The Stone Book of Atlantis

         John Martin tucked the rolled-up map back into his knapsack and took his lantern back Paul. This was the right way, he was sure of it now. He looked as far down the passage way as the light permitted. As far as John could tell, the corridor seemed to go on forever, curving slightly to the left. According to the map, the passageway should intersect with another at some point, but it didn’t say when. The map had been copied from an ancient scroll found in a Tibetan monastery, captured by the Nazis, and stolen by British spies before finally being delivered to the American Government. This particular copy dated back about one thousand years, but the information on it purportedly dated back to the Tower of Babel, giving the owner directions to the Stone Book of Atlantis.
         The Stone Book of Atlantis was an artifact so obscure that few people had heard even a rumor of its existence. A compendium of antediluvian knowledge, the tome contained the secrets of the lost pre-flood civilization. Apparently Plato had been on to something, but with the wrong set of facts. It had taken forty days and nights for Atlantis to disappear into the depths. How and why the book had come into existence remained a mystery, but Soon after his rise to power, Hitler had learned of its secrets  and decided it would be to his advantage to possess such an artifact. When the United States Government had learned of the incredible power to be gained from the Book and Hitler’s plan to have it retrieved from its ancient hiding place, President Roosevelt had given the military permission to send the team of three archeologists to keep the book from falling into Nazi hands.
         The three of explorers, John Martin, Paul Chambers, Rob Taylor, had been traversing the tunnels for a little over a week, following the ancient map. Whoever had carved the tunnels must have assumed that the treacherously narrow thousand foot staircase preceding entrance the complex proper would have deterred any would-be pillagers, so any traps were mercifully absent. Unfortunately the Germans were not as absent. The team of archeologists had arrived only a day before their rivals and had only maintained a tenuous lead.
         As he walked along the corridor, John paid attention to the walls and floor. Carving these passages must have taken years, with hundreds of years of traffic required to smooth the walls and floor. He wished he had more time to study this place, though there wasn’t much to be seen. The few rooms that were there were little more than caverns with level floors and no furniture. Behind him, Rob, muttered, “Thousands of years these tunnels have been here, you’d expected at least some dust, but nothing.”
         The passage came to an abrupt end. Spilling out onto a walkway carved into the chasm wall, it stretched away to the left of the opening. An immense gulf yawned before them.
         “Did we miss a turn somewhere?” Paul asked, hair mussed from his nervous habit of constantly combing his hair with his fingers. He hated enclosed spaces.
         John shrugged, “Maybe not so much a turn as a couple landmarks, but I think this is the way.”
         “Well,” Rob said, checking his copy of the map, “This looks like the chasm on the map. There’s the walkway on the left, circling the chasm, I’d say we’re on the right track.”
         “Let’s go on then.” John said. “We don’t know how much far ahead we are.”
         “There’s the food and water issue too.” Paul added, “We’re running low on both.”
         The team struck out onto the ledge, keeping as close to the wall as possible. The chamber was massive. The lantern light failed to reach the far wall.
         As they walked, Rob said, “I wonder what’s down there?”
         John lit a flare and tossed it over the side. After several moments, they heard a small plop. “Water, apparently.”
         As the walkway stretched on, John detected a gradual upward slope and curve. They were making progress, and were probably almost out of this chamber. As he looked out across the chasm, his blood froze. Beams of light lanced from the hole in the wall, and then someone shouted something in German. Paul shouted to duck. This sounded like a good idea.
         John ducked and extinguished his lantern as bullets ricocheted off of the rocks around him. Behind him, Paul and Rob doused their lights as well, covering the group in a shroud of darkness. Bullets still pinged and cracked on the rocks, but any hit would now be sheer luck. Their ledge was higher than the one on which their attackers stood and recessed into the wall, providing a measure of cover. The gunfire abated somewhat, so John crept toward the edge and looked across the chasm. Four lanterns glowed brightly, casting the twenty gray uniformed figures into sharp relief. On the right sleeve of each gray uniform was a bright red armband each emblazoned with a swastika within a white circle. The Nazis had caught up with them.
         This group wasn’t the whole of the two-hundred man Nazi contingent, but it was enough to cause trouble. The rest of the expedition was behind this group, waiting to exit the tunnel onto the ledge. The Americans were losing their lead, and the Germans were quickly closing the gap.
         Paul and Rob had eased their pistols from their holsters and slid ammo clips into the guns, waiting on John. His pistol had been in his hand from the moment the bullets had started flying. Drawing bead on the German leading the way, John pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed and reechoed off the walls of the chasm as the soldier lurched and stumbled over the edge. The sound of gunfire filled the air as the two sides exchanged fire; the Americans picking off German soldiers on the well lit ledge as the German MP-40s fired almost blindly into the darkness. With moments, the surviving Germans had pulled back into the tunnel, leaving twelve gray-uniformed bodies on the walkway.
         As Paul and Rob kept a watch on the tunnel, John pulled the rolled up map from his pack and spread it out on the ground. Digging around in his shirt pocket, he pulled out a match and struck it. Ignoring the occasional gunshot and scream behind him, John examined the map. The main thing was to get off this ledge. Scanning the paper, he found that the ledge eventually ran into a chamber that served as a junction for four tunnel, one of which led to the Book Chamber. There wasn’t anywhere that they could make a stand and drive the Nazis back, but maybe they could keep them from catching up. John blew the match out and flicked it over the edge.
         John turned back to his companions, “You two all right?”
         “Yeah.” Paul replied shakily.
         “None the worse for the wear,” Rob said, relighting one of the lanterns, “But I’d like it if we didn’t have to do any more of this.”
         “We need to move.”
         “Y’think?” Paul shot back. The lanky archeologist was never at a loss for sarcasm. “I told you coming down here at all was a bad idea.”
         “I meant off this ledge. I could shoot Nazis all day, but we don’t have the time or the bullets for that,” said John. John‘s brother, George, had been killed by Germans in the Great War, but this was no time for a vendetta. “Let‘s move.”
         Rob nodded, “Yeah, but how can we keep them from following us?”
         “Is there any dynamite left?” John asked
         “What?” The surprise in Paul’s voice was evident.
         “We were sent down here to get to the book first. Getting back after we’re done is a secondary priority.”
         “I don’t know about you two, but I’d like to not die half a mile underground.” Rob replied. John could sympathize with this. Both Rob and Paul had wives and children on the surface, and John had been caring for his younger sister since their parent’s deaths five years ago.
         “So would I.” John said, “Let’s make for the tunnels. Maybe something will present itself.”
         The ledge ended a couple hundred feet rounding a corner on the wall, and ran into the large junction chamber. John consulted his map. The second tunnel from the left led to the Book Chamber, and the others wound around in circles, going nowhere in particular.
         “So what’ll we do?” Paul asked.
         John thought for a moment that he didn‘t have. He glanced at the tunnel. It was about six feet wide. “The Germans probably have a copy of the map, so they won’t fall for a decoy.” A thought occurred to him. “But what if we made giving up more advantageous than coming in after us?
         “How?”
         “Collapse the tunnel.”
         Rob nearly dropped the lantern. “Are you crazy?”
         “Maybe,” John replied, “Look, it’ll take maybe two sticks to collapse the tunnel. On the way back, we use another to help use dig out.”
         “And get shot.” Paul put in.
         “Maybe not,” said John.
         “That,” Rob said, “would take a miracle.”
         “The Bible’s full of them.”
         Any further debate was interrupted by someone shouting in German. The Nazis were just around the bend. The glow of a lantern could be seen on the ledge.
         Paul pulled two sticks of dynamite from his pack and handed them to John, “Looks like we’re going with your plan.”
         The three men fled down the tunnel as the German shouting intensified. They had been seen. John fumbled with one hand to pull a match from his pocket, finally grasping one. As he ran, he stuck the match on the wall and it flared to life, only to be snuffed out by a passing bullet. That was too close. He pulled another and struck it, shielding it with his body. Lighting one the fuses, he tossed the stick on the floor behind him, hoping the fuse was longer than it looked. The explosion seconds later told him it hadn’t been.
         A cloud of dust chased them out of the tunnel and onto a landing hanging from the chamber wall. When the dust had settled and the coughing had stopped, the explorers stared across the chamber in awe. An ethereal blue light permeated the space, revealing a chamber almost a mile across. An enormous mural was carved into the white stone dome of the chamber, depicting the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood in gigantic proportion. Tranquil water lay below them, mirroring the mural on the above.
         In the center of the chamber was a pillar, towering over the water and linked to the terrace by a stone bridge. It was onto this bridge that the three archeologists now stepped. Crossing the gulf slowly, almost reverently, the men approached the pedestal where the Stone Book of Atlantis had rested for thousands of years.
         Reaching the pedestal, they saw an intricately carved stone box on sitting on an equally intricate stone table. The men worked quickly and silently, lifting the heavy lid off of the box and setting it on the floor. All three looked inside the box. A plain stone cover stared back at them. As one, the men lifted the book from its crypt and balanced it on the side of the box. The pages were stone plates, bound together by three rings of some brown metal. The three men stared at it for a moment.
         “So do we open it?” Paul asked.
         John shrugged, “I don’t see what harm it would do have a look. After all, the odds of getting out of here don’t look so good.” With that, he turned the cover over, revealing the first page.
         Diagrams of fearsome war machines presented themselves to the explorers. Flying weapons that destroyed whole cities with a single shot, steam-powered giants that crushed buildings in their hands, horrific fusions of machine and man that tore through fleeing crowds; the Book was full of such monstrosities and the instructions needed to construct them.
         “No wonder God destroyed them.” Paul said.
         “They fell so far in so short a time.” John added, “There’s a lesson to be learned here.”
         “Pride goes before a fall?” Rob suggested.
         “Close enough.” John replied. He stood up straight. “We can’t take this with us. It would be horrible for the Germans to get their hands on it, but it might be just as bad for the Americans to have it.”
         “Yeah,” Rob said. “This writing wouldn’t be too hard to translate.”
         “So we could be seeing this kind of stuff in the States.” Paul added. “But what do we do with it?”
         Minutes later, the three men looked on from the landing as the top of the pillar exploded, taking the Book with it. What was left of the bridge snapped off with an ear-splitting crack, plunging into the water below. When the ripples had faded from the surface, John, Paul, and Rob turned and walked back into the tunnel. They knew that they were probably all going to die; however, the fact that they had kept the same evil that had destroyed the world once from surfacing again did bring some consolation. They might not survive, but those they cared for would be safe
         As they neared the piled of rubble, Rob glanced over to his right, and stopped. He looked again. “Hey guys!” He said, “Come here!”
         When Paul and John joined him, he pointed at a large crack in the wall, just big enough for a man to fit through, and as they inspected it more closely, they felt something.
         “Is that a draft?” John asked.
         “That’s a draft.” Paul confirmed.
         Rob stepped through the crack and entered a large circular chamber. Looking up, he thought he could discern a pinprick of light high above him, shining out of the wall. Could it be?
         By now Paul and John had joined him. Shining his lantern around the room, John spotted a set of roughly hewn steps that rose into the darkness, hugging the wall. When he looked up, he saw the same pinprick of light that Rob had. They had found their way out. It was not on the map, and had no reason to be here, but it was. John Martin was not a man to see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, but he knew God’s hand when he saw it. He looked at his companions. “Let the Germans solve their own problems. Let’s get out of here.”
         With that, John began to climb the stairs with Paul and Rob close behind. The going was easy, and they quickly found themselves at the top of the stairs. Fading sunlight shone through the doorway, almost blinding their dark adapted eyes. They stepped through the opening and into the Turkish highlands. A village lay in the valley below. The windows of a dozen houses were beginning to glow in the twilight, beckoning the weary explorers.