David Golemon - Legend

Then she noticed she could hear running water and smell fresh vegetation. Then she heard a hoarse growl. She shot back against a wall using her ass and good hand, the fingers of which touched an object not made of stone. She grasped it; it was a pole of some kind. But as she tried to use leverage against it to stand, it started to tilt off balance. She let go but too late, the pole crashed to the ground with a loud clang and the sound of breaking glass. She looked down and did a double take. Unless Padilla was centuries ahead of his time, someone had indeed beaten even Helen Zachary to El Dorado. Lying at her feet was a light stand. Old, rusty, and three legged, with six high-powered lamps. Her eyes followed a power cord to another stand, this one upright. The cord led from that to still another.

"What the…?" she mumbled as she saw in the unnatural green light that there were six stands in all. They had been arranged in a semicircle facing inward from the ninety-foot perimeter they had been placed in. Now the graffito picked up by the camera on Snoopy 3 was starting to make sense.

Sarah glanced around her but could see no generator that the light stands had been connected to. She followed one thick cable to a wall, and from there to an opening that was about seven feet in diameter. It looked as if it had been burrowed out of solid rock. She tentatively reached out with her foot and touched a raised step, then another and another. She slowly backed down the several steps she had taken, not knowing if she wanted to head that way in the darkness. At least here she had that strange phosphorescence to see by. Curious, she ran her hand along the wall and then brought it to her face. Her fingers were covered in some sort of natural tritium. Her entire hand glowed softly as she quickly wiped it on her pant leg.

"What in the hell is going on here?" she blurted out.

She looked closer and could see that the glowing particles were actually ancient writings of some kind; indeed, the whole wall was imbedded with the mineral but only parts of it were carved, creating a relief. Possibly an ancient people had spelled out their history. She wondered if the writings were Incan.

Her eyes caught on a darker object that had been stuck into one wall. As she approached she could see that it was a torch. She felt it and determined that it was made of some kind of metal, a rough iron perhaps. She tried to pull it free of its mounting but it was stuck with hundreds of years of grime. She doubled her efforts. As it finally came loose she almost lost her balance with the sudden change of momentum. Some sort of fuel substance was still embedded in its end. She felt in her pockets and found the lighter she always carried for the one chance, she had always joked, where she might find herself deep in an underground cave with no flashlight. She used her thumb to bring the lighter to life and she raised it to the tip of the old iron torch. It flamed to life. She held the torch away from her and examined her surroundings more fully.

All around her were strange images and hieroglyphs. Drawings of animals lined the walls, and images of small people. She could see the people were in chains as they toiled, bearing heavy loads on their heads and shoulders, while Incan taskmasters stood by with menacing whips and clubs. Far more menacing were the skulls. They lined the entire chamber at about head height. There were at least a thousand that had been inlaid into the solid rock. The torchlight also revealed stone slabs, like bunks, covering the floor. The cavern held room upon room with large seating areas. Around her, ancient chains lined the walls, most broken but a few looking as if they had been used only yesterday. Sarah picked out evidence of fire pits, long dead, in the center of the cavern, lining a deep grotto. The ancient stone flooring was worn smooth by the countless footsteps of slaves long dead.

Sarah moved the torch around, following the long history along the walls of what had to have been the Sincaro Indians and their Peruvian slave masters. Some images depicted load upon load of gold being mined from this site. Others were pictographs of strange green minerals being pulled from the depths of giant pits. She was studying one such rendering when a burst of steam erupted from the wall twenty feet to her right. She leaned down and felt the wet floor, and was amazed at how hot it was. She pulled her hand back and then touched the floor again, this time lightly. She knew then that, indeed, there was underground seismic activity here. That explained the difference in water temperature the deeper into the lagoon one went.

She held the torch up once again to examine the walls. There were depictions of many of the creatures she had seen in the diving bell. They stood like guards before the images of small men and women . These must be the Sincaro , she thought as she lightly touched one of the reliefs.

A clear picture was emerging: The beasts were trained in these lower levels to watch and feed the Sincaro. Whatever was mined here was too dangerous for the Inca to supervise. So they trained these beasts to be the Sincaro's overseers.

Sarah turned her attention to the skulls lining the walls. Not only were they small, presumably of the Sincaro, but there were also larger bones and skulls belonging to the strange creatures. So the fate of the overseers was the same as slave. Death.

Turning from the wall, she shined the torch along the center canal. It, too, was carved from the stone and looked to be twenty or thirty feet deep. Sarah suspected that these canals ran from the top of the pyramid, originating from the river that fed the interior falls, all the way through from level to level, transporting the ore from one level to another. She even saw crumbling block and tackle used to fight the gravity of the canal as ore was shipped up, indicating that she was in the very deepest part of El Dorado. The whole mine must have been inundated with these canals. It was the most ingenious method of moving ore from place to place that she had ever heard of.

Something grunted in the darkness beside the moving water and Sarah held up the torch in that direction. Her eyes widened when she saw the large creature rise from the man-made canal and swim easily into the large grotto that took up the entire center of the huge cave. It came to shallow water and stood, fully eight feet tall. The large, powerful-looking arms were laid easily at its side.

Sarah swallowed and looked up at the creature. She remembered its huge black eyes from the diving bell incident. She winced as she moved her broken wrist and then a memory returned.

"You pulled me out of the boat, didn't you?"

The beast moved its legs as it shifted weight from one leg to the other. Its gills on either side of it jawline moved in and out as its mouth opened and closed, obviously trying to breathe in enough air to have strength on land. She realized that although the creature was amphibious at the very least, its underdeveloped lungs must not be capable of sustaining it for long periods out of the water.

"Wouldn't Ellenshaw love to get a look at you? I think he would crap himself," she muttered.

Viewing the animal close up, without the color-deluding dark waters of the lagoon interfering, she could see that it was really just an enormous mutation of a freshwater cichlid, a mild-mannered species one could buy in any aquarium-supplies store in the States.

Sarah studied the swaying creature as it studied her, more than just intrigued, but that still didn't mean that this magnificent being didn't scare the hell out of her.

The beast barked hoarsely twice and then slowly began to move off toward the deeper water. Trusting it not to attack her, Sarah turned back to the pictures that seemed to glow against the light, and reexamined the ancient drawings. She looked closely at the mineral that the creatures brought from deep in the mine and wondered what it was. Emeralds, maybe? She held the torch closer to the wall and saw the spot that depicted the area where the dead were placed. She saw that both Sincaro and the creatures were buried side by side, as if they were equals in their misery and finally their deaths.