The passageway opened up into a very large room. Taking a guess it was 60 or 70 feet square with a pair of large columns on either side of the entrance. There was nothing spectacular about it other than the ceiling was shaped like the inside of a pyramid and the walls were lined with what looked like hundreds of earthen pots. About 10 or 15 feet into the room was another chair holding the remains of another person, decayed and decomposed just like the others.
“Looks like our last victim,” I said as I approached the elaborately decorated seat.
This skeleton was decorated even more elaborately than the other two. Instead of a garment on the upper torso she appeared to be wearing a solid silver breast plate that extended from her shoulders down to her waist, contouring her breasts and chest features like it had been made from a mold or casting. There is a pair of small holes at the ends of the breast cups the size of a half dollar coin, apparently to allow her nipples to stick out. At the tops of the shoulders and at two places on the sides were thick leather straps which held a similar back plate in place at the skeletons back. The silver buckles were still fastened as if she were ready to stand up and start giving commands at a moment’s notice. Several thick silver chains hung from around the neck and down over the breast plate. One of which held a pendant with the embossed shape of the key Mandy used to let us in here.
“This must be the ruler of the city,” Mandy exclaimed as she stepped up to the chair to inspect its occupant. “Look here,” she said as she reached into the lap and picked up a pair of silver rings with big stones hanging from them. “Talk about a pair of nipple weights, these must weigh one or two ounces each.”
The two rings had large teardrop shaped stones hanging from them in silver mountings. As Mandy wiped the dust away it quickly became evident that they were a pair of emeralds. The rings themselves looked to have a split in them with a small single pin hinge so they could be removed. Probably so the woman could take off the breast plate for sleeping. She also had several dozen bracelets on each arm as well as both ankles. And instead of rings on the fingers she wore silver finger sleeves on eight of the fingers, all of which were encrusted with various sized gem stones of different colors, leaving the thumbs free and exposed. This had to be the ruler.
“Only one place left to check,” I said as I reached for the bottom hem of the skirt around her waist.
Mandy trained her flashlight on the remains as I gently lifted back the material. As expected there was a large stone in the seat directly beneath where her crotch had been as well as 3 very thick silver chains around her waist. “Oh my,” Mandy said with widening eyes as the full size of the stone was finally revealed.
The stone was about 5 or 6 inches long, considerably bigger than either one of the two previous stones we found with the other women. And it was a solid inch and three quarters to two inches in diameter, making it almost the same size as the silver key. As I held the skirt up Mandy reached in and picked up the dust covered stone.
“It’s easily a pound or two,” Mandy said as she slowly ran her fingers up its length, pushing a hundred years of dust and decay from its surface. With the first swipe of her fingers Mandy froze in place, her eyes glued to the object in front of her. “HOLY SHIT!!” Mandy exclaimed quietly as she quickly began rubbing the stone from top to bottom in a frantic attempt to polish it all at once. “David….” she said as her motions became more and more energetic, “It’s the biggest fucking emerald I have ever heard of!”
I dropped the hem of the skirt and looked at the now sparkling stone in Mandy’s hands. It appeared to be one big solid emerald crystal. It was just barely distinguishable on the sides, but the flat faces of the crystal were still notable. Both ends had been polished and smoothed into rounded ends, making insertion from either end possible. With these kinds of crystals found with the remains of the former leaders and keepers of this place, I wondered what was inside the dark looking pots that surrounded the room.
As Mandy stood inspecting the big crystal I stepped over to the first row of pots. Standing close to four feet tall they were aligned side by side extending all the way around the room from the pillar at the entrance to the opposite pillar 4 rows deep with a second stack of shorter vessels on the back two rows, making a total of six rows of pots. They didn’t look extra ordinary in appearance, being a dark color and comparatively plain compared to the chair behind me. It wasn’t until I picked up one of the lids that I realized they were made out of silver. A hundred years of neglect had tarnished the outsides of them. The lid alone must have weighed 8 or 10 pounds. But what I saw inside is what really made my heart flutter. As I moved the lid out of the way my eyes were instantly greeted with the sparkling green color of hundreds of raw uncut and unpolished emerald crystals.
“Mandy,” I said as I set the lid down on the adjacent pot and reached into the top of the open vessel. “I think we found the jackpot!”
Mandy looked over at the top of the open pot as I lifted my hand and poured the contents out in the beam of her flashlight. The cascade of green sparkling gems made a nice gentle sound as my hand emptied. Mandy let out a loud gasp as she watched the 50 or so stones fall from my hand before her flashlight turned away and shown around the rest of the room. ‘Hitting the jackpot’ was an incredible understatement. It would be like telling a guy standing in front of a tidal wave that he was about to experience moisture. No, this was more like ‘HOLY MOTHER FUCKING SHIT WERE RICH ! !’
“We did it,” I said with my heart thumping in my throat as I looked back over at Mandy who was standing with her mouth hanging open. “All of those years of research you put in really paid off.”
“David,” Mandy said as she started bouncing up and down on her toes. “We’re rich! Holy shit we’re rich!” She looked back at me with a grin that reached from ear to ear.
I am pretty sure I knew exactly how she felt because I know her rather well. My condition could best be described as that kind of tingly feeling you get when you have hyperventilated and the oxygen levels are starting to return to normal in your system. I felt like I could just fly apart in all directions at once as I looked at the huge cash of wealth and my beautiful girlfriend.
The holler was virtually simultaneous. “WAHOO!!” we both shouted before we ran to each other and locked into an air stifling embrace. Mandy’s small body felt fantastic crushed up against my chest as we celebrated jumping up about 75 different tax brackets. Mandy’s family might have been wealthy, but nothing like this. We were now richer than most nations in the third world, and it was all ours! We kissed passionately as I spun us around in circles. This payday had been a long time coming.
Setting about the inventory of the booty was simple enough. With several trips each to the room with the flasks Mandy and I soon had the whole passageway and the treasure room lit up. With the orange light flickering in the slight draft that came through the room the bounty seemed larger than we had first thought. With my tape measure in hand I began the task of laying out the room. It was 69 feet by 69 feet square with a 12 foot wide opening for the passageway. The pots, arranged 4 rows deep on the bottom, were 40 inches tall each while the ones on the top 2 rows were 28 inches tall. The remains of a thick woven mat separated the two different stacks, keeping the top rows supported from tip over. The pots themselves were 18 inches in diameter, making a total of 46 standing side by side against the longest stretch of the wall. Some quick math gave me the jaw dropping total.
“Mandy,” I said as I looked at my notebook in disbelief. “There are 1504 of these silver pots in here; 900 on the bottom 4 rows and 604 for the top.” I think the revelation of how many pots there were in the room was a bit too much for Mandy. She just stood there with her mouth hanging open as she looked around the room. “I don’t think we’ll be hauling much of this out of here.”
Actually there was no way to do it. In an effort to begin the extraction of our new found wealth I tried to move one of the pots. There was no way. It must have weighed a thousand pounds. And with just over 1500 of them, that was an estimated 750 tons, twice the weight of a 747 jumbo jet. It would take an army.
“Well we had better pick wisely,” Mandy said as she started going from pot to pot and removing the lids. “Since we can only take a little back with us we had better make it count.”
Her thinking was smart and clear, given the circumstances. We would have to choose what we took with us and just make several thousand trips back here. Our biggest issue is that neither one of us knows very much about gemstones. By that I mean which is the more valuable a diamond or an emerald? And we had quite a few more choices than that to choose from. As our inspection took us around the room the collection of wealth varied from pot to pot. Several dozen pots near the passageway were empty. I could actually move these. Just one large empty silver vessel weighed about 80 pounds. So we couldn’t even take one of these back with us. Not without giving me a hernia.
It appeared, after a little bit of detective work, that the room was divided up into sections with each section having a different kind of treasure. It became easier to tell what was in each pot after I found the small markings near the lids. The pots with a single vertical line were filled with emeralds. And these came in all shapes and sizes. One such pot had emerald crystals that were the size of golf balls while another was filled with emeralds the size of peas. Most of the pots seemed to be emerald filled.
The pots with the two horizontal lines were filled with ruby. (Pretty sure that’s what they were) The bold red stones were also assorted by size though there were nowhere near as many of these as the ones filled with emerald.
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