Timeline - Michael Crichton [38]
She looked up at Marek. “Give me five.” He released five feet of line, and she slid down until she was lightly touching the dirt mound. Little rivulets of earth trickled away beneath her feet. She eased herself forward.
“Three more.”
She dropped to hands and knees, giving the mound her full weight. It held. But she looked up at the arch uneasily. The keystone was crumbling at the edges.
“Everything all right?” Marek called.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go in now.”
She crawled back toward the gaping hole at the arch. She looked up at Marek, unhooked the flashlight. “I don’t know if you can do this, André. The dirt may not support your weight.”
“Very funny. You don’t do this alone, Kate.”
“Well, at least let me get in there first.”
She flicked on her light, turned on her radio, pulled down her headset so she was breathing through filters, and crawled through the hole, into the blackness beyond.
:
The air was surprisingly cool. The yellow beam of her flashlight played on bare stone walls, a stone floor. Chang was right: this was open space beneath the monastery. And it seemed to continue for some distance, before dirt and collapsed rubble blocked the far passage. Somehow this chamber had not been filled with dirt like the others. She shone her light up at the roof, trying to see its condition. She couldn’t really tell. Not great.
She crept forward on hands and knees, then began to descend, sliding a little, down the dirt toward the ground. Moments later, she was standing inside the catacombs.
“I’m here.”
It was dark around her, and the air felt wet. There was a dank odor that was unpleasant, even through the filters. The filters took out bacteria and viruses. At most excavation sites, no one bothered with masks, but they were required here, because plague had come several times in the fourteenth century, killing a third of the population. Although one form of the epidemic was originally transmitted by infected rats, another form was transmitted through the air, through coughs and sneezes, and so anybody who went into an old, sealed space had to worry about—
She heard a clattering behind her. She saw Marek coming through the hole above. He began to slide, so he jumped to the ground. In the silence afterward, they heard the soft sounds of pebbles and earth, trickling down the mound.
“You realize,” she said, “we could be buried alive in here.”
“Always look on the bright side,” Marek said. He moved forward, holding a big fluorescent light with reflectors. It illuminated a whole section of the room. Now that they could see clearly, the room appeared disappointingly bare. To the left was the stone sarcophagus of a knight; he was carved in relief on the lid, which had been removed. When they looked inside the sarcophagus, it was empty. Then there was a rough wooden table leaning against a wall. It was bare. An open corridor going down to their left, ending in a stone staircase, which led upward until it disappeared in a mound of dirt. More mounds of earth in this chamber, over to the right, blocking another passageway, another arch.
Marek sighed. “All this excitement . . . for nothing.”
But Kate was still worried about the earth breaking free and coming into the room. It made her look closely at the earth mounds to the right.
And that was why she saw it.
“André,” she said. “Come here.”
:
It was an earth-colored protrusion, brown against the brown of the mound, but the surface had a faint sheen. She brushed it with her hand. It was oilcloth. She exposed a sharp corner. Oilcloth, wrapping something.
Marek looked over her shoulder. “Very good, very good.”
“Did they have oilcloth then?”
“Oh yes. Oilcloth is a Viking invention, perhaps ninth century. Quite common in Europe by our period. Although I don’t think we have found anything else in the monastery that’s wrapped in oilcloth.”
He helped her dig. They proceeded cautiously, not wanting the mound to come down on them, but soon they had it exposed. It was a rectangle roughly two feet square, wrapped with oil-soaked string.