my flashlight,” Mac said.

They knelt well away from the edge and Gideon and Rei shined their lights along the ledge and below. Across the chasm there was a small waterfall flowing down from somewhere high up, landing in what sounded like a pool of water. It was too far down to see. There was no water on their side of the chasm.

“We’re not filling our water bottles here,” Gideon said.

“No, and I’m damn glad I didn’t come down here alone last night,” Mac said.

“Don’t even say it! That was awful,” Rei said, squeezing her eyes closed.

“Well, we should head back. We still have to find the X, and the right tunnel. Hopefully that was all the excitement we get for today.” Gideon stood, stretched his shoulders, and put on his backpack.

Shaking his head at his folly, Mac followed suit. Gideon helped Rei up and held her pack for her to slide into.

“All buckles all the time,” he said. The others agreed.

Thanks to the glowing green smears on the wall, they had no trouble finding their way back to the central cave.

“At least we know it’s not that one,” Rei said, looking around at the other two tunnels. “I know he left a mark. He always left a mark. We’ll just have to look more closely at these two and find it.” She headed to the tunnel on the right.

The three of them searched the walls and the floor around the right tunnel entrance, and went a dozen feet inside the tunnel, before deciding to try the other one. Near the entrance to the left tunnel a stalagmite had slowly formed, looking like a column. They had to squeeze around it to look at the wall, part of which was obscured by the column of hardened mud.

“Nothing,” Gideon said.

“Nope,” agreed Mac.

“There
must
be. He wouldn’t have taken us this far and then stopped. We know we came the right way to this cave, because there was an X only a few yards from its mouth. What if there’s another of those really narrow ones, like the one we came through behind the waterfall?”

This perked the men up, and Mac took one flashlight, and Gideon and Rei the other, and they began to search for a smaller opening in the rough walls. Rei walked ahead in the pool of light and looked behind every outcropping or jagged rock.

“Here! It’s here! Well, something’s here… Shine the flashlight in there, Gid,” she said.

Gideon shone the light and Rei looked in. “I can’t really tell for sure, but it looks like an opening… Should I go in?”

“Wait a sec,” Mac said. “There’s no X out here anywhere. I’d rather not split up, even on the other side of a rock wall, until we’ve found the mark. And if we don’t find the mark… I think we have to call it a day. At least until we can come back with more supplies. We could die in here without those Xs to guide us out.”

“He’s right,” Gideon said. “I think we have to know for sure… We can’t afford to lose another flashlight, or a person—the last time we didn’t follow an X was shaving it way too close.”

Rei nodded, and stepped back from the rift. They all resumed their search, ending back at the left tunnel. Nothing.

“This isn’t right. Let’s think this through. He said he’d left marks all the way to the Throne. The last marked tunnel led to this room. So there must be a mark in here somewhere,” Rei said.

“There’s not. We’ve looked everywhere,” Gideon said, sitting back on his heels.

Mac shone the light around randomly, thinking. “Wait. What if…” He got up and went to the stalagmite and looked at the wide bottom, which was formed to the wall. “What if this stalagmite has formed here since Father Eduardo made the mark. What if the X is on this wall,” he rapped the rock, “but we just can’t see it anymore?”

“Brilliant!” Rei exclaimed. “And we’ll know if we go down the tunnel because there either will or won’t be another X.”

Gideon stood up. “Great work, Mac!” He clapped him on the shoulder.

“Let’s wait til we find the next X to get too excited,” Mac said, but he smiled, happy to redeem himself.

They decided to go down the tunnel to see if Mac’s deduction was correct, but in either event, they would return to the open room for a meal and a pit stop. They walked two dozen yards, each flashlight scanning a wall, and there, on the right, was an X. They did high fives and laughed, but their relief was deep. The weight of being underground wasn’t so bad as long as they were following in the Templar’s and Jesuit’s footsteps. Being at a dead end made the rock seem heavy and the tunnels more claustrophobic.

After an hour of rest, they returned down the tunnel and carried on. The rest of that day was uneventful, and they had decided to stop within the hour, when Rei stopped and cocked her head.

“Listen! Do you hear that?” she asked.

The men listened, but shook their heads. “Nope, what?” Gideon asked.

“Water!” she said.

They hurried forward, and this time the water was right in their path, a small stream trickling over the rocks on the left and hurrying across the slightly slanted floor to disappear through fissures on the left. The little bed was a couple of inches deep, the water cold and free of smell. They all knelt down and splashed their hands and faces, letting water run over their arms.

“I didn’t find any purifying tablets,” Mac said. “Should we worry?”

“I’m not. We need water, here’s water. We’ll die without it, so we just have to hope we don’t die with it!” Gideon said, angling his empty water bottle as best he could into the flow.

It took a good while to fill the bottles, as the trickle wasn’t strong and the stream wasn’t deep. But when they had all drunk their fill, and replenished the bottles, they felt much better. Another hour hike brought them into a small cavern, and they decided to camp there for the night.

“Sometime tomorrow we should find it,” Rei said as she smoothed out her sleeping bag. “The Throne of Solomon. I can’t believe it!”