Lying on top of the mud were four irregularly shaped objects such as he had never before laid eyes upon. He had the immediate impression of the turquoise he’d known as a child in South Africa, but these were a bluish green color that he couldn’t quite identify.

He walked over to the silt pile and stretched out to touch them.

“Don’t touch, Mr. Frik! Bad stuff!”

Frik looked around to see who had spoken and saw the backs of his workers as they scattered, all except Eduardo.

“He’s right, Señor Frik. Better not to touch.” In a show of bravado, the Venezuelan moved to Frik’s side. “See where they come from first. Make sure they’re not Obeah, or the Obeahman might get us.”

“Don’t tell me they’ve got you convinced about their kaffir bogeyman.” He’d dealt with enough shamanistic beliefs in his boyhood on the veldt that he was unimpressed by the men’s fear that the objects might be fetishes. Besides, when he’d first been told of the local superstitions, the anthropologist he’d talked to had said that this particular myth predated the arrival of the Africans and their Obeah worship. It was probably, in fact, as old as the first Arawaks to cross the gulf from Venezuela on their migration northward.

Frik got up abruptly and strode over to the drill assembly. The bit looked like a giant apple corer, almost twenty inches in diameter. Hand on the side of the drill, he glanced through the base of the derrick to the water fifty feet below.

“I’m sending the camera down. I want to see the bottom of the bore hole.”

He set up the feedback equipment, attached the underwater video camera to a cable, and lowered the assemblage down the well. As it descended, he focused on the small screen that would show what the camera found. Despite the sophistication of the equipment, the image was grainy and cloudy with silt from the drilling process. It got even worse when, about seventy feet below the seabed, the camera passed through the hole in the roof of the cavern.