Heading underground

 Mere glimmer of a red dusk was all that was left from the daylight when Lara returned to my hotel room. It was somewhat rudimentary, but one would not expect lavish luxury in such a remote, sparsely inhabited place. To the contrary, it was lucky that the isolated village in the Northern Labrador offered accommodation in the first place.

She had spent the entire afternoon photographing the area of interest, some thirty kilometers southward, from an airplane flying at low altitude. Having taken off her heavy aviator jacket, she dropped a handful of memory cards on a little desk I had in the room, which served as an improvised command center.

Minutes later in front of my laptop, we were already examining aerial photos she made, looking for any sign of Gatnamot, the ancient underground temple mentioned in Icelandic sagas. My programming knowledge was very limited and crude, but I had managed to prepare a program which would hopefully detect and point to any regular structures or straight lines in the photographs, and spare us from checking all of them manually.

It did pick around forty photographs of some interest, even though we were both aware that the likelihood of them all being false positives was extremely high. Lara, nevertheless, insisted on checking them right away. Matching her energy, especially when she wanted to research or uncover something, was often difficult.

The process was slow, with lots of zooming and matching any interesting shapes we spotted to their occurrences in other photographs, from different angles. They invariably turned out to be natural structures which, from a given angle and with the artefacts produced by the camera and the encoding, initially seemed interesting.

I clearly remember we were looking at the twenty-fourth photograph, right after a tea break we had taken to rest our eyes following more than two hours of examinations. Regardless of Lara's undiminished energy, it was coincidentally me who spotted something unusual. Rocks of various sizes and colors spread over grey soil were nothing unusual, but a certain one, isolated from the rest, seemed as if it was roughly rectangular.

Zooming in as far as the limited resolution made it sensible, we could only just discern creases in the rectangle, suggesting it was built, constructed from blocks, rather than a naturally occurring structure.

The moment was electrifying—was it indeed artificial in origin? Lara bit her lip, and I had no doubt she wanted to go and explore the place right away, but even she understood we would have to wait until daylight.

We went through the rest of the photographs nevertheless, and then set out to identify the exact location of the stone rectangle. Luckily, this was not particularly difficult: each photograph had a precise timestamp, and Lara's airplane's avionics had logged its exact location: all we had to do was to find and interpolate the airplane's location at the moment when the key photograph was shot.

And take plenty of rest.

 

With the area offering no easy rugged landing spots, and no helicopters available, next day Lara rented the best off-road vehicle she could find—a stout former military truck converted for civilian use. Again, contrary to many artificially tweaked depictions of Lara, she liked company on her travels, and insisted I join her, at least as long as she was on the surface.

We set off toward the coordinates calculated the night before, guided by the onboard GPS. Among the truck's many virtues, passenger comfort was missing and, combined with the rugged terrain, the journey was both slow and exhausting. Still, after over two hours of Lara's skilled driving, we finally approached the area we had been looking for.

Holding the photograph on my map, I managed to get the key bearings and navigated Lara to drive us to the vicinity of the rectangular rocky object, but not too close: we wanted to avoid the wheels destroying any possible clues in the ground in the object's proximity.

Stopping and observing the object in front of us was another electrifying moment, because the structure was clearly artificial in origin. Surrounded by a large patch of rocky dirt, there was a stone platform roughly the size of a snooker table, made of tightly fitting individual stone blocks. There was no chance of it having been randomly assembled by nature.

We left the truck and carefully approached the object, diligently recording and photographing everything as we walked.

"Looks rather like a grave of a giant," she said.

The sides of the object were featureless, so we climbed on its top. The only features I could discern were creases between the stone blocks—everything else seemed like normal wear and tear throughout centuries, possibly over a millennium.

It was an interesting find in itself, to be sure, but there was no entrance nor any special details I could see. Lara's knowledge, however, allowed her to see facts where I could not. She kneeled and inspected the blocks we were standing on.

"Observe the surface," she spoke. "See these slightly asymmetric dents? Clearly modeled with a narrow iron chisel, which fits with the Viking theory. And individual blocks have dents of differing sizes, meaning multiple stonemasons were involved."

She stood up and considered for a moment. "Help me inspect all the blocks. It was not uncommon for the stonemasons of the era to chisel their initials or signatures on the stone blocks they made."

I had only begun the search on my half when Lara jubilantly called me. Indeed, near the edge of one of the stones, two little symbols were engraved: a rather narrow letter 'R', followed by a 'Y' with an extra vertical line at the top, resembling the Greek Psi.

"These are runes," she said with a very serious tone. "Think about it: runes. On American mainland. Yes, we know of the Norse colonization of Newfoundland in the eleventh century, but this is something else. Do you think we have found Gatnamot?"

I thought for a while before answering. My thoughts raced. "I think yes," I squeezed finally. "Based on Icelandic sagas and legends of the Naskapi, we found it exactly in the narrow area we predicted it would be. I think anything else would be an unthinkable, fully impossible coincidence."

"So do I. This alone will rewrite many history books."

We stood in silence, aware of the gravity of our find. Then Lara circled the small platform, looking for any further clues. Suddenly she stopped and turned toward me.

"But there is some... discrepancy. This is nothing like how the sagas describe it, nothing grand. A stone slab, and an important one at that, but nothing majestic nor sacred."

She was not wrong, but I had a natural answer. "Don't forget: these are sagas and legends, and thus likely to exaggerate everything, even if they refer to a real place. Perhaps Gatnamot indeed is no more than this slab, but the word-of-mouth and the need to embellish stories distorted it over time into the grand halls you are talking about. Think of Greek mythology as a good analogy: there is a palace at Knossos, and a very nice one at that, but the legends added the narrative about the famous labyrinth, for the sake of drama."

"You may be right. Perhaps the old storytellers would not be content with the narrative of the famous warriors gaining superhuman powers on a mere slab of stone, and therefore invented the underground temples, secret halls, and whatnot."

"Exactly. Even the legends based on truth are typically full of such fantasies and dramatizations. In nearly all cultures. Still, let's search onward—perhaps there are other clues we have missed so far."

The next set of runic initials was less of a surprise, and from the third onward, it was hardly news anymore. Luckily, it was a sunny day, and sharp shadows helped noticing small details.

Lara was examining the central element of the structure, a large square block of stone, when she called me. That one was not perfectly flush with the surface, and she pointed me to an unusual set of indentations on its side, near the top edge. They were visibly chiseled, and formed a line which was supposed to be straight, but was slightly irregular.

"Any idea what this is? Was the stonemason testing his chisel here, hoping this side would never be visible?"

Lara was not yet aware she had made a brilliant discovery.

"I know what this is," I said in amazement. "I have seen them in Nordic structures already. These are anchors for the metal hooks, to make lifting easier!"

"Lifting? So this panel is supposed to be lifted?" I heard the excited tremble in her voice.

"Indeed! You can even see these micro-fractures where the metal hooks, probably pulled by a group of people, wore down the stone over time. This entire panel is not just floor... it's a heavy trap door!"

She flexed her fingers. "We need to find a way to lift it," and for once, I agreed with her.

There was no way two people, no matter how athletic, could lift the slab manually. But our truck gave me an idea.

"We have a winch on our truck we can try. No idea how thick—and therefore how heavy—the panel is, but maybe it is within the capability of the winch."

Lara parked the truck right in front of the structure, while I attached the winch hook to the panel. We started the winch which, predictably, first raised the truck's front wheels onto the platform. Then we stopped the winch, braked the car, even put several rocks in front of its wheels to improve its stability, and restarted the winch.

One could hear the winch motor struggle, but after a few moments, with heavy rumble, the panel started to rise slowly. We stopped the winch and rushed to the newly-opened hole.

As it turned out, the ancient legends had not exaggerated. Underneath the panel, there was a steep stairway leading down underground, and turning right after ten meters or so.

She looked seriously at me. "You know I cannot not enter."

"But...! Without equipment?"

She smiled and walked to the back of the truck, where she took a backpack. "Never leaving home without it. Now, listen—I will not break my word, and will therefore not insist on you following me. But if I am not back by seven o'clock, feel free to leave and seek help from the authorities."

Before I could even form some kind of a reply, she was already kneeling next to the panel and entering the underground.