Chapter Fifty-Nine
As the doors swung open, the group got their first glimpse of the interior of the city, and they all froze in awe.
The hole in the ceiling of the cavern was larger on this side of the wall, and light streamed down into the city.
The sandstorm above filtered the intense sun to give the light a pinkish hue, and the city was awash in a supernatural glow.
In front of them, the road continued straight for what must have been half a mile.
Pillars, just like the ones they had seen outside, lined the road at regular intervals.
It was clearly some type of colonnade, though many had collapsed and most of the entablature connecting them at the top had long since fallen away.
And on each side of the road was the city.
It expanded out in both directions so far that Nate couldn’t see where it reached the cavern walls, simply disappearing into the darkness.
There was a mix of small square houses that appeared to be built with sandstone, and large, conical-shaped towers whose roofs flared out at the bottom and came to a point at the top.
Some of the houses had crumbled, and some of the towers had fallen, lying at odd angles. But plenty more were perfectly intact.
It was a metropolis of single-, two-, and three-story buildings.
Wide roads and narrow passageways ran throughout the city, crossing at right angles.
It must have been capable of supporting tens of thousands of people at its height, and the magnitude of the sandstone buildings interlaced with limestone and gold accents created an almost otherworldly effect in the pink light.
Immediately Nate identified a mixture of architecture that both thrilled and confused him.
The city could have been ancient Babylon, with compact gatherings of square buildings throughout the city, or Persepolis, ancient seat of the Achaemenid Empire, with the massive, almost ziggurat-like constructions that may have been temples or palaces.
But there were other influences as well.
He spotted at least two structures that resembled rudimentary triumphal arches, historically a type of Roman architectural monument built to commemorate military triumphs.
There was an amphitheater on the far side of the city that resembled the one built in Tarragona, Spain, with stacked stone rounding out the entertainment venue.
And there was more than one pyramid present.
While not as massive as those they had seen at Giza just days prior, they still loomed large over much of the city and, unlike their Egyptian counterparts, retained their polished limestone coating.
The entire city appeared frozen in time.
Several structures had crumbled, either from time or from its cataclysmic plunge into the enormous cavern they now occupied.
But many more stood just as they had thousands of years ago.
There was a distinct lack of vegetation, as after having been sealed off for millennia there must have been no sunlight for plants to conduct photosynthesis.
Only a thin, slimy layer of algae lay across the road, washing in with the tide from the small underground sea.
The whole setting of the city contrasted sharply with its surroundings.
The entrance lay at the shoreline like some type of beachside resort, while the tallest buildings reached toward giant stalactites that jutted down from the ceiling above.
The road they were standing on continued straight, and Nate followed it with his eyes as it ran up a steep slope to its destination.
At the top of the hill was a palace more opulent than he could have ever imagined.
It had a large gate that very closely resembled the Ishtar Gate built by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, and stood as one of the inner gates of the city.
Like the Ishtar Gate, it was colored a brilliant blue and stood intimidatingly above the road.
It was flanked on either side by massive statues that Nate couldn’t make out at this distance and connected to high sandstone walls on either side.
Behind the walls, in what must have been a large courtyard, the palace loomed, reaching to a height of at least five stories, if not higher.
It was an indescribable construction. There were several domes sitting upon sometimes square, sometimes hexagonal towers, giving the structure a decidedly Arabian feel.
More pillars adorned the front of what appeared to be a grand entrance, and supported the weight of a large, centrally located dome.
Nate sucked in his breath as he realized the sheer scale of the rotunda.
The dome itself must have been similar in size to the one that sat atop St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and it shone from a distance as if laced with gold.
Nate was awash in emotion. His eyes brimmed with tears and he laughed. It was real! The city was real! He had been right all along, and it was he who had put the pieces of the puzzle together to lead them to the lost city. He felt giddy and relieved and intimidated all at once. They had done it.
“ ‘This is Iram,’ ” he again quoted One Thousand and One Nights under his breath, “ ‘with pillars decked and dight, the like of which was never made in the lands.’ ”
Tim put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and shook him hard. “You did it, man! You actually did it!”
“It’s so beautiful,” Ana said as she walked over to Nate’s other side and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“This is amazing,” Shane said absently, still staring ahead at the palace.
“Ubar,” Wally whispered silently under his breath.
They spent several minutes soaking it all in. Not only the magnitude and significance of the find, but the sheer size of the city, and the fact that it was in an underground cavern next to a lake.
As the immediate shock and bewilderment wore off, Nate began looking more closely at the features around him.
What appeared to be the main thoroughfare running between the city gate and the palace was not just lined with columns in various states of disrepair.
There were shapes strewn about that after a moment he recognized as more corpses.
He glanced to his left at the side of the road and realized that, unlike outside the city, the sides streets of the interior were littered with them.
Nate walked over to the nearest one and knelt to examine it.
Dark, desiccated skin was pulled taut across the body, revealing detailed features of the skull and exposing a mouth full of teeth.
The eye sockets were vacant, and there was less calcification, probably because it was so far removed from the water.
The paper-thin skin seemed extremely fragile, as if the slightest movement of air might cause it to tear, and indeed there were cracks forming where it was tightest over the shoulders, knees, and face.
Like the body by the lake, a small measure of dark hair clung to the scalp in much the same manner that tatters of richly colored clothing clung to the emaciated body.
Below the knees, the legs were crushed, possibly from the impact of a lopsided column that was mere inches away.
“It’s pretty horrific,” Ana said poignantly.
“That’s putting it lightly,” Wally added.
“Poor souls,” Nate said, looking out at the other corpses flung about in various scenes of death. “Many of them must have been killed when the city collapsed into the cavern. But certainly others survived and maybe lived out their last days down here.”
They were all silent as they contemplated the heaviness of what had occurred in this location thousands of years prior.
There had to have been other survivors too, Nate thought.
Ones who escaped. Perhaps who shared their knowledge with other civilizations, the same knowledge that Nate saw traces of in the architecture.
“How did it get here?” Shane asked no one in particular, though Nate fielded the question without taking his eyes off the city.
“The meteorite strike. It must have caused a cave-in, the same way the explosives we set off did. The city was built atop this area because of the freshwater lake beneath it. It had an unlimited supply of water, and so it grew ever bigger, expanding the richer it got. But it was also built over a massive cavern. The weight must have made the land unstable. When the meteorite struck, the ground crumbled and the city slowly slipped down into the cavern in one piece, swallowed up by the desert. More of a gradual sinking than a total collapse. Gentle, like quicksand.” Nate still couldn’t believe it.
He had expected buried ruins, not a standing city, largely preserved in the same manner it had stood thousands of years earlier.
“That’s why the city is at an angle,” Ana added. “The palace isn’t on a hill. The city is slanted from where it slid into the cave.”
“And look,” Nate said. “You can’t see anything behind the palace, which would have been built in the center of the city, not close to an exterior wall. The hole it slid through was covered up by sand over the millennia. There must be another half of the city buried back there.”
“It’s incredible that it stayed roughly in one piece,” Ana remarked. “You’re right. It must have been a gradual process, with a gentle enough slope created for the solid ground the city was built on to slide wholly into this cavern. It could have taken days, or even weeks to fully submerge.”
“And months, if not years, for the sand to fully bury the entrance,” Nate added.
“So it’s been down here the whole time,” Tim said.
“The Surah Ash Shu’ara spoke of the city’s demise, and there’s a measure of truth to all religious stories. The ancients believed the city was smote by Allah for its lack of deference. In reality, it was a mixture of structural issues, phenomena from space, and weather.”
“Which doesn’t disprove their belief,” Tim observed.
“You’re right,” Nate agreed. “I can’t prove otherwise.”