An hour into the storm, there arose a great commotion somewhere near the front of the elephant convoy. Linley pulled back the sheet of canvas to see what it could be. She saw her father waving his hands. Archie shouted, but she could not make out what he said. Linley pushed the canvas away from her head, feeling the rain beat against her hair.
“What is that?” Archie cried. “A temple?”
A temple! Linley looked around. From between the dripping leaves of the jungle canopy, she could make out a smooth stone wall, though years worth of vines had grown over its face.
The mahouts gave a command, and their elephants sank down to the ground. Linley and the others scrambled out of the howdah baskets and jumped down onto the muddy ground. Patrick followed, red mud splashing onto the legs of his trousers as he struggled to wrap the canvas sheet around Linley’s shoulders.
She gripped the canvas in her fist and clutched it tight against her.
The Talbot-Martin team sloshed through the wet earth until they reached the wall of the temple. Archie pulled out his machete and sliced away some of the vines, revealing more of the smooth stone.
Sir Bedford studied it, looking for any sign that this could be his temple. “Cut away more!” he ordered. “Clear this entire section!”
Archie cut through the thick vines, pulling away what he could to reveal more and more of the stone wall. Intricate carvings began to show, but they had long ago been worn down by centuries of life in the jungle.
“We need to find a door,” Linley cried, clawing a tangle of wet hair from her face.
Reginald also pulled out his knife, and he and Archie did their best to clear as much as possible. While they did so, Patrick looked up into the canopy, trying to see how high the wall stood. He estimated it was fifteen feet high, solid all the way up, and that there was no visible roof.
“This is a courtyard wall,” he explained to Linley. “We could scale it easier than we could look for a door.”
She shielded her face from the rain and looked up at him. “Scale it?”
“Sure.” He grabbed at a piece of loose vine and gave it a hard tug. The vine did not budge. “If we used this vine as a rope—”
“Not so fast,” Archie said. “There is no ‘we’ about it. Your idea, your job.”
Patrick gave the vine one more yank. “I’ll do it. How hard can it be?” He found a place where the thick, twisted vines still clung securely to the wall, and he put his boot into one of the loops. Using them as a foothold, he started his slow, steady climb.
Patrick did not look down. He kept his eyes forward and his mind focused. How different could climbing a wall be from climbing a tree? Not much, he found, as long as he took his time and thought about where he placed his hands and feet.
He finally reached the top of the wall and used his arms to pull himself up onto the ledge. Patrick looked down into the temple courtyard below. It was covered in leafy ferns and young trees whose roots busted through the stone floor.
“What do you see?” Sir Bedford called up to him.
He could see that the courtyard was vast. What once may have been lily pools were grown over, and the roof of the central building lay in rubble.
“I say!” Linley’s father called again. “What do you see?”
“Not much,” Patrick replied. “The place is in ruins.”
He could hear Archie snort. “Of course it’s in ruins!” he said. “We’d wouldn’t be here if the bloody place was ship-shape!”
Surveying the temple courtyard further, Patrick saw fallen statues twisted with vines. He was about to call for Linley to come up and see for herself, when something out of the corner of his eye stopped him.
Snake. He could barely see it. He had to look again just to make sure he had, in fact, saw anything at all. But it was there, slick and black among the vines. Patrick inched away from it. He had no idea if it was poisonous or not, and he certainly wasn’t going to take any chances.
“What’s wrong, Patrick?” Linley called up to him.
“Snake.” His voice came out as a strangled whisper. Clearing his throat, he tried again, this time loud and clear. “A snake.”
“Don’t move!” she said.
The snake moved in silence through the leaves and vines that grew over the wall. Easing his foot along the ledge, Patrick inched away. His heart pounded against his chest. His eyes never left the snake. It was a few feet away from him, and he prayed it wouldn’t come any closer.