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He could find nothing else about the Agris so he returned to the shelves.
Searching again, he saw a volume on the lowest shelf entitled Red
Basin, Red Heart. He grabbed it and leafed through its pages. Yes! It was the
same "Red Basin" the other book had mentioned, and this volume's map gave its
location a circular area in the northern end of Benin.
In Egyptian time, 4000-2000 B.C., the Red Basin region was peopled by sun
worshipers. We know a little about this mysterious cult by the remnants of
ruins far older and of a culture far more advanced than any that exists in
Africa today.
Sun worshipers? Hadn't Hartridge said some-
thing about sun worshipers? On impulse, Gabriel abandoned the Africa section
for the library's section on religion. Here were books worthy of the
Schattenjagers, everything from archaic occult tomes to ancient translations
of the Torah. He pulled a book on man's earli-
est religions and found a section entitled "Sun
Worshipers, Africa." Triumphantly, he turned the pages.
The African sun god was violent and terrible, and so became his worshipers.
They practiced a particularly bloody form of ritual sacrifice, much as the
sun-
worshiping Aztecs did centuries later and thousands of miles away. The most
brutal and grisly tribes in
African history descended from this sun-worshiping cult, though the cult
itself expanded to include many other deities, merging with other African
religions to become Voudoun.
The most fascinating archaeological site related to sun worshipers is in this
region. It's the snake mound in the Republic of Benin, located fifty miles
south of the border to Burkina Faso. Thirty miles northeast of Natitingou.
Unlike the snake mounds of
North America, the Benin example is a double snake mound.
A double snake mound?
Heart pounding, Gabriel leafed through the book looking for a photograph,
didn't find it.
Cursing, he stuffed the book back on the shelf and ran over to the section on
Archaeology. He knew as soon as he looked at the shelf which volume it was,
for one was slightly pulled out from the rest,
as if hastily returned.
The book's title was Ancient Sacred Sites. He pulled it out and riffled the
pages from back to front. And found it. It was the centerpiece of the book, a
colored photograph that was spread out on both pages. The shot had been taken
from a hilltop and it overlooked a brown, dusty valley. Low, mounded hills
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surrounded the basin, and in the valley's center were similar mounded shapes,
but these were, had to be, man-made. They were two earthen rings, the outer
ring a perfectly round "O" and the second ring, a simple, domed structure,
positioned per-
fectly inside the first. At the closest edge of the outer ring was something
that looked like a mouth the mound's entrance. Between the inner and outer
rings, narrow straight structures ran, probably interior hallways. There were
six of them, evenly spaced, like the spokes of a wheel.
Wheel-within-a-wheel.
Yes. This was their birthplace, this was where the talisman was. It had to be.
And Wolfgang, he would have known it, too.
Chapters
And then the wheel went round and round, I could not find my way.
Twelve and three and turn the key. I heard the madman say.
July 28,1993
People's Republic of Benin
The cabbie, whose name was Behanzie, chat-
tered cheerfully throughout the thirty miles from Natitingou to the Red Basin
valley. It took them three hours, driving on roads that were dirt at best and
more often plain old mud.
Throughout this jostling, stickily hot ordeal, as on the plane, Gabriel found
himself experi-
encing pangs of self-doubt. They were made worse by the inescapable memory of
the mes-
sage in Gerde's eyes as he'd left the castle. Find
Wolfgang. Bring him home. As if he, Gabriel, were supposed to be rescuing
Wolfgang. Didn't this start out the other way around?
It was, Behanzie explained, the rainy season.
They had been passing through green fields and semitropical forests. It was,
therefore, a bit of a surprise when they at last peaked a short climb and
Gabriel found himself looking out over the
Red Basin valley. As in the picture, the valley was brown, a place of dust and
dried grass, rainy
season or no. The double snake mound lay coiled below, and a narrow, winding [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]