Catacombs (53 page)

Two thirds of the way to the summit the engine of the Beech began to labor as the small propeller failed to take a satisfactory bite of the thinning air. They saw the running lights of the helicopter winking against the dark face of Kibo a little below the glacier, at about sixteen thousand feet. The boiling upstanding cloud from the caldera now blotted out a fourth of the sky overhead, and there was a haze of fine ash at this altitude. The sun was going down; they were buffeted by strong winds. Goliath winced anxiously and tried to climb as the copter disappeared from view.

"Well, that's it," he said with a slight frown. "They've set down somewhere under the glacier." He wiped blood from his upper lip and nose and pleaded with his old dame.

"Just another couple of hundred feet, you can do it, sweetheart, you goddamned well will do it for me." To Oliver he said, "I've a splendid idea. See the bare place just ahead? That's the saddle between Kibo and Mawenzi peaks. It's possible to land an airplane there; at least I've heard of one bush pilot who pulled it off. But he had a few hundred more hours in the air than I do. I shall be very disappointed with myself if I don't give it a try, having come this far. While we still have the light I'll just set her down and put you off with your gear. Then if I take off at full power I think I can climb high enough toward the scarp to sight the helicopter. When I have done, I'll wag my wings so you'll know where to climb in the morning."

Goliath looked at his gauges, including one that told him his oil pressure was on the low side and another that his fuel wasn't stretching.

"Hmmm. A good teacupful left, I suppose. Wind seems to come from several directions at once. Just like Serengeti at certain times of the day. We'll just crab right on down then, no use beating around the bush. Here we go." Oliver swallowed hard and lay back in what appeared to be a faint. "Two . . hundred feet . . . one hundred . . . and . . . fifty . . . and . . . bloody . . . Guinness . . . Book . . . of . . . Records, I'll bugger all!"

The Beech, as if suddenly unsupported by the air, came down hard enough to blow a tire, but didn't, rebounded from the short tough grass and patches of scree, barreled down an irregular alley of giant lobelia. Goliath applied extreme rudder to avoid a towering rock pile, steered into more of the thick grabbing grass, touched the brake lightly several times. The plane wallowed and slid across the undulant saddle and stopped seven hundred feet after touchdown. Just ahead of them was a depression like a gravel pit, twenty feet deep.

There was sweat on Phillip Goliath's forehead and more blood on his upper lip, which ran down his chin when he smiled.

"Just between you and me," he allowed, "that was a spot of luck. We took a walloping, didn't we? Oh, well. Let's see if there's damage."

He inspected his plane thoroughly, paying particular attention to the struts, then frowned at the mist of ash building up on the windshield. The light was fading quickly from the sky, the snows of Kibo.

"Sorry to drop you and run," he said to Oliver, wiping a finger across the glass, "but this sort of thing is not so good for internal combustion engines. Best of luck. Keep your eye on me when I climb up there." He pointed to the three-sided, in slanting gash in the rock below Kibo peak, where they had last observed the helicopter.

Oliver had made a small pile of the sleeping bag, ice ax, and three small plastic water bottles. He was wearing his hooded yellow slicker. He stepped forward, grasped Phillip Goliath's left hand with his two hands, and hung on wordlessly, gazing into the younger man's eyes.

"Working for you, every day of my life. No pay."

"Oliver, that isn't necessary. I've had loads of fun. Looks as if it'll be three against one up there, do watch yourself."

Goliath climbed back into the plane. The engine roared. Goliath brought the nose around as Oliver lifted the tail, and then he took off the way he had come, with a wave of his hand.

The staggerwing had trouble picking up speed in the grass; it rose, just missed some tall lobelia, fell back into the saddle, bounced, and rose again a little higher into the air, perhaps sixty feet. Oliver watched it crawling for altitude in the darkening sky, wing-tip lights flashing. His fists were clenched. Goliath flew toward the basaltic crag of Mawenzi, the noise of the engine fading quickly. Then he banked and came back, well above Oliver's head. He was climbing toward the scarp, rising to meet the down-shifting cloud of gases and ash from the crater. Oliver stopped breathing.

He saw the Beech catch the light of the dying sun, just for a moment; high up against the chiseled gash in the rock it glowed as if it were incandescent, and the wings dipped in acknowledgement of the hidden helicopter. Wind brought tears to Oliver's eyes. He couldn't hear the popping hum of the plane's engine anymore. As he watched, the left wing dipped too low. Goliath attempted to level off, to glide, and then the plane just plunged out of the sky, powerless, and was torn to pieces on the jagged slope of the mountain.

There was no noise of crashing, no fire, no sign of Phillip Goliath's "old dame" or of Phillip himself: the happiest man Oliver had ever met, and one of the bravest. Oliver continued to stand there, his chin lifted, choked with tears, the wind whipping the drawstrings of the slicker's hood painfully across his cheeks.

THE CATACOMBS

May 23

E
rika was standing less than ten yards from the helicopter, which Tiernan Clarke's men had finished unloading, when the small plane appeared overhead, its engine sputtering. She looked up, a hand shielding her eyes from the brassy glare of the sunset, and saw the pilot dip his wings as if he were in trouble. Then the left wings dropped precipitously as the engine quit. Although he seemed to be attempting to glide down to the moor nearly three thousand feet below, where he had some hope of landing without cracking up, he abruptly lost control.

The plane struck the mountain and blew apart, a flashless, almost noiseless explosion of metal fragments, pieces of trees that were in the way, and human remains; some of the fragments had a momentary brilliance as they carried into the light sea from the west.

She turned; she was already pale and gulping from altitude sickness, and shaky on her feet. Clarke had come up behind her in time to witness the accident. He put out a hand to steady her.

"My God! What can we do?"

"Nothing, Erika. There's no hope for anyone who was in that plane."

"But what was he doing up here?"

"Having a close look at the volcano, I suppose," Clarke said, barely concealing his indifference. He brushed at the tephra collecting in his hair, and hers, looked up at the mushrooming cloud over Kibo. There was a deep rumbling from inside the mountain, which was trembling slightly again.

"That can't be good," he said forebodingly of the cloud. "You'd better lead us inside, Erika. Is it far?"

"No . . . just there, through the gully. A hundred yards or so." She licked her lips. Her eyes looked vague. He saw she was going to faint and bellowed for oxygen. The two black men he'd brought with him, Simon Ovosi and Ned Chakava, came running with a big cylinder between them and Clarke placed the transparent cone over Erika's nose and mouth. A few deep breaths, and some color seeped into her cheeks.

They went then into the Catacombs, Erika leaning on Clarke's right arm, Simon and Ned bent over with the weight of the packs and cylinders of oxygen which they would all need from time to time at this altitude, even inside the Catacombs.

Soon the walls of the gully rose steeply above their heads; the path at the bottom, worn smooth by the feet of the explorers less than a year ago, wound tightly between outcrops of rock and occasional stunted groundsels that had somehow taken root and refused to die despite the near absence of sun during the day.

On the walls black markings appeared, randomly at first. They seemed to be cracks in the granite, but the light from Clarke's powerful flashlight bounced back dazzlingly.

"It's obsidian," Erika explained. "Volcanic glass, and nearly as hard as the rock itself. In a few moments you'll see that it hasn't occurred naturally–we think the obsidian was placed here by artisans."

She aimed Clarke's flashlight beam for him; a wall on their left, chiseled nearly smooth over an area ten feet square, was like a mosaic, the space filled with bold curving strokes and geometrical figures.

"Those are pictographs; what do they remind you of?"

"I don't know." Clarke looked more closely. "That one is almost a face–an animal's face."

"A cheetah, to be exact. The black arabesques and spots are simply the facial markings of cheetahs, which emphasize their everyday expressions and facial moods. The people of Zan, you see, were part cat."

"For the love of– What is this, Erika, your little initiation joke? New boys at the digs, and all that?"

"Not at all," Erika said, with a broad smile. "We're part ape, aren't we? You'll soon see for yourself what I'm talking about. This is how their written language evolved, pictographically, from the numerous subtle differences in mood that all faces, animal and human, express. Their ability to evolve symbolic notation came much later, of course."

Erika was feeling stronger, Clarke noted with satisfaction. She went on eagerly a few steps ahead of the others and came to another, large pictograph, some vertical slashes in the stone which also appeared to be obsidian. But one was not: It was a dark cleft only three feet wide. Erika simply walked into it and was swallowed up.

"Hey, Erika!"

"No need to yell," she said calmly, her voice sounding as if she were still standing next to him. "Even if we were a hundred yards apart I could hear every word you say. The acoustics are uncanny. It has to do with the placement of the clefts in the walls of the gully. Come on, we're wasting time."

"Amen to that," Clarke said, and followed her. Without the flashlight beam he would have found himself, within a few steps, in complete blackness. The walls on either side were rough but not jagged, and inches from his shoulders. He felt uncomfortable in such close quarters; he began to sweat. His heart thudded from the exertion. He looked back with a sweep of his light to the entrance, where Ned and Simon were squeezing in with the packs and tanks. "Erika?"

"I'm up here." Her voice was just a whisper.

It was a bit of a climb, and the ceiling soon dropped, forcing him to hunch along. No wonder the Catacombs had remained inviolate
 
for so many thousands of years. In modern times Kilimanjaro had been climbed only since 1889. The way up from Nyangoro was not difficult enough for serious alpinists, who preferred to inch their way up Mawenzi, and too tough for the ordinary run of tourists.

Clarke negotiated a tight turn, his mouth open as he struggled to breathe. Behind him he heard the other men panting, and a canister of oxygen rang against one wall.

"Careful, you bloody idiot!" he shouted, and pressed on.

Another, hairpin turn to the shrinking passage; he was forced, cursing, to his hands and knees. As he rounded the bend he lifted the flashlight in his hand; light was reflected back brilliantly from obsidian strips along the walls of a small chamber. All but one. Erika stepped into view, beckoning to him.

"This way."

Another ten yards and there was head room. As he got to his feet, the mountain shook and rumbled. He braced himself, a hand against each of the side walls. The tremor lasted twelve to fifteen seconds, but it seemed much longer as he considered the possibility of the passage collapsing on him. He tried to be realistic. This couldn't be the first time in ten thousand years there had been serious seismic activity on Kilimanjaro. And he wasn't planning to stay around for very long.

When the tremor ended he made his way to the cleft where he'd seen Erika and aimed his flashlight beam through it. The beam picked up a gruesome sight; some sort of gargoyle on the wall of a cave. He went in, and felt Erika's hand on his arm.

"Is this it?" he said, casting the light around. The room had a low ceiling. It was about thirty by twenty feet. There was a crude stone altar of some sort, and more of the dark, fierce-looking creatures that at first glance had seemed to be carvings, leaning down at an angle from the walls. They were mostly feline, but they had certain human features: claw-like hands instead of forefeet, for instance.

"What are they?"

"Mummies, but nearly hard as stone. They're remote ancestors of the people of Zan. They had language, rudimentary skills with simple tools, a culture of sorts. From carbon dating we estimate their ages at about one hundred thousand years."

Clarke whistled.

"Don't do that!" she said sharply.

"What's the matter?"

"And keep your voice low. I told you about the way sound carries, from the top to the bottom of the Catacombs. That's a distance of almost a thousand feet."

"What difference–"

"Look at this," she said, and directed the beam of his flashlight to the small cylinder of oxygen she was holding in one hand. "It's empty. Someone just threw it aside."

"One of your own explorers, more than likely."

"Not at all," Erika said, sharp again. "We were here for months. Have you seen one scrap of trash, one stone out of place anywhere? No archaeologist or serious explorer will leave debris at a valuable site. It's a cardinal sin; unforgivable."