The Temple Mount Code (11 page)

He luxuriated in the hot water. A stone oven in the center of the room provided heat. All he had to do was step out of the tub long enough to fill a copper kettle with water from the bath and reheat it. For the moment, the water was wonderful.

He took a breath and slid down into the tub till the water closed over his head. He closed his eyes and let the hot water soak into him. He felt sleepy and knew that he would do well to crawl into bed on the other side of the room when he got out. He was already feeling pruny, like he had spent far too much time in here …

And suddenly, just like that, it all made sense.

Lourds couldn’t see in the darkness. He opened the stone oven, burned his fingertips enough to smart, and fed in a few pieces of wood. The orange glow brightened and pushed back the darkness. He spotted his pants, went to them, and started pulling them on.

Once his boots were on, Lourds fisted his shirt and headed for the door. Out in the hallway, he trotted over to Hu’s quarters across the narrow stone hall. He rapped on the door. ‘David. It’s me. Time to get up.’ He rapped on the door again. ‘David.’

Hu’s door opened and the professor filled it, standing there in Hawaiian boxer briefs, bedhead, and a perplexed expression. ‘Thomas? What’s going on?

Lourds took a deep breath and tried to control the excitement that filled him. ‘We were wrong about the scholar’s rock room. I was wrong about it.’

‘What?’

‘The room. That’s what’s wrong. All of it. There’s no way those people went roaming about the countryside for those scholar’s rocks. And no way they could have smoothed them like that with hand tools. I should have thought of it sooner. My only excuse is that I was too tired to think properly. Grab some lights and help me wake the others. We’re going to need help.’

‘Mate, I hope you’re right about the big reveal. We’re wasting a lot of our generator fuel lighting this place.’ Rory didn’t look happy or convinced.

Lourds studied the room as the BBC production crew, Gelu and his Sherpas who had stayed to enjoy the respite, and the monks hung lights around the room. They’d put most of them on the east wall, where Lourds felt confident they would find the room’s secret.

‘Get your cameraman over here.’ Lourds ran his fingers through his hair and reseated his hat. ‘I only want to explain this once.’

One of the young monks pointed and whispered. ‘Cowboy.’

Lourds grinned at that and shot the young monk with a forefinger pistol.

The monk laughed, then quickly took one of the staging lights Gloria gave him and started climbing the wall. He went up the craggy surface so easily it looked like he’d switched off gravity and flowed up.

Gloria looked at Lourds with a confused expression.

The cameraman switched the device on. ‘Let’s roll.’

Lourds hit his spot, straightened his hat brim, and waited just a second. Then he waved at the 116 figures standing behind him. ‘Yesterday evening, when I first saw these scholar’s rocks depicting the migratory people who came here after Jiahu flooded, I was fooled. I thought those figures simply represented the struggles of those people to get to this place, the hardships they’d endured, and even the enemies they’d faced. I thought that was the whole story. I was wrong.’

Reaching out, Lourds directed the camera toward the figures.

‘What you see there is only part of the story. It relates the history, and we’ve found some of the same symbols on those scholar’s rocks. I thought that was the find, and I thought that was the vindication of those people. Then I started thinking, wondering why the tortoiseshell had been left behind at the grave.’

Lourds pulled the camera back to him and let his excitement show as it did when he was in the classroom.

‘The tortoiseshell had to have been left behind with someone that would mark the way for others of the tribe. He was probably a wise man, a shaman. We’ll know more when the archaeologists at the Jiahu site reveal their findings. Someone from this place had to return to Jiahu with the tortoise map.’

Lourds stepped back, allowing the cameraman to frame him and the cavern in the shot.

‘When the Yellow River overflowed its banks in the past, the floods have always been horrendous. I feel confident in saying that the floods that struck in 5800
BC
were terrifying. Added to that, the people living there had drawn the ire of an enemy. Maybe it was just a predacious encroachment. Robbers taking what they could from a peaceful community. Maybe it was a more hostile intent. That community was in a good spot until the flood. Their developed fields alone would have been worth a war to another people that had been uprooted by another flood. We may never know.’

Taking a breath, Lourds pointed at the scholar’s rocks. The cameraman stayed locked on him, but Rory looked impatient.

‘Possibly the people who came here thought their respite would be brief. Instead, they became stuck here because there was no home to go back to, or because the travel was hard, and they didn’t want to chance it again if they could meet their needs here. We do know their lives were harsh while living here. But they concealed their greatest secret.’

As every eye in the chamber stared at him, Lourds hoped he was right. He’d piled on promises, and he was expected – like a magician – to pull a rabbit from his hat.

Now it was time to produce the rabbit.

14

Scholar’s Rock Temple

Himalaya Mountains

People’s Republic of China

July 28, 2011

Lourds grinned into the camera as nervous energy spiked his system. ‘One hundred and sixteen figures stand in this chamber. Each of them weighs several hundred pounds at least. Some of them weigh a thousand pounds. My original thinking was that the people dragged the rocks into this cavern.’ He turned toward the figures. ‘Then I thought about all that work. And that didn’t explain how all of them are smooth.’

Waving to the cameraman, Lourds walked down into the chamber while the expedition and the monks looked on. He felt like David Copperfield about to make an invisible elephant appear.

Except the elephant wasn’t even in the room.

‘As I considered the problem, I knew that the people needed a way to smooth the scholar’s rocks. I also realized they needed a source of water and food. Lake water can smooth rock, but nothing wears down edges as fast as running water.’

Lourds stopped beside the scholar’s rock of the flat-backed tortoise. He gestured to it, and the cameraman panned in for a full-frame shot.

‘Professor Lourds.’ Rory, his patience exhausted, trailed after the cameraman. ‘Please. That camcorder battery is only going to last a little while longer. It takes hours working a hand generator to charge them.’

Ignoring the director, Lourds continued.

‘Why make the tortoise with a flat back? I kept missing that. I mean, it was apparent. It looks like a serving dish. Or maybe a table.’ He pointed to the extremities. ‘Then it came to me. This tortoise was used as a staging platform.’ He whirled and pointed at the surrounding figures. ‘If you look at them, you’ll quickly realize that
each and every one will fit on the back of this turtle
.’

In the back of the crowd, Brother Shamar smiled proudly and nodded. The old man hadn’t known the secret before, but he was catching on quickly.

‘If this tortoise is a staging platform, as I believe, then there has to be a support mount for a rope to run through somewhere on the ceiling of this cavern.’

Lights swiveled toward the cavern’s ceiling. Hooking his fingers and toes into the craggy rock, Lourds climbed. The going was rough, and he wasn’t nearly as graceful as the monks, but he reached the ceiling nearly twenty feet above the stone floor. Some of the monks and BBC crew climbed with him, and Gloria followed as well. They all held on one-handed and shined their flashlights around the uneven ceiling.

For a long few minutes, Lourds feared his hypothesis was incorrect.

Then Thompson shouted. ‘There! Do you see it?’

He waggled his light over a thick stalactite, and the beam jumped through the hole that had been augured through the stone.

Lourds grinned.

Upon closer inspection – done while hanging from a climbing harness attached to pitons driven into the ceiling by the Sherpas – Lourds determined that the hole had been used for hauling.

‘The lips and inside are worn smooth.’ He hung upside down while talking to the cameraman. ‘If you’ll pass that camera up here – ’

‘He most certainly will not.’ Rory stepped protectively toward the expensive equipment.

Lourds laughed and took a small digital camera from his shirt pocket. ‘Your loss. These digital images will have to suffice.’ With a quick, practiced pull on the ropes, he righted himself and took pictures of the hole. It was wide enough that he could have thrust both arms in and had room left over. And it was at least four feet deep. There had been plenty of leverage for the ropes.

At the top of the cavern, Lourds looked down. He had that much of the puzzle figured out, but where had the rocks come from? Then, on the eastern wall, he saw a crack near the top.

When he climbed up to the top of the eastern wall, Lourds found the gap he’d spotted. It was only a few inches wide, nothing that would have been seen from the ground or by anyone not looking for it. Upon closer inspection, he found a seam that had been mortared into place. Cool air and the sound of rushing water sounded beyond.

A sandblaster couldn’t have peeled the smile from his face.

‘Wall is false.’ Gelu pounded on the section of the wall with his pickax.

The rock sounded empty.

‘Hollow on other side.’

Lourds turned in the climbing harness and shouted down to Rory. ‘If your cameraman has a stout heart, now would be the time to get him up here. Otherwise you’re going to miss that big reveal you’ve been waiting so impatiently for.’

When the cameraman was lashed securely in place to pitons, with a pair of Sherpas watching over him, Lourds and Gelu attacked the false rock with crowbars. Shamar had given his blessings to the endeavor.

‘Rock made good.’ Gelu growled as he shoved. ‘Put into place much good.’

Lourds silently agreed and leaned more heavily on his borrowed crowbar. The rock broke, and he had to find a new leverage place. In the end, though, the mortar gave way to the crowbars. Lourds and Gelu tried to hold on to the piece, but it was no use.

‘Look out!’

The carefully shaped section, eight feet wide and ten feet tall, toppled backwards and skidded down the twenty-foot slope. Thankfully, no one was standing that close, and the slab stopped well short of the first line of the scholar’s rocks.

Lourds took out his mini-Maglite and shined the beam into the dark recesses on the other side of the opening. Another cave wall gleamed dully forty feet away. He climbed over to the opening and stood peering down into the darkness.

He couldn’t estimate the distance for certain, but he guessed that somewhere around a hundred feet below was a rushing stream cutting its way through the guts of the mountain. Cold air seeped into the cavern from the closed-off area.

‘The monks are going to hate us for all the draft we’ve brought into their homes.’ As Lourds stood there, the beam reflecting off the water, he thought he saw another opening near the bottom. ‘I need a flare.’

Gelu called out to one of his men, and an emergency flare was tossed up.

Lourds grabbed it, banged the end to set it off, then tossed it into the abyss. He counted the seconds of the fall as the brightly burning red star fell into the crevice, then into the water. A hundred feet was about right.

And there was another opening at the bottom near the waterline.

After the river carried the flare’s light away, Lourds turned to Gelu. ‘Can you get us down there?’

The Sherpa nodded. ‘Sure. No problem. Is what we do.’

True to Gelu’s word, the Sherpas quickly hammered in pitons and laid climbing ropes down the rock face.

Bundled up in cold-weather clothing again, Lourds rappelled down into the crevice. The BBC crew was more than a little put out that filming the discovery had gotten so difficult. To make matters worse, they’d had to stop filming except in bits and pieces to save the batteries.

Four of Rory’s crew worked on the hand generators to power up the batteries. They looked like mad monkey dervishes as they kept winding and handing the units back and forth as they took breaks. The monks joined in, but the effort required a lot to produce a little.

Using a spotter light on his forehead, Lourds descended into the darkness. Except for the rushing water, everything was still. The rope sang through his gloves and the D-ring on his climbing harness. He caught himself on his feet, then pushed off and shot down at a controlled speed again.

He was on the cavern near the bottom of the crevice before he knew it. He overshot the wall and ended up sliding out of control into the cavern. His head whipped about, and he couldn’t tell what he’d gotten himself into.

‘Thomas!’ Gelu bellowed behind him.

Half-in and half-out of the cavern, holding on with one hand on the rope and the other on the cavern mouth, Lourds yanked his head up and focused on his predicament. Fear gave way to astonishment as he peered inside the chamber.

‘Thomas!’

‘I’m here. I’m fine.’ Lourds spoke more quietly to himself. ‘My God, I’m fine.’ He dug in his boots and climbed up into the cave as Gelu slid down beside him and perched expertly on the chamber lip.

The Sherpa grinned. ‘Thought you lost.’

‘Me too.’

‘Water maybe bad. Take underground.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right about that.’ In the cave, Lourds pulled a flare from his backpack, banged it on the nearest stone wall, and held the blazing tube aloft.

Around him, the final resting place of several dozen Jiahu immigrants lay undisturbed. Desiccated remains lay in hollowed shelves in the walls.

Gelu stood at Lourds’s side and gazed around in wonder. ‘Not monks.’

‘No, definitely not monks.’

The monks practiced sky burial, laying the bodies of the dead out in the wild for carrion birds and ground predators to take.