Part 16 (2/2)
Then, finally, a distantclunksplonk.
”Whoa...” West whispered.
”Jack!”a voice called both in his earpiece and from somewhere nearby.”Down here!”
West looked down, and saw Stretch and Scimitar poking their heads out from an identical ledge sixty feetbelow his.
The only walkways connecting their tunnels to the magnificent dotted wall were a pair of narrow ledges-one for each hallway: West's higher one ran along the shortleft hand connecting wall Stretch's lower one ran along theright side one.
Along each narrow ledge were more of the handsized holes-handholds, Jack guessed, but lethal ones. Each hole, he noticed, every single one, had a small carved Chinese symbol above it.
”Cla.s.sic Chinese tomb trap,” Wizard said. ”The easy way to spot a grave robber in ancient China was to spot the guy with the missing hand. Those are handchopping holes.
Some have grips inside them, to help you climb. All the others have springloaded scissor blades. If you know which ones are safe, you get across. If you don't, you lose a hand and in all likelihood fall to your death.”
”What's the clue?” West said.
”It's here.” Wizard went to a panel on the wall, on which was written: ”'The greatest treasure,'” Wizard translated. ”What, according to Laozi, was the greatest treasure?” he asked aloud. ”Ah...”
He recalled the old philosopher's axiom in his mind: Health is the greatest possession, Contentment the greatest treasure, Confidence the greatest friend, Nonbeing the greatest joy.
”It's contentment,” he said to Jack.
Sure enough, one of the handholes on the lefthand ledge bore the symbol for contentment--above it. So did the third one, and the fifth, and several more.
”Go!” Wizard said. ”Go! Go! Go!”
Wasting no time and trusting his friend, Jack plunged his hand into the first hole...
...and found a handgrip.
Then he was off, out along the ledge, above the bottomless black of the subterranean chasm.
Stretch called in: ”We got an inscription, too:'The n.o.blest path to wisdom.'”
Following close behind Jack, Wizard said, ”That's an easy one. Look for the Chinese symbol for 'reflection.' It's a Confucian saying: 'There are three paths to wisdom: first, by reflection, which is n.o.blest second, by imitation, which is easiest and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.'”
After Wizard described it, Stretch said,”Got it. It's above every second or third handhole.”
”Use only those holes, Stretch,” Jack said. ”If you use any of the others, you'll lose a hand. See you on the other side.”
At length, Jack came to the great pockmarked wall itself, and saw that again every single hole had a symbol carved above it.
It made for a bamboozling sight, and to the uninitiated, it would have seemed totally incomprehensible.
But following the holes that bore the symbol for ”contentment,” he found a continuing path that ended at the square hole in the center of the polished wall.
Freeclimbing across the sheer slippery wall, high above the deep black chasm below it, he traced a winding path from the left, while Stretch and Scimitar followed a similar trail from their ledge on the lower right: And all the while, Mao and his crew lay on the floor of the hallway, a few of them groaning weakly on the edge of consciousness.
Jack, Wizard, and Astro came to the square hole, where they were soon joined by Stretch and Scimitar.
”Looks like we go together from here,” Jack said.
He cracked a glowstick and tossed it into the dark hole, revealing another ultralong tunnel, squareshaped this time, big enough to crawl through and stretching away into distant darkness.
”What choice do we have?” he said to no one.
And so he hoisted himself up and climbed into the square hole and guided by his helmet flashlight and another glowstick, disappeared into the pa.s.sage.
THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER.
THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER.
AFTER CRAWLING for about 600 feet, Jack emerged in a dark chamber of some kind, where he could stand easily. He removed his breathing mask.
For some reason, however, his flashlight couldn't penetrate the darkness around him. He could see a lake of some kind immediately in front of him, but no walls. Only black, infinite black. It must have been a large s.p.a.ce.
He cracked a glowstick, but it revealed little more.
So he fired his flare gun...
...and beheld the s.p.a.ce in which he stood.
”Hooah...” he breathed.
In his time, Jack West Jr. had seen some big caverns, including one in the southeastern mountains of Iraq that had housed the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
But even that cavern paled in comparison to this one.
It took seven more flares to light it fully.
The cavern that West saw wasimmense -utterly immense roughly circular in shape and at least five hundred yards in diameter.
It was also a masterpiece of structural engineering: it was a natural cave, sure, but one that had been shaped by the work of men-tens of thousands of men, Jack guessed-to be even more impressive than Nature had originally made it.
Eight towering pillars of stone held up the cavern's soaring ceiling. They had clearly once been limestone stalact.i.tes that, over thousands of years, had eventually met their matching stalagmites on the floor of the cavern, forming into thick roofsupporting columns. But somewhere in history, a Chinese workarmy had shaped them into beautifully decorated columns, complete with faux guard balconies.
But it was the column in the very center of the cavern that dominated the scene.
Thicker than the others and entirely manmade, it looked like a glorious tower, a great twentystory fortified tower, reaching all the way to the cavern's superhigh ceiling, where it joined with it.
It was easily the most intricately decorated of all the columns: it bore many balconies, doorways, archer slits, and at its base, four sets of rising stone stairs leading to four separate stone doorways.
Surrounding the tower and each of the other columns was a wide perfectly still lake of a dark oillike liquid that was certainly not water. It glinted dully in the light of West's flares. Stretching across it from West's position all the way to the tower in the middle of the cavern was a long series of sevenfoothigh steppingstones-a bridge of sorts, but one that no doubt possessed its own nasty surprises.
”Liquid mercury,” Astro said, raising his gas mask to briefly sniff the lake's fumes. ”You can tell by the odor. Highly toxic. Clogs your pores, poisons you right through the skin.
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