Jane (44 page)

This was a dissection laboratory! I swiveled and faced the opposite wall, awash in wonder, hoping perhaps to see the dissection of the human back, but there, lying cut open on the same table, was a Mangani female, a full-term fetus still curled up in her womb.

“Jane! Come!” Tarzan had returned for his laggard partner. “You must come now!”

Loath to expose him to this gruesome image, I dutifully followed him out into a stone corridor. One of its walls had collapsed inward. Ulu now stood staring down at the pile of rubble. I could see that at least two of Ral’s soldiers had been crushed beneath the mammoth stones. There was a bare black foot poking out of the crumbling rock and a crushed Waziri skull oozing blood and brain. It reminded me again of the danger we were in. But there was nothing to be done about it now.

Ulu turned on his heels and rushed down a short hall, disappearing through a doorway. Tarzan and I followed and found ourselves in an altogether empty chamber. It was small, but the ceiling was very high. The only features were built into each of the four walls—what could only be called an “instrument” the size of the body of a cello. It was nautilus shaped, and the accordion-folded membrane covering it resembled the gill of a fish.

Grim and determined, Ulu strode to the wall facing the door we had entered (I had long ago lost my bearings and had no idea of its compass direction). With the back of his fingers, he lightly strummed the curved instrument. It produced a resonant, nearly inaudible tone that was rather more
felt
than heard around us. A moment later, the loud and distant roar of rushing water filled the chamber. It was the underground river in the mine!

I saw Tarzan’s eyes widen with wonder, and I, too, marveled at the technology mastered by the ancients who had inhabited these halls. Ulu, who’d been listening closely, was clearly dissatisfied with what he’d heard. When the sounds of the Ogowe tributary subsided, he moved to the next wall and strummed the “listening instrument” as he had done before. At first there was complete silence. We all strained, trying to hear something. Anything. Then it came—faint rustling and scurrying and the distant sound of the library rats chewing the parchment scrolls.

The listening device was most certainly directed at each of the four quadrants of the labyrinth. Tarzan, as excited as he had been when rediscovering the English language at Zu-dak-lul, silently gestured to Ulu, asking if he might strum the instrument on the third wall. Ulu nodded his consent.

Tarzan ran his fingers over the membrane. Instantly, the sound of voices could be clearly heard in the chamber.

“Get me outta this dump, Conrath. It ain’t what I signed on for.” It was one of the mercenaries. “It’s a goddamn tomb,” another man muttered, though it was as loud and clear as if he had been standing in the sounding room with us.

“And I didn’t sign on a pack of whining lily-livered chumps,” Ral Conrath snapped.

“My brother’s dead back there. What’s my mother gonna say when I can’t even bring home his body?”

“She’s going to say, ‘Thank you, Son, for bringing me back this lovely pile of gold,’” Ral replied in an old woman’s voice. “And then she’ll bake you a cherry pie. Hey, McKenzie!” he called.

“Yeah, boss.”

“Fall back. I want a word with you.”

I remembered that McKenzie was the tall red-haired soldier.

“You think we’ve got a mutiny on our hands?” Ral said.

“I dunno. Depends on how happy they are with what we find. And how soon we find it.”

“M’tolo!”
we heard Chief Waziri call.

Conrath’s voice was decidedly shaky. “I don’t like that guy,” he said.

“Yeah, well, he’s all we’ve got,” McKenzie said.

Conrath lowered his voice. “Maybe there is no treasure room at the center of the maze. Maybe it’s a dungeon or a well he and his buddies will try to throw us into.”

“Hell of a time to think of that, boss.”

“I don’t like the way this place is starting to look. Look at those things.”

“Yeah, it’s giving me the creeps.”

“You back there,” Conrath called. “Keep a close eye on those black fellows!”

The voices faded out.

We looked to Ulu, who—though he could not have understood the overheard conversation—seemed more alarmed than ever. Tarzan spoke to him quietly in Waziri, then turned to me.

“He knows where they are. They are very close, he says. We must run.”

“Close to what?”

Tarzan shrugged. “Words I do not understand.”

I wondered how much of Ral’s conversation with his men Tarzan had comprehended. The different dialects. So many colloquialisms.

But there was no doubt what must now be done.

Followed closely by Tarzan, whose head swiveled from side to side devouring the unfathomable sights, Ulu raced ahead, navigating brilliantly through the jigsaw of chambers, his urgency to rescue the chief and their men from the white devil his only driving force.

I had a purpose as well. Much as these surroundings astonished and confounded me, I knew with all certainty that there was nothing on earth more imperative than the ending of Ral Conrath’s miserable existence.

As we continued inward, I saw that the man-made splendor of the labyrinth had been corrupted by the hand of nature. Roots of the gigantean trees above had invaded the rooms. With the slow, steady power of growth alone, they’d broken through solid rock as if it were custard, spiraling down around marble columns, snaking across floors, tangling around altars to obscure the faces of their deities. The next few chambers were small and claustrophobic, the roots almost entirely engulfing the walls. This, then, must have been what had spooked Conrath and given McKenzie the creeps. It did, in fact, have a sinister look, a reminder that the most magnificent of man’s achievements were so easily crushed by the relentless hand of Nature.

We turned a final corner and found ourselves in a broad pillared court with a soaring ceiling, its marble walls glowing with soft white light. Here the roots had found purchase underfoot, and we were forced to pick our way carefully across the thick woven mat of wood. Before us was a set of stupendous double doors, larger by half than the ones that had led us into the maze.

They were covered in gold.

We fell silent at the sight. But as we approached the astonishing doors, our attention was drawn to the two walls that flanked them. On our left was a fabulously painted fresco—a vast square building of two stories—the labyrinth as it must have looked in the past, its top floor aboveground. Behind it rose the volcanic peak—the largest mountain of the Sumbula Range. But below it, where the three smaller Sumbula hills should be, were three pyramids of various sizes. The largest of the structures resembled that most famous of all Egyptian megaliths, the one on the Giza Plateau. I stared for a long moment at its bright white surface, what Egyptologists reckoned the Great Pyramid had looked like before its limestone casing had been looted to build the nearby city of Cairo.

But where, then, were the Sumbula Hills? It took a moment to adjust my thinking. The smaller cones weren’t hills at all.
They were tree-covered pyramids!

Now I saw that Tarzan and Ulu were across the way, riveted to the opposite wall—this an even more complex mural. On the left end had been painted the labyrinth complex, its volcano and pyramids. On the far right was a huge walled city, nothing less than a metropolis, and built in concentric circles—the second of the Waziri’s oft-repeated motifs.

All of it was gilded in gold leaf.

I made my way across to it and saw the city, its enormous circular grid of turreted palaces, broad avenues, towers, and stadiums. I now realized that the labyrinth and the city were two ends of a pictorial map. A caravan of figures—humans and elephants—appeared to be traveling from the Sumbula site to the metropolis. There were finely painted renderings of mountains, low hills, jungle, forest, rivers, rock escarpments, swamps, and desolate deserts between the two.

I had Tarzan ask Ulu about the painted city.

“Opar,” he uttered, then fell silent.

An undiscovered city hidden deep in the wilds of Gabon.
The maze in which we were standing—fabulous as it might be—appeared humble compared to what might in fact be “Opar, the Lost City of Gold.”
What would Ral Conrath make of that?

The Great Chamber

“I will kill him,” Tarzan whispered.

I held his eyes. “Let me.”

We were standing outside the golden doors left carelessly open, a testament to Ral Conrath’s belief that he would be unmolested during his endeavors.

I looked behind me. Ulu was still studying the extraordinary fresco of a people’s journey to a golden city. Tarzan quietly called to the charm doctor and he joined us at the doorway. We stared in at a sight beyond all comprehension.

It was a great chamber, one of massive proportions. Four rows of columns of a size that rivaled Luxor soared to the ceiling, the true height of which was completely obscured by a thick forest of tree roots and vines. Some of the pillars, all of them entangled by the thick vegetation, leaned precariously at odd angles, displaced, I surmised, by the millennia of slow incursion by the roots or, more alarmingly, by the recent tremor that had toppled the waterwheel in the mine. One at the far end had fallen altogether and now cut the front of the chamber into two uneven sections.

From this vantage point we could see that the walls of the oblong chamber were shimmering with yellow fire, for they were entirely covered in the Waziri’s medallions—the coin of this mysterious realm. In neatly spaced rows amid the gilded armoring were thousands of small alcoves, and in each of them were piled more coins. Millions of them.

This was clearly a vault. The very heart of Sumbula.

At the far end of the chamber, perhaps a hundred feet from where we stood, were two immense statues standing side by side—a male and a female, rulers of this culture, or perhaps deities.

I could clearly hear the voices of Ral Conrath to the left of center and his armed henchmen to the right who, by the sound of them, were forcing the Waziri to pull coins from the alcoves and toss them in piles. Chief Waziri was presumably among them.

Tarzan signaled to Ulu that they would attack the right flank, and the charm doctor began his stealthy move toward the front, using the thick columns to hide his approach.

Tarzan pulled me close and buried his face in my hair. Though no words passed between us, I clung to him, my fears for his life and my own overcome by the pride I felt for his confidence in me. He pushed me to arm’s length. “In there, find me,” he said, “and I will find you.”

Then he was gone, scrambling up the nearest column using the circling vines for foot- and handholds. Halfway up the pillar, he leaped into the thicket of hanging roots and began swinging silently to the front of the great chamber. I followed his lead, grateful that my limbs and fingers were able to easily lift me into the bare “branches” of the strange inverted jungle canopy and to the far end of the massive columned room.

From my high perch, I looked down upon a scene of unspeakable greed. Just below was Ral Conrath inspecting a treasure trove of small statues, his features disfigured with his lust for gold.

“Holy Christ! Wait till you see this, McKenzie!” he called to his man in the opposite corner of the vault.

McKenzie and the other guards had their rifles pointed at all the native men and their chief, forced to work removing coins from the alcoves, throwing them into wooden crates.

Coffin-shaped crates,
I thought bitterly, remembering my father, and found that my hand had quite unconsciously tightened around the Bowie’s hilt.

Above the Waziri, well hidden in the tangled roots, Tarzan crouched, taking his bow from his shoulder. Slowly he turned his head and found me with his eyes, held my stare.

In the next moment, he loosed his first arrow and the melee began.

That shaft struck a guard in the chest. He shrieked as he dropped to his knees, alerting the others, who swiveled and fired wildly, trying to locate the archer. Another guard clutched at his neck where one of Ulu’s darts now protruded. The man began convulsing violently, his back arching so extremely that a moment later a loud crack reverberated through the chamber as his spine fractured and he fell screaming to the floor. Another henchman watching his cohort in horror was next to receive one of Ulu’s poison darts. This man’s shrieking began almost at once, as though fire was coursing through his veins. Then he started to bleed. First from his nose and ears, mouth and eyes. A red stain spread across his groin. And soon he was bleeding through the pores of his skin. Face and hands. His clothing was suddenly drenched in blood. Moaning pitifully, he dropped to the floor and lay still.

Gunfire ricocheted off the metal walls. Stone shard projectiles went flying from the columns. Chief Waziri called out a single word to his men, who instantly scattered.

Ral Conrath stood gaping at this sudden chaos. His pistol was poised for a shot, but all the targets were moving.
Where were those damn arrows and darts coming from?