Chapter Fifty-Nine #2
“How long do you think the city has been down here?” Wally asked.
“I’m not sure,” Nate said, shaking his head. “Until we can carbondate some of this I won’t know with certainty, but it has to be at least two thousand years. Maybe even three thousand.”
“It’s so well preserved,” Ana commented.
“It’s been sealed tight for centuries,” Nate explained. It hasn’t been exposed to the outside world until today.”
Nate once again glanced at the naturally mummified corpses strung about.
It seemed like the dark, leathery skin was beginning to crack even more, and the remaining tufts of hair were beginning to fragment, likely due to the introduction of the hot desert air hitting the bodies.
The scientist in him was suddenly distraught, knowing that the condition of these remains would continue to degrade the longer they were exposed to oxygen, possibly robbing them of vital evidence of the past.
“Well I hate to break things up,” Shane said, “but how about we take a stroll up to that palace and see what we find inside?”
Nate was overwhelmed. There was centuries of history down here, and the pure magnitude of it was astounding.
He could spend the rest of his life down here and not scratch the surface of what it had to offer.
It would take a team of hundreds of trained scientists decades to properly excavate it.
As such, he figured there was no harm in beginning at the palace.
They were all waiting for his concurrence. This was his discovery, and they deferred to his expertise.
“I guess it’s as good a place to start as any,” he agreed.
Together, they began walking down the road.
Nate couldn’t get over the engineering marvel that was the city.
Such advanced building techniques shouldn’t have existed for at least another thousand years, maybe more.
The stone walkway was still intact, as were a surprising number of the columns.
The ones that had fallen lay near their bases.
It was a testament to the builders’ engineering prowess that the entire city could slip hundreds of feet into a cavern and yet look as if a minor earthquake had occurred.
Most of the buildings were still standing, of which many did indeed seem to be constructed out of sandstone.
It was truly a city captured in time, comparable, he thought, to Pompeii, which had been encased in volcanic ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
“Do you realize that we are the first people to walk these roads in over two thousand years?” Nate asked in awe.
“Well let’s just hope we don’t become a permanent fixture down here,” Tim responded, staring at the multitude of preserved bodies they had to either step around or over along their walk. “I haven’t exactly seen a way back to the surface.”
Nate hadn’t even considered that. He’d been so caught up in the discovery that the thought of how they were going to leave this place wasn’t even on his radar. They were essentially trapped hundreds of feet belowground in a cave with no way to get back up.
“Well, we know we’re not getting out the way we came in,” he said. “All we can do is push forward.”
After several minutes of walking past rows of ancient buildings, they arrived at the magnificent gate to the palace, and Nate observed the statues that flanked the large entryway. “It’s a sphinx!” he noted in bewilderment.
“Like the one in Egypt,” Shane said.
“Right. They also have them in Greece and India, among other places. It’s interesting that this gate is guarded by two of them. Another cultural import, though at this point I’m not sure which civilization got it from which.”
“Seems like the sphinx wasn’t the only thing guarding the gate,” Wally said, motioning to a scene outside the gate.
Several bodies were clustered together in the area, though Nate had not taken the time to observe their arrangement.
As he did so now, he noted that several of the deceased appeared heavily clad in dull green armor, which Nate recognized as copper-plate armor, similar to the Mycenaean-era Dendra panoply.
Short swords, made of what looked like bronze, were littered about, crystals growing on them.
Wooden shields had pulled from their copper frames and were curled upon themselves like tree bark, and copper spears, the heads turned a blue-green patina and the wooden shafts brittle and warped, impaled many of the dead.
“These must have been survivors of the initial impact,” Nate said. “It looks like palace guards versus locals. They must have turned on the ruling class after the city submerged. Maybe they blamed them for the curse on their city.”
“Maybe,” Tim said. “Maybe they just wanted to loot the palace and leave. The slant of the cityscape means they would have had to pass through here on their climb out, right?”
“Right,” Nate agreed, looking at the imposing palace doors that were still sealed shut. “And so do we.”
As magnificent as the blue gate was, it presented a new challenge, and Nate hoped that it opened in the same manner.
The doors were smaller than the gates to the city, but more elaborate.
They were also solid gold, but more ornately decorated, with characters inlaid with silver.
There was a scene depicting a large man in a side profile pose wearing a crown.
Seven even larger figures stood behind him holding rectangular bags with curved handles, a motif Nate recognized from other sites around the world, including Assyrian and Sumerian reliefs in modern-day Iraq, Olmec sites in modern-day Mexico, and the oldest, carvings on Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.
It was a stunning parallel, and Nate was astonished.
Overwhelmed by the historical novelties he was encountering, he filed that piece of information away to contemplate later.
In front of the man wearing the crown, several smaller men were lined up to bring him gifts. And in their hands where the gifts would be were gemstones of varying colors fixed into the door. Nate recognized rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, as well as a few others he couldn’t place.
“ ‘Now when I came to the castle, I found it had two vast gates inlaid with all manner of jewels and jacinths, white and red, yellow and green,’ ” Nate quoted One Thousand and One Nights again. It was fascinating how relevant the text was to the ground truth.
“Now that is a lofty palace,” Shane commented. “I assume these are the gemstones we’re looking for?” He eyeballed them, putting his face mere inches from some of the stones that were as big as his thumb.
“What’s a jacinth?” Tim asked.
“A gemstone,” Ana answered. “A variety of zircon.”