Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [112]
“Come here,” I say over my shoulder. I scan the hundred or so bottles set into their nooks and select the dozen that, according to my limited knowledge, are the rarest, the most expensive. I pull these from the shelves and begin handing them to Espy.
“What are you doing?” she asks as she accepts two bottles.
“We’re not animals, are we?”
“I suppose not.”
There is still an element of time that dictates our actions, even if I buy in to George’s insistence that we’re alone here. Who knows what the younger Manheim has orchestrated. It’s this uncertainty that makes me willing to sacrifice. Once the dozen bottles are safe, I go to the left of the shelving unit, wrap my fingers around the column board, and pull. At first, nothing happens. I tug hard and can detect no give, nothing to indicate any movement. I let go, rub my hands together, take hold of the wood again, and pull.
Passages like this one, even though constructed with weighty materials such as stone, would have been designed so a single person could manipulate them—the magic of hinges and rollers. I’m not sure, then, what’s making this so difficult, especially considering that Manheim could not have left the bones unobserved for decades. I wonder if there’s another entrance that he didn’t have time to make known to me. Sweat is beading on my forehead, and I’m about to release, when I hear a cracking noise and watch as a thousand-pound slab of rock detaches from the wall and swings open. At least half of the remaining wine bottles are upset by the motion and tumble from their perches in a deafening cacophony. But the commingling of expensive wine into a pool does not mar my excitement as the dim electric lighting reveals the first few feet of a roughhewn passage, one that disappears into darkness.
This moment is the personal crucible for any archaeologist worth his or her salt. It’s the point at which the thrill of discovery—the desire to jump in—is tempered by the sobering knowledge that one false move could destroy months of work. While this is an unusual case—a well-preserved passage, new in archaeological terms, and cared for by acolytes—there is still the unknown that’s encountered at any dig, where you can never know what lies down a corridor, what sort of condition any artifacts might be in, or if one ill-conceived step could upset some weight-bearing balance and bring a ton of solid rock down on what you’ve come to discover.
And for the first time in my professional life, I find that I don’t care.
I turn on a flashlight we borrowed from the electrical room on the first floor—after securing Victor, who is still unconscious. I shine the beam of light into the passage. It curves slightly for about twenty feet and slopes downward until I can see nothing but rock and dust, then darkness.
“Ready?”
Espy nods and we step in. It’s an entirely different atmosphere than when we entered Quetzl-Quezo. There’s a heightened energy, a sense of expectation, and a healthy dose of respect for the unknown. If I were back in South America, or even Egypt, and this was a standard tomb, thousands of years old and filled with debris and rubble, I would feel less concerned about our safety than I do right now. Despite what one sees in movies, ancient tombs were not places in which ingenious priests devised complex defense mechanisms to deal with intruders. Those that do hold wards—beyond the standard curse carved above the main entryway or outside the burial chamber—seldom include anything beyond concealed pits or garroting wires. What concerns me here is that this is not an ancient tomb, but a relatively modern one, built in a time when people harbored fantasies about the ancients of the pyramid age. It’s possible the builders might have included traps based on popular fiction—amateurs attempting something that the masters would not have tried.
We proceed slowly, taking short steps, allowing the flashlight to illuminate every inch of a corridor that looks to have been carved from the rock by heavy machinery. I lead the way, following the curve and the downward slope, and stopping