John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“Why is the entrance around the back?” I wanted to know.

“To face the sunrise,” the priestess explained. “At sunrise on Midsummer Day, the sun is positioned precisely in the center of the doorway and shines straight down the shaft.”

“That must be impressive,” I said. Roman religion does not make a great thing of the solstices and equinoxes, except to have festivals in their general vicinity, such as Saturnalia. This may have been because, prior to Caesar’s reform of the calendar, it was so difficult to predict when they would fall.

The ground fell away behind the temple, so that the cave entrance was situated in the center of a middling hillside. The area around it was positively overgrown with vegetation associated with death, funerals, and graves: asphodel and hemlock, myrtle, cornel, towering cedar, and other, equally evocative plants.

“It’s a gloomy gardener that planted this place,” I said.

“Nothing was planted here, Praetor,” said Iola. “All is as it has always been. The growth here obeys the will of the gods we serve.”

“Don’t be such a Skeptic, dear,” said my ever supportive wife.

The entrance was smaller than I had pictured, and less rugged. It was a tall, narrow doorway surrounded by facing stones carved in a peculiar and antiquated fashion, the designs being similar to the ancient figures and patterns I had seen plastered over in the temple. The stone was deeply weathered and stained and bore no writing in any language. It looked older than the Lapis Niger and I suspected that it predated the appearance of writing in Italy. For the first time I began to take seriously the suggestion that this shrine was indeed Aboriginal. Just before the entrance, instead of the usual altar, there stood a broad stone table laden with cult objects: more chaplets of asphodel, miniature thyrsi or wands of cornel wood tipped with small pinecones, amulets depicting a tripartite woman’s face, caps of dogskin, and so forth. There was also a tray of cups and a pitcher, all carved from wood and blackened with age.

“First,” Iola said, “you must be purified and protected by the apotropaic rites.” This involved a great deal of chanting and fumigation with incense, sprinkling with water from a holy spring, followed by more chanting, and culminating with the sacrifice of a black dog. Iola broke a sprig from one of the cedars, dipped it in the dog’s blood, and painted our foreheads, our feet, and our hands with it.

It was all very conventional. I had been hoping for something more exotic.

Iola poured the cups full of something from the pitcher. Like just about everything else in the vicinity, the liquid was black. I knew that she expected us to drink the stuff. Sure enough, each of us was handed a cup and watched expectantly. Julia and the other women knocked theirs back as if they’d never heard of Socrates. I eyed my cup dubiously and the men of the party watched me.

For a while I toyed with the idea of throwing the cup away and going back to the villa. I reflected, however, this was some sort of religious charade, not a likely assassination plot. You don’t murder somebody you intend to fleece. So I swallowed the vile liquid and the rest did the same. It was predictably bitter and I was pretty sure I detected oil of wormwood among the ingredients.

We were draped and garlanded with leaves and hung with amulets. Fortunately, only the freedmen of the party were required to wear the dogskin caps, which they accepted with poor grace, Hermes in particular. He had been getting arrogant since I freed him, so perhaps this little humiliation was beneficial.

One of the still-speechless priests or acolytes or whatever brought a flaming torch and the others produced small torches from someplace and ignited them. The flames were streaked with green, a bit of mummery I recognized: certain preparations of copper, mixed with firewood or any other burning medium, will produce green flame. The blackrobed torchbearers filed into the cave entrance and we followed.

My first impression of the cavern was one of disappointment. In the first place, it was not a natural cavern at all, but a man-made tunnel, and not a very big one at that. Its roof was so low that the taller members of the party had to duck their heads somewhat. It was so narrow that the walls brushed the shoulders of the men of the party. The closeness was quite oppressive, though from the giggles I heard behind me, the younger men and women were enjoying it. The smoke from the torches may have contributed to the carefree mood of the young people. Besides the acrid copper scent, I detected a smell of burning hemp. I had encountered this in Egypt and it is known to encourage merriment.

Soon the giggling stopped as the pervasive gloom affected everyone. Every few steps a small niche was cut into the wall, in which burned the flame of a small lamp. With this bit of light added to that of the torches and my improving night vision, I could discern the tool marks on the walls. Every bit of this tunnel had been cut from solid rock, and as we progressed along the down-sloping passage, I was struck by the incredible amount of labor and time that must have been expended in its carving, for surely only a single man could have worked on the rock face at one time; perhaps two if one worked crouching while a second leaned over him, standing. All the same, it seemed an unreasonable way to carve a tunnel. A small gang of miners could have made a wider tunnel in much less time.

Still, there it was. It had been cut with great care, the walls perfectly plumb, the floor smooth and sloping with great regularity. The ceiling was somewhat of a mystery, for what appeared to be centuries’ worth of torch soot obscured it. It seemed more like something Egyptians would do than Italians. We are no slouches at stonework, as witness the wonderful masonry of our Cloaca Maxima, built when Rome had kings, and still as sound and perfect as the day the stones were first set in their courses. We carve away whole hillsides and tunnel through mountains to build our roads and aqueducts, but these projects are sensibly planned and carried out for practical purposes: to facilitate transport or carry water or conduct sewage away from a city.

This tunnel to Hell was something else. It was an uncanny work, produced at an immense cost in time and labor for purely occult purposes. My mood seemed to grip the others as well. They became very silent except for occasional shudders and gasps. I do not know whether it was the effects of the smoke or that drink or the stupefying monotony of the priestly chant, but we began to see and hear things (I questioned everyone later and confirmed that we had all experienced the same thing). Streaks of colored light began to dart among us and we heard whispering voices. I could not make out what they were saying, but they had that maddening quality so common to half-overheard conversations that if they were a tiny bit louder we might understand them.

The women became truly frightened, even Julia. We men maintained our stout Roman facade of Stoic impassivity to hide the quaking of our bowels. For make no mistake about it, we were all frightened. The hazards of battle and politics, the terrors of the natural world, these things may be dealt with employing one’s physical bravery, strength, and resources. But what may a mortal man do in the face of the supernatural?

Not that I truly believed that these people could take us to the underworld and communicate with the dead, but those feelings of dread are easily aroused under the right circumstances, and they had the circumstances in the form of that tunnel. Thoughts flitted through my mind like those flickering lights, of cleverly manipulated mirrors and hidden holes to bear the voices of whispering confederates. At the Museum in Alexandria I had seen many wonders, all of them performed openly by philosophers without the slightest recourse to supernatural means, but that had not been amid such surroundings.