THE SECRETS OF THE MOJAVE

(Or, The Conspiracy Against Reality)

Page # 8d

…Thomason looked from Jack to Bill and asked, ‘How long have you men been in this country?’

Jack spoke before Bill had a chance. ‘Not very long,’ said Jack quietly. Bill glanced curiously at Jack but said nothing. If Jack thought that 30 years was not very long, that was all right with Bill.

Thomason said, ‘I’ve been in and out of the Death Valley country for 20 years. So has my partner. We know where there is lost treasure. We’ve known about it for several years, and we’re the only men in the world [?] who do know about it. We’re going to let you two fellows in on it. You’ve been good to us. You’re both fine fellows. You haven’t asked us any questions about ourselves, and we like you. We think you can keep a secret, so we’ll tell you ours.”

Jack blew smoke and asked, “A lost mine?”

“No, not a mine,” said Thomason. “A lost treasure house. A lost city of gold. It’s bigger than any mine that ever was found, or ever will be.”

“It’s bigger than the United States Mint,” said White, with his voice and body shaking with excitement. “It’s a city thousands of years old and worth billions of dollars! Billions of Dollars! Billions! Not Millions. Billions!”

Thomason and White spoke rapidly and tensely, interrupting each other in eager speech.

Thomason said, “We’ve been trying to get the treasure out of this golden city for years. We had to have help, and we haven’t been able to get it.”

“Everybody tries to rob us,” put in White. “They all want too big a share. I offered the whole city to the Smithsonian Institution for five million dollars — only a small part of what it’s worth. They tried to rob us, too! They said they’d give me a million and a half for a discovery that’s worth a billion dollars!” he sneered. “I had nothing more to do with them.”

Jack got up and found his plug of tobacco. He threw away his cigarette and savagely bit off an enormous chew. He sat down and crossed his legs and glowered at White as he worked his chew into his jaw.

Bill’s voice was meek as he asked, “And this place is in Death Valley?”

“Right in the Panamint Mountains!” said Thomason. “My partner found it by accident. He was prospecting down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass. He was working at the bottom of an old abandoned shaft when the bottom fell out and landed him in a tunnel. We’ve explored the tunnel since. It’s a natural tunnel-like a big cave.

It’s over 20 miles long. It leads all through a great underground city; through the treasure vaults, the royal palace and the council chambers; and it connects to a series of beautiful galleries with stone arches in the east slope of the Panamint Mountains. Those arches are like great big windows on the side of the mountain and they look down on Death Valley. They’re high above the valley now, but we believe that those entrances in the mountainside were used by the ancient people that built the city. They used to land their boats there.”

“Boats!” demanded the astonished Bill, “boats in Death Valley?”

Jack choked and said, “Sure, boats. There used to be a lake in Death Valley. I hear the fishing was fine.”

“You know about the lake,” Thomason pointed his blue chin at Jack. “Your geology would tell you about the lake. It was a long time ago… The ancient people who built the city in the caverns under the mountain lived on in their treasure houses long after the lake in the valley dried up. How long, we don’t know. But the people we found in the caverns have been dead for thousands of years. Why! Those mummies alone are worth a million dollars!”

White, his eyes blazing, his body trembling, filled the little house with a vibrant voice on the edge of hysteria. “Gold!” he cried. “Gold spears! Gold shields! Gold statues! Jewelry! Thick gold bands on their arms! I found them! I fell into the underground city. There was an enormous room; big as this canyon. A hundred men were in it. Some were sitting around a polished table that was inlaid with gold and precious stones. Men stood around the walls of the room carrying shields and spears of solid gold. All the men — more than a hundred — had on leather aprons, the finest kind of leather, soft and full of gold ornaments and jewels. They sat there and stood there with all that wealth around them. They are still there. They are all dead! And the gold, all that gold, and all those gems and jewels are all around them. All that gold and jewelry! Billions!” White’s voice was ascending to a shriek when Thomason put a hand on his arm and White fell silent, his eyes darting about to the faces of those who sat around the table.

Thomason explained quietly, “These ancient people must have been having a meeting of their rulers in the council chamber when they were killed very suddenly. We haven’t examined them closely because it was the treasure that interested us, but the people all seem to be perfect mummies.”

Bill squinted at White and asked, “Ain’t it dark in this tunnel?”

“Black dark,” said White, who had his voice under control again. His outburst had quieted him. “When I first went into that council room I had just some candles. I fumbled around. I didn’t discover everything all at once like I’m telling you. I fell around over these men, and I was pretty near almost scared out of my head. But I got over that and everything was all right and I could see everything after I hit the lights.”

“Lights? There were lights?” It was Bill asking.

“Oh, yes,” said White. “These old people had a natural gas they used for lighting and cooking. I found it by accident. I was bumping around in the dark. Everything was hard and cold and I kept thinking I was seeing people and I was pretty scared. I stumbled over something on the floor and fell down. Before I could get up there were a little explosion and gas flames all around the room lighted up. What I fell over was a rock lever that turned on the gas, and my candle set the gas off. That was when I saw all the men, and the polished table, and the big statue. I thought I was dreaming. The statue was solid gold. Its face looked like the man sitting at the head of the table, only, of course, the statue’s face was much bigger than the man’s, because the statue was all in a perfect size, only bigger. The statue was solid gold, and it is 89 feet, six inches tall!”

“Did you measure it,” asked Jack, silkily, “or just guess at it?”

“I measured it. Now you’ll get an idea of how big that one room — the council room — is. That statue only takes up a small part of it!”

Steady and evenly, Jack asked, “Did you weigh the statue?”

“No,” said White. “You couldn’t weigh it.”

Bill was puzzled. “Would you mind telling me how you measured it?” asked Bill.

“With a sextant,” said White. “I always carry a sextant when I’m in the desert. Then if I get lost, I can use my sextant on the sun or moon or stars to find myself on the map. I took a sextant angle of the height of the statue and figured it out later.”

“A sextant,” said Bill, frowning heavily.

Jack said, “It’s a part of the church, Bill. Never mind that… Tell us some more about this place. It’s very interesting.”

Fred Thomason said, “Tell them about the treasure rooms.”

“I found them later.” White polished his shining pate with a grimy handkerchief. “After I got the lights going I could see all the walls of this big room and I saw some doors cut in the solid rock of the walls. The doors are big as slabs of rock hung on hinges you can’t see. A big rock bar lets down across them. I tried to lift up the bars and couldn’t move them. I fooled around trying to get the doors open. I must have been an hour before I took ahold of a little latch like on the short end of the bar and the great bar swung up. Those people know about counter-weights and all those great big doors with their bar locks — they must weigh hundreds of tons — are all balanced so that you can move them with your little finger if you find the right place.”

Thomason again said, “Tell them about the treasure.”

“It’s gold bars and precious stones. The treasure rooms are inside these big rock doors. The gold is stacked in small bars piled against the walls like bricks. The jewels are in bins cut out of a rock. There’s so much gold and jewelry in that place that the people there had stone wheelbarrows to move the treasure around.”

Jack sat up in sudden interest. “Wheelbarrows?” he asked…

“We don’t know how old they are,” said Thomason, “but the stone wheelbarrows are there.”

“Stone wheelbarrows,” marveled Jack. “Those dead men must have been very powerful men. Only very strong men could push around a stone wheelbarrow loaded with gold bars. The wheelbarrows must have weighed a tone without a load in them.”

“Yes,” said Thomason, slowly, “the wheelbarrows are stone and of course they are very heavy–“

“But they’re very easy to push around even with a load in them,” White explained. “They’re scientific wheelbarrows.”

“No,” objected Jack in a low tone of anguish.

“Yes,” insisted White, pleasantly sure of himself. A small boy could fill one of those stone wheelbarrows full of gold bars and wheel it around. The wheelbarrows are balanced just like the doors. Instead of having the wheel out in front so that a man has to pick up all the weight with his back, these wise people put the wheel almost in the middle and arranged the leverage of the shafts so that a child could put in a balanced load and wheel the barrow around.”

Jack’s heart was breaking. He left the table and threw his chew out the door. He went over to the stove with his cup. “Anybody want more coffee?” he asked. No one did.

Bill studied Thomason and White for several minutes. Then he asked, “How many times have you been in this tunnel?”

“I’ve been there three times,” said White. “That’s counting the first time I fell in. Fred’s been in twice, and my wife went partway in the last time we were in.”

Mrs. White stroked her blond hair and said, “I thought my husband was romancing when he came home and told me what he found in the mountains. He always was a romancer. I was sure he was just romancing about this city he said he found. I didn’t believe it until they took me into it. It is a little hard to believe, don’t you think?”

Bill said, “It sure is.” Jack stirred sugar into his coffee and sat down at the table again. Bill asked, “Did you ever bring anything out of the cave?”

“Twice,” said Fred Thomason. “Both times we went in we filled out pockets with gems, and carried out a gold bar apiece. The first time we left the stuff with a friend of ours and we went to try and interest someone in what we’d found. We thought the scientists would be interested or the government. One government man said he’d like to see the stuff and we went back to our friend to get the gold and jewels and he told us he’d never seen them and dared us to try to get them back. You see, he double-crossed us.

We were in a little trouble at the time and the loss of that stuff just put us in deeper. We couldn’t get a stake because we were having hard work making anyone believe us. So we made another trip out here for more proof. That time we brought out more treasure and buried it close to the shaft entrance to the underground city before we went back to the Coast. I persuaded some university officials and some experts from the Southwest Museum to come out here with me. We got up on the Panamints and I could not find the shaft. A cloud-burst had changed all the country around the shaft. We were out of luck. The scientists became unreasonably angry with us. They’ve done everything they can to discredit us ever since.”

Jack watched Thomason and White across the rim of his coffee cup. Bill said, “And now you can’t get into your treasure tunnel. It’s lost again. That’s sure too bad.”

Thomason and White smiled. “We can get in all right,” said Thomason in a genial voice his cold eyes did not support. Mrs. White smiled confidently and her husband bobbed his head. Thomason went on: “You’ve forgotten about the old boat landings on the Death Valley side of the Panamint Mountains. All we have to do is climb the mountain to the openings where the galleries come out of the city on the old lakeshore. Do you know the mountains along the west side of Death Valley?”

“I’ve been down there,” said Bill.

Thomason turned to White: “How high do you think those galleries are above the bottom of Death Valley?”

White said, “Somewhere around forty-five hundred or five thousand feet. You looked out of them; what do you think?”

“That’s about right,” agreed Thomason. “The openings are right across from Furnace Creek Ranch. We could see the green of the ranch right below us and Furnace Creek Wash across the valley. We’ll find those windows in the mountains, all right.”

“You going down there now?” asked Bill.

“That’s it,” said White. “We’re through with the scientists. We tried to make a present of our discovery of science because we thought they would be interested. But they tried to rob us, and then they laughed at us and abused us…”

THE SECRETS OF THE MOJAVE Page #8e