"Or they were fighting each other," said Muller. "Rioting."

At last the ramp leveled and they came into an enormous cavern the size of a train station, the ceiling so high that it was lost in darkness overhead. Raeder guessed the stone hall was a lobby or assembly area for this underground maze. Arched doorways directly ahead led to what had evidently been a huge dining room, with stone tables and benches, some of them shattered. Beyond was a stone counter and ovens. On the walls were faded murals of fantastically opulent gardens and pavilions, with brilliantly colored birds, huge butterflies, and grinning apes. Eden in a cave.

"I suspect they worked down here but didn't live down here," Diels said. "There's too much love of nature. That's what the valley was for."

"Or they missed the nature they'd abandoned," Keyuri said.

"But why dig underground at all?" Kranz was baffled but fascinated by his own bafflement. Here was a lifetime of research and prestige! "What was down here?"

"Come, before these glow staffs decide to dim," Muller said.

"I don't think they'll ever dim," Diels said. "I think that's the tingling, that they replenish. Can you imagine a lightbulb that powers itself forever? That alone would make us rich, Kurt."

"I just hope you're right," said Muller. "It's a long climb back in the dark."

They went back to the cavernous lobby. There were more small doors to the left side, leading to dark, tight chambers. To the right, however, was a large, garagelike opening. When they explored this, they realized there was a hangar door half-attached. It had been knocked askew into this new room but still hung by one hinge. This gigantic door was metal, and a solid red from rust. Flakes littered the floor like cinnamon.

Beyond was a vastness into which their light would not initially reach. There was a sensation of cold, empty space, and their footsteps on the stone floor echoed.

"Lift the staffs as high as you can," Raeder ordered.

When the glow strengthened, its light was reflected ahead by vast, hulking machinery that filled the wall opposite the door. It reminded them of a factory or power plant, its engines extending into a cave hewn from rock. As they approached this apparatus, their light brightened even more and the staffs vibrated more. There was a faint insect hum.

"This is no ancient civilization," Diels murmured. "This is some incomprehensible future."

Some great beast of a machine, the size of a hundred locomotives, loomed above them, a great matrix of pipes, wheels, gears, drums, pistons, and levers receding into gloom. Cables looped like vines. Catwalks allowed access to higher levels. At the top, pipes branched out from the machine like the limbs of a tree to run and entwine along the ceiling. At the machine's center, these pipes gathered into a trunk that dived into a faintly glowing pit in the earth, as if this apparatus had organically grown out of some kind of hell.

Some parts were metal, but other parts, including the piping, were of dull-colored material the Germans couldn't guess at. There were no obvious wheels or buttons for control, and no obvious purpose to the contraption. It did have a focus, however. In the center of the machine, at floor level, horizontal tubes from left and right ended in a gap. In this gap was a stone cradle. And lying on this cradle was another staff, this one looking as if it were made of crystal. Its ends were aligned with the hollow pipes that ran in two directions from the machine.

These pipes disappeared into horizontal tunnels about ten feet in diameter at either end of the huge room. The tunnels themselves extended into darkness.

There were squat boxes at the base with blank screens. Diels passed his staff near one. It hummed, and then made a residual crackle when the staff lifted away. "Perhaps these boxes showed some kind of picture or signal," the scientist hazarded. "They could be the controls."

"But what does the machine do?" asked Kranz.

"I have no idea."

"There are tunnels at either end of this big room," Raeder said. "Let's check them."

These were more peculiar still. The hollow pipes near the crystal shaft became encased in larger pipes that ran through the tunnels, extending as far as their light would cast.

"Is it a pipeline?" asked Diels. "Is it to send some kind of oil or chemical from that machine, a refinery, to someplace else?"

"Or perhaps this is the refinery, and these tunnels conduct crude oil," Kranz guessed.

"It must go to other parts of the city." Raeder turned to Keyuri. "What do you know?"

"That to truly understand, we need wisdom."

Nunnish nonsense, and he was tiring of it.

"Should we follow it?" Kranz asked.

"I think we need to figure out this big machine first," said Diels.

"Look, more staffs," said Muller. There was a rack of them near the squat boxes at the base of the machine, like a rack of arms. Some were dull and black, like carbon. Some were crystalline. Some were metal. When Muller took one, it flared brighter and whiter than the ones from above. They blinked in its illumination. "I can feel it vibrating," the geophysicist said. "It's like it's a radio receiver for energy."

"Are they more powerful light sticks?"

"I think they're here to be charged in the machine's cradle," Raeder said. "I think they're instruments of Vril. Weapons. Wands."

The improved visibility from the new staff only deepened the mystery. Now they saw that some of the pipes at the ceiling had been torn and knocked askew. These walls, rough-hewn and undecorated, had black rays on them like blast marks from explosions. There had been some kind of accident.

And in the center of the machine, where pipes ran down into a circular well, was a high metal mesh to guard its perimeter.

Raeder took Muller's staff and walked over to this, looking through the grill to peer down the shaft. Far, far below-impossible to say how far, but tremendously deep-was an eerie red glow. Heat wafted up. Stairways, pipes, and cables descended into the pit. On the sides of the shaft, gates led to new stone stairs that seemed to delve ever deeper.

"Perhaps I have led you to hell," Raeder told the others. "Or a chute to the center of the earth."

"What do you think the pit is for?" asked Kranz, looking down warily. It was dizzying how deep it delved.

"They're getting energy from the earth," Muller hazarded. "Heat energy, and perhaps electromagnetic energy as well. Or some new form of energy we can't guess at. Perhaps they mined into this valley for this very connection, or went underground because their experiments would only work in places deep and dark. Maybe it was so dangerous that they had to pick the most remote spot on earth. In any event, every machine needs fuel, and this one uses the planet's core, I'm guessing. The black sun, perhaps."

"But a machine for what?"

"For Vril." Raeder took the brighter staff and passed it near one of the squat boxes. The black rectangle on its top began to glow. There was a clunk, a groan, and a hum as the huge machine began to start. Nothing moved, but some of its components gave that same ghostly green glow they'd seen at the top of the tunnel, and now the room was fully lit for the first time.

"It's coming to life," muttered Kranz.

They stepped back, unsure what the mechanism might do. It began to make a whirring sound. In the stone cradle before them, the crystalline staff began to glow.

"It's a generator," Raeder decided. "It's transferring energy from the center of the earth, or energy we can't detect, to these instruments or weapons. Look. Those pipes from the deep bring energy. The motors and gears transfer it to the horizontal pipes that extend into the tunnels. And they in turn feed power to that staff, charging it like a battery. But how could an ancient civilization master such a thing?"

"All their knowledge was lost," Diels hazarded. "Or they left here for another world."

"Left where? To prehistoric Germany, to our age of heroes? Did they give rise to the legends of the gods?"

Muller was looking about, peering into shadows. "Or they didn't leave at all," he said. "Look." He pointed.

Kranz followed his finger. "Oh my God!"

The hangar door, they'd seen, had been almost knocked from its hinges. But what they hadn't seen was that some blast or force from the machine had swept across the room and hurled everything against the far wall, in the shadow behind that door.

In that newly illuminated gloom there was a white shoal of bone, a bleached reef, including hundreds of blank-eyed human skulls. It was a ridge of bony remains.

It was a hurled heap of long-dead people.

30.

The Lost Valley, Tibet.

October 3, 1938.

For one terrifying moment, after Ben Hood pulled his ripcord during his fall toward Shambhala, nothing seemed to happen. Then the parachute opened with a bang and he snapped hard against its straps, gasping. He looked up. The silk had blossomed into a reassuring canopy. Beth's biplane was a black dot against the dying light and then was gone, past the mountains.

Alone.

He looked down. The ground was coming fast.

He tensed for the shock until remembering to relax. The ground was dark and jumbled, ruined walls running in every direction and small canals descending from the mountains. Pools from ancient reservoirs were rectangles of gray. Nor did he have any idea how to control his direction. Obstacles rushed up, he lifted his knees reflexively, and then with a thud he was down, rolling, his chute snagging on some old parapet.

For a moment he lay still, stunned. Then he sat up to confirm nothing was broken.

There was no sign of Raeder or anyone else.

Hood unbuckled his parachute and let it sag over the wall, the strings trailing like long white worms in the gloom. Now what?

He had no food, no water, and no weaponry except the .45 on his hip. But Raeder must be here, and with him Keyuri, unless the bastard had already tortured and killed her. There'd be other Germans, too.

His one advantage, he hoped, was surprise. Judging from the explosion, the Nazis expected they'd blocked his pursuit by dynamiting the canyon.

Hood began navigating over old rubble, the dusk continuing to deepen. Then he came upon a clearer path, an old road with ruptured paving. He stopped.

There was a low hum. Was the ground vibrating?

The sound seemed to come from where the road led. There was the faintest green glow in that direction. Keeping to the deepest shadows and wary of ambush, Ben hurried as fast as he dared. Walls, turrets, and huge statues rose all around. The statues were looking backward, in the direction he was going.

Shambhala looked very strange.

If only Roy Chapman Andrews and Agent Duncan Hale could see this.

The road led to a tunnel sloping down into the earth. It was from there that the humming emanated. There was a faint, sickly luminescence that seemed to emerge from the walls of the tunnel itself, as if the rock were alive with energy. How this could be, Hood had no idea. Then, a hundred yards in, a circular entrance with a narrow pocket to either side into which some kind of aperture door had slid. Beyond was darkness. Except not complete darkness, because far, far below a yellow light glimmered, like a candle at the end of the tunnel. In that direction, too, was the source of the noise, a whir like a turbine.

The ruin looked centuries or millennia old yet trembled like a powerhouse.

Hood took out his pistol, wary.

Then there was a new rumble. The tips of the door's black petals began closing like an insect maw.

For just a moment he considered bolting. But then whatever he'd come for would be forever beyond his grasp, wouldn't it? He'd be haunted by incompletion, like last time. He stepped through and watched, die cast, as the door slammed shut.

He was in Shambhala.

It was dark, except for that distant light.

He carefully began to walk downhill.

As Hood descended he occasionally felt currents of air from what he assumed were openings on both sides of the central tunnel, and felt like he was being watched by the spirits of what had once been here. No one challenged him, however. There was only the murmur of spoken German ahead.

The humming grew louder and he saw light slanting out from a hangar-sized opening. It spilled into a cavernous lobby, a great stone atrium with carved pillars branching across a rock ceiling. Various doors opened to all sides. Now he heard excited voices to the right. He trotted lightly to where a massive iron or steel door had been wrenched askew. Shielding his own body from view, he peered inside the next room.

And there was Raeder and his party! It was startling to see his quarry after four years, standing in a ballroom-sized stone chamber barren of all furniture or decoration. He was as Hood remembered him, tall, handsome, and carrying himself with that peculiar Teutonic poise. Raeder and three other men he assumed to be Nazis were dressed in mountain boots and heavy jackets, their packs on the floor. A smaller, slighter figure was Keyuri; when she moved his recognition was instant. Her slim grace was like a fingerprint. Each of the five people held a long staff, he saw. From the tips a light shone, like a gas wick. And beyond was some kind of vast machine, high as a cliff, glittery from metal and somber with black pipes and boilers. This contraption glowed and emitted a low whine. Pipes from the machine led into low tunnels at each end of the room. At the center of this behemoth was a cavity. In this cavity was a rack, and on that rack rested another staff, but this one translucent, like a piece of agate. It was not shining like a lantern but instead pulsed with a golden glow, like a beating heart. Beyond was a pit that appeared to descend into the earth, its mouth reflecting red.

What ancient civilization had built this thing?

"I think the machine is energizing the staff with a power we've no knowledge of, the power of Vril," Raeder was saying to the others. "Something comes through those pipes in the long tunnel."

"What's the staff for?" one of the Germans asked.

"Think of legends and fairy stories. Remember the magic wand or wizard's staff? What if they were true? I think our forebears wielded these rods of power."

"It's dangerous," Keyuri warned.

"And hard to control," said a German who seemed unhappier than the others. "Why are all those bones there, Kurt? Where are all the inhabitants?"

"We've discovered exactly what the Reichsfuhrer sent us here for," Raeder said, ignoring his question. "What matters is Germany."

Hood looked to the shadows beyond the twisted door. There was a great, ghastly pile of human bones, the dead of this civilization in a macabre tableau. What the devil had gone on here? Why was this place so secret, so remote, so buried?

"Touching the staff may be like touching a hot wire," another of the Germans cautioned.

"Or like holding the butt of a gun," said Raeder. "Most savages would be afraid to pick up a firearm. But not all." He hesitated just a moment, looking at the others. Then he strode decisively under the brow of the machine, stooped, and reached for the cradled staff.

"Kurt, no!"

"Stop sounding like an old woman, Julius."

Yet as he reached, the humming died with a sigh, and all the lights from the staffs they held dimmed. He paused.

"Somehow you've turned it off," one of the Germans called. "Like blowing a fuse."

"Or cooling a candle so you can touch it. This wand wants to be held." So Raeder hesitated just a moment more and then seized the staff and lifted it clear. It shone like amber, a beautiful six-foot-long staff of honeyed crystal, pulsing like life itself.

Unlike the other staffs, this new one didn't cast light but instead purred with it, honey and amber flowing up and down its length. "I can feel its energy," Raeder reported. "From my hands to my toes."

"Energy for what?" one of the Germans asked.

"It's an elixir." Tentatively, Raeder moved the staff through the air. It gave a hum. When he swept it in an arc it hummed louder, an odd chord that echoed in the vast room. "It makes music!" He laughed.

"Unearthly music," one said.

"The music of the spheres, perhaps," Raeder told them. "The music of the cosmos. It isn't wicked. It's beautiful!"