Jack Higgins – Sheba

He pulled himself in and went forward, his fingers brushed against the smooth, slimy sides, and then it was dark, utterly dark and he turned in a panic and swam back towards the faint light of the lamp and surfaced, rasping for air.

‘What’s it like?’ Cunningham demanded.

Kane waded out of the water and stood knee-deep on the bank of shale beside the wall. ‘Bloody murder. There’s a tunnel that’s hardly big enough to crawl through. I swam along it for a few yards, but it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.’

He pulled himself up on to the wall and Cunningham turned the beam of the lamp into the slot below. ‘Once again we don’t seem to have a great deal of choice, do we?’

Climbing down presented no problem. There were plenty of footholds where the mortar between blocks of stone had crumbled away, leaving a score of deep cracks through which water trickled steadily.

The steeply inclined floor of the slot was slimy and treacherous to the feet, and Kane led the way cautiously for some fifty yards, until the roof closed in on them and they were faced with a dark opening.

They moved inside and stood ankle-deep in water, and he flashed the lamp from side to side. As the beam splayed across smooth walls, thousands of tiny chisel marks sprang into view.

‘The river must have created this passage in the first place,’ Cunningham observed, ‘but someone’s certainly done a hell of a lot of work on it since.’

Kane moved forward slowly, a strange excitement stirring inside him. The sound of the river faded behind them and they were alone in a dark and mysterious world.

The passage twisted and turned, moving down all the time, and the water gradually deepened. As they rounded a corner, they came to an off-shoot at one side.

Cunningham glanced at Kane enquiringly and Kane shrugged. ‘May as well take a look.’

They moved into a room about ten feet square, with walls of drafted masonry. Great store-jars, each almost as tall as a man, stood like silent sentinels on either side.

‘Grain jars,’ Kane said.

As he turned away, the beam of the lamp fell across the far wall and figures leapt to life in vivid colour.

The painting depicted some ancient triumph. Prisoners, most of whom seemed to have short, curling beards, moved together in a column, legs shackled, backs bowed against the whips brandished by soldiers in fish-tailed breastplates and helmets.

‘My God,’ Cunningham said. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’

‘Only in the Nile Valley,’ Kane told him. ‘Certainly not in Arabia.’

They moved out into the passage and continued past several other store rooms, finally coming into a wider, pillared passage, the walls of which were covered with paintings.

At one point Kane halted beside a nook inside which stood several clay jars with painted sides. As he lifted one down to examine it, Cunningham moved forward excitedly. ‘They’re funeral urns, aren’t they?’

Kane nodded. ‘The whole thing’s beginning to click into place. Those grain jars and now these. Offerings to the gods for a safe journey. We must be coming to a tomb.’

He lifted the round lid of the jar and looked inside. It was empty. ‘Probably oil or spices or something like that – gone with the years.’

Cunningham took down another jar which also proved to be empty. Kane was about to turn away when he noticed a smaller one, the top held in place by clay seals, standing on a small shelf at the back of the nook.

He put down the lamp with one hand and lifted the jar with the other. As he stepped back, it slipped from his fingers and smashed against the stone floor of the passage.

He lifted the lamp, and as he directed the beam on the floor, there was a glint of gold amongst the sharded pieces of clay and a flash of green fire.

He dropped to one knee and carefully picked it up. It was a beautiful gold necklace and pendant. Carefully set in the gold filigree were three perfect emeralds, sparkling in the lamplight.

Cunningham whistled softly. They’d give their eye-teeth to have that in the British Museum.’

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *