Cox was not an easy man to get close to. He had few friends on board the Polar Storm. His first impression of Pitt had been as a snotty bureaucrat from NUMA headquarters, but he could see now that the special projects director was a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, yet humorous kind of guy. He was actually beginning to like him. The ice chips began to fly like sparks.
Thirty-four minutes later, Cox climbed down and announced in triumph. "Ah have an entrance, gentlemen."
Pitt bowed. "Thank you, Ira. General Lee would have been proud of you."
Cox bowed back. "Like Ah always said, save your Confederate money. You never know, the South might rise again."
"I believe it might at that."
Pitt climbed the footholds gouged in the ice by Cox and slipped through the hole feet first. His boots made contact with the deck four feet below the opening. He peered into the gloom and realized that he had entered the ship's aft galley.
"What do you see?" demanded Northrop excitedly.
"A frozen galley stove," answered Pitt. He leaned through the hull. "Come on up, and bring the lights with you."
Cox and Northrop quickly joined him and passed around aluminum-encased halogen lights that lit up the immediate area like a sunny day. Except for the soot on the flue atop the big cast-iron stove and oven, the galley looked as if it had never been used. Pitt pulled open the fire door of the oven but found no ashes.
"The shelves are bare," observed Cox. "They must have eaten all the paper, cans, and glass."
"Well, maybe the paper," muttered Northrop, beginning to feel distinctly uneasy.
"Let's stick together," said Pitt. "One of us may spot something the others missed."
"Anything in particular we're looking for?" asked Cox.
"A storeroom in the aft steerage hold beneath the captain's cabin."
"I say it should be two or more decks under where we stand."
"This has to be the ship's officers' and passengers' galley. The captain's cabin must be nearby. Let's find a passageway below."
Pitt stepped through a doorway and shined his light on the dining room. The table and chairs and surrounding furniture were encased in an inch-thick layer of ice. Under their halogen lights, the entire room sparkled like a crystal chandelier. A tea set rested in the center of the dining table as if waiting to be used.
"No bodies in here," said Northrop, with relief.
"They all died in their cabins," said Pitt. "Probably a combination of hypothermia, starvation, and scurvy."
"Where do we go from here?" Cox asked.
Pitt motioned his light through a doorway beyond the dining table. "Just outside, we should find a passageway that drops down to the deck below."
"How do you know your way around a two-hundred-year-old ship?"
"I studied drawings and old plans of East Indiaman merchant ships. Though I've never actually seen one until now, I know every nook and cranny by heart."
They dropped down a ladder, slipping on the ice that covered the steps but remaining on their feet. Pitt led them aft, passing old cannon that looked as new as they had the day they had left the foundry. The storeroom's door was still open, just as Roxanna and the crew of the Paloverde had left it.
Pitt, anticipation surging through his veins, stepped inside and swung his beam around the storeroom.
The packing crates were still stacked from deck to ceiling along the bulkheads, just as they were when last seen in 1858. Two of the wooden crates sat on the deck, their lids pried open. A copper urn was lying on its side behind the door, where it had rolled when the ship was hurriedly abandoned by Mender and his crew as the ice pack began to melt and crack apart.
Pitt knelt and began lifting the objects from the open crates with tender loving care and setting them on the icy deck. In a short time, he had collected not only a menagerie of figurines depicting common animals-- dogs, cats, cattle, lions-- but also sculptures of creatures he'd never seen before. Some were sculpted from copper, many were bronze. He also found figures of people, mostly females dressed in long robes, with full pleated skirts covering their legs to their strangely booted feet. The intricately grooved hair was long and braided to the waist, and the breasts were simply formed without exaggerated fullness.
Laid on the bottom of the crates, like chips on a casino craps table, were round copper disks half an inch thick and five inches in diameter. The disks were engraved on both sides with sixty symbols that Pitt recognized as similar to those in the Paradise Mine chamber. The center of the disks revealed hieroglyphs of a man on one side and a woman on the other. The man wore a long pointed hat on his head that was folded over on one side, and a flowing capelike robe over a metal breastplate and a short skirt similar to a Scottish kilt. He sat on a horse that had a single horn protruding from its head, and held a broad sword above his head that was in the act of cutting through the neck of a monstrous lizard with an open mouth full of gaping teeth.
The woman on the opposite side of the disk was dressed the same as the man, but with more ornaments about her body, strings of what looked like seashells and some kind of beads. She was also astride a horse with a horn in the center of the head. Instead of holding a sword, she was thrusting a spear into what Pitt recognized as a saber-toothed tiger, an animal extinct for thousands of years.
Pitt's mind traveled to another time, another place that was vague and nebulous, barely outlined in a gentle mist. As he held the disks in his hand, he tried to sense a contact with those who had created them.