Amazingly, it took just as long for his toes to brush the ground as it had to enter the chamber from the tunnel.His feet rolled flat from ball to heel, steadying himself as if he"d spent the last year in zero gravity. He disengaged clamp from cable, took off his gloves, and felt for the line"s end. There it was, right at his fingertips, without having to be uncoiled; which meant the depth of this chasm was very close to the line"s full hundred feet. A whistle escaped his lips, pierced the silence around him, and bounced back two fold.
He grabbed the flashlight from its place in his belt and clicked it on.A blazing cone of yellow light cut a streak through the darkness. Ken looked around in amazement, trying to take in each thing the flashlight"s narrow beam revealed. He stood in the middle of a huge, square room – fifty or so feet from wall to wall by his best estimation. Hieroglyphs covered those walls for as far up as he could see. Six crudely built wooden tables stood against the wall he faced. He marched slowly toward one of them. A thick layer of white dust – Ken thought it most likely the granular remains of bones – covered the top of its flat slab. He pulled a brush and plastic bag from his belt and stepped forward, intent on sweeping in a sample for later testing. His foot struck a vagrant stone and he fell, barely getting his hands up in time to stop his face from striking the splintery edge of the table. He glanced up at the opening he"d come through, now just a speck in the middle of nothingness. Again that feeling of foolishness washed over him. He had to be careful.
He paced along the edge of the room, attempting to decipher some of the more interesting symbols.What he saw was both beautiful and terrifying; a tale of harmony and discord, birth and demise, life and death. A common theme Ken hadn"t seen before was interspersed between each set of pictograms – a single flame beside a primitively painted skull with no jaw. He tried to wrap his mind around the images. He"d seen pictograms such as these over the years, but they always seemed to flow smooth, always told a story. The invading skull and flame didn"t make sense.
That lack of logic shot a spike of enthusiasm up his spine.If there had been a Black Death here, or a period of religious cleansing like the Crusades, the messages printed on these walls might be the only record. This is the place, his feelings screamed, the answer, the missing piece of the puzzle!
With renewed vigor, Ken worked at a much faster pace.He turned where one wall met another and carried on much as before, eyeing his discovery with the nervous glee of a child at Christmas. His pace quickened again and he passed to the third wall, then the fourth. That was where he stopped.
An arched portal appeared in the middle of that fourth wall.It stood only five feet high.
Ken bent and flashed his light in to get a look at what lay beyond.
It was a passageway, the same height as the portal which led to it.The barrier at the end of the tunnel looked to be made of a strange, milky substance, like a sponge. The walls leading down contained nothing as elegant as hieroglyphs; only smooth rock with nary a crack. It took a moment for Ken to realize that nowhere in the temple interior did he see so much as a seam. This place hadn"t been built with the customary adobe bricks. To the contrary; it seemed to have been borne from the earth itself.
The sound of clamor reached his ears and he aimed the flashlight at the floor of the tunnel, revealing a scurrying sea of insects.The bugs didn"t enter the main chamber, though there was nothing to stop them; they simply clawed and scurried all over each other, as if to leave the safety of the passageway would bring an immediate end to their short lives. Ken let out a sigh.
He could stand the proposition of squatting through the burrow with those things under his feet, but he hadn"t brought a change of pants or socks; which meant he"d most likely be stuck with their gummy innards all over him until they arrived back at the hotel. “Small sacrifice,” he whispered, then crouched beneath the stone arch. Insects crunched beneath his soles and he had to fight off the itch to purge his morning meal of poached eggs and blood sausage when they began crawling over his boots and up his leg. He held his breath and went on regardless. Nothing so little as a few bugs could stop him now.
The insect-and-dust-filled corridor ended after only twenty-two steps.The milky substance turned out to be thick tangles of spider webs. Ken brushed them aside, exposing the wall. His bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and stared into the eyes of a monster.
It was only a painting, though a very meticulous one, of a decaying man, hunched over and grinning with a lipless sneer.The care that went into creating this morbid work of art was astounding. He could clearly see the flesh hanging from its bones like frayed carpet fibers. Ken shivered and brushed away a centipede that had made its way to the nape of his neck before hunkering in to take a closer look. No detail had been spared; there were even fibers of exposed muscle that seemed to glisten in the flashlight"s beam. This is amazing, he thought. It’s so intricate.It belongs in the National Gallery, not the…
A final detail caught his eye, stopping him cold.