"Tim Lahaye & Bob Philips - Babylon Rising 02 - The Secret On Ararat" - читать интересную книгу автора (LaHaye Tim)

"What are you grinning at, Professor?"she asked, her eyes never leaving the parchment.

"Nothing, Shari. Nothing at all. It's just nice to see someone so absorbed in their work, is all."

She gave a short "hmph," still not looking up, and Murphy's smile broadened. Shari Nelson was one of
the top students in his biblical archaeology class at Preston University, and for al-most two years she had
been his part-time research assistant. In that time he'd come to appreciate her passion for the subject, her
limitless capacity for hard work, and her sharp intelligence. But most of all, he valued her warm and
generous spirit. She might be pretending to ignore him right now, but they'd been through enough tragedy
and heartache together in the past year, with the deaths of his wife and her brother still painful every hour
of every day, for him to know that she would drop everything—even a fascinating ancient parchment like
the one she was studying—if he needed her.

"So what's up, Shari? Did the results from the carbon-dating tests on our little pottery fragment come
in?"

"Not yet," Shari replied, returning the parchment to the clear plastic container on the bench. "But
something has definitely arrived for you." She gestured toward a large white envelope with the purple and
orange lettering of Federal Express.

Shari watched eagerly as Murphy picked up the package. Clearly she'd had a hard time containing her
curiosity while she waited for Murphy to arrive at the lab.

"Strange," he mused. "No return address. Just Babylon. Doesn't look like it went through the usual
FedEx mailing process." He heard Shari gasp. Babylon, she knew all too well, could only mean one thing:
a whole heap of trouble.

Murphy carefully opened the envelope and shook the contents—a smaller envelope with the words
Professor Murphy printed in heavy marker and a xeroxed page from a map—out onto the workbench.
He glanced at the map, then opened the second envelope. Inside was an index card with three words
typed on it.

CHEMAR. ZEPHETH. KOPHER.

He handed it to Shari while he examined the map. A route had been marked in pink felt-tip from
Raleigh, moving west, across the border into Tennessee. Where the snaking line stopped, there were an
X and four barely legible words written in a spidery scrawl:

"Cave of the Waters. Mean anything to you, Shari?"

"It sounds like somewhere you definitely don't want to go," she replied firmly.

He winced. Exactly what Laura would have said. Same tone of voice, even.

"It's coming back to me. I've heard of this place. It's in the Great Smoky Mountains . . . past Asheville,
somewhere between Waynesville and Bryson City." If he remembered it right, the cave was discovered
in the early 1900s but had never been fully explored, because the high water table in the area—not to
mention at least three underground streams that ran through it—caused the chambers to flood
periodically. It was supposed to contain a vast labyrinth of passageways, but no one knew how far they