Sydney adjusted the light as she stretched out on her belly, leaning her head into the hole. The glyphs seemed to be a rhyme--some kind of verse. She held onto the table leg and stretched further over the gaping hole. Trying to read the first line of the verse, her excitement rose, causing her hand to slip off the leg. Before she could right herself, she tumbled into the chamber. She hit the floor hard, kicking up dust that hung in the air. Gasping for breath, she lay on her back fearing the worst. Was anything broken?
The cave was huge, high-domed and rugged with stalagmites the size of temple columns. Then she saw it--a cartouche amid the symbols. She raised herself and crawled to the wall, bait held by the light, feeling herself in the throes of a peak experience only dreamed of by archeologists. Grid hieroglyphs, written in the form of the ancient of ancients and read either from right to left or vice versa. But the writing wasn't that old. What an anomaly! And something else stood out, something odd. The glyphs faced neither right or left. They faced both right and left, running together in a way that made no sense. She had never seen anything like this and felt totally out of her element. Yet it all somehow seemed ... familiar.
She had literally fallen into the biggest find of her life. Her senses became heightened with a fear that could easily overwhelm her. And at times her fear of panic was greater than the panic itself. Nothing seemed broken. But she was trapped. Alone. And scared to death.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Fun to read your excerpts, Jeri!
ReplyDelete