The Source - Michael Cordy [84]
Right now, Ross sympathized with him.
Holding his breath, he glanced round the system of toxic subterranean caves and passageways. From the heat under his feet, and the river of fire behind them, he guessed there was magma beneath. He felt as he had in the caves of Cueva de Villa Luz in southern Mexico, as though he had gone back billions of years to when the young Earth was a toxic incubator for the most primitive forms of life. Even here there was life: he could see small extremophiles feeding off the sulphurous walls.
Following the gilt seams, he dragged Sister Chantal and Zeb through the labyrinth for so many seconds that he feared they would not find their way out before they had to breathe.
Then the pyrites stopped. All he could see ahead of him was solid wall. A dead end.
Sister Chantal's face was pale, her eyes bloodshot. She looked on the verge of death. Was this where they would die?
Then she smiled.
She took his torch and Zeb's, and, with her own, switched them off. In the sudden darkness, needing to breathe, he felt close to panic. Then a hand gripped his elbow, turning him. In the darkness, uncorrupted by torchbeams, he discerned a faint vertical line of light down the right-hand side of the apparently solid wall. He moved closer and saw that two separate walls ran parallel to each other, a thin gap between them forming a passageway. He moved into it and walked towards the light.
Outside, he gulped fresh air. When his eyes grew accustomed to the glare he saw he was in a place unlike any he had seen before. Where the air in the caves had been poisonous, it was now sweet, fresh and perfumed. If the toxic caves were Hell, this was Heaven on Earth. He turned to Sister Chantal, but before he could say anything, she nodded.
'Yes,' she said, with an ecstatic smile. 'This is the garden.'
Ross stood at one end of a deep elliptical basin, more than a thousand yards long and many hundreds wide, completely enclosed by a funnel of rock so deep that the sun's rays barely reached its verdant floor. He seemed to be inside a huge eye, the pupil a perfectly circular lake in the centre. At the far end, where the ground was higher, he could see another cave. A stream flowed from it to feed the limpid lake. The clear water had a green glow, as though fireflies were swimming in it.
Around the lake grasses were growing, with trees and exotic plants unlike anything in the jungle they had just walked through – unlike anything he had ever seen in nature.
'Look, Ross.' Zeb held open her photocopied pages of the Voynich with the illustrations, then waved at the trees, flowers and plants around them. 'They're just like in the book, and the descriptions of this place are spot-on.' She pointed to the far cave. 'That must lead to the forbidden caves Falcon wrote about, where the nymphs lived.'
And where the conquistadors died, thought Ross. To his left, at the base of the cliff, he saw a pile of perfectly spherical rocks, and more half-formed spheres emerging from the cliff. They reminded him of the Moeraki boulders on New Zealand's South Island. But it was the plants and the glowing water that captivated him.
And the air.
It had a subtle fragrance and taste, a delicious blend of floral, vanilla and citrus notes that was sweet yet not cloying.
The others were equally enraptured. Sister Chantal bent down beside the lake, cupped her hands in the water and drank, her face radiating joy. If she had been a cat she would have purred. Ross noticed that the water in her cupped palms contained microscopic glowing particles, similar to those he had spied in her leather pouch when they had first met.
Suddenly an eerie sound filled the air, like a choir singing. There were no discernible words or phrases, just a series of almost mechanically perfect notes. Beautiful yet soulless,