The Call - Michael Grant [44]
And sadly there were no bright exit signs.
One wall of the cave was lit with its own set of spotlights. It was too far away for Mack to see details, but he could see that something, lots of somethings, had been chiseled or drawn onto the rock face.
“That’s what we came here to see,” Jarrah said. “Can you handle it?”
Mack stood up. His legs buckled, but Stefan grabbed one arm and Jarrah caught the other and kept him from falling. On wobbly pins, stomach clenched, heart pounding but no longer quite as if it intended to beat a hole in his ribs, he walked the few dozen steps to the rock face.
The wall went thirty feet up. It was the same reddish rock that all of Uluru seemed to be made of, but this surface was polished to a near-mirror shine.
This polished area went forty feet to his left as well. And all of that square footage, a space that would equal thousands of pages of a book, was covered in what could only be writing. The letters were strange, nothing recognizable, although here and there one of the shapes would look a little like a T or a stylized Z.
The wall was scarred in places by deep fissures. In other places the rock had simply collapsed, fallen down to make a pile of pebbles and fragments.
“What is it?” Mack asked.
“We’re not totally sure. But my mum thinks it’s the last ten thousand years of history,” Jarrah said in a voice full of awe.
Mack looked at her, skeptical. “How could that be?”
Jarrah pointed to a series of marks that ran like the lines of a ruler across the bottom of the wall. “We think each one is a year. At the far end there’s a vertical set of marks. We think those are days. And do you see these smaller markings, these curlicues? That’s how I knew where you would be. We think they are sort of the equivalent of GPS numbers. Each indicates a place relative to here. Distance and angle from Uluru.”
“That’s crazy. I can see how maybe someone could do all this to show things in the past, but there’s no way to predict what happens in the future.”
“Yeah, well, that makes sense, mate,” Jarrah said cheerfully. “Except for the fact that all these markings, this whole chamber, are more than ten thousand years old.”
“What?”
“Mack, when this was written, all of it was in the future.” She led him to the last chiseled inscription. It barely peeked out from the edge of a massive rock collapse, the last visible thing on the wall.
Jarrah pointed. “That right there? That’s yesterday. And the curlicues? Those show distance and angle from here to the place where you fell from the sky.”
“Me?”
“See that?” She pointed to an angle line with three small marks. “That’s the number twelve in base four.”
“Who counts in base four?”
Jarrah tilted her head and smiled mysteriously. “Someone with four fingers instead of ten, I’d guess.”
“No one has…,” Mack said, then fell silent as a chill went all through him.
“Yeah. You get now why we wanted you to see this?”
“And what are the rays coming out of it?”
“Ah. That took a while to figure out. But then we found this.” She led the way back along the wall, back into the past. They had to climb over a jumble of rocks. “See that? Same symbol. Three thousand years ago. Someone like you was here. See how the distance and angle are zero? Someone like you, Mack, one of a group of people, the Magnificent Twelve, came here, was in this place right where you’re standing.”
Then, with hushed reverence, Jarrah pointed to a symbol that, judging from the marks, had just appeared a few months earlier. “See that? That’s a gum tree, a eucalyptus. A jarrah, you might say. And it is linked with you, Mack. And with the symbol for the Magnificent Twelve.”
She shook her head as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. “Weird, eh? To find your fate was chiseled ten thousand years ago.”
Mack could only stare. It shook his entire worldview. Although in fairness his worldview had already been rather badly shaken. His worldview was a cube of raspberry Jell-O in the middle of an earthquake.
His gaze was drawn to a sort of