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“The sun goes down pretty soon, Maddock. We gotta make this fast,” Bones said. Lina agreed as she aimed the beam of her light up ahead of Maddock in the narrow cave tunnel.
“It’s not like it’s going to get any darker down here,” Maddock said, looking around the narrow, pitch-black cave. “This passage is so narrow I don’t see how it could go on for very far. Let’s just check around this corner up here and then we’ll head back.”
Bones grunted in agreement as Maddock angled his body in order to wedge it into the fissure that jogged off to their right. Working his way into a new corridor, Maddock was surprised to find himself in a long, narrow tunnel with passages leading off left and right at various intervals. A narrow, web-like arrangement of fissures and cracks, he knew that they now had a dizzying array of options for which way to go.
And that was when an anomaly on the right-hand wall caught his attention. A crude drawing that Maddock recognized as being a rune, part of the Germanic alphabet. Playing his light over the stunning find, Maddock could see that it was shaped almost but not exactly like a menorah. An odd-looking base, with the seven candles seeming to hover over it. Oddly, only one of the candles is depicted as lit—the second from the right.
Bones and then Lina reached Maddock and they added their lights to the menorah drawing. Lina, her interest renewed, checked her watch. “It’s definitely going to be night time if we don’t head back soon, but, like you said Maddock, it won’t get any darker in here and I think it’s worth a little night hike after we get back topside to see what this is all about.”
Maddock nodded. He used his smartphone to take a flash picture of the rune, and then said, “Let’s move into this passage.” They begin to explore, working their way deeper into the base of the mountain. They moved relatively easily down the tight straightaway, but Maddock paused when he reached the first of several new passages that branched off to the right and left. “Let’s check this one out.”
He ventured into the right-side passage, which was even narrower than the main tunnel. Each of the cavers had to turn sideways to be able to fit between the cave walls, but it was passable and before long Maddock came to a dead end. The group had no choice but to turn around and file out the way they had come until they reached the main passage again.
“Geez that only took like an hour,” Lina said, her patience clearly growing shorter.
Maddock ventured further into the main passage until he reached another offshoot, also on the right side. “This one opens into a decent sized cave, Maddock noted. But he continued down the line, Bones and Lina trailing behind him, playing their lights around the passage walls. Up ahead Maddock shone his beam down another open cave mouth, but again, he opted not to explore the side passage in favor of walking down the main tunnel to see what was happening with the branching passages.
He reached another passageway, this one on the left side, that led somewhere. He passed it and proceeded down the tunnel until the next right-hand passage, stopping there while he waited for Bones and Lina to catch up, shining his light on another cave on the right side just before the main passage came to a cul-de-sac.
Lina heaved a heavy sigh on reaching him. “Lots of possible cave offshoots in here. And to think we were looking mostly at the right-hand ones. I guess we’ll have to investigate every one of these passageways, plus any on the left side of the main passage.”
“In detail,” Bones agrees. “That’s how Maddock likes it.”
“Maybe not,” Maddock said, his gaze focused on the picture of the rune on his phone. Then he trained his flashlight back down the main passageway from the way they had come. “I’ve got an idea.”