Indiana took a step back, ready for a trap. He didn’t need to. The square charm sank into the depression, and he heard the grinding of large chains as the door on the other side of the room opened.
A smile spread across his face. He had been clever. At the last minute he remembered that certain tribes of Africa, like the Hausa, think of direction differently than most Europeans or Americans. To an American, the stone is in front of the statue if it is between the viewer and the statue. It seems ‘in front of’ because it is partially or wholly blocking the viewer’s view of the statue. To the Hausa, a thing is ‘in front of’ something else if it is further from the viewer. It is as if the viewer is looking toward an infinitely distant point. The thing furthest from the viewer is closer to that distant point, and is thus in front of things closer to the viewer.
Indiana walked up to the door, which was now almost totally retracted into the ceiling. It was carved out of foot-thick rock. It would take advanced machinery to move them. However had built the temple had significant resources and knowledge of weights and pulleys. It couldn’t have been a single man. Indiana thought it would take closer to a hundred men to even begin such a project.
As he continued to progress deeper into the partially natural cave, he noticed that the path began to slant downward steeply. He also thought it was veering slowly to the left, further from away where Bond was.
When Indiana saw light ahead he first thought it was his flashlight reflecting off a rock. He turned the flashlight off, and the light remained, one hundred feet down the passage. Indiana moved forward and became aware of the sound of water. “So,” he thought, “this is a living cave.” A living cave, sometimes called an active cave, is a cave that contains a water source.
“What in God’s name?” Indiana spoke aloud as he stepped into the chamber and shielded his eyes. The chamber was twice as bright as the entrance had been. A look around the chamber quickly revealed why. A hole, most likely manmade, was present on the left wall of the chamber, near the ceiling. The hole led all the way out of the cave, to the surface and allowed sunlight to pour in. At the place where the sunlight directly hit, a mirror had been set up. This mirror reflected to another mirror, then to another and another. Indiana saw at least six mirrors, all of which helped spread sunlight throughout the room. The mirrors were an old ‘silvered’ kind, and they had begun to flake and grow dull. Indiana figured that when they were new the chamber would have been twice as bright as it was now; almost as bright as the surface.
The light wasn’t what shocked Indiana. What surprised him the most were the plants and animals. Someone had created an artificial environment in the chamber. What Indiana was looking at was an ‘association’; a group of animals living in balance with one another. He felt inadequate to observe such a thing. A biospeleologist would give his right arm to discover what Jones had.
“The balance is dying,” Indiana thought. He saw evidence of many kinds of plants and the petrified remains of several trees. The amount of still-living plants was perhaps an eighth of what had once been there. The plants had to be what was keeping the association alive. Indiana wasn’t sure how the soil, which must have been brought into the cave thirteen hundred years ago by the people who placed the mirrors, could still have enough nutrients to support plant life. “Perhaps there is some kind of special bacteria in the soil that use sunlight to create minerals and nutrients that the plants live on,” Indiana mused.
The plants must fee the bugs, which Bond noticed buzzing around the chamber. Suddenly a small, pale fish leapt out of the pool of water, presumably to catch a bug. That told Indiana the next link in the chain. Small fish ate the bugs. “And the small fish must feed those.” Indiana watched two stingrays gliding along the bottom of the shallow pool.
The room began to darken. Indiana assumed that direct sunlight only shone through the hole perhaps an hour at most each day. He used the rapidly fading light to look around the room. Across the fifty foot wide pool he saw a door and another pedestal. He assumed it was another puzzle.
A rush of wind pushed against Indiana’s face. There was a breeze, and it wasn’t coming from the passage he had come from. He followed the current of air and quickly found the source. It was a chimney; a small vertical hole in the ceiling that led to higher ground. It was a little wide, however. Perhaps it would be classified as a shaft, which is wider than a chimney. Still, Indiana thought he could climb it, especially with the help of his pick ax.
Indiana looked at the ground and saw the remains of what was probably a bucket. Not much was left, but there were a few rusty nails and some fragments of black, rotten wood. Indiana guessed that the rope had decomposed long ago, but he knew what the chimney had once been used for. “A dumbwaiter,” he said, amazed. He assumed that water or food was taken from this room to the upper part of the cave via a bucket. The implications of this were enormous. Someone had once lived in the cave, probably over long periods of time.
Indiana looked up the chimney/shaft. Climbing it would probably take him much closer to where Bond was, if not the exact same passage. Then he looked across the pool at the door. That way might provide more answers into who had once lived in the cave. Torn between two desires, Indiana took a deep breath, and, after several seconds, decided.He walked over to the pool and looked across at the door.
He took the ax out of his backpack and began to work his way up the chimney.
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