By Monkey

Chapter 4

Pyre of Forsaken Souls

      Timing.

     Jones knew it would be a matter of timing.  And he would have to do it right.  He would have to balance the best use of the light with the amount of time the flare would burn considering how long it would take for the bones to catch fire.  Before, when he’d set the magnesium flare on the skull of the Spaniard it hadn’t taken long for it to catch.  He was confident he could get a fire going without having to use both of the remaining flares.  At least he hoped it would take only one.  There were certainly plenty of bones scattered about, but would it be enough fuel to keep a fire burning long enough?

     But again, it would be a matter of timing.

     In the darkness Indy felt down the wall again to the rat holes.  He felt along the bottom of the small arch on the left, and its elongated stone lintel.  There! There it was. The crack.  Sure it was just slightly wider than a slice of paper, but it was long, and Jones knew that it probably ran deep.  Thankfully for him the Inca builders had used low quality limestone for the stones in this wall instead of the more durable granite to be found throughout most of the rest of the tomb.  

     He ran his finger along the crack several times.  A feeling of hope resurged inside him.  Like a man lost at sea clutching on to a bit of flotsam he rubbed his finger back and forth along the length of the small crack that just might save his life.

     But it was time to act.  He took just a few more moments to go over in his mind the tasks to be done, and the order in which to do them.  Then he tightly gripped the magnesium flare in his right hand and struck it on the magazine of his Webley which he held in his left.

     Once again the gloomy, fetid, darkness of the death chamber was displaced by the brilliance of a flare.  Once again Jones watched the startled rats, seemingly twice as many as before, flee out through their small holes.  Hundreds of beady little eyes, grown so accustomed to darkness, were in an instant temporarily blinded, and they ran away from the brilliant luminescence as if scorched by a flame.  Jones held tightly to the flare, its powerful light and flame now representing nothing less to him than his own life.  

     He acted quickly.  The first thing he did was re-locate the sword of the conquistador.  This he set down close to the wall.  Next he picked up the slender radius and ulna bones of the unfortunate Spaniard.  Here he paused for a moment to make the sign of the cross.  Regardless of his own religious beliefs Jones knew that the Spaniard would probably appreciate the gesture.

     “…The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he mumbled softly as his hand went from his forehead, to his chest, and then each shoulder in turn.

     “Muchas Gracias, and forgive me Amigo.”  He placed his flare down on the Spaniard’s bleached, white skull as he had before.  The small hole that the first flare had burned into the bone made for a convenient, though macabre, holder for this second one.

     He then picked up the sword, placed the bones against a small natural outcropping of rock from the cavern wall and struck hard.  He struck again, and again.  The bones shattered but he was careful to pick up each and every one of the small shards.  He continued to chop and break the bones up into smaller pieces, glancing now and then over at the burning flare to gage the amount of time he had to perform his task.  He wanted to avoid using the third flare if he could help it.

     After he had finished breaking up the forearm bones into small pieces he reached over for the humerus bone.  This too he broke up.  The process was then repeated with the bones of the other arm of the dead Spanish conquistador.

     Within a few minutes Jones had a sizeable amount of small, broken bone shards arrayed in front of him which he gathered together into a loose pile.  He cast a wary eye over towards the burning flare again.  It made for a rather ghoulish picture, the brightly burning flare sitting atop the leering, white skull while flickering shadows of light and dark danced in its empty eye sockets.

     Gathering up the pile of bone shards the archaeologist placed them carefully under the cracked lintel of the rat hole, arranging them as one would arrange tinder for a campfire.  A campfire for the dead, Jones thought to himself with dark, mirthless humor.

     And now came the crucial point in the process.

     Pulling the burning flare from its macabre holder, Jones placed it directly into the center of the small pile of bone tinder.

     His doubts about whether or not it would catch were quickly resolved as the remains of the Spaniard caught fire almost immediately from the concentrated heat of the magnesium flare.  With slight popping and crackling the bone shards began to burn.  Jones allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction, but there was still much to do, and he had to act fast.

     Reaching for more bones, any bones, He picked up the conquistador’s sword again and went back to work.  Femurs, tibias, fibulas, ribs and pelvis all were rapidly turned into unrecognizable shards and fed into the growing fire beneath the rat-hole’s arch.  With the increasing size of the fire Indy was able to feed larger and larger pieces of bone into it.

     Eventually the effort of his exertions began to tire him and despite the coolness of the cavern, he began to break a sweat.  He put down the sword and pulled off his fedora.  He wiped away the droplets of moisture and pushed back the locks of light brown hair that matted to his forehead.  Then he used his hat to further fan the flames of his fire.

     The fire had now fully caught, and was beginning to burn well enough for him to perform his next task; the rather gruesome one of collecting up more fuel for the flames.  But it had to be done, and quickly.  He fed a few more large pieces of bone into the fire and then turned around.

     The flickering flames cast sinister shadows of sharpened spikes that danced and darted about on the dark volcanic rock of the cavern’s walls as he moved amongst the scattered remains on the floor of the pit.  The light from the fire was sufficient for the task and Jones moved efficiently between and among the deadly spires, collecting the bones of the many victims and carrying them over to the fire under the rat hole.  Just as important as the light for him was the fact that the fire kept the rats at bay as well.

     Within minutes he had assembled quite a pile of bones beside his now crackling popping blaze.  The fire started to burn hotter, and he could now feed whole, unbroken pieces of bone into it.  All of them burned brightly together, Spaniard and Inca alike, their discarnate souls uniting in an eerie pyre, reaching out across centuries to help Indiana Jones escape from a terrible fate.  It was a fate that they themselves had not been able to escape, and Jones hoped that the bones remembered, and would burn hot for him.

     But he knew that the chances of success were slim, perhaps even none.  Nonetheless it was the only hope that he had.  The technique of splitting stones by heating and cooling was one that had been used for millennia by all cultures that worked with stone construction.  From the mysterious stone idols of Easter Island to the great monuments of Egypt, countless giant blocks of stone had been cut from quarries using the same technique.

     He didn’t need to build a pyramid, he just needed to split one twenty-five inch long lintel stone that was already cracked; surely it could work.  If the stone would split and he could knock it out, then there were at least two other stones that he could see that would most probably loosen enough that he could knock them out as well, giving him enough room to wiggle through to freedom on the other side.  But it all depended on the heat of his fire.  He needed to keep it burning, keep the heat flowing up into the small crack.  He needed to expand the crack, even if by just a few millimeters, it might be enough to split it.

      He fed more bones into the fire, leaned back against the cavern wall and closed his eyes for a moment.  He began to realize his level of exhaustion, the events of the past hour had been taxing, but he resisted the urge to doze, he knew he could not afford to fall asleep and let the fire die.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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