Berger nodded, his face a frowning mask of concentration, the expression he thought conveyed ideological commitment, but which only made him look as if he suffered from chronic constipation. Brohm was surprised at his own feelings. He should be anxious at being volunteered for such a hazardous enterprise. Instead, it was as if this cave had been waiting for him all his life. It held no terrors, quite the opposite. He felt as if he were being welcomed.
Gruber checked their bindings and roped himself into line behind Jigme. Twelve-foot lengths of hand-tested climbing rope linked the five men and each had been issued with a torch and spare batteries. Like the others, Brohm’s pack contained food and water for three days. The Germans carried side arms, although for the life of him he couldn’t think what they were going to shoot. With a nod to Berger, Gruber jerked the rope linking him to the Tibetan. ‘Go,’ he ordered.
They walked in reverential silence, like pilgrims entering a cathedral. Jigme’s steps were tentative, as if every footfall had the capacity to plunge him down a shaft to the centre of the earth. He swept the ground in front of him with the torch and then swept it again. The beam lit up the tunnel for ten or twelve paces ahead, but beyond it lay the darkness of the tomb, unforgiving and eternal. Superstition was as central to Jigme’s life as it is to every Tibetan, but nothing had prepared him for the inner terror he felt as he inched his way forward. Familiarity brought no lessening of the fear, because each step took him further from safety and closer to the demons that inhabited this place. He knew nothing of Atlantis, but his finely tuned senses told him they were not alone in the darkness. If he could, he would have broken free and fled back to the surface, but Gruber had tied his knots with a climber’s efficiency. There was no escape.
Roped behind Gruber, Walter Brohm could feel his leader’s impatience at their slow progress, but it was clear no amount of threats would make the Tibetan guide move any faster. A barely discernible draught tickled the back of Brohm’s neck and made him think there must be another opening somewhere ahead. Given the angle of their descent it seemed unlikely, but at least the draught meant the air down here was relatively fresh. Most of Brohm’s senses, though, were concentrated on his immediate surroundings. He allowed Gruber to pull him along and used the torch to study the tunnel walls. What could have created a shaft as uniform as this? He would have expected some signs of erosion, most probably from an ancient water source, but there were none. Instead the walls, which surprisingly dripped with moisture, appeared as smooth as glass. And the perfect circle was an illusion. Beneath his feet the floor of the tunnel was horizontal, though uneven. In the torchlight it looked like the petrified surface of a lake.
As he marched, his mind discarded the possibilities one by one until he was able to see the tunnel in an entirely different way. The walls didn’t just look like glass, they were glass, or at least vitrified stone. Whatever had made this passage had created a heat so intense that it had actually melted the rock. He had recognized the great saucer in the plateau above as the impact crater of a meteorite, a celestial object, in this case a very large one, which had struck the earth several thousand years earlier. It appeared that some element within the meteor had survived the impact, retaining enough mass, heat and power to allow it to cut through the solid rock in much the same way as the new armour-piercing shells from the experimental weapons facility at Stuttgart cut through layers of metal. The possibilities were fascinating.
He couldn’t be certain how far they had travelled when he heard the sound, but his disbelieving brain told him it must be more than a mile. At first it was just a whisper in the still air that brought Jigme to a faltering stop. Gruber snarled at him to go on, but it took a sharp push in the back with a pistol barrel to encourage the Tibetan’s feet to move. Brohm felt the tension grow with every step and the sound increased in volume until it became hauntingly familiar. It was impossible. What they could hear was the solemn rhythmic chant of the Buddhist monk. A few steps later they saw the flickering yellow shadow light of an oil lamp ahead, accompanied by the faint, rancid scent of yak butter oil.
Gruber pulled Jigme to a halt and untied him so that they could move forward side by side, signalling with the pistol for the others to follow. By now the musical chanting echoed from the walls and it was clear it came from more than one voice. Astonished, they approached the small chamber that marked the end of the tunnel. It was wider than the shaft and Brohm noticed evidence of tool marks that told him this, at least, was man-made. Gruber muttered what might have been a curse or a prayer and Brohm heard gasps from behind as the others reached the chamber. What he found there made him wonder if he had gone mad.