Day 5. The Palace of Exodus
A steep hill ascent awaits Lara Croft in the early morning of an autumn day in northern Ethiopia. A possible remnant of the Aksum empire might await her there. She's identified a spot, like a path that seems possible to go by walking. But this is likely a forgotten temple. Her mission is to reach a crevice whose entrance is guarded by the Lion of Judah. "Could I find a bit of the Glory of the Kings in here?" Lara asks herself.
The slow trekking ascent gets to a dead end. To the sides, a steep fall. Those you'd never count it if you fall. Apparently, rain has eroded that part of the old path, but the gap seems within reach. "Time to practice new moves," Lara thinks. She's been training hard to jump longer with running jumps, and she executes one, and makes it by grabbing to the edge with an axe. She's still not confident enough in her hands' grip for the running jump.
From there, it's axe time. Nothing she can do by walking or using her hands. Below, Jonah is following her trail with the binoculars. The running jump almost makes his heart stop. He'll never be that athletic. He's relaxed that Lara has gone back to the safe axe, and is no longer attempting wild athletic maneuvers in a steep hill. "She's made it," Jonah celebrates.
A Lion of Judah in the entrance of the crevice, and a Ge'ez inscription below it. "Palace of Exodus, to the Great Glory of King Solomon and the people of God," Lara reads. She turns on a flare and starts examining the cave. An underground castle, carved inside the hill. "This is rougher, yet bolder than the Prophet's tomb," Lara says. "There's hardly light in here." She starts descending through some steps carved in the very hill.
Slippery steps indeed, as Lara in her amusement to the engineering of making a castle by carving a hill, makes a wrong step and saves her neck by grabbing to a ledge with her hands. She had been training climbing to improve her grip and avoid falling stupidly. So far, she had luck with those slips. But you can never tell. This time, she uses her hand grip, and her new gymnastic abilities to raise with a handstand, and then back to the stairs.
After finishing the staircase descent, she's at the threshold of the Palace of Exodus. She assumed it would all be dark, but she's finding a dim light inside the palace. "Fluorescence," she marvels. "That's how they built it!" There are not many decorations inside the palace, beyond the glowing rocks, and a shrine in the center of the only hall. A shrine with a tabot on top of it. The tabot is covered by a crimson cloth with golden decorations.
The shrine, however, doesn't look Christian or Jewish at all. It's structured like a scale model of a circular ziggurat, and there's cuneiform carvings in it. "For the flame of Babylon keeps the mighty Leviathan asleep," Lara reads. She feels a bit strange about this. "It's a back translation, not an original phrase in sumerian, but why?" she asks herself.
She gets a bit closer, and she feels the floor lighter, so she instinctively jumps back. She has activated a spike trap, and dodged it by the skin of her teeth. "That's my trap quota of the day," Lara jokes. She then removes the clothes of the tabot, and sees it. "Solomon's palace," Lara reads in hebrew. She dares open the tabot, and only finds water, algae and fungi inside it. For Lara, everything in the tabot is a complete mess. The fake sumerian riddle, the water in the tabot, and Solomon's palace. Nothing seems to make sense.
There's also a throne carved in stone. It has the Lion of Judah and the Star of David. And then, some inscriptions of Solomon in Ge'ez. "Here sits Solomon, king of kings, granted eternal wisdom by Yahweh, who in the great dream learned the secret of the eternal flame of Babylon and the imprisonment of Leviathan," Lara reads. She's thinking about it, and all she can see is a parallel to the Epic of Gilgamesh. "Are we after Tiamat or is it something else?" Lara asks herself. The eternal flame of Babylon seems a quite daunting artifact to Lara's eyes. All she can think of now is searching for clues in Jerusalem.