Hidden Within

Watching Indiana Jones as I child, I couldn’t wait to get my bull whip and fancy hat and depart for the world of high stakes antiquity hunting. And nothing is more high stakes than pushing a ground penetrating radar that looked like a lawn mower in the Tenere desert sun.

“Stop pushing sand over here!” Jenelle yelled, shaking her little brush in my direction.

“Sorry,” I said for the fourth time. By the second time, I stopped arguing. I was about ten feet from her assignment, but apparently, that was too close.

This was my third day of mowing sand. It won’t be long before they’re making a movie about me. “Randy Simone : Mower of the Lost Kingdom.”

“Randy! What the hell are you doing over here?”

Ahh yes, Mathias, the Berber King of the expedition, bringing his incessant micromanaging to his grad student kingdom.

“I’m…running the grid from the assignment board?”

“No, no, no, that’s tomorrow’s schedule. You need to be scanning G7.”

“Ugh, but I’m almost done.”

“That’s your problem,” he said, walking off to find his next victim.

I powered down the radar, shaking my head at all the fun I was having. This was not the exciting opportunity my college counselor said it would be. “Real world experience goes a long way towards securing a job,” she’d said. I was now exactly good at pushing things with wheels.

Standing on the dune crest above G7, my enthusiasm continued to hide from me. I hated scanning dunes. It was like trying to mow the side of a hill while it ran away from you. I powered up the scanner and started my journey, like a duck at a carnival shooting game.

We weren’t the only university out here, and Mathias, anointed by God himself, I mean the department head, Dr. Galanis, had dutifully reminded us, every…single…day, that if we didn’t find some high grade artifacts from the Green Sahara period, the anthropology department was gonna lose its funding. The previous team had discovered a pot shard last year. Yes, our university’s entire haul was a trapezoidal section of broken earthenware. And this year? We were off to a great start. We’d uncovered a treasure trove of…continued disappointment.

I’m sure the Gobera Cemetery sounded great on paper. It’s where they’d found that five thousand year old lady with the two kids on a bed of flowers. But what they failed to mention, was this site had been picked clean for years. It was like the cookie plate found on Christmas morning, except there weren’t even crumbs.

“I’m sure they missed something,” Mathias had countered when I pointed this out.

Two passes complete, only ten million to go. Mathias was convinced this stupid device was our key to finding something. We’d had three of them, but the other two had stopped working. I prayed this one joined them. At least I only had about two months to go before I was outta here and back to the states.

On my tenth pass, my stomach decided to have words with me. “Where is the tithing I require” it growled. Sorry buddy, you’ll have to take that up with the king.

I was about to reach for the earbuds in my pocket when the readings on the radar became erratic.

“Yes! Please tell me this thing is broken,” I told the desert.

I cycled through a few of its modes only to discover I was wrong and the readings were right. A bolt of excitement shot through me. Finally, my enthusiasm made an appearance. The rational part of my mind reminded me not to put the cart before the horse. But if this was something, oh man, take that Janelle! I’d be the hero this year.

I knew I should have gone to Mathias before doing anything, but…what if this did turn out to be nothing? No, that would be embarrassing. Besides, whatever I’d found was only about a foot down. I snapped my imaginary bullwhip and got to work. I pushed the radar out of the way, dropped to my knees, and started digging with my hands. It didn’t take long to find a relatively flat hard surface. Clearing more of the sand away, I found carved lines of human figures standing next to a rectangle.

“No way!”

This was something significant. I’d seen this style before, the rock engravings of the Tin-Taghirt. What were they doing here?

Excited, I inched forward to clear more of the sand away. Apparently, there was some necessary field training I’d not been forced to sit through yet. The stone below me cracked across its center. The culmination of my quick thinking could be summed up in two drawn out words, “Oooooooh shiiiiiiiiit!”

The stone broke apart and fell inwards, myself with it. When my brain finally registered what was going on, I realized I was sliding head first down a slanted surface, a shaft, into darkness. I tried to push my feet against the walls to slow myself, but I was moving too fast. Then a change of direction as I slid across a mostly flat surface. My forearms burned from their valiant effort to slow me down.

When my eyes adjusted, I discovered it wasn’t dark, but dim. A tangle of illumination covered the walls of the small chamber I had landed in. An archway separated this space from more darkness. I climbed to my feet and ran my hand across the patches of luminescent moss. Looking closer, I found another carving of people around an inverted triangle. There were glyphs here I didn’t recognize. How had no one else found this?

I wanted to keep looking, but I knew the protocol. I had to swallow my pride and admit Mathias had been right. Even so, I’d done it. I saved the anthropology program. I turned and tried to crawl back up the shaft, but it was too steep. Before I could consider this problem further, something dragged behind me. I wheeled, instantly terrified at what could be lurking down here. A giant scorpion maybe? I grabbed one of the larger pieces of stone that slid down with me. My eyes searched the darkness, but found nothing. Then, a slight movement. The barest of reflections from two eyes staring at me. A twist and a whoosh, then the eyes were gone. A gentle pitter patter faded like my last bit of courage.

I raised the broken stone while widening my stance. The hair on my neck raised, as I was certain I was being watched. Scorpions have six eyes right? Or was it twelve?

More pitter patter. I lifted my other arm, trying to appear larger. The eyes retuned, only this time, they continued closer. That’s when I discovered they were attached to a face. A young woman’s face. Her eyes were completely black and her skin grey. A dark fabric surrounded her in a fashion I’d never seen. She continued closer.

“Stay back!” I yelled instinctively, retreating a step, shaking the stone so she would notice it. Maybe it was the dim lighting, but she looked like no human I’d ever seen.

She looked to the stone, then back at me. Her expression softened. She raised her hands to show me they were empty.

“Who…are you?” I asked, not sure what to say. Her head titled as she listened to my words. Did she understand me? How did she get in here? A cave?

She pointed to the scorpion basher still raised in my hand. I lowered it, but didn’t drop it. I felt my heart racing, unsure of the situation I was in. Was I in danger. This felt like danger.

“Azul?” I said, trying a Berber greeting I had heard before. Her head twitched. Oh no. Had I said the wrong thing? My hand squeezed the stone tighter. She placed a hand on her face and pointed at mine. Like an idiot, I nodded, having no idea what I’d just agreed to.

She made a sound that was hard to explain. It wasn’t loud, but it echoed pleasantly around me, like a fluttering. She moved even closer. I could hear my heart beating in my ears as the anticipation pounded inside me. As her hand came up, my breathing stopped. And then, her hand was on my face. It pulled away quickly at first, then returned. After smiling, she grabbed my hand and placed it on the side of hers. Her skin was cold, but not unpleasant. We stood there, staring into each other’s eyes, for at least three centuries. I was lost in her expression.

Then I flinched at a new fluttering sound, this one much deeper, echoing from outside the chamber. The softness in her expression vanished. She glanced backward quickly, before pointed past me to the shaft. The fear in her eyes was now mine.

“What’s coming?” I asked. She grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the shaft. The deep fluttering was getting louder. Her hand twisted a stone wheel I hadn’t noticed. Stone scraped across stone as I watched in amazement as treads formed inside. The shaft was now a stairway.

The strange woman jabbed her finger towards the shaft. A fluttering escaped her slightly open mouth. I knew she was telling me to leave, but something inside me wanted to stay. This was probably the greatest find ever. People living under the desert? I couldn’t even wrap my head around the implications.

Her hands pushed hard on me with urgency. I finally relented.

“I’ll come back,” I said as she touched my face once more. I dropped the broken stone and started my journey back out. As the square of blue got larger, the enormity of what I’d discovered got the recognition it deserved. This was big, really really big. Finally, the feeling I’d been searching for. The little kid inside me was getting what he wanted.

Outside, I hurried back to the main excavation shelter.

“Mathias! I…found something!” I could barely get the words out I was breathing so hard.

“The correct schedule this time?”

“No! A shaft! With a chamber, and carvings!”

His eyes grew wide at first, then narrowed.

“Did Jenelle put you up to this? Get back to work.”

“No! I’m serious! I did it!”

I could tell his eyes weren’t convinced, but his mouth said otherwise, “Alright, alright, show me what you found.”

As we climbed the dune of G7, my excitement deflated into disbelief. Not only was the hole gone, but so was the radar. I skipped down the dune to where I thought the entrance had been. Dropping, I dug and dug, but found nothing. How could it be gone?

“It was right here!”

“That is not how you excavate a site,” Mathias scolded, as he crossed his arms.

“It was here! I’m telling you! Just below the surface. I…fell into it! But…I got back out. Look at the burn marks on my forearms!” He didn’t need to know about her, yet.

“Where’s the radar?” Mathias asked, ignoring anything I’d said.

“It’s…,” I…didn’t know.

“Dammit Randy, that’s our last one!”

“Maybe it fell in?” I suggested, knowing how stupid it sounded. He just shook his head. That’s when his dad voice made an appearance, “When you check out equipment, it’s your responsibility to keep track of it.”

I just stared at him, knowing he didn’t believe me.

“I hope you like cleaning tools,” he said, apparently my punishment for wasting his time. “Now find that radar,” he commanded before heading off.

Out of sight, I heard him yell, “Jenelle, get over here!”

It didn’t matter. I know what I saw. My counselor almost got it right. It wasn’t experience I’d find here, but purpose. I looked at the endless sand around me, like Tanis being wiped clean from the desert. This was my Well of Souls, my Ark of the Covenant.