Remi turned to Sam, clasped his face between her hands, and kissed him. “Daydream later, okay?”
“Okay.”
Together, they began separating the tangled mess, setting guylines to one side, bamboo-and-wicker struts to the other. Once done, they carefully lifted the mummies from the gondola and began untangling them from the last bit of rigging.
“
I’d love to know their story,” Remi said.
“It’s obvious they’d been using the upturned gondola as a shelter,” Sam said. “Perhaps the crevasse split open suddenly, and only these two managed to hold on.”
“Then why stay like that?”
Sam shrugged. “Maybe they were too weak, by that point. They used the bamboo and rigging to build a small platform.”
Kneeling beside the mummies, Remi said, “Weak and crippled. This one’s got a broken femur, a compound by the looks of it, and this one . . . See the indentation in the hip? That’s either dislocated or fractured. It’s awful. They just laid in there and waited to die.”
“It won’t be our fate,” Sam replied. “A fiery balloon crash, maybe, but not this.”
“Very funny.”
Remi stooped over and picked up one of the bamboo tubes. It was as big around as a baseball bat and five feet long. “Sam, there’s writing on this. It’s scratched into the surface.”
“Are you sure?” Sam looked over her shoulder. He was the first to recognize the language. “That’s Italian.”
“You’re right.” Remi ran her fingertips over the etched words while rotating the bamboo in her opposite hand. “This isn’t, though.” She pointed to a spot near the tip.
No taller than a half inch, a square grid framed four Asian symbols. “This can’t be,” Remi murmured. “Don’t you recognize them?”
“No, should I?”
“Sam, they’re the same four characters engraved on the lid of the Theurang chest.”
35
NORTHERN NEPAL
Sam opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut. Remi said, “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m sure, Sam. I remember drinking tea and staring at these characters on Jack’s laptop screen.”
“I believe you. I just don’t see how—” Sam stopped and furrowed his eyebrows. “Unless . . . When we landed here, how far were we from the last set of coordinates?”
“Hosni said less than a kilometer.”
“Maybe a half mile from the path Dhakal would have taken on his journey. What if he died near here, or ran into trouble and lost the Theurang chest?”
Remi was nodding. “And then our balloonist friends come along centuries later. They crash-land here and find the box. When was the earliest manned balloon flight?”
“Just guessing . . . late sixteenth–early seventeenth century. But I’ve never heard of a dirigible from that period as advanced as this one. This would have been way ahead of its time.”
“Then at the earliest, it crashed here almost three hundred years after Dhakal left Mustang.”
“It’s plausible,” Sam admitted, “but hard to swallow.”
“Then explain these markings.”
“I can’t. You say they’re the Theurang curse, and I believe you. I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it all.”
“Join the club, Sam.”