基本信息出版社：Bantam Press
页码：400 页
出版日期：2008年05月
ISBN：0593055713
条形码：9780593055717
版本：Airport / Export Ed
装帧：平装
正文语种：英语
内容简介 An ancient skull with a terrible legacy has just been found. It signals that the end of the world starts now. . . . .
Ancient wisdom predicts the end of the world with uncanny precision. But it also provides the key to staving off apocalypse — a flawless sapphire of incomparable beauty carved into the perfect likeness of a human skull.
Stella Cody has discovered a crystal skull of exquisite beauty. It has been hidden for four centuries. She also inherits its legacy of dark secrets, intrigue, and murder.
Facing an increasingly implacable enemy, Stella and her lover, Kit, struggle to crack the code that hides the skull’s intended resting place. Their search takes them from the intellectual rigour of Cambridge University to the untamed wildness of England’s prehistoric stone circles.
But time is against them, and they have only hours left to uncover the secret that may yet save the world.
作者简介 Manda Scott first came across the phenomenon of the crystal skulls while studying shamanic dreaming in the early 1980s. Since then she has met with teachers and healers from tribal nations across the world. She has learned that the ancient Maya were astoundingly accurate astronomers, and believes that we should take their prediction that the world will end on 21 December 2012 very seriously indeed. A veterinary surgeon by training, she has also written the bestselling Boudica quartet of novels which are available as Bantam paperbacks. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
Edgar nominee Scott (No Good Deed) mixes adventure, supernatural phenomena and cryptography to create a fast-paced supernatural thriller. Mayan apocalyptic astronomical documents chillingly predict that the world will end on December 21, 2012, unless 13 crystal skulls are reunited. Cedric Owen, a 16th-century scholar and physician whose family has safeguarded one of the skulls from time unknown, struggles to unlock the jewel's secrets and arrange for its safety. Nearly five centuries later, newlyweds Stella Cody and Kit O'Connor unlock Owen's cipher and track the skull to its hiding place, only to find themselves caught up in a global struggle between the keepers of the skulls and those who are determined to destroy them and bring about the end of the world. Stella and Kit's race to prevent the apocalypse turns into a life-threatening, heart-pounding battle between good and evil. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Praise for Manda Scott’s Sunday Times bestseller Boudica novels:
“A powerful novel, alive with love, deceit, wisdom and the heroics of humanity.”–Jean Auel
“One of the boldest recent adventures in historical fiction.”–Independent
文摘 CHAPTER ONE
Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
BENEATH INGLEBOROUGH FELL,
YORKSHIRE DALES, MAY 2007
BECAUSE IT WAS HER wedding gift, Stella came out of the tunnel first. Filthy, wet and shivering hot-cold from the effort of the last fifty-metre uphill haul, she crawled on her belly, pulling herself facedown into the empty blackness beyond.
She moved slowly, keeping taut the umbilical line that linked her to Kit, feeling with her hands for the quality of the footing, then shuffling forward no farther than the spilled light from her head-torch.
Like the tunnel, the cave was of chalk. Her gloved hands pressed on stone washed smooth by century upon patient century of water. Her torch revealed bright trickles of damp everywhere, washing over flat, undulating limestone. Beyond the splash of yellow light was unknown territory, unmapped, unexplored, as likely to be a ledge and a bottomless fall as a flat cave floor.
With cold-stiff fingers, she established safety, set a bolt into the wall by the mouth of the tunnel, clipped into it and tugged the rope to let Kit know that she had stopped and not to pay out more rope. By the light of her head-lamp, she checked her compass and her watch, then marked the incline and her estimate of its length and direction with wax pencil on the chart she kept in her chest pocket, where it would not snag on tunnel walls.
Only after she had done all these things did she turn and look up and round, and send the thread of her torch into the vast, cathedral space Kit had found for her.
"My God . . . Kit, come and look."
She spoke to herself; he was too far back to hear. She tugged twice on the rope, saying the same thing, and felt the single answering twitch and then sudden slack as he began to move towards
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