Indiana Jones and the Secretof the Sphinx (19 page)

"I knew you would come," she said. "But I have to admit, I was expecting something a little more artful than your simply sneaking up behind me."

"Ah, but it is effective," Jadoo said, regaining his composure. "Particularly when I bring an armed company with violence in their hearts."

Sokai and Lieutenant Musashi dropped down into the Sphinx enclosure, followed by Warrant Officer Miyamoto and a half dozen Japanese soldiers armed with submachine guns. Miyamoto barked orders and the soldiers trained their guns on Faye.

Jadoo closed the distance between himself and Faye and snatched the Staff from her hands.

"I never dreamed it would be in such fine shape," he exclaimed. "It has such weight still, and the wood has such a wonderful texture, almost as if it were part of a living tree." He brought the Staff to within inches of his nose. "The smell of fresh almonds!"

Faye crossed her arms and regarded Jadoo with scorn. A gentle wind came from the east, sending old newspapers and other trash skittering across the sand while gently stroking Faye's hair. Jadoo did not remember her hair being so shot full of gray.

"Tell me, have you attempted to conjure with it?"

Faye was silent.

Jadoo held the Staff in front of him, unsure of what to do next. Then he pointed it at the sky and commanded it to produce hail.

Faye laughed.

"No matter," Jadoo said. "I will find the words."

"I see that your little band of misfits has done much of the work for us," Sokai said as he approached. "I am particularly grateful that Dr. Jones has volunteered to test the passage for pitfalls. Tell me, are his fat friend and your tomboy daughter with him?"

Faye shrugged.

"So brave," Sokai commented with feigned sadness, "and yet so foolish."

"I have always listened to my heart instead of my head," she said.

Sokai parted his trench coat and drew his samurai sword from its folds. He leveled the sword at Faye, placed the tip right beneath her chin, and pushed just hard enough to draw a drop of blood.

"If you so much as call out," he said, "these soldiers will kill you. And if you cause trouble here on the surface while I am down there, I will without the slightest hesitation kill your brat. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Faye said.

"Good," Sokai said as he sheathed his sword. "Warrant Officer Miyamoto, keep a close watch on this American bitch. Lieutenant Musashi, follow me."

The stairs ended in a small room with no decoration. A small, square hole in the ceiling led to a long shaft.

"Give me a boost," Indy said.

Mystery put her hands together to make a stirrup for Indy's right boot, then helped lift him up to the ceiling. He put his hands on either side of the chimneylike shaft, but the pain from his injured shoulder made him wince and give a small cry.

"Let me," Mystery said.

"No, I can do it," Indy said as he dropped back down. "I just need a minute."

"We don't have a minute," Mystery said as she adjusted the coil of rope. "Let me, and then I can lower the rope for you. This is my type of thing, Dr. Jones."

"Too dangerous," he said.

"How dangerous do you think it will be when you fall twenty feet and land on this rock floor?" she asked as she jumped up and grasped the lip of the shaft, which only projected out a fraction of an inch, with her fingertips. She hung there for a moment, and then pulled herself up into the shaft, with her back to one wall and her feet against the other. She kicked off her shoes.

"All right," Indy said. "But be careful. Go slowly, and don't touch anything that looks suspicious. If you feel anything move, get out of the shaft quick."

"Don't you think I know anything?" Mystery asked.

"Yes, I do," Indy said. "I've just gotten kind of used to having you around, is all."

"I see a beam up above me," Mystery said as she made her way higher. She gave no sign that she recognized Indy's expression of fatherly sentiment.

"Is it wood or stone?" Indy asked.

"It's metal," she said.

"What kind?" Indy asked. "Copper?"

"Nope," Mystery said. "It's iron."

"It can't be iron," Indy said. "The structures at Giza were built before the Iron Age."

"Sure," she said. While Indy debated whether she should touch it, she grasped the beam and swung up into the next chamber. She tucked the lantern under one arm as she tied the rope around the beam. "It looks like iron, it feels like iron, it's as strong as iron, but it's not iron."

"Don't touch it," Indy called.

"Too late," Mystery said as she dropped the coil down the shaft.

Indy put his torch in his teeth, grasped the rope, and fought his way up the shaft to the beam to join Mystery. He found himself in a fairly spacious chamber of finished limestone, with no feature other than the beam—which Indy had to admit was iron—and a doorway to the north.

"Good job," Indy said.

"Thanks."

"The next chamber," Indy said and nodded toward the doorway. "The Hall of Truth. If the book truly exists, it will be in there. Are you ready?"

"I've been ready since I was twelve," Mystery said.

The entrance to the room was flanked by two massive marble columns; the one on the left was black, while the other was a brilliant white.

Indy held the torch aloft and stepped through the doorway, followed by Mystery and her electric lantern. There was a wavering musical chord, a major chord.

Mystery switched off her lantern.

It wasn't needed.

The room had become illuminated by some diffused, unseen light source. The floor, walls, and ceilings of the room were polished, rose-colored granite. In the middle of the room was a black granite pillar, and in relief on the pillar were a number of characters from various ancient languages—Sumerian, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Coptic, Greek, Chinese, and a couple that Indy did not recognize. The only character that Mystery recognized was the Greek one.

On the pillar was a book, or something that resembled a book but wasn't quite like any book either of them had ever seen: The pages of the book were of a highly polished, silvery metal, and they rippled—in time to the wavering music set off by the disturbance of the air that Indy and Mystery had caused merely by entering the room. The pages turned upon a golden spine, but they also went down inside the pillar, so that the book appeared endless.

"The Omega Book," Mystery said.

"Now I know I'm dreaming," Indy said.

"Does this feel like a dream?" Mystery asked as she pinched his forearm.

"No," Indy said, rubbing the spot.

"Then quit talking nonsense," she said. "My father said the book existed, and he was right. But this looks more like a machine or something than a book."

"The Ancient of Days, perhaps?" Indy asked as he tossed the torch onto the bare rock floor of the room behind them.

"What?" Mystery asked.

"The divine...
something
that gave mercy and bread to the Israelites each morning," Indy said. "Some people have said that the Bible's description of it sounds a little like a Stone Age people attempting to describe an automobile—eyes for headlights, a mouth for the radiator, that sort of thing."

"What do you think?"

"This could be it, and I wouldn't know."

"I wonder where the light is coming from," she said.

"From recessed mirrors or polished plates or crystals in the walls or ceiling," Indy responded. "I've seen some barrows in England which achieved nearly the same effect with light from the midwinter sun."

"Dr. Jones," Mystery said. "It's night outside, remember?"

"That is a problem with my theory," Indy said. "Anyway, be careful. There have been no traps or pitfalls so far to speak of on the second level, but there must be something deadly here."

"Maybe it's the book," Mystery said.

Indy nodded as he walked over to the pillar. He leaned down to examine the book, and the force of his breath turned the shimmering pages. On the right side, new pages rose to take the place of those that had disappeared into the base of the pillar.

"Are we on the wrong side?" Mystery asked. "Is the book upside down?"

"No," Indy said. "These ancient languages generally read from right to left."

He gently lifted a page between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. The page was so thin and light that he could not feel it between his fingers. The characters, which were about the size of newspaper type, were somehow cut into the page. There was a rainbow of colored sheets of the same material on top of the pillar.

"Can you read it?" Mystery asked.

"No," Indy said. "It doesn't make any sense to me. I wonder what these other sheets are for."

Mystery picked up the red sheet that was on top.

"This stuff is amazing," she said. "You bend it, and it springs right back into shape."

She experimented a moment with it, then crumpled it in a tight ball between her hands. When she released it, the sheet unfolded back into a perfect, uncreased page.

"I had this game when I was a child," she said. "It was a code book, and to read it you had to put a colored page over it. I wonder if it works like that."

Indy took the red sheet and slipped it behind the page.

"I'll be," he said. "Look, Chinese and Sanskrit and some other language I don't know."

Indy took the next sheet, which was blue, and slipped it behind the same page. Three columns of text appeared—one in Egyptian, one in Coptic, and the last in Greek.

"This is incredible," Indy said. "I've never seen anything like it—the
world
has never seen anything like it, at least not the world we know. We'll have to rewrite history. This is the archaeological discovery of the age."

"What's the page about?" Mystery asked.

"It's the life of a French farmer named Francois Malevil," Indy said. "Like the Rosetta stone, the three translations are identical. The dates are also given in different numbering systems. Let's see, it will take me a moment to reconcile the Greek with our present system."

Indy paused for a moment.

"The fourteenth century," he said.
"After Christ.
No, that can't be right. My God, it is. Look, this entry talks about a Roman soldier who died at Actium."

Indy gave in to his first instinct: He began turning the pages an inch at a time, scanning the names, eagerly searching for "Jones."

"This thing isn't in alphabetical order," he complained.

"What are you doing?" Mystery asked.

"Of course," Indy said, glancing at the dates. "It's in chronological order."

"What are you looking for?"

"My own name."

"No," Mystery said. "You can't. We aren't supposed to know."

"The book—," he stammered.

"Don't you see?" she said. "This is the last trap. You can look up anybody else's name but your own. You've got the ultimate archaeological reference here. Look up Jesus or Joan of Ark, but not Indiana Jones."

Indy stopped.

"I'm right," Mystery said. "You know I am."

"Seventeen-year-olds are so sure of themselves."

"This one certainly is," she said. "The world isn't ready for this."

"Then what are we doing here?" Indy asked.

"I'm here for one reason only, and that's to find out what happened to my father," Mystery said. "You're here because I can't read any of the languages that book is written in."

Indy paused.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I hadn't thought of that before," Indy said. "There are people missing from my life I'd like to look up, but I don't think I should."

He flipped through the book, looking for the 1930s.

"The book gets thicker as you go forward in time," he said. "More people to keep track of, I guess. Okay, I'm getting close. Going through the twenties now."

Mystery nodded.

"Let's see," Indy said. "Maskelyne... Believe it or not, there are several. When was your father born?"

"Eighteen ninety-three."

"Okay, Kaspar Maskelyne. Born July 16, 1893, at Leeds."

"That's him."

Indy ran his finger down the text, reading to himself.

"Yes?" Mystery asked.

"This stuff isn't as easy to read as the baseball scores in the morning paper," Indy said as he took a green sheet and inserted it behind the page. "I'm not all that fluent in Sanskrit, okay? Let me check it with—"

The wavering music chimed again.

"Dr. Jones," Sokai said as he stamped out Indy's smoldering torch in the outer room with the heel of an expensive but well-scuffed black shoe. "Don't you know you shouldn't be so careless with fire?"

Lieutenant Musashi, who was behind him, laughed wickedly.

Sokai unsheathed his sword as he entered the room.

"I see that you have found the prize which we all seek. Is it as exciting as we had hoped?"

"Where's Sallah?" Indy asked.

"We found him in the corridor," Sokai said. "He is now outside, with the woman, being guarded by Warrant Officer Miyamoto and his troops. Move away from the book."

Indy did so.

"How unfortunate for you that we meet again. I will be extracting more than an eye in restitution from you. I was thinking an organ closer to your... well, heart, for lack of a better word, would do nicely and we'd go on from there. Wouldn't want you to die too quickly now, would we?"

"Don't get your hopes up," Indy said.

"Who is this creep?" Mystery asked.

"This is Sokai," Indy said. "He's the one who started all this trouble for me in the first place."

"Quiet," Sokai said as he handed the sword to Musashi. "Skewer them if they move."

Sokai approached the book, his one good eye gleaming in the soft light. He leaned over to examine the page, then frowned.

"What's wrong?" Indy taunted. "Can't read Sanskrit?"

"Get over here," Sokai demanded, not realizing that another of the colored sheets would have rendered the text in Mandarin, a language he could read.

Indy walked over slowly.

"How does this work?" Sokai asked.

"I have no idea," Indy said.

"No, I mean the entries," Sokai said impatiently. "They tell the past, present, and future? Find my entry and read it to me. If I know what lies ahead, then I can bend things to my will."