The Templar Legion by Paul Christopher Read Free Book Online

the door was sealed with pitch,” explained Rafi, pointing to the thick, black, tarry substance that still could be seen around the edges of the arched doorway.
    “It was sealed?” Holliday asked, running his hands over the wood surface. It was ironwood of some kind, extremely hard and very old.
    “Hermetically,” answered Rafi.
    “How’s that possible?” Holliday asked. “The door’s solid but there had to be some air exchange through the stones or the floor.”
    “Let me show you,” said Rafi. He leaned hard against the door and pushed. It didn’t budge. Holliday put his shoulder to it as well and the door grudgingly opened, a long lance of sunlight spearing dramatically into the room and illuminating the object in the middle of the floor.
    It was a stone sarcophagus, eight feet long and four feet wide and made of huge slabs of polished black basalt. The sides of the sarcophagus were carved with extraordinary scenes: what was surely a Viking ship being attacked by crocodiles, men in Roman tunics marching, their standard held high, and laboring slaves, backs bent with the weight of heavy baskets, their legs shackled to one another. The top of the sarcophagus was slightly more conventional, showing the stone effigy of a knight in chain mail, gripping his sword in both hands. The sword’s blade was entwined with a snake and at the knight’s feet a baboon slept, curled into the fetal position. On the knight’s free arm was a stone shield carved with the familiar Templar cross inlaid in a darker basalt. The sarcophagus was resting on the backs of six crouching lions made of the same black stone as the cross.
    “The tomb of Julian de la Roche-Guillaume, I presume,” said Holliday, his voice suddenly a bit breathless. He went to the sarcophagus and let his fingers trail the length of the old warrior’s sword, a sword in stone not much different from the one in Damascus steel he’d found hidden in his uncle’s home in Fredonia, New York, and which had started him on his long Templar adventure—a world within a world and plots within plots, stretching up through the centuries until today.
    “More than that,” said Rafi. He turned away from the huge stone coffin and went to the far wall. For the first time Holliday noticed that the walls had been covered with tarpaulins that hung on lines and rings like shower curtains. With no pause for dramatic effect Rafi pulled the dull green cloth aside.
    Peggy’s eyes went wide.
    “Holy crap,” she whispered, awestruck.

5
     
    It was a vision of paradise.
    “The Garden of Eden,” said Peggy, her camera forgotten.
    As Rafi pulled the curtains back from all four walls he revealed an enormous panorama, the sarcophagus in its center. The artist had painted it from some high vantage point, capturing the jungle, the enormous cascades of the waterfall and the nearby hills in perfect detail. Every tree, every branch, every leaf, every rocky crag and outcropping was captured in glowing greens and ochres, blues and whites and brilliant yellows, the magnificent arc of the rainbow as the water dropped into the foaming gorge as perfect as a photograph.
    Looking closer, Holliday could see that the jungle was alive, populated with birds, beasts and reptiles, snakes hanging from trees, a jaguar half-hidden by dappled shadows and perfectly in proportion, a line of tiny black human figures winding along the middle hill, wicker baskets balanced on their heads and shoulders as they walked down the hill and delivered their load onto strangely shaped dugouts waiting on the river. It was a masterpiece and a perfect dreamscape for the sleeping knight in the center of the tomb, beautiful enough to last him for eternity.
    “It’s magnificent,” said Holliday. “Who painted it, I wonder?”
    “It was almost certainly Roche-Guillaume himself,” said Rafi. “The painting is in much the same style as the sketches he made of his other travels.”
    “He painted the inside of his own