David Golemon - Legend

As they listened the floor beneath their submerged feet began to rumble. Then a soft green glow started to illuminate the interior of the room. Chunks of tritium touched off by the brightness of the torchlight before the door slammed down had started the reaction it needed to gather its internal energy and start to brighten. Jack quickly found Sarah as the rumbling below grew to a fever pitch.

"This isn't going to be pleasant," she said as she locked eyes with him.

"What's happening?" Virginia asked. She started to feel that the floor and the water around her were heating up. "What is this thing?"

"It's what the ancient Inca used as an escape route in case of collapse. The mine must be sprinkled with them."

"I don't like the sound of this," the badly injured Jenks said.

"Sprinkled with what?" Carl asked as he took the floating Sarah and held onto her.

"I think we're in an elevator."

"A what?" several people asked at once.

"An elevator!" Sarah shouted.

At just that moment the rumbling stopped and suddenly they heard a great hissing as the water around them became almost unbearable with heat. Then in an instant, an explosion rocked the chamber and all inside were pressed underwater as centrifugal force sent them all to the bottom.

Five thousand years ago, the Inca had feared being trapped in cave-ins far more than they dreaded any other possible disaster. Consequently, they had engineered the most ingenious escape platform the ancient world had ever devised. They had taken a naturally formed shaft that ran up and outward to the top of their excavated pyramid and had drilled a shaft beneath the flooring of the lowest cavern. Once reaching the boiling lava flow two thousand feet below, the Inca had capped the well at the cost of over a thousand slaves' lives. The chamber had been fitted to precise specifications inside the naturally formed shaft, which had been smoothed to a finish that would have made any future stonemason proud. The seal formed a natural tube that was as close to airtight as humanly possible at the time. Sarah had heard a rumor of the technology advanced by the University of Southern California, following a large dig inside the ruins of the northern Yucatan site of Chichen Itza. She had remembered the specifications — and now had prayed the Inca had gotten it right. They had.

The chamber was propelled up through the interior of the giant pyramid at eighty miles an hour, and was gradually building speed. The pressure buildup under the chamber had been unleashed when Sarah had activated the fulcrum release, and that in turn had brought down ten tons of iron weight onto the stone caps that had been sealed five thousand years before by the elevators' original designers. The immediate release of so much pressure and steam just beneath the designed escape apparatus had no difficulty in forcing the stone chamber up and into the smoothed shaft. The only problem the Inca had failed to see was that of stopping. Even Sarah, the professor who taught her, and many others who had studied the system in classrooms across the globe were unable to figure out the problem. It was assumed that since the shaft and the chamber itself weren't perfect, the pressure would eventually bleed off. But there was controversy in that lone theory. No one had been able to see any logical explanation as to how this could be controlled. In essence, they could be traveling in an express train with no brakes.

As the centrifugal force increased, all inside sputtered to the surface of the rapidly shallowing water as it was forced out of the minute cracks in the chamber. They could feel the speed gathering as the elevator roared upward into the unknown parts of the pyramid.

"Oh, shit," Kelly said as she hugged Robby.

"I hate this!" the master chief announced.

Suddenly the chamber tilted, as the elevator started to climb the steep, inverted slope of the inside of the great pyramid. Everyone screamed as the angle changed and they lost their footing. Jenks screamed in agony as Jack lost his balance and fell, crashing them both to the floor. The angle of ascent finally stabilized as the enclosure made its way up toward the uppermost reaches of El Dorado.

"We're slowing!" Sarah shouted.

Beneath the flooring of the chamber, the pressure was bleeding off the higher they climbed. The Incan engineers had calculated the length of the escape against the distance the pressurized wave could travel through the shaft, a simple formula that most would have considered impossible. And it would have been, even by the Inca, if several hundred Sincaro hadn't been used as guinea pigs in its weight-to-pressure-ratio experimental development.

Without warning, a tremendous hissing exploded with ear-hurting sound through the stone walls of the chamber. Outside, as the elevator passed the third level from the top, another fulcrum release was ripped that opened a series of stone valves in the shaft. Steam and pressure was rapidly bled off in a calculated feat of engineering that was designed to evacuate the shaft of pressure that was left over after the push to the top. At the same time as the bone-crushing stop on the upper level slammed everyone once again to the floor, the passing chamber tripped a series of stone nubs that broke away and allowed spring-loaded logs, hewn and covered with amber thousands of years before as a preservative, to pop free of the shaft through drilled holes. Six of these shot out under the chamber and arrested it just as it rebounded off the stone ceiling.

The wall that had closed to seal them in broke free and crashed into a large chamber where the elevator had come to rest. Dust swirled about as coughing and crying could be heard. From somewhere high above, natural light filtered into the highest chamber of the pyramid as Jack quickly stood and pulled Jenks out.

"Quick, Carl, get everyone out!" the major shouted.

Now the others heard what he had, the splintering of wood coming from the shaft. There was a general panic as the students rushed, were pulled, or crawled out of the elevator as the popping and cracking became louder. Just as Sarah cleared the doorway, the elevator gave a huge lurch and then it quickly vanished back down the shaft in the swirl and vacuum of the air.

As they all looked at one another in turn, most still in shock at their double narrow escape, the silence seemed to be a blessing.

"I guess the brakes gave out," Sarah said weakly as she turned over and lay on her back to stare upward at the intricately carved pyramid top two hundred feet up.

But of course it was the gruffness of the man in the most pain who broke the ice of terror that shrouded the company. Jenks sat up on one elbow and looked around.

"Goddamned Incans can't design worth a shit!"

The dim light at the top of the pyramid had faded to nothing as Jack gathered torches and relit them and passed them around.

The new level they were in was fresher than anything they had come across since their arrival inside El Dorado. Jack had surveyed the extreme topmost of the apex and found the main vents that gravity fed the canal system throughout the mine. The point of the pyramid must have protruded from the river above, as its windows were above the surface. The torrent of water came down inside a culvert from the falls above and emptied into another large grotto at the center of the floor. The speed of the current was adjustable, he could see, by a system of floodgates controlled from this room. A large handle was set into one stone wall, and that in turn was attached to a dam door. The flow of water into the grotto was smooth and even, creating a current of a gentle five or six miles an hour down the gravity-fed canal system.

"There must be close to three hundred miles of interior canals inside the mine. The structure is unlike anything uncovered in history. A team could spend a lifetime in here and never uncover anything," said a woman's voice.