Shadows Out of Time

“If this place is anything like the one I entered in Egypt, it won’t necessarily be guarded. But be prepared anyway. It’ll seem like a heap of very old ruins. That’s part of its disguise. Deep down in the heart of it is where we’ll find our target. I’ll know when we see it.” He watched the rest of the party settling for its last sleep under the blazing sun. In the haze of the journey, the desert people had become indistinguishable, their private thoughts inscrutable.

An hour after nightfall they crested a low ridge and the moonlight deftly painted another ridge beyond them, a high scarp, its rocks exposed, leaving tall, jagged stumps of rock, sheer and glassy, apparently impenetrable. Mamoudou pointed to a cleft in the rock surface, a long, tall gash, like the slash of a giant’s scimitar. “There,” he said, his voice dropping. “It leads to the place of stars below the sands.”

The company quickly crossed the dust bowl, the camels picking their way through a field of small, sharp boulders, dangerous as mines. The moon rode high, a brilliant light, when they came before the tall crevice. Darkness seemed to bleed from it, together with a cold breeze, permeating the surrounding rocks with an aura of deep unease. The camels tried to shy away, but Mamoudou had two of his men prepare a place for them to rest. Everyone dismounted. From now on they must journey on foot.

“You’ve been beyond here?” Phillips asked him.

Mamoudou shook his head. “Not I. But one who ventured within came back to Chinguetti. He spoke of a decaying city and its passageways. At home, he sat in a stone room, without food or water, and did not stop speaking for five days. In that time his body shrank until only the bones and a little skin remained, sucked dry by the madness that claimed him.”

Overhead, night had swallowed the skies and countless stars gleamed in their myriad clusters. Silence, more extreme than any Phillips had ever experienced, closed around them and the camels snorted in renewed fear. They could have been on a distant world.

“My two men will remain with the beasts until we return. The rest of us may enter, if it is still your desire.”

Phillips nodded. Garner and O’Reilly had already unloaded their packs and strapped them to their backs. They looked unwieldy, but both men were built like oxen and grinned at the effort. They said nothing, ready for the final trek beyond the wall of stone. Mamoudou and his ten remaining Arabs got into line. Their faces were devoid of expression, but Phillips could read the fear in their eyes. He hid his own misgivings. Where they were going would be festering with an evil beyond time.

Several of the men carried flashlights, while Garner and O’Reilly had lamps fitted to their helmets. Their beams prodded the bulging wall of darkness within the cleft as the party entered. Slowly the body of men wriggled onward, twisting and turning into the gut of the rock, heading downwards, the dusty path’s inclination increasing. The walls opened out around them and by the lights they carried they could see they had come into a jumble of low buildings, their walls leaning into one another, broken, some in ruins, others like spires, alleys choked with several feet of dust. Windows gaped, twisted, and everything dropped away into the lower darkness. Age draped everything like a shroud, a remnant of another time.

The company followed the main street, descending in a long spiral until presently the walls on one side fell away to reveal a gulf, a huge cave, like the empty maw of an extinct volcano. Phillips knew, however, this was no natural chasm. Some other power had scooped it out of the desert floor, or bored down to the distant bowels of the earth. The party came beyond the crumpled city and examination of the inner walls of the huge cavern revealed chiseled bands of stone, the work of unimaginable beings, from a time hidden by centuries. The slope broadened and soon the company had come to the first step of a stairway. It had not been created for human feet, being far too wide and deep.

Phillips shone his flashlight out into the vault and it was as though he had aimed it at the night sky, revealing an infinite, starless void, though within it something curdled, invisible, remote shapes writhing in silence more unnerving than any sound. Phillips turned the beam aside, again watching the stone descent. The magnitude of the place gripped the company like a fist, making each of them dizzy with uncertainty, their senses reeling at this exposure to immensity beyond normal human comprehension. Far, far below them, a rising wind swirled, with its threat of desert storms and stinging sand blasts, and yet this was a tunnel down into the utter heart of the stone, not an exit back to the world the party had left.

“Hear the song of the underworld,” Mamoudou whispered to Phillips. “Close up your ears, for it will drive your reason from you.”