Indiana Jones and the Secretof the Sphinx (23 page)

Something moved in the water around her.

A pair of anacondas wrapped themselves around her torso and lifted their heads from the water. They were not big snakes as anacondas go—they were perhaps twelve or fifteen feet in length—but at any moment Indy expected to hear the cracking of her rib cage as the snakes squeezed the life out of her.

Instead, the snakes serpentined around the Queen's torso like a pair of tame cats. The Queen's mouth went slack, and her eyelids fluttered in religious ecstasy.

Then the snakes left her and made instead for the bank of the pool, where the slave sacrifices knelt beneath the obsidian blades of the warriors.

"Hey!" Indy shouted, moving closer. "Get up! Get out of there! At least make a run for it."

Indy pulled out the Webley, drew a careful bead on the head of the larger of the snakes, and fired. The Webley barked, but the slug did no damage. He squeezed off the remaining rounds in the cylinder, but there was not so much as a splash of water behind the snake to indicate that a slug had even been fired.

The snakes took the closest victim first. They slithered up his legs, wrapped themselves around his abdomen, and began to squeeze the life out of him while he shook with fear. When they were finished with him, they rolled him into the cenote, the sacred pool. Then they went to the next in line and began to repeat the process.

"Fight!" Indy said. "Why don't you fight?"

One of the slaves in the middle of the sacrificial line, a powerfully built young woman whose mouth was still swollen from a recent beating, kept her head down but watched the approach of the snakes from beneath half-closed lids. Indy saw her take a deep breath, watched the muscles in her arms and legs tense, and helplessly shouted encouragement when she turned and sent a knee into the groin of the warrior who guarded her.

The soldier gasped and the slave girl snatched the obsidian sword from his grasp. In one two-handed movement she brought the blade slashing up against his throat, nearly decapitating him. As the guard's body fell to the ground she released a war cry that was so alarming the birds fled the surrounding trees.

She slashed the ropes that bound her ankles. But instead of racing down the steps of the pyramid toward freedom, she turned instead in the direction of the high priest. She plunged the blade into his stomach, then leaped into the cenote and splashed frantically toward the Queen. Although the sun was now hidden by a cloud, the Crystal Skull blazed even more fiercely than before.

The Queen smiled and opened her arms as if to embrace her.

Then a half dozen baseball-sized stones struck the slave girl's body, propelled with mechanical force by the warriors with the heavy sticks. The stones broke bones wherever they struck her body: her back, her ribs, her left arm. But despite these injuries, she maintained her forward motion and managed to draw the sword with her unbroken right arm.

The slave girl was about to bring it down upon the smiling Queen's head when a last stone struck the base of her skull, and all life went out of her body. The sword fell impotently into the water. She fell facedown in the water, with a growing rose-colored bloom around her head.

Indy turned away.

The Crystal Skull glowed so brightly on the stone altar that it seemed on fire. Then, the jaw dropped and a black cloud began issuing from its mouth.

Indy's vision blurred as the cloud engulfed him.

When he could see again, he was standing in front of the heaping ruins of the Temple of Serpent. The jungle was once more in command. But on the ground at his feet was a granite rock the size of a baseball, covered with hair and fresh blood.

Epilogue

He found the professor on the Quadrangle, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, eating a sandwich from a sack lunch beside him. The man was just past fifty, but already he had the distracted mannerisms of age. Or, perhaps he had always had. His graying hair was a bird's nest of tangles. His clothes were rumpled and somewhat mismatched, and when he crossed his legs Indy noticed he wasn't wearing socks. As the professor slowly ate his sandwich, his unfocused eyes were fixed above the spires and rooftops of Princeton University.

Indy stood uncomfortably some yards from the bench, his fedora in his hands, unwilling to disturb the professor's apparent reverie. But the expectant, worried look on Indy's face was enough to warrant the older man's attention.

"Come," the professor finally said with a wave of his hand and a glance toward Indy. "Are you going to stand there all day or are you going to speak?"

"I didn't want to disturb you," Indy said sheepishly.

"And you think your staring is not disturbing?"

"Pardon me," Indy said. "It was rude."

Indy turned to go.

"Wait, wait," the older man said. "Come and sit beside me. I'm the one who is being rude now, I'm afraid. What is on your mind? Something interesting, I hope. Perhaps you are merely an autograph seeker? I do not understand this American obsession with fame."

"No, professor," Indy said as he sat down on the bench, his hat still in his hands. "I haven't come for your autograph, or for your picture. I've come for your advice."

"Advice," the man said and chuckled. "Everybody wants my advice these days. I'm afraid you have come to a very poor source for that. I have been accused of being a not very practical person, of spending too much time in my head and not enough time in the world. Do you know what I was thinking just now? I was thinking of how beautiful the clouds are, and how I would stare at them through the classroom window when I was a child."

"Did you like school?"

"I hated it," the professor said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I wanted to be in the clouds. School was dull, regimented, and sucked the very life out of young minds. I was a very unhappy little boy. What a shame we do this to our young."

Indy smiled.

"The advice I seek," he said, "is of a very impractical nature."

"Have I seen you before?"

"Yes, sir. I teach archaeology here. My name is Jones, and we have met once or twice. My friend Marcus Brody introduced us."

"I'm sorry, but I don't remember," the professor said.

"I'm sure you had more important things on your mind."

"Like clouds," the professor said and smiled mischievously. Then he finished his sandwich, dusted the crumbs from his hands, and rummaged in his lunch sack. He extracted a bright red apple, which he offered to Indy.

Indy was hungry. He placed the fedora on the ground between his feet. Then he polished the apple on his pant leg, regarded the shine of the bright red skin for a moment, and sank his teeth into it.

"What is this very impractical advice you seek?"

"Time," Indy mumbled as he wiped apple juice from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. "Why is it always
now?
Is it possible to return to the past, or to move ahead to the future? What exactly is time, anyway?"

The professor smiled.

"Time," he said, "is what you measure with a clock."

Indy waited patiently.

"That's it?" he asked when he realized nothing more was forthcoming.

"What more do you want?" the professor asked.

"I don't know," Indy said. "Answers, I suppose. After all, you are the world's greatest authority."

The older man scowled.

"That is fate playing a trick on me," he said. "I have questioned authority all of my life, and now I find
myself
an authority."

Indy was disappointed.

"I was hoping you could give me some ... validation," Indy said. "I have had some unusual experiences, in which miracles seemed possible. Time travel, even."

"You're asking me to tell you that you're not crazy," the professor said. "But I can't help you. I am merely a scientist, just another human being like yourself. The answers you seek, my son, are inside of you."

Indy nodded.

The professor smiled.

"One of the most incomprehensible things about the universe," the older man said, "is that we can comprehend it at all. But we are still in childhood, and as our understanding grows, so does our responsibility. We are all travelers in time, Dr. Jones. Live in the present, keep looking to the future, but always remember the past. And never forget to listen to your heart."

Afterword

Does magic work?

That question continues to nag, despite advances by science during the last three hundred years that would otherwise seem to lay the question to rest—with a resounding "No!"—once and for all. But the question is more than academic; it gets into the thorny area of belief, straddling the dark middle ground between superstition and religion.

There is a distinction between stage magic, which is used to entertain, and that which is done in an earnest attempt to influence natural or human events. Nobody makes that distinction clearer, or is more cynical of attempts at real magic, than professional magicians such as James Randi. Randi, through a foundation bearing his name, has a standing offer of more than a million dollars to anyone who can, on demand, demonstrate "any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability of any kind under satisfactory observing conditions." Although some have attempted, none have succeeded in winning the reward.

Randi's attitude, and that of the late Carl Sagan, author of
The Demon-Haunted World,
exemplifies the paradigm embraced by most scientists. If something cannot be verified by the experimental method, the hard line goes, then it does not exist. Anecdotal evidence that suggests the existence of ESP and other fringe beliefs is merely a manifestation of the human need to tell stories and sustain the understandable but childish habit of magical thinking. Indeed, there does appear to be a deep-rooted need for stories that perpetuate the belief in magic or otherworldly doings, as any researcher in "urban folklore" can tell you: Statues that weep blood, ghostly hitchhikers that disappear upon arrival at their destination, and alien beings that commit abductions with sexual overtones hark back to tales told in earlier centuries.

A somewhat softer attitude has been taken by researchers such as Rupert Sheldrake, author of
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World.
Sheldrake argues that ESP and other traditionally taboo topics have been neglected for too long by mainstream science. It is time, Sheldrake says, to test these phenomena on a wide scale, and it doesn't take big money in the form of endowments or research grants to do it.

"This book is not only about a more open kind of science," Sheldrake writes, "but about a more open way of
doing
science: more public, more participatory, less the monopoly of a scientific priesthood." He suggests seven shoestring experiments for the layperson to test—for example, the seemingly psychic ability of pigeons to home and the common human sensation of being stared at. About 80 percent of people have experienced the latter, Sheldrake says, and the phenomenon is closely related to the ancient "Evil Eye"—a belief in negative influence that can be transmitted to another by the act of staring.

Magic is a part of all religious systems, or appears to be at least a part of the
origins
of all religions, although its importance to each system varies. In the nineteenth century, however, there was a trend in Judeo-Christian civilization to set magic apart from other religious phenomena and to describe cultures that practiced it as "primitive." Today, the distinction between magic and religion is less clear, although magic tends to be technical and impersonal—a means to an end, in other words—while religion has personal and spiritual overtones.

Egypt was called the "cradle of magic" by Albert A. Hopkins in his 1897 book documenting the world's most famous magic tricks, and for good reason. In addition to Pharaoh's magicians mentioned in Exodus, ancient papyri are rife with spells and incantations, and there survive plenty of magical documents from the apex of Eygptian magic, which occurred around the second century in Alexandria. Indeed, magic—at least professional magic, the conjurer's art—seems to have survived well in the twentieth century. Snake charming is still a widespread family business from Egypt to India.