The Medusa stone by Jack Du Brul

Author:Jack Du Brul [Brul, Jack Du]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780451409225
Publisher: New York : Onyx, c2000.
Published: 2000-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Valley of Dead Children

It was just before dusk when Habte, Selome, and Gibby arrived in the Valley of Dead Children on the half-loaded tractor trailer. Five minutes after the rig had crossed the secret bowl of land and trundled to the head gear, a bright yellow excavator tracked onto the plain, its hydraulic arm coiled to the boxy, rotatable cab. The operator had been forced to clear away part of the ancient landslide at the valley's entrance to allow the truck access to the mine site. Rather than reload the cumbersome machine, he'd driven it to the former Italian installation.

Wind whipped the dust of their progress across the landscape, eddies and gyres forming and collapsing in their wake. At the camp, both vehicles were shut down, and silence rushed in on them. Habte quickly followed Selome out of the truck, and he dodged into the main bunkhouse. Returning outdoors, he shielded his eyes against the red sun nestled on the western rim of the bowl and scanned for Mercer. The Toyota Land Cruiser was gone and there was no sign of him.

"Gibby," he called, and the boy scrambled off the trailer. "This is the right place. Where's Mercer?"

"I don't know," Gibby admitted. "He said he was going to wait here for us. He was upset that the mine was empty and seemed eager to talk to us. I can't guess where he went."

Habte ignored a creeping sens until I found this spot. The wind whips over the northern wall of the depression, curls back on itself in a vortex that can gust to about twenty miles an hour." Mercer used his finger to draw a crude sketch in the soil. The drawing showed the side of the mountain with a V-shaped symbol pointing at its flank.

"The tricky part comes when you need to channel the air into the shaft, concentrating the flow exactly where you want it. Now, look again on the desert floor right below us."

It was Gibby, with his younger, sharper eyes who saw it first. "There," he pointed. "I see what you drew."

There were two faint lines in the dirt, just a shade darker than the rest of the desert. They were two hundred feet long, angling toward each other so they nearly met below where the party stood. They were too geometrical for nature to be their creator. They were the work of man.

"What are they?"

"All that remains of the foundations of two huge walls. Judging by their width, I'd guess they were at least seventy feet tall, more than enough to catch the wind blowing off the mountains and channel it into a mine entrance. I'm sure there are some vents driven into the mountain to allow an escape outlet for the wind, but I'm not too concerned with those quite yet."

"You mean, we are standing on top of another mine?"

"That's right." Mercer tempered his excitement with difficulty. "A horizontal drift tunneled into the mountain."

"When was this excavated?" asked Habte.

"I don't know. We can check the foundations to get an idea, but it's not really important.

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