"Looks like it was carved by Satan himself," murmured a crewman in awe.

Totally unintimidated, Roxanna held it up and stared into the empty eye sockets. "It has the appearance of ebony gla.s.s. And see the dragon coming out between its teeth."

"My guess, it's obsidian," observed Mender, "but I couldn't begin to presume how it was carved-" Mender was interrupted by a loud crackling sound, as the ice around the stern of the ship heaved and grumbled.

One of the crew dropped down the stairway from the upper deck, shouting, his voice high-pitched and harsh. "Captain, we must leave quickly! A great crack is spreading across the ice and pools of water are forming! I fear if we don't hurry, we'll be trapped here!"

Mender wasted no time in questions. "Get back to the ship!" he ordered. "Quickly!"

Roxanna wrapped the skull in her scarf and tucked it under one arm.

"No time for souvenirs," Mender snapped at her. But she ignored him and refused to let go of the skull.

Pushing Roxanna ahead of them, the men hurried up the stairway to the main deck and dropped down onto the ice. They were horrified to see that what had been a solid field of ice was now buckling and breaking up into ponds. Cracks turned into meandering streams and rivers as the seawater poured up through the ice onto the floe. None of them had any idea the floe could melt so fast.

Skirting the upheaved ma.s.ses, some of them forty feet high, and leaping across the cracks before they widened and made crossing impossible, the crew and Roxanna ran as if all the banshees of h.e.l.l were after them. The macabre, indescribable sounds of the ice grinding against itself struck terror in their minds. The going was exhausting; at every step their feet sank six inches into the blanket of snow that had acc.u.mulated on the level stretches of the floe.

The wind began to pick up again, and incredibly it felt warm, the warmest air they had felt since the ship had become jammed in the ice. After running a mile and a half, everyone was ready to collapse from exhaustion. The shouts of their shipmates on the Paloverde, begging them to hurry, urged them to greater efforts. Then, abruptly, it seemed that their struggle to gain the ship had ended in vain. The last crack in the ice before they could reach the safety of the Paloverde nearly defeated them. It had widened to twenty feet, too far for them to leap over, and was spreading at a rate of a foot every thirty seconds.

Seeing their predicament, the Paloverde's second mate, Asa Knight, ordered the men on board to lower a whaleboat over the side, and they manhandled it across the ice to the fissure, which had now increased to nearly thirty feet. Heaving and pulling the heavy boat, the crew struggled to save the captain and his wife and their shipmates before it was too late. After a herculean effort, they reached the opposite edge of the fissure. By then, Mender, Roxanna, and the others were standing knee-deep in water that was coming up through the ice.

The boat was quickly pushed into the freezing water, and the men rowed it across the rapidly expanding river in the ice, to the vast relief of those minutes away from death on the other side. Roxanna was lifted over the side first, followed by the rest of the crew and Mender.

"We owe you a great debt, Mr. Knight," said Mender, shaking his second mate's hand. "Your daring initiative saved our lives. I especially thank you on behalf of my wife."

"And child," Roxanna added, as two crewmen wrapped her in blankets.

He looked at her. "Our child is safe on the ship."

"I wasn't talking about Samuel," she said, through chattering teeth.

Mender stared at her. "Are you telling me you're with child again, woman?"

"I think about two months."

Mender was appalled. "You went out on the ice in a storm knowing you were pregnant?"

"There was no storm when I set out," she said with a weak grin.

"Good Lord," he sighed, "what am I to do with you?"

"If you don't want her, Captain," said Bigelow jovially, "I'll be happy to have her."

Despite the fact that he was chilled to the bone, Mender laughed as he hugged his wife, nearly crushing the breath out of her. "Do not tempt me, Mr. Bigelow, do not tempt me."

HALF an hour later, Roxanna was back on board the Paloverde, changed into dry clothing and warming her body around the big brick-and-cast-iron stove used to melt whale blubber. Her husband and crew did not spare any time for creature comforts. The sails were hurriedly removed from the hold where they had been stowed, and were carried into the rigging. Soon they were unfurled, the anchors were pulled off the bottom, and, with Mender at the helm, the Paloverde began to thread her way through the melting water between huge icebergs toward the open sea again.

After enduring six months of cold and near starvation, the captain and crew were free of the ice and headed home, but not before they had filled her casks with seventeen hundred barrels of sperm oil.

The strange obsidian skull that Roxanna had taken from the frozen Madras went on the family mantel of their home in San Francisco. Mender dutifully corresponded with the current owners of the Skylar Croft Trade Company of Liverpool, who were operating under a new name, and sent off the logbook, giving the position where they had found the derelict ship on the sh.o.r.e of the Bellingshausen Sea.

The sinister and dead relic of the past remained in frigid isolation. An expedition consisting of two ships was mounted from Liverpool in 1862 to recover the Madras's cargo, but neither ship was ever seen again and were presumed lost in the great ice floe around Antarctica.

Another 144 years would pa.s.s before men were to rediscover and set foot on the decks of the Madras again.

PART ONE

AS CLOSE TO h.e.l.l AS YOU CAN GET

1

MARCH 22, 2001

PANDORA, COLORADO

THE WANING STARS IN the early-morning sky blazed like a theater marquee when seen from 9,000 feet above sea level. But it was the moon that had a ghostly look about it as Luis Marquez stepped from his little wooden frame house. It wore a curious orange halo that he had never seen before. He peered at the odd phenomenon for a few moments before walking across the yard to his 1973 Chevy Cheyenne 44 pickup truck.

He had dressed in his work clothes and slipped quietly out of the house so as not to wake his wife and two daughters. His wife, Lisa, would have gladly gotten up and fixed breakfast and a sandwich for his lunch pail, but he insisted that 4:00 A.M. was too early for anyone but a mental case to be roaming around in the dark.

Marquez and his family lived simply. With his own hands, he had remodeled the house that had been built in 1882. His children went to school in nearby Telluride, and what he and Lisa couldn't buy in the booming resort ski town, they brought home during monthly shopping trips to the larger ranch community of Montrose, sixty-seven miles to the north.

His routine was never complete until he lingered over his coffee and stared around what was now a ghost town. Under the spectral light from the moon, the few buildings that still stood looked like tombstones in a cemetery.

Following the discovery of gold-bearing rock in 1874, miners poured into the San Miguel Valley and built a town they called Pandora, after the Greek fairy tale about a beautiful girl and her box full of mysterious spirits. A banking interest in Boston bought up the mining claims, financed the mine's operation, and constructed a large ore-processing plant only two miles above the more famous mining town of Telluride.

They'd called the mine the Paradise, and soon Pandora became a small company town of two hundred citizens with its own post office. The houses were neatly painted, with mowed green lawns and white fences, and although Pandora was set in a box canyon with only one way in and out, it was not isolated. The road to Telluride was well maintained, and the Rio Grande Southern Railroad ran a spur line into town to haul pa.s.sengers and supplies to the mine and the processed ore across the Continental Divide to Denver.

There were those who swore the mine was cursed. The human cost of extracting fifty million dollars' worth of gold over forty years was high. A total of twenty-eight hard-rock miners had died inside the damp and forbidding shafts-fourteen in one disaster alone-while close to a hundred were maimed for life because of freak accidents and cave-ins.

Before the old-timers who had moved down the road and resided in Telluride died off, they'd claimed that the ghost of one of the dead miners could be heard moaning throughout the ten miles of empty shafts that honeycombed the steep, ominous gray cliffs that rose nearly 13,000 feet into the lazy blue skies of Colorado.

By 1931, all the gold that could be profitably processed from the ore with the aid of chemicals was exhausted. Played out, the Paradise Mine was shut down. Over the next sixty-five years, it became only a memory and a slowly healing scar on the panoramic landscape. Not until 1996 had its haunted shafts and tunnels heard the tread of boots and the clang of a pickax again.

Marquez shifted his stare onto the mountain peaks. A four-day storm had come and gone the week before, adding four feet of snow to the already packed slopes. The increasing air temperatures that accompanied the spring turned the snow into the consistency of mushy mashed potatoes. It was the prime avalanche season. Conditions were extremely hazardous in the high country, and skiers were warned not to wander from the established ski runs. As far as Marquez knew, no major snowslide had ever struck the town of Pandora. He was secure in knowing his family was safe, but he ignored the risk to himself every time he made the drive up the steep icy road in winter and worked alone deep in the bowels of the mountain. With the coming of warm days, a snow slide was an event waiting to happen.

Marquez had seen an avalanche only once in his years on the mountain. The sheer magnitude of its beauty and power as it swept rocks, trees, and snow down a valley in great clouds, along with the rumbling sound of thunder, was something he had never forgotten.

Finally, he set his hard hat on his head, slipped behind the wheel of the Chevy pickup, and started the engine, letting it idle for a couple of minutes to warm. Then he began cautiously driving up the narrow, unpaved road that led to the mine that once was the leading gold producer in the state of Colorado. His tires had made deep ruts in the snow after the last storm. He drove carefully as the road wound higher up the mountain. Very quickly, the drop-off along the edge stretched several hundred feet to the base. One uncontrolled skid and rescuers would be untangling Marquez's broken body from his mangled pickup truck on the rocks far below.

Local people thought him foolish for buying up the claims to the old Paradise Mine. Any gold worth extracting was long gone. And yet, except for a Telluride banker, no one would have dreamed that Marquez's investment had made him a rich man. His profits from the mine were shrewdly invested in local real estate, and with the boom of the ski resort he had realized nearly two million dollars.