Shadows Out of Time

They were all wrapping their neckerchiefs around their ears and turning up jackets and clothing to muffle the sounds. Shrieks tore at the air, invisible sirens sweeping to and fro, shadows coalescing, making the hell-wind a solid reality, though mercifully human eyes could not decipher details. Gradually the walls became less shrouded in mystery, glowing faintly, spotted with lichen and larger globules of fungus, the phosphorescent light strengthening as the descent continued. This weird glow distorted the shadows of the intruders, throwing them upon the twisted inner wall, making of them bizarre shapes, mocking throwbacks to a more primitive man-thing that barely stood on two legs. Other shadows writhed on the measureless wall, arachnid and crustacean, as if a time-lost sea had cast up in its silent waves a slurry of crawling life.

Deeper down went the party, the steps thrusting out into the void away from the wall until they wove their way between immense columns that themselves twisted and knotted as though, spewed up from molten lava, they had cooled into these fantastical shapes, a forest of unimaginable contortions. The fungus clung to them in fat clusters, hanging like vile fruit, glowing and in some places pulsing, as though about to burst and give forth a terrible stream of spores, which the men on the path knew instinctively would bring a choking death if once inhaled. Carved into the columns were the faces and limbs of unrecognizable beasts and demonic creatures, so convoluted as to seem alive, on the point of raking with claws their puny human prey.

Phillips marveled at the resolve of the Arabs. They were terrified, yet held to the downward trek. He exchanged brief glances with the engineers, and they, too, were almost unnerved, but nevertheless resolved. It was a relief to come to a flat plateau of rock, providing a way off the stairway to those hellish depths to which it must lead. Phillips led the way across it, seeing ahead of him another wall, though this was comprised of blocks, each one weighing countless tons, shifted into place by incomprehensible powers. A roughly triangular doorway, taller than a man, had been set into this wall, with archaic lettering around it, though in no language recognizable to man. Phillips, however, had seen such a doorway before, under the Egyptian desert.

“What we seek will be beyond there,” he said, pointing, as the company clustered about him. All of them held their weapons at the ready, expecting hostile action from an unseen enemy at any moment.

Phillips led the way, the two soldiers close to him. There was more light beyond, where huge mounds of mushrooms and saprophytes were piled up at the walls of what the men could see was a colossal chamber, a tomb, perhaps, or a temple. Yet it was on a scale beyond any human construction known, as if the men had walked out on to an alien world’s surface, a place beyond their own stars, raised and shaped by beings from gulfs beyond the knowledge of men. Column after column rose up, as though a forest of them supported the very desert high above, each of them wrought into the body of a leviathan, a god wrought in stone, massive and intimidating. They seemed no more than a breath away from coming to life.

Cold terror groped at them all as, insect-like, they went across the floor of this gargantuan temple. High up in vaulted darkness, stranger winds sang and swooping shapes flitted among the vaults, huge, bat-like things that stirred the dust of aeons. Phillips felt himself edging nearer to a kind of madness, his nerves threatening to snap. He forced himself onward.

The floor became a wide stone bridge, recognizable now in the growing light of the all-pervasive saprophytes as the spoke of a colossal wheel. The party was heading along it to where it sloped down to meet an enormous central hub. As the men went on, the cavern opened out and they saw more of these immense spokes, radiating inward from the circumference of the cavern, the far side lost in distances so vast the light could not penetrate them. The hub was the goal, the place they sought, the key to the mysteries of this whispering underworld. For a while the company paused, each man gathering what courage he could in the face of the terrors now besetting them all. They knew they were not alone. Like creatures caught in a seething jungle, they were surrounded by feral, hungry beasts.