The Adventures of Indiana Jones also tells us what the three levels of the Universe represented on the Sankara Stones are; the illuson of worldly matter, the reality of transcendental spirit and the oneness of all space, time & substance.
Indiana examined the little nook. It was empty, but an indentation at its base indicated the conical shape of the stone that had once lain there. The shape was familiar to him. "The stone, was it very smooth?"
"Yes," nodded the shaman.
"It was from the Sacred River?"
"Yes. Brought here long ago, before my father's father." With three lines across it. Indy could see it in his mind.
"Yes, that is right."
"Repesenting the three levels of the universe, "Indy went on; the illusion of all worldy matter, the reality of transcendental spirit, the oneness of all space, time, and substance. It was potent mythology; it vaunted potent talismans. "I've seen stones like the one you lost. But why would the Maharajah take this Sacred Stone from here?"
The interdimensional aliens can move between dimensions.OXLEY: Multiple dimensions! Fascinating to ponder Mutt! Mignon Thorne wrote a interesting perspective, teased out the notion of changeable physic...
...and therefore random pockets of extrinsic physics...
...Changeable physics a bit like eddy in water, what with hot and cold spots, se what I’m getting at?
And at that very moment, the Thirteen Crystal Skeletons begin to vanish, one by one. They don’t disappear, or get in a ship and fly away, it’s more that they slip away, turning sideways and sliding into thin air, or another dimension, or someplace we cannot grasp.
Marduk has the power to cross between dimensions, and with malevolent intentions had them build the Great Machine.Gennadi Volodnikov: I'm searching for Marduk, a creature the Babylonians worshipped as a god. But he doesn't live in Heaven, just on another plane.
Radio Man: What kind of plane, sir? Soviet or American?
Gennadi Volodnikov: Not airplane, you idiot, it's another dimension of reality--the Aetherium!
Radio Man: Be careful, professor. When questions of ideology arise, they often conceal doubts about methods and results.
Gennadi Volodnikov: Inform ministerstvo we're making excellent progress--all according to plan. We know the true story is waiting in the Room of the Tablets. That's where we'll find out what happened to the Tower...and to the machine Marduk inspired. We're close. It's a matter of days, and damn the ideology!
Nebuchadnezzar built the Great Machine, but not understanding it the people tore down the machine, but four disciples took four parts of the machine with them across the world.Gennadi Volodnikov: Da! The Lord Marduk himself crossed over from the Aetherium to inspire the Babylonian priests. And Marduk, potent and malevolent to this day, will have his mest on those who desecrated the Great Machine.
Marduks power is said to be able to change the world and shake the Earth according to inscriptions on different machine parts."Make welcome, seeker.
Know that it was Nebuchadnezzar, in heed of the writing that Marduk made
appear unto him, who builded the great engine.
Having no understanding, the rabble hath thrown down his work, but four
trusted disciples are...are scattered upon the face of the earth, and the
relics go with them.
Wouldst thou tread the path of knowledge, look eastward.
Urgon it is who flees to the Heavenly Mountains, where Shambala holds a mighty
secret."
Indiana Jones: The inscription reads..."My power will change the world." Turner fouled up again!
The Great Engine exists in another dimensions, and is one massive machine.Indiana Jones: Look at that thing, humming like a top. Wait, I see writing...it says, "Verily will I shake the Earth."
Indiana Jones: Marduk charged up his thunderbolts here. Maybe I should give it a try...
Marduk possesses Indy's companion Sophia, and when Indy defeats Marduk (after powering up using the energy from the Great Machine) it disappears and Sophia returns to normal. Shortly after though, the Great Machine (and possibly the entire Aetherium) collapses, along with the ancient temple back on Earth.Indiana Jones: Marduk used this thing to charge up his thunderbolts. Maybe I should try the same thing...
A few more examples of people who are in the book, such as a French Farmer and a Roman Soldier in 1400AD."Kaspar Maskelyne came to the mysterious East four years ago, searching for a book of secret knowledge told of by the ancient Arab scholar, Ibn Battuta." Faye snapped her fingers and a book danced high over the heads of the crowd. "This book—the legendary Omega Book—contains a complete record of the lives of every soul who will ever live on this earth, and all of the secrets of nature. Every religion refers to it. There are different names for it, but it is the same book. And it can only be found with the aid of the Staff of Aaron."
You cannot look up your own name in the Omega Book (though you can get someone else to do so for you)."This is incredible," Indy said. "I've never seen anything like it—the world has never seen anything like it, at least not the world we know. We'll have to rewrite history. This is the archaeological discovery of the age."
"What's the page about?" Mystery asked.
"It's the life of a French farmer named Francois Malevil," Indy said. "Like the Rosetta stone, the three translations are identical. The dates are also given in different numbering systems. Let's see, it will take me a moment to reconcile the Greek with our present system."
Indy paused for a moment.
"The fourteenth century," he said. "After Christ. No, that can't be right. My God, it is. Look, this entry talks about a Roman soldier who died at Actium."
The Omega Book contains the past, present and future, and can be read in different languages."Of course," Indy said, glancing at the dates. "It's in chronological order."
"What are you looking for?"
"My own name."
"No," Mystery said. "You can't. We aren't supposed to know." "The book—," he stammered. "Don't you see?" she said. "This is the last trap. You can look up anybody else's name but your own. You've got the ultimate archaeological reference here. Look up Jesus or Joan of Ark, but not Indiana Jones."
When Sokai forces Indy to read the Omega Book, it reveals he will shortly burn to death. Promptly this happens, and no attempts to alter the Omega Book or damage it work.Sokai approached the book, his one good eye gleaming in the soft light. He leaned over to examine the page, then frowned.
"What's wrong?" Indy taunted. "Can't read Sanskrit?"
"Get over here," Sokai demanded, not realizing that another of the colored sheets would have rendered the text in Mandarin, a language he could read.
Indy walked over slowly.
"How does this work?" Sokai asked.
"I have no idea," Indy said.
"No, I mean the entries," Sokai said impatiently. "They tell the past, present, and future? Find my entry and read it to me. If I know what lies ahead, then I can bend things to my will."
"This isn't easy to read," Indy said.
Musashi grabbed Mystery by the hair, close to the skull, and twisted. Mystery choked down the pain.
"I'm going as fast as I can," Indy said, his eyes smoldering. "Sokai, born in Hawaii. Schooled at—"
"I know all that," Sokai said. "Go on to the future."
"Nineteen thirty-four," Indy said. "Blinded in Manchuria by an American he was torturing. Followed the same American, Indiana Jones, from Manchuria to India and eventually to Egypt."
Indy paused. "Go on!"
"If you insist," he said. "Burned to death beneath the Great Pyramid in the Hall of Records at the Giza necropolis."
"No!"
"That's what it says."
Sokai backhanded Indy with his fist.
"You are lying," Sokai said.
Indy wiped the blood from his split lower lip with the sleeve of his jacket and gave Sokai a hard look that convinced the spymaster that he wasn't.
"Change it," Sokai said.
"I can't," Indy protested. "I don't even know how it was written in the first place."
"Use a pencil," Sokai screamed. "You have a pencil, don't you?"
Indy took the pencil from his shirt pocket and tried to write on the page.
"It won't make a mark," Indy said.
"Try harder this time," Sokai said, "or Musashi will kill the girl."
Musashi switched the sword to her left hand, drew her pistol, cocked it, and held it to Mystery's head. Indy leaned so hard on the pencil trying to make a mark that it snapped.
Sokai grasped the page and tried to tear it from the book, but it wouldn't come loose. He succeeded only in slicing his hand on the edge of the page.
"Look," Musashi said.
Sokai's trouser leg, above the heel that had stamped out the torch, was beginning to smoke.
"My God, it's true," Indy said.
"No," Sokai said as the cuff burst into flames. He frantically tried to put the fire out, and when that didn't work he unbuckled his belt and tried to wriggle out of his pants. By this time, however, the flames had spread to his shirt and trench coat.
Sokai screamed. The room was filled with the stench of burning flesh and hair. Sokai dropped to the floor and began to roll.
"Cut them off me," he begged Musashi.
She dropped the pistol and attempted to slice the clothes away from his body, but succeeded only in stabbing him in a half dozen places. His very body seemed to be combusting, and the flames grew no matter how many articles of clothing were removed.
"My sword," Sokai croaked and grasped the handle with a burning hand. "I will at least take Jones with me."
Sokai struggled to his knees and made a lunge for Indy, but it was far too short. Pieces of burning flesh sloughed from his face and hands. Sokai fell upon his back, but held the blade aloft until the fire burned through his wrist and the samurai sword clattered onto the granite floor.
"Oh, God," Mystery said and went to Indy, where she buried her face against his leather jacket. leather jacket. Sokai was nothing but a smoking pile of ashes.
Many Pincoyans are illusionists, who can make it look like they changed their shape by making their target think that.THE HIDDEN LAND BELOW
A strange mystery connects the whispering moai statues of Easter Island to the eerie ghost ship of Chiloé Island, leading Indiana Jones on a dangerous quest into a hidden interior world. Earlier Indy accidentally caused an imbalance between the two worlds when he disposed of a fabled but dangerous relic. Now, the leader of an unstoppable army uses this artifact to enter our world and for a deadly alliance with an even darker force....
For centuries man has told tales of a hollow earth, or an underworld, populated by a mysterious race and strange characters. Sometimes describing an underworld of death, sometimes another dimension, these stories tell of mermaids, ghost ships...and a cosmic balance that must be restored lest the powers within march to conquer the outside world—and only Indiana Jones holds the key!
Minhocoa is a giant snake which guards the doorway between worlds. Salandra also says not to take the legend literally (as a lot of it is steeped in metaphors). Mihocoa is the between-world itself, and there's no way to return to exterior world without first going through her stomach, the Land of the Lost."How did he make himself look like Beitelheimer? What kind of trick was that?"
Salandra didn't answer immediately. She seemed to be mulling over what he'd told her. "Sacho is an illusion shaper; many Pincoyans are. He didn't actually shift appearances, he only made you think so. There's a difference."
Weavers of spindles talk about the different planes of existence of the higher and lower worlds. They believe it is their job to guard cosmic balance of the Universe and all its planes."That octopus wasn't too happy when we left it."
"We were lucky to survive. But, unfortunately, there's much worse in here. We are inside Minhocoa."
"Who or what is that?"
"A giant snake."
"A what?"
"Pincoya was built around the waterfall, which our legends say is a fountain for an enormous snake who guarded the doorway between worlds. There was a bad time in our history when sacrifices were made and many innocent people were thrown into the pool, and into the snake's mouth."
"I don't like being anywhere near snakes, much less inside one of them," Indy said.
"Don't take the legend literally."
Right. The fairy princess of the interior world tells me not to take a legend seriously.
"But there is some truth to the story," she continued.
"There usually is."
"You see, my father once told me that the legend served the purpose of discouraging our people from following these underground corridors to the exterior world."
"You mean this might be a way back to the real world?" He spoke the words slowly, trying not to get overly excited.
"The real world?"
"You know what I mean. My world."
"If we make it. The problem is that Minhocoa is the between-world. There is no way we can get to your world without first passing through her stomach."
"Her stomach?" He had a brief vision of himself being swallowed whole by a mythical snake, then being digested. "That's what you said? Her stomach?"
"In the legend, Minhocoa's stomach is the place you've already heard about, the Land of the Lost."
The mind of the maze manifests an image for Indy and Salandra, appearing as a different form before both of them. If they fail, it threatens to find them through their dreams and destroy them from the inside, and it can walk through walls.Mama Juan tapped the central disk. "This is the plane on which we live. It is called Ninulanc." He ran his fingers over the upper disks. "These are the higher planes, Mamanulang, Mulkuakukui, Nyuinulang, and Xatsalnulang." Then he moved his finger to the disks on the lower side. "These are the realms of the underworld, Haba Sivalulang, Haba Kanenulang, Haba Kaneexan, Haba Guxanexan."
He went on to explain that the Kogi houses were built in the same shape as the top half of the spindle. The floor was Ninulanc, and the underworld was an abstract extension of the house, existing below the earth. "The daytime sun weaves in white thread, from west to east, while its nighttime counterpart travels in the underworld from west to east, weaving a black thread in the fabric of time."
The analogy fascinated him, but Indy wondered if they were all madmen cut off from the world, existing in their own reality, one in which spindles had assumed far greater meaning than they deserved. He watched Mama Juan closely as the old man pointed at the center point of the large spindle. "The Kogis are here at the gate to the underworld. We are the guardians. We work our spindles day after day to make sure that the weave of the universe, above and below, stays together as a finely woven piece of fabric.
"That sounds like a lot of work," Indy said, recalling that Salandra had said she did the same sort of thing.
The dogs sent by Wayua are not gentle in anyway, but Salandra was able to calm them by reaching into their minds."Find a way. There are many routes leading here."
"And if I don't succeed?"
"I will find you through your dreams and destroy you from the inside out."
"How do we get out of here?"
The creature didn't answer. Instead, it turned and walked through a wall as if the wall didn't exist.
"What in God's name was that thing?" Jones asked.
"An image projected by the mind of the maze." Salandra described what she had seen. She wasn't surprised when Jones said that he'd seen something else altogether.
"It looked like a gigantic frog with a human head," he explained. "Enormous black eyes, a wide, flat nose, and hardly any lips."
The pack of dogs is attacked by an unknown creature, which throws one of the dogs."What did you do to those dogs, anyhow? They were acting like puppies."
"I reached into their minds and calmed them, but they've been trained by Wayua. There's nothing gentle in their nature. They'll be after us in a few minutes.
They come across the remains of the dogs. Something tore them apart.Suddenly, the hounds snarled and growled, frenzied now as if they'd cornered their prey. But Indy didn't think the dogs were barking at him and Salandra. Then a wild, unearthly shriek cut through the air. It wasn't the dogs; it was something else. Something worse. The terrified shrieks collapsed into a single, ear-splitting squeal. A moment later, one of the dogs catapulted past them, and crashed against a wall.
"That was no jump," Indy hissed. "Something threw it."
Indy looks at the creatures tracks.The corridor curved, and Indy couldn't tell whether they were retreating from the scene of madness or heading toward it. Then he found his answer as he spotted the dogs, or rather what remained of them. They'd been gutted and decapitated, their limbs strewn about.
The creature appears, and it's in the form of a devil.She pointed at a trail of bloody footprints. They looked as if they'd been made by a hoofed creature. Indy studied the prints, then dropped to one knee and placed his hand, fingers spread, over one of them. The track was an inch or two larger all the way around. "This doesn't make sense. It's walking like a two-legged creature, and by the size of its hoofs, I'd say it's—"
As it approaches though, it changes, taking the form of a snake with a human head.The creature filled the passageway. Its eyes, a pair of burning coals, seared him. It stood nearly as tall as the walls. Its legs were covered with fur, its chest leathery and vaguely human-looking. Snakes slithered around its shoulders and neck. It had claws for hands, but its head was human, except for the horns above its forehead. It had a prominant hooked nose and beady eyes. If this was hell, Indy knew who he was looking at.
The creature took different forms and said different things to both Indy and Salandra, and even its tracks changed from hoofs to paw prints. It can do this as it responds to different peoples thoughts.It moved closer, and now the thing was a snake with a human head.
Indy says he'd say the creature was just a hallucination (or illusion), but he also saw that it had torn apart the dogs. Salandra points out the dogs getting ripped apart is what they intended to do to them."What happened to it?"
"I don't know."
"Did you see its head?" she asked. "It had three eyes, one on its forehead. And it spoke to me in my own language."
"What? It spoke English, and it didn't have three eyes. It had horns, but then it was a snake, too." He described the creature and repeated what it said to him.
She shook her head. "That's not what I saw or heard. It was the body of a silver bear, and it told me that my father was dead."
"Look at the tracks. They're hoofs, not paws." But now he saw that some of them looked like paw prints.
"But you said it was a snake, too?"
"I don't know any more what I saw, but we're lucky we didn't end up like the dogs." They started down the passageway. "I think it responds to our thoughts," she said. "You saw the devil because you think you're in hell. I was told my father was dead, because I'm worried about him."
Salandra's mind and dreams are being invaded by another being, preventing her from controlling her dreams.As they moved from one passage to another, a luminous green haze settled over the maze. Indy's vision was limited to about fifty feet, but the maze kept him from seeing much beyond that distance anyhow. "I'd say the creature was just a hallucination, except I saw what it did to the dogs."
"The dogs got just what they intended for us," Salandra pointed out.
The image of Maleiwa faded, but now Salandra's inner vision was flooded with a barrage of other memories of the Wayua leader. Salandra recognized she was dreaming, and when she did so, she willed away the images. She was a skilled dreamer, after all, and she could stop or change a dream at will. But to her great consternation, she couldn't control the thoughts and images. They sped by rapidly, and they were somehow associated with a keen intensity They sped by rapidly, and they were somehow associated with a keen intensity of feeling that she didn't comprehend. She prodded and poked into the depths of the dream as only one with her abilities could do, and there she found something totally unexpected, and nearly beyond comprehension. The dream-thoughts were not for her benefit; they were triggered by another being that had invaded her innermost thoughts. She reached out with her mind and touched the other. The contact was momentary, but the shock of it jolted her down to her very essence. Her heart nearly exploded from acute fright.
To be fair, the beam of light was already by his faceIndiana Jones seems to react to a beam of sunlight, causing him to fall over. Make of this what you will.
(Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny, issue #1)
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