THE SEA

Beneath the Mariana and Yap Trenches, 6,010 Fathoms

It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery. . . .
-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

For days they had been remarking on a nebulous gleam the color of milk, occupying the rump of their horizon. They thought it might be a cloudbank or steam from a waterfall or perhaps a beached iceberg. Ali feared they were suffering collective hunger delusions, for they'd begun stumbling on the trail and talking to themselves. No one imagined a sea-side fortress carved from phosphorescent cliffs.

Five stories high, its walls were as smooth as Egyptian alabaster. It had been whittled from solid rock. Beerstone, Twiggs told them. The Romans used to quarry it in ancient Britain. Westminster Abbey was made of it. A creamy white calcite, it came out of the ground as soft as soap and over the years dried to a hardness perfect for sculpting. He adored it for its pollen residues.

Long ago, hadals had skinned away the face of this wall, denuding its softer stone to cut out a complex of rooms and ramparts and statues, all of one piece. Not one block or brick had been added to it, a single huge monument.

Three times as broad as it was tall, the dwelling was empty and largely in collapse. It breasted the sea and was clearly a bulwark anchoring the commerce of some great vanished empire. You could see what was left of stone docks and pier slips submerged an inch beneath the water.

Even weak with hunger, they were beguiled. They wandered through the warren of rooms looking across the night sea and, to the fortress's rear, onto the crags below. Stairs had been cut into the cliff sides, seemingly thousands of them, leading off into new depths.

Whoever -- or whatever -- the hadals had built this defensive monster against, it was not humans. Ali estimated the fortress dated back at least fifteen thousand years, probably more. "Man was still chipping flint in caves when this hadal civilization was engaged in riverine trade across thousands of miles. I doubt we were much of a threat to them."

"But where did they go?" Trov asked. "What could have destroyed them?"

As they wandered through the crumbling hulk, they encountered a people from another time. The fortress rooms and parapets were built to Homo scale, with ceilings planed at a remarkably standard six feet.

With a pencil-thin beam of light, Ike traced a set of handholds carved into the upper half of the platform's circular wall. He opened his hundred-pound pack and laid out the contents, and they all took a peek.

"You're still carrying rope?" marveled Ruiz. "How many coils do you have in there?"

He tied one end of the rope to his waist. "I'll trail the rope," he said. "If there's anything up there, I'll fix the line and you can come take a look."

Armed with his headlamp and their only pistol, Ike stood on Spurrier's and Troy's shoulders and gave a hop to reach the lowest hand-hold. From there it was only another twenty feet to the top. He spidered up, grabbed the edge of the platform, and started to pull himself over. But he stopped. They watched him not move for a whole minute.

"Is something wrong?" asked Ali.

Ike pulled himself onto the platform and looked down at them. "You better see this for yourself."

He knotted loops in the rope to make them a ladder. One by one, they climbed up, weak, needing help.

Between themselves and the tower, ninety feet in, a ceramic army awaited them. Lifeless, yet alive.

They were hadal warriors made of glazed terra-cotta. Facing out toward intruders, they numbered in the hundreds, arranged in concentric circles around the tower, each statue bearing a weapon and a ferocious expression. Some still wore armor made of thin jade plates stitched with gold links. On most, time had stretched or broken the gold, and the plates had tumbled to their feet, leaving the hadal mannequins naked.

It was hard not to speak in a whisper. They were awestruck, intimidated. "What have we stumbled into?" asked Pia.

Some brandished war clubs edged with obsidian chips, pre-Aztec. There were atlatls -- spear throwers -- and stone maces with iron chains and handles. Some of the weaponry carried Maori-type geometries, but had to predate Maori culture by fourteen thousand years. Spears and arrows made of abyssal reed had been fletched not with bird feathers but with fish spines.

It was fair to guess by the details that the statues had been built true to life. In that case, the warriors had averaged an extraordinary five feet ten inches -- fifteen eons ago. As Troy pointed out, it was always a mistake to generalize too much from the looks of an army, for armies tended to recruit the healthiest and fittest specimens in a population. Even so, during the same Neolithic period the average H. sapiens male had stood five to eight inches shorter.

"Next to these guys, Conan the Barbarian would have been nothing more than a mesomorphic runt leading a bunch of human pipsqueaks," Troy said. "It kind of makes you wonder. With their physical size and this level of social organization and wealth, why didn't the hadals just invade us?"

"Who says they didn't?" asked Ali.

Excerpted from The Descent by Jeff Long. Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.