Examining The Undergrounds
Arduously, Lara tried to scramble up. Dozens of cubic metres of sand were pressing heavily upon her sore body, which made her feel stuffy and short of breath.
The woman coughed. Apparently, she had swallowed some of the dusty, old sand, and had it ended up in her lungs... That wasn't good at all, but no one had told her being a tomb raider would be a very healthy profession... This was a job for the tough folks, and it was time for her to free herself from this unwelcome embrace.
After some struggling, grunting and pushing ahead, she managed to get her torso and arms above the surface of the sand sea. It wasn't long until she succeeded in freeing her legs too, and she was rather relieved to be able to use those properly again.
The sunbeams shining through from above made a magnificent light show appear on the dark walls of the pit that probably was a disused well. Somehow, it gave the ancient dead-end a serene, almost sacred feel, but that could've also been the silence, a silence that seemed to take her back to the earlier stages of human history whenever she visited an unexplored tomb... A silence that allowed her to drift away to a world both foreign and familiar, a world that didn't have any living inhabitants left to tell its stories.
Lara grinned. She was going overboard way overboard with her reveries. 'Nothing's wrong with a little passion, but there's no need to get all sentimental about the lack of sound in underground places...'
She'd better get ready to leave. She quickly did some stretches, checked if her newly acquired bruises and grazes were so bad she needed to treat them with her only medipack, and easefully re-did her messy braid when she noticed that that wasn't the case.
Then, she carefully tried to get up her feet again. It was time to examine the pit now, and find a way out as fast as she could. Eventhough the matter didn't stress her at all - she had been in worse situations -, she knew that she would die if she stayed down there for too long.
Yet, it would cost her a lot of effort to get all the way up again... The pit was ridiculously deep, twelve, fifteen... Twenty metres maye? It was too wide to use the 'back-against-the-wall-method' too, the radius of the thing was unbelievable, Lara actually couldn't imagine why the old Negev people had even bothered to dig a hole this massive in the middle of a mountain range...
Was this even a well, as she had assumed before? There wasn't much water in this area, and the small amount of residents it had nowadays definately knew that.
Had it been different - let's say... a thousand years ago? She wasn't here for work, so she hadn't bothered with doing much research about the environment. Of course she had some basical knowledge of the area, but it didn't concern the groundwater level of the place through the ages...
Lara kneeled down and let a handful of sand run through her fingers. The upper layers were pretty dry, but there was a slight chance of the sand a few metres deeper being moist.
The Negev mountains weren't too fertile, but there was some vegatation. Nothing too spectacular; basically tough, yellowish grass and an occasional small brown bush, but even those plants were in need of water.
Lara dug into the sand some more. Too bad she hadn't brought a shovel, it would've come handy if she really wanted to uncover the actual bottom of the pit... Technically, it wasn't the most sensible thing to do since she wanted to get back to her tent before sundown, but if this incredibly deep hole was actually a tunnel of some sort it likely held secrets she would love to unravel...
Unexpectedly, a huge, black scorpion crawled out of the dusty mess. Lara quickly withdrew her hand. She was lucky to have great reflexes, because the thing was extremely fast.
She hastily reached for her guns, but they weren't in their holdsters!
''Argh, of course... Damn it!'' she gnashed as the scorpion started to climb upwards her leg. ''These things aren't supposed to happen on holiday!''
Without even worrying about its poisonous stinger, Lara's gloved hands grabbed the scorpion and smashed it against the wall. It was dead instantly - the tomb raider had played handball in her younger years - and dark blood flowed out of the scorpion's hard, testaed body.
''This is what we do with vermin!'' she panted, while growing more and more aware that the small beast had probably even bigger, more dangerous congeners crawling aorund underneath her feet at the very moment. Suddenly, she wasn't sure if digging deeper was a very good idea...
No, she'd ascend again, go back to her camp, mark this place on a map and return another time with the correct gear. All she had now were a rope, a small medipack, a single flare and a few bottles of water - the latter not really being anything but extra burden...
She often was in for a good challenge, but laying her life on the line to gather a few artifacts and heretic idols was downright laughable. Then it started to dawn on her that she actually did that a lot, and that she even called it her hobby...
She made a face, shook her head and walked towards the shaft's wall, until she stood right next to the spot where the dead scorpion had found its final resting place.
If there were any bricks that stuck out even just a little, she could use them the same way as she would use the grips of a climbing wall.
Unfortunately, she couldn't find any. After having made an entire round she gave up on that plan, a tiny bit discouraged. She wanted to sit down on the ground again to devise another plan, but she knew better.
Suddenly, there was a brick that drew her attention. But instead of it sticking out a little bit, it seemed to be pushed a little further in...
'This might be something...'
Lara gave the rectangular unevenness a gentle push, and much to her delight, that what she had hoped for happened. The brick disappeared behind the other side of the wall, she could even hear it falling down on a hard surface.
''Yes!''
If she took more bricks out - which was possible now - she could create a hole that was big enough for her to fit through... Since climbing up again seemed impossible, investigationing this underground labyrinth was a great alternative.
Hopefully she wouldn't find any animals or creatures ahead, though. If that happened, she'd be dead meat - she knew that by heart, but it was better than dying of starvation on the bottom of a sandy pit.
About ten minutes later, Lara was satisfied. A big, pitch plack square opening marred the whilom perfect, smooth wall.
The tomb raider stepped through it and lighted her only set of flares. Those would burn for ten, fifteen minutes maybe, if she hadn't reached an illuminated room by then, she had to go on by palpability.
Lara heaved a deep sigh and looked around the room she was finding herself in now.
It wasn't huge, but it was certainly bigger than she had expected. In fact, she hadn't thought she'd arrive in an actual room at all. It had made more sense to her if the architects had connected the well's entrance with one of those dreadful trapped corridors, one with traps only insiders could switch off, that way they could've deterred intruders immediately...
'Apparently, I would've done a better job designing this secret underground edifice... It's official; I've seen too many tombs. Or no, wait, wait... Whoever these people were, if they took the effort to build an entire thing at a depth of minus twenty metres, they were certainly not stupid... Let's see what surprised are ahead of me!'
Lara shone with her flares along the sides of the room. Racks packed with papyrus rolls were bathing in the spooky, green light.
''A library'' she said, accidently out loud, her eyes widening a little. This was a great find... All the knowledge that was documented in those rolls, this was even grander than Alexandria!
Oh, she intensely hoped that they were written in one of the twenty ancient languages she was able to decode... Working on those documents herself would be a delight - she really didn't want to give any of them off to a grey, old museum guy before she had read it herself.
The urge to walk to one of the oak racks to grab a roll and open it was almost overwhelming, but her sense told her not to.
If this room wasn't trapped, there perhaps were guardians... Who knew what creatures were hiding in the shadows?
'This doesn't seem like a place for improvident deeds... No temple is, in fact.'
For one minute Lara listened carefully if she heard any groans or grunts in the distance, or - even more terrifying - close by. She didn't leave her position in front of her self-made emergency exit. It gave her a false sense of safety.
When the sixty seconds had passed without hearing undesired sounds, Lara prudently took a few more steps forward. She walked really slowly, and she kept on walking until she had reached the centre of the room.
There, she cocked a brow. ''A bookstand...''
The bookstand seemed to be made of massive gold. Certain winged figures were depicted on it in relief, and if Lara hadn't been so concerned with studying the roll it carried she had recognized that the magnificently-made artwork would look fantastic in her library at home.
The incriptions of the roll were relatively understandable to Lara. It was a strange variation on Hebrew - it was mixed with some Arabic and Ancient Greek elements.
What kind of language belonged to this remarkable script? And who were the people that used to speak that language, centuries ago? Their architecture looked like a major mix as well - nothing about how this place was built was unfamiliar to Lara, but the way different techniques were combined was.
There was something that flabbergasted the tomb raider even more than the ways of the long-lost, foreign people though. That was the fact that this scroll wasn't in one of the many bookcases on the walls. No way the original founders of the library had stored it like that - this particular document did by no means seem more important than the others.
Someone had been here before her.
Lara frowned. ''What is this anyway?'' she murmured, a little grumpy because she wasn't the first in the millenium to set a step inside the library. Her fingertops stroked against the old papyrus as she tried to preen a few of the crumpled old thing's wrinkles. ''This seems... something... random words... The tidal wave... The craft of forging... Crop harvest... Alexandria's misfortune... Aha!''
She was looking at the list that contained all the titles that were stored on one of the many bookshelves.
'That explains a lot...'
Just when Lara wanted to stow the roll away again - her flare started to flicker, a sign that she had to look for a way out of the underground complex - her eye fell on something that looked like a black fingerprint, a little bit below halfway the list. It looked pretty fresh, as if it had only been made a day or three ago.
'Hmm...'
Lara had seen similar black stains before. Back in the day when she raided tombs with her father, she had left dozens of artifacts with such smudges - much to her regret.
This was old-fashioned lamp oil.
Lara quickly decoded what the characters before the stain said. 'Macedonian art... Did this small Israelian civilization have contacts with the great Ancient Macedonians as well?
''Impressive... Let's see if I can find the complete scription. I'll need to visit this place more often...''
Lara started searching one of the bookcases in the middle of the wall. 'This is about a harvest... Here smiths are mentioned... Ah, an article about Greece's greatest harbour, that was on the list too, right above...
Shoot!'
Someone - most likely the person who left the oil smear on the list as well - had taken a whole bunch of rolls with them, leaving a huge void on the third shelve from above.
'That is extremely impolite...'
Suddenly, her flare started to flicker more heavily than before and a small panic attack hit Lara. If she didn't find an exit in time, she was doomed.
The woman took a deep breath and started to sprint across the room, just in case she'd notice a lever or anything like that now that she still had light. Fortunately, she saw something that looked like a ladder... It likely took her to another storey of the library.
Perhaps the rooms there were illuminated by candles or torches. Most of the temples she had visited had had lighted areas - it was unclear most of the time who had taken care of the lighting though, those places usually hadn't been visited for hundreds of years.
Just when Lara had clenched her fingers around one of the rusty sports on eye level, her flare stopped flickering to leave its owner in absolute darkness. An ominous ambiance came over the place and - eventhough there was quite a lot of space - a claustrophobic person would definately lose reason in the underground library now.
With a smirk on her face, Lara started climbing. In the meantime she listened attentively if she heard anything suspicious - who knew what was waiting for her on the second floor?
Oddly enough, the ladder didn't seem to stop after a metre or five. She had already ascended above the ceiling, and she now was in some kind of shaft... It was really muggy and narrow, and she wondered if it possibly was built for ventilation purposes. It didn't seem like a very legit exit to her.
When she had climbed another five metres higher, Lara finally could see her hands again. Not that clearly yet, everything in the shaft was still dim and shadowy, but with every sport she went up both her hands and the ladder got more definition.
The tunnel was too cramp for the tomb raider to turn her head, so she couldn't look up as she wished to, but she could tell that she was approaching the end by the fast increase of light and the occasional breeze.
Then, there suddenly were no grips anymore... Lara smiled contently as she pushed herself up, to find herself hanging above an open hatch in the middle of the Negev desert.
''That was not a bad way to spend the afternoon...''