“Hm. Not unlike several pillow lavas that I’ve seen,” Rudi’s voice commented dubiously.
“These are metamorphic, not igneous,” Hamil answered.
“And when you probe down under, you can see there are no plumes. They were cut and laid,” Jean Graas added.
“Hm,” Rudi said again. But even he couldn’t argue.
They moved on, still ascending at a mild angle, into the narrowing rear part of the gallery, where Hamil stopped again to let them examine a series of large stones of various shapes and angles that had been set on one side. There were long and short rectangular blocks, several broken curved pieces suggestive of sections of arch, some round pieces, and a few with markings from which encrusting rock had been painstakingly removed, looking tantalizingly as if they could be symbols of some kind. But whether they were or not, it was plain even to Kieran’s unschooled eye that these objects had been fashioned. Trevany recognized a couple of instances of indentation marks similar to ones found in South America and Egypt for accepting I-shaped metal pieces to clamp adjacent blocks together. Hamil confirmed that was what he thought they were too. Another broken fragment of rounded rock was surely part of a humanlike chin and nose.
An opening at the back of the gallery, looking at first like a tunnel mouth, turned out to be the entrance to a chamber from which several shafts and crawlways radiated away, some rising, others descending. Hamil led the way, single file now, along a shaft which required only moderate stooping, through another opening. The far side opened up suddenly, in a way that came as a surprise after the warren that had preceded it, into a space that was high but narrow, braced by props mounted horizontally. The rock on one side had been cut into a rising series of ramps and ledges bearing scaffolding, cable boxes, and lights. But it was the other side that captured everyone’s attention as the party crowded in to straighten up and stand in awe along the rubble-strewn strip of floor between. They were gazing up at the wall that Kieran had seen on the screen in the Juggernaut.
“We broke through, and here it was, uncovered by a fall that appears to have taken place at some time,” Hamil told them. “We haven’t had to do much digging at all.”
That explained how it could have been news two days ago, yet unburied to an extent that should have required weeks of digging. The space was more confined than the view on the screen had suggested, comprising for the most part a vertical rock fault that revealed part of the wall all the way to its top, where it ended in a line of corbeling at about twenty-five feet. It was smooth and unweathered, grayer and lighter than the surrounding rock. To the left, the wall disappeared behind a line of obscuring rock slanting down to an opening that looked like a pilot tunnel following the base. Just outside the opening was a small, turretlike vehicle, not much bigger than a shoe box, running on what looked like rubber tracks. It was equipped with a lamp, a miniature camera on a pivoting arm, and a variety of sensors, manipulators, and appendages.
“Is that friend Gottfried?” Kieran asked, gesturing.
“Yes,” Rudi confirmed. “He’ll be in action again later today.”
The right-hand side of the wall was buried behind fallen rock extending to the roof, but cleared enough in the lower parts to reveal the ends of several massive stone steps and part of a vertical corner that could have been one side of a gateway. As Trevany and Juanita had said of the mysterious constructions found back on Earth, the way these huge stones fitted was strangely complex yet precise. Kieran tried to imagine what sequence of measuring, cutting, testing, trimming, repositioning and remeasuring would be necessary to achieve such results. He couldn’t. Yet, according to the orthodox wisdom that still prevailed upon Earth, it was supposed to have been achieved by cultures that hadn’t advanced beyond levers and pulleys, by means of earth ramps and rollers. Trevany scoffed that such explanations were the confident inventions of Egyptologists sitting in university offices; “Construction engineers,” he said, “just shook their heads.”