When Petru left, Mrs. Larry's feelings were extremely complex and conflicted. Of course, she hoped that the Redbeard man would come back to save her, but she also didn't want anyone else to be put in danger because of her.
Seeing that Petru had reached the top of the altar unscathed by the savages, Mrs. Larry breathed a sigh of relief. She sat down, leaning against the cold rock. The giant moon in the sky didn't bring her much pressure; compared to her past experiences, nothing could be worse.
She remembered Petru's words and kept reinforcing the subconscious thought in herself—no matter what happened, she should not leave. In fact, even without Petru saying it, she would have stuck to this idea, because the worst outcome of staying here was death.
As she gazed at the ever-growing moon, she began to ponder how this phenomenon had occurred. Had the moon strayed from its orbit and was hurtling towards Earth?
If that happens, the entire world will be affected; what will happen to people in other places?
Is it like the savages on the altar, crawling on the ground and chanting doomsday prayers? Religious people would, she thought.
Were they so terrified by the shocking sight that they couldn't think straight and could only stare blankly at the sky, waiting for disaster to strike? Most people would probably be like that, she thought.
Was it wise and decisive to board a plane immediately and escape to the plateau or the other side of the earth to gain a slim chance of survival? Rich people and politicians would, she thought.
Is it about preparing contingency plans, organizing manpower, maintaining order, and making a last-ditch effort and a death throes? True leaders and the human elite would do that, she thought.
Was she thinking about how, in a very short time, before the Earth was destroyed, to preserve the seeds of human civilization in the safest place so that it would have a chance to continue? Her friends, those scientists, would do that, she thought.
Is it because of impending death that the ugliest side of human nature erupts, leading to arson, murder, looting, and all sorts of evil deeds? Surely... no one would do that, she thought, not entirely sure.
She found it strange that she had such thoughts and so many ideas, yet she also found it quite interesting.
If this isn't a disaster, and if she can make it back alive, perhaps she can write these thoughts into a novel, she thought.
The moon continued to grow larger, and a rumbling sound came from afar. She knew it was the tides caused by gravity turning into a tsunami. Was it really the end of the world?
However, what she saw next made her doubt the idea. She saw the large rock in front of her slowly rise to the surface. The rock she was leaning against was also moving, and then it floated up, brushing against her back.
One stone after another floated up and drifted into the air. But she was still sitting on the ground, feeling only slightly dizzy from the rush of blood to her head; otherwise, she was perfectly normal.
Although Mrs. Larry is not a physicist, and her research field has always been in the area of humanities and archaeology, she still has basic physics knowledge. No matter how close the moon gets, it will not pull rocks from the ground into the air. Its gravity will only make the tides a little bigger, and after the Earth and the moon get closer, the moon's orbital speed around the Earth will also increase, possibly completing a revolution around the Earth in just a few hours, and then the continents will be submerged by seawater.
But now, the moon has been overhead for so long and shows no signs of moving away. It doesn't look like it's orbiting the Earth, or rather, it doesn't look like what we see from Earth; it looks more like what we see from a lunar geosynchronous space station.
The fact that those rocks floated up couldn't possibly be due to the moon's gravity. If the gravity were strong enough to make the rocks float, then she should have floated up too, but she was still sitting on the ground.
More and more stones floated, densely packed in the air, like a meteorite swarm in the Kuiper Belt.
The stones float to a certain height and then stop moving, as if they have found their place. Larger stones float at lower levels, while smaller ones continue to rise, with smaller stones floating higher and higher. The higher the stones go, the fewer there are, eventually forming a pointed shape at the top.
Mrs. Larry looked up and thought the shape resembled a pyramid floating in space. Remembering the shape of the altar, she finally understood: this was a pyramid, originally half-built, and the stone now floating in mid-air was the other half.
It's like we're doing a geometry problem. We draw a trapezoid on paper, and then draw auxiliary lines upwards along the hypotenuse of the trapezoid using dashed lines. When the two dashed lines intersect, they combine with the original trapezoid to form an equilateral triangle. Of course, this isn't a plane geometry problem, but a solid geometry problem. So what we see in the air now isn't an equilateral triangle, but a regular square pyramid, a pyramid constructed using dashed lines.
However, some stones were still rising. This time, it was the opposite of before: the larger stones kept rising, while the smaller ones rose more slowly and stayed at a low altitude. There were already many floating stones in the air, but these rising stones did not collide with them. Instead, they peacefully floated to their respective positions along their own trajectories.
The shape of the pyramid was already there, but now it's been disrupted by even more stones. Mrs. Larry didn't understand it at first and thought she was overthinking it, but it was just her professional intuition that made her mistake the stones for a pyramid.
The moonlight shone on the stone, reflecting a peculiar light that formed a halo between the stone's crevices. She shifted her gaze from the stone to the halo in the crevices, as if looking at light filtering through a skylight.
At that moment, she finally realized that this was not one pyramid, but two pyramids—two pyramids stacked on top of each other, facing each other.
The stones that floated up later formed an inverted pyramid, which stands opposite the original pyramid and interlocks with it. Its base is at the apex of the other pyramid, and its apex is at the center of the base of the other pyramid, which is where Mrs. Larry is now standing.
Her feet stood at the very center of the altar. Her body was the apex of the inverted pyramid.
Mrs. Larry didn't know if she was dreaming, but even if she was, it was a magnificent dream—a giant moon filled the entire sky, and above her head, two opposing pyramids made of stacked meteorites floated.
Moonlight filtered through the crevices in the rocks, falling onto the ground and creating patterns of light and shadow. These patterns were peculiar, resembling strange symbols.
Mrs. Larry remembered similar symbols engraved on the scepter of the savage chieftain and on their pottery. She judged it to be an ancient script.
She read it line by line, memorizing it all. For one of the world's best archaeologists and linguists, this was no difficult task. The challenge lay in deciphering the text.
After looking at all the light spots on the ground, she unconsciously moved her feet away to look at the spot she had been covering—the apex of the inverted pyramid—which was also the center of the base of another pyramid.
She saw some lines on the ground, as if they were engraved with some kind of pattern. She squatted down to look closely and first saw a geometric symbol:
They are two equilateral triangles, connected at their vertices, with a vertical line passing through the vertices and connecting to the center point of the two triangles.
It was a familiar symbol; she had seen it before. It was because of this that she boarded the research vessel Discovery and went with Robbins and the others to investigate an ancient and mysterious ruin.
She noticed some lines on the ground next to the symbol, not straight like the symbol, but extending outwards in a somewhat twisted manner. She lay down, brushed away the dirt with her hand, and discerned that it was a stone-carved mural.
She guessed it was an ancient totem.
The painting depicts a tall, towering tree with mountain shapes carved along its roots, floating clouds in the middle of its trunk, and a circle on its crown, the shape of which is unclear—perhaps due to excessive brightness or the moon.
On the highest branch, a bird was perched.