The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (25 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s the entrance to the tomb, John?” said Nimrod.

“Search me,” said John. “All I know is that it’s somewhere under this plateau. Beneath our feet are the bodies of at least twenty thousand men, as well as the one man whose secret they were killed for. After the tomb was closed up, the whole area was covered with earth and trampled by horses for several weeks. Then grass was allowed to grow on top of it. I doubt that even the sons of Genghis Khan could have said where the original entrance lay.”

“And yet,” said Nimrod, “if the Hotaniya crystals were taken from the tomb, we could expect to see some recent sign of an entry here.”

“Not in the dark we can’t,” murmured Groanin.

“That is what we must look for,” insisted Nimrod.

“Like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Groanin. He thought for a moment and then added, “In a giant barn without a light.”

“Excellent, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “You’ve given me an idea.”

“I have?”

“As always, your grumbling has managed to provoke a useful thought in my brain.”

“It did?”

Nimrod muttered his focus word and, in the blink of an eye, an enormous wooden barn appeared over their heads. It covered the entire plateau and from its raftered ceiling there hung several dozen powerful halogen lights that illuminated everything on the ground.

“
O’trúlegur
.” Axel laughed with amazement. “This tomb will have to be something to be beat this,” he said. “Nimrod? That’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen since I climbed aboard your flying carpet in Fez.”

“Thank you, Axel,” he said. “But it has left me feeling rather tired.” Nimrod sat down on the carpet. And then lay down wearily.

“Are you all right, Uncle?” Philippa asked him anxiously. Under the bright lights of the barn ceiling, he looked pale, and there were bags under his eyes she was sure had not been there before.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just a little tired, like I say. Using djinn power to make something as big as this barn is always going to be rather exhausting. Especially after a long flight.”

He closed his eyes as everyone came and knelt beside him.

“Sir,” said Groanin. “Perhaps a cup of tea would help to revive you.”

“Yes,” said Nimrod. “That sounds ideal. Perhaps in a little while. Only right now, I’d like to sleep.”

“I don’t think he’s slept since Fez,” said Groanin.

“Fez,” whispered Nimrod. “That does seem like a long time ago now.”

“Didn’t he sleep in Australia?” asked John.

“No, not him,” said Groanin. “Not after that beastly Icelandic stew he ate.”

“It’s always hard to sleep after you’ve eaten a good
kœstur hákarl
,” said Axel. “That’s one of the reasons people eat it.” He shrugged. “I didn’t sleep well myself.”

“Besides, he’s been too worried to sleep,” added Groanin. “About all these flipping volcanoes going off.”

“I’m afraid you will have to search for this entrance yourselves,” Nimrod said quietly. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” said John.

“Tell the professor to use his pocket transit. He’s a geologist, so he’s bound to have one in his bags.”

“I’m here,” said the professor. “I have a Brunton with me. Tell me what I’m looking for.”

“I think you’ll find that the main part of the plateau is perfectly flat,” said Nimrod. “At least that was my impression when I first looked at it. However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a slight dip in it somewhere, and you’ll need the Brunton to find it. When you do, that’s the most likely place to look for an entrance to the tomb of Genghis Khan.”

“All right,” said the professor, and went to find the instrument in his bag.

Nimrod pushed himself up on one elbow. “When you find the entrance, be very careful. It’s possible that the
Mongols or even the person who was here before us may have left some sort of trap to protect Genghis Khan or to cover his tracks, respectively.”

“You mean like a booby trap,” said John.

“I mean exactly a booby trap, “said Nimrod. “Good luck.”

Then he closed his eyes, lowered his head onto his forearm, and went straight to sleep.

P
hilippa and John stood up and exchanged a worried look over Uncle Nimrod’s sleeping body. A horrible, unthinkable thought now passed between them that neither wished to utter in so many words. And it was finally John who, gathering all of his courage in his mouth, gave utterance to half of their joint-ventured thought.

“Are you sure he’s asleep, Groanin?” said John. Groanin knelt down beside his master and nodded. “Aye, lad, he’s sleeping like a baby.”

“I’ve never seen him like this before,” said Philippa. “Five adventures we’ve been on and not once has he ever so much as yawned.”

“Has it been so many?” asked Groanin. “Five. It seems like more than that. And yet not that many. I often thought we would all go on much longer than this. But lately —
lately, I’ve had a strange feeling that things were ending, somehow.”

“What do you mean?” asked John.

“You’re growing up, of course,” said Groanin. “You’re really not children anymore. You, John, are becoming a young man. And you, Philippa, you are becoming a beautiful young woman.”

The twins stared awkwardly at each other for a moment, looking for some sign that what Groanin had said was true; but they could see nothing, no sign that they were any different from before.

Surely, he was exaggerating. Perhaps, he was actually saying something else.

Philippa glanced down at her uncle.

“You don’t think —” Philippa hesitated. Nothing Groanin had said had put her mind at rest. If anything, she was more worried now than she had been before. “Oh, Groanin, you don’t think Uncle Nimrod’s dying, do you?”

“Dying?” Groanin frowned. “Whatever makes you say that, girl?”

Philippa shrugged. “I don’t know. But he’s not getting any younger, you know.”

“It’s just that suddenly he looks older,” observed John. “Haven’t you noticed? His hair seems much grayer than when we were in Naples. Doesn’t it?”

“So does yours, lad,” said Groanin. “So does everyone who’s got hair, unlike me. It’s volcanic ash that’s made it gray, like everything else. Ash from that beach in Sumatra.” And
so saying, he leaned down and blew some of the gray from Nimrod’s hair.

Philippa breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’ll look after him, don’t you worry,” said Groanin and, taking off his duffle coat, he laid it carefully over Nimrod’s shoulders. “You two go and help the professor find the entrance to the tomb so that we can get out here before something awful happens to us all.” He shook his head. “I must say, I do fear it.”

The professor had a little instrument in the palm of his hand that looked like a complicated type of compass. He held the instrument at waist height and, looking down into a small mirror, he lined up target, needle, and guideline, and then read the azimuth.

“A Brunton compass,” he told the twins, who’d never seen such a thing before. “Properly known as the Brunton pocket transit. No self-respecting geologist is ever without one of these little compasses. Fault lines, contacts, foliation, sedimentary strata, craters, there’s no surface geological feature this can’t find.”

Axel had one, too, and was taking readings from the opposite side of the barn.

“Well, that is extraordinary,” said the professor.

“What is?” asked John.

“How your uncle recognized that this plateau is completely level. It’s like the surface of a billiard table. Hard to believe this place was ever trampled down by horses. Now, if you’d said they had flattened it with a heavy garden roller, I might have found that easier to believe.”

“They did,” said John. “I was there. Or at least, Dunbelchin was there. And I remember what she remembers.”

“Nimrod’s always had a good idea for proportion,” said Philippa. “He can draw a perfect circle, you know. With an equal diameter whichever part of the circumference you measure it from.”

“Interesting.”

Eventually, the two Icelanders came together to compare their compass readings, and after a minute or two’s conversation in Icelandic, they walked toward the center of the plateau. John and Philippa followed.

“At the approximate center of the plateau,” explained Axel, “is an area about ten feet in diameter that dips by as much as three feet from the edge.” He shook his head. “You hardly notice it with the naked eye. But with the Brunton, it’s obvious.”

John knelt down and examined the ground. “The grass here is different,” he said. “Not nearly as coarse as the grass on the outer edge. It must have been covered in new turf.”

Axel knelt down beside him and started to go around the dip on his hands and knees. Every so often, he stopped and pushed a finger into what looked like a hole in the ground.

“These look like holes made by tent pegs,” he said. “As if this dip on the plateau was protected from the elements by some sort of canopy or tent.”

“For an archaeological excavation, perhaps,” added the professor.

“Remember what Nimrod said about booby traps.”
Philippa’s tone was suddenly urgent. “Please be careful, all of you.”

Axel pulled an old, broken tent peg out of the ground by way of confirmation and waved it at the others.

John went and fetched the shovels they had brought with them from Afghanistan and started to dig. So did the others. It was hard digging because the earth was partly frozen but after twenty or thirty minutes, they had uncovered a section of a large and heavy green tarpaulin sheet made of a rubberized canvas.

“It’s only a guess,” said John. “But I don’t think the Mongols knew about rubber, do you?”

“This has been used to cover up a hole.” The professor patted the tarpaulin with the flat of his hand. “See? Underneath this part, there is earth, but underneath this part, there’s nothing at all.”

From his trouser pocket, Axel produced a knife and began to cut into the tarpaulin. This revealed a dark hole from which cool, damp, stale air drifted up onto the plateau. Swinging his legs over the edge of the hole he glanced up.

“Here, John, fetch me one of those flashlights will you? We’ll take it inside the excavation.”

John carried the light and shone it into the hole as Axel climbed inside. For a moment he held on to the edge and then, letting go, disappeared from view.

“There’s a sort of platform in here,” said the Icelander.

“Do be careful,” urged Philippa.

“It’s quite safe, I think. Although I don’t believe it’s of recent construction.”

They heard the sound of his leather-soled, hobnailed climbing boots move heavily along the platform.

“The platform itself is attached to an intricate system of wooden ladders that go down a long way. And that looks a bit like Escher’s impossible staircase. The hole I just climbed through appears to have been made in a sort of curving leather roof. Quite a thick leather roof, I think, with wooden rafters and leather bindings. A bit like one of those framed leather tents that Mongol nomadic tribesmen use.”

He paused and then added, “Fantastically well made, really. I mean, extremely strong. And —”

“I believe it’s called a yurt,” said the professor.

Axel gasped audibly.

“What is it?” asked Philippa.

“If it’s a yurt, it’s the biggest yurt I’ve ever seen,” said Axel. “It must be at least a hundred and fifty feet in diameter. And probably as far down to the floor.”

“Hold on,” said John. “We’re coming down.”

John and Philippa climbed in after him. John went first and then helped his sister climb in.

John sighed with exasperation when he saw that his sister had brought Moby.

“Do you have to bring that stupid duck everywhere?”

“He’s not doing you any harm,” said Philippa.

They found themselves on a solid wooden frame that extended into the darkness. There was a sort of handrail and, peering carefully over it, John saw that the platform was perhaps a hundred feet off the floor. And that the system of ladders was, indeed, as Axel had described, like
Escher’s impossible staircase. Except that it did actually look possible to climb down.

Axel was standing at the far end of the platform and staring down at something. Something that had been tied on to the platform.

“There’s something dead here,” he said.

The professor passed John another flashlight and followed the twins into the excavation. All three walked carefully toward Axel.

“It’s the remains of something that had a peculiarly long neck,” he said, shining his flashlight onto a weird-looking skeleton. “Perhaps a horse. But something very old, I should say.”

“Or something very young,” John said grimly.

“It’s a baby camel,” said Philippa. “Dunbelchin’s calf, most probably.”

“Yes,” said John. “That’s exactly what it is.” He shook his head. “No wonder Dunbelchin remembered this spot. Even with a few feet of soil on top, she could easily smell and hear it through this leather roof.”

“These were very calculating men, those Mongols,” said the professor. “Very calculating and very cruel.”

Axel took hold of the ladder.

“This ladder might be over seven hundred years old, but it looks safe enough.” He started to climb down. “Everything is amazingly well preserved. But cold. Yes, it’s very cold down here. It’s the cold permafrost on the ground that’s probably kept things preserved for so long.”

“That’s a pity,” said Philippa.

“Why?” asked the professor.

“Our djinn power doesn’t work when we get cold,” said Philippa.

“Let’s hope we’re not here long enough for that to happen,” said John, and climbed down the ladder after Axel.

Philippa left Moby on the top platform and went after her brother.

It was the echo of John’s voice and Moby’s quacking that first told Philippa how big the mausoleum of Genghis Khan really was. And glancing down the ladder herself, she was astonished at the size of the burial chamber. It was huge. Despite this, it wasn’t very long before she started to suffer from the claustrophobia that often afflicts djinn when they find themselves inside confined spaces. But in Philippa’s case, her claustrophobia had more to do with the fact that she was inside a mass grave, an uncomfortable fact that the smell of death and decay in her nostrils only seemed to underscore.

After climbing down the complex series of ladder and platforms, the four explorers found themselves on the floor of the burial chamber.

It was John who made the first two discoveries. It was an ossuary, which is what you call the final resting place of several sets of human skeleton remains. Except that this was no ordinary resting place and no ordinary ossuary, for there were many more than several human skeleton remains in this mausoleum. And while there were too many of the neatly stacked skeletons — most of which were still wearing Mongol armor — for John to count, there were also so many
that one particular round number — twenty thousand, to be precise — seemed to present itself immediately to his mind. Indeed, it was more like a pyramid than an ossuary and it now occurred to him that the system of ladders and platforms down which they had just climbed seemed to have been built not only as a means of access up and down the height of the mausoleum but also to keep the carefully built mountain of bones firmly in position.

“You remember all those soldiers the sons of Genghis killed to keep this place a secret?” he said.

“Yes,” said the professor. “Twenty thousand, wasn’t it?”

“I just found them,” said John. “All of them.”

The others came to take a look.

“Incredible,” said the professor. “Like sardines in a tin. They must have been killed as they lay one on top of the other. Absolutely incredible.”

“
Horrible
is the word I’d have chosen,” said Philippa.

“I’ve never seen such a large pile of bones,” remarked Axel. “It’s like an Everest of human bones.”

John was already walking around the base of the pyramid. “Here,” he said. “I think I found our man.”

They followed him around to the far side of the ossuary to find another skeleton, seated on a throne that was set into the wall of bones. He wore better armor than the dead soldiers who surrounded him in death; but he was no less dead for all that. He wasn’t very much taller than the long sword that lay across his thighs.

“You really think it’s him, little brother?” asked Axel.

Philippa shone her flashlight onto the floor where underneath the dead man’s feet was painted a map of Asia and central Europe, from Peking to the Danube.

“These look like his conquests,” she said. “So who else could it be?”

John bent down to retrieve a piece of shiny wastepaper off the ground. He glanced at it and then put it in his pocket.

A little farther away, they came across what had once been the great khan’s treasury; they knew this because there were wall paintings of stewards and slaves filling chests with coins and jewels, silks, perfumes, and most eloquently, a golden casket with a picture of an exploding volcano on the front.

“The Hotaniya crystals,” said the professor. “They must have been in that golden casket.”

But of this and the other treasures in the tomb of Genghis Khan, there was no sign because all of the chests were gone or empty.

“It looks like everything of value that was here has been stolen by the grave robbers,” said Philippa.

“That’s what grave robbers do, little sister,” said Axel.

“I wonder why they left that sword on his lap,” said John.

The professor inspected the hilt more closely. “For the simple reason that if you were to pull it away, you would bring this entire mountain of bones down upon your head. It’s very cleverly positioned. Look.”

John bent forward to take a closer look at the sword. “Yes, you’re right.” He shrugged. “Ingenious.”

“To protect a rusty old sword?” Philippa frowned. “I
think not. More ingenious would have been a way of protecting what was in the khan’s treasury.”

“You sound almost disappointed,” said Axel.

“We’re not out of here yet,” said John.

“Well,” said Philippa. “We’ve confirmed what we always suspected. That one of the things that was here but that is here no longer were those Hotaniya crystals. We’ve also confirmed that someone robbed this grave. And, most probably, that this must have been someone who lived in the age of rubberized tarpaulins.”