‘Tell him, Jamie. Tell him it all.’
He looked up to see Sarah standing at the top of the stairs. ‘All right.’ He nodded. And told Tenzin about Walter Brohm and the discovery that would change the world.
The crater was enormous and as Jamie watched through binoculars from a sheltered hide on the rim a mile away, he realized Tenzin had been right and there had never been any chance they would get close to the shaft, never mind inside it. Chinese soldiers swarmed round the entrance while bulldozers and earth-moving equipment stripped the earth for hundreds of yards around and loaded it on to lorries that shuttled back and forth up a roadway of crushed rock that had been dug into the crater side.
‘Let me see.’ Reluctantly, he gave the binoculars up to Sarah who had been twitching impatiently at his side.
‘Make sure the sun doesn’t catch the lens,’ he warned.
‘I’m not an idiot, Saintclair.’ She focused on the digging operation. ‘This has to be costing them millions. Most of the equipment would have been flown in by helicopter. Whatever they’re mining here must be incredibly valuable.’
‘It is not a mine, it is a shrine,’ Tenzin said patiently. ‘A sacred place for a thousand years. And they are digging up nothing but worthless earth and rock. They seek the Sun Stone, or traces of its passing, but you cannot steal what has already been stolen.’
Sun Stone. The hair stood up on the back of Jamie’s neck as he heard the phrase for the first time.
‘Long before Buddha’s time, a meteorite landed here.’ Tenzin saw Jamie’s look. ‘Yes, Mr Saintclair, I’m something of an amateur geologist – I picked it up at Cambridge when I was studying applied physics, and a monk has plenty of time for reading. As you can see, it must have been very large to cause a crater of this size. Ninety per cent of the object would have burned up in the atmosphere and when it struck it would have disintegrated on impact, creating a huge dust cloud. This is an area rich in such craters, though most are much smaller. Once, a man could become rich collecting the residue of fallen meteorites, glassified minerals known as tektites. But this was a meteorite like no other. It contained a substance so indestructible that it drove a tunnel eight feet in diameter a mile and a half into the living rock. If you move a little to the left, Miss Grant, you will see the entrance to the shaft.’
‘How do you know so much about all this?’ Sarah asked.
‘It has been passed down through the generations,’ Tenzin said simply, as if no further explanation was required. ‘The Holy Men of that time believed the devastation the meteorite caused was the wrath of the Sun god. They came here to carry out a ritual that would appease the god.’
‘A sacrifice?’
Tenzin nodded sadly. ‘They were less enlightened times. Seven prisoners were led down the shaft the meteor had driven into the earth, but as they prepared the victims for the sacrifice they discovered something astonishing.’
Jamie found he was holding his breath and when he looked at Sarah, he saw her eyes were wide, like a little girl listening to a frightening bedtime story.
‘The Sun Stone. It was like nothing they had ever seen before – dark, perfectly spherical – and it had a quality that amazed them. It was not subject to the laws of gravity. Or more correctly it was gravity neutral. It floated. The ancients believed that the Sun god had sent them the seed of the earth’s destruction and they feared it. They decided that it must never again be touched by the light of its creator. For two hundred generations the Sun Stone was kept in its lead-lined casket, never again to pollute the earth or the water or the air. Then the Germans came.’
XLVI
BACK IN THE relative sanctuary of the monastery, Sarah stared into the flickering, oxygen-starved flames of a tiny fire. Thick cloth squares covered the windows of this lower room to ensure no light could escape, and the smoke filtered up through a hole in the roof to dissipate through openings in the upper storeys. She could hear the soft snicker and rustle as the building’s population of bats prepared for their nightly hunt. The contrast between now and the immense focusing of technology they had witnessed earlier made her head swim. It was as if she had been sucked into some kind of time warp that had swept her back to the fourteenth century. Yet the reality of the crater had accompanied them like some vengeful spectre and was here all around them in the room.
‘So the Sun Stone is the key? Walter Brohm discovered a substance from another world and was determined to exploit it?’
‘Whatever we happen to think of Brohm, he was a brilliant physicist,’ Jamie agreed. ‘Right up there with Oppenheimer, maybe even Einstein. It wouldn’t have taken him long to work out that this was something completely outside his experience.’