Exploring is an occupation that I find the most gratifying, I suppose the urge to roam the darkest most mysterious reaches of the world first took hold of me when I was about eight. My father was quite well read and I came from quite a privileged family. I was the latest in the Oswald family name, a family that made its name out of coal and industry. My name, for those wondering, is Harold Oswald, but that is immaterial at the moment. I read his books of the tales of Christopher Columbus and the like and it gave me a taste and a fancy that there was still much to explore. I was young and naive and the world was a much bigger place.
I was in my mid to late twenties when I graduated from the queen Mary University in London with degrees in geography, ancient history, languages and sufficient knowledge to support my endeavours with. It is upon my travels I began to learn that every culture had at least one old folktale, myth or legend about cities that fall victim to horrible disasters that served as a cautionary tale to its beholders. Intrigued I delved deeper and found that each of the tales involved an ancient civilisation that forsakes a powerful deity, Atlantis, Camelot, Lyonesse and countless others that fade only into distant memories.
It was during my travels in Mesopotamia and whilst on a search for the lost city of Lagash when I happened upon a discovery that yielded a very different culture. Tales came from the east to the locality I was staying in that a huge temple and the portents of indeed a large town or civilisation had recently been uncovered after a series of sandstorms had cleared away. Piqued to have possibly found a metropolis unknown to the entire civilised world I organised a team of expeditors and local men to search and seek out the strange constructs.
The travel across the desert took days and I soon began to feel disheartened that I would not find the source of the rumour. It was just as I began to seriously contemplate going back to the hostel that I found the temple. It sat in the deepest of chasms I had seen in all of my years illuminated by the sunset giving it an ominous crimson glow. It was a pyramid much like the ones found in Egypt but it had only three sides that were segregated into vertical columns reaching to an apex. It sat atop what I can only describe as an elegant ziggurat base. In essence it blended both Sumerian and Assyrian cultures into this strange new and wonderful one. It stretched out to the back for about a mile before it was cut short by the sand and it loomed above us about a thousand cubits in height and half that in width and its great stone steps loomed before me to a sealed entrance. Where I am sure it once had colour had faded to only dim orange and red stains on the rock. It was adorned upon its two levels by a hundred statues of sandstone soldiers kneeling behind their shields with swords drawn and flanked at three corners by beasts of indescribable ferociousness and stature. They were not like any I had seen, being a mix of a lion, a bird and a dragon poised to attack any mortal fool who was careless enough to approach. The soldiers while lean and muscular knelt behind circular shields engraved with one swirling symbol and many patterns of squares and triangles. The top section of the temple was triangular in design and flat at its face had it not been for the idol of a sitting bearded giant, upon first impressions a noble king, robed and armoured and with a plaited beard. His face was a mix of sternness and of a look focused out on the vastness of the desert as if contemplating the existence of each grain of sand. He was flanked by two symmetrical statues of Nubian looking priests again with shields of swirling lines, triangles and squares, ever in service to their powerful contemplative master. Each statue was weathered by the sand, some missing arms and some missing heads all a testament to their grand age.
Indeed the fact that it still stood was as much a miracle as its discovery. Surely it was a sight to behold and I nearly fell to my knees and wept had I not been excitedly ordering my workers to excavate the entrance immediately.
As they worked more and more of this hidden world became apparent, we uncovered building upon building from the site in the same style of inverted triangles and squares. We found elegant statues similar to those seen upon the pyramid of the noble bearded king. All buildings followed the basic ziggurat shape and what we assume to be the housing of the previous inhabitants were big enough for a medium family. Each hovel possessed one chimney hole, one door and the remnants of wooden shelves for bedding.
However the excavation laid out discoveries less serene and more morbid but no less enthralling. Mummified bodies of the inhabitants were found dried out and crushed by the weight of the tons upon tons of desert sand. Some were contorted into horrible malefic grins and grimaces and all were tanned brown or black by the time we unearthed them. The eyes and outer flesh long since gone they stared at us with empty black voids of desolation. But perhaps the strangest thing was the shape of the heads. They were much like our only the skull had been elongated outwards and so were slightly conical in shape, this baffled my men and myself as to why and more importantly how such a vast disproportion could occur. They were also much taller than us as humans each averaging around six feet in height.
The sheer number of corpses found suggested to us all that the city was lost suddenly to them, perhaps overnight and they had no time to prepare. Perhaps the towering chasm proved to be too high for them or maybe they were simply resigned to their lonely fate. Nevertheless they were dead now and these were their relics, their inheritance passed to me and my crew. Their bodies being valuable among the finest riches we found in the city.
We also found the vestigial laying of ancient roads and pathways and within three months we had uncovered a large part of the city centre. However even in the wake of this great feat much of the chasm still laid buried and a desire burned within me to search more and find out how expansive this societies tomb had been. But that was not the task at hand. The entrance into the ziggurat had been cleared and I stood before it, trembling at the thought of being the first living being to set foot inside this wondrous building in decades.
The entrance beheld a face similar to the one upon the top of the ziggurat. It was again of a bearded man. But it was enraged and snarling, its mouth opening into a corridor of darkness within and glaring down at me, the intruder, with contempt and extreme prejudice. The windswept plaited beard flowed to the very edges of the building in wild locks. I could almost hear the beings screams of anger forbidding me to step inside. Taking an oil lamp (the only available light) I ventured deep into the unknown. I was eager to quench my thirst for knowledge and discover one of the deserts many buried secrets.
The inside was adorned with treasures of their age, a time capsule of their culture. I saw ornate blades that twisted like serpents upon the walls and I saw statues of their various gods, one of whom being the statue above me on the throne and the other three being vastly different to him. One was a female with braided hair and a long flowing robe that showed her finely sculpted breasts and gave her a sense of serenity and tranquillity.
The statue’s robe had no end instead being seemingly connected to its base with what looked like water around her feet. The other two were male and again very kingly. However where one closely resembled the idol outside the other was very different. He had no hair and his face was contorted into pure rage. He wore the armour of the warriors outside and was decorated with waves and curls that mean the same to any culture. He wore fire upon himself and burned with a fury like none I had seen before in a statue. The detail of their faces was a marvel at as he held his flaming sword out to me. He was clearly put here as a deterrent to early and impressionable grave robbers. The one remaining statue was much like the first one I had discovered but it lacked the beard instead having longer braided hair tied at the back. Instead of being a figure of battle like the seated one or the fire one, he wore robes and the crown and the neck guard of a king. He again was calm but his face showed the potential for fury illustrated also by the fact he had one hand on his sword. These figures alone gave me an insight into their religion and culture. I admired each face and each figure, astonished at the level of detail. The swords were actual swords. The robes flowed as a real one did. Their sculpting ability seemed to rival that of even the renaissance artists.
Upon the walls I saw a crude symbolism. It was similar but not akin to Hebrew or Sumerian and was alas rendered unreadable to me, its meanings lost to the ages. I could however pick out the egyptian-esque murals. They depicted a humanoid race, robed in full length robes for women and waist skirts for men. They wore headdresses of gold and silver (inlaid into the murals) and as I progressed down the temple I began to gain hold of their history as the murals flowed together to paint a story before my eyes.
they had once lived and prospered as we do today, they had carts and slaves to pull them and the indications of education, literature, music and art indicated by the scholars, writers, the players shown blowing on strange elongated horns and the artists sculpting the very temple I stand in. another mural showed the people worshipping their god (which I now understood to be the colossal seated king atop the ziggurat) by engaging in a human sacrifice at his feet. The gods to them embodied vital aspects of their world, the blazing burning sun, life giving water, the air which we breathe and of course sand. Each of the elements to them could have both beneficial and malevolent aspects. To avoid the latter they worshipped them all fanatically. They would sacrifice willing members of their own breed at the feet of the statue of the earth god (seemingly their chief god) and danced in a grisly ritual of blood.
As I pressed on I soon found myself in a large chamber. At the centre of the room stood a pedestal and atop the pedestal was a totem-esque statue similar to the seated king. The murals continued in this room but the style had changed, they were more frantic as if intentionally rushed in a state of panic. They depicted the people turning away from their gods and refusing or even questioning sacrifice as a method of worship. This enraged the gods and they turned against their patronage. The sands and the seas became violent and uncross able, the air became thick and carried diseases and the sun burned down relentlessly than before. These once proud intellectuals and masters of masonry began a downward spiral of decadence. Eventually the sacred idol of the earth god behind me was stolen from the temple. In a violent fury unlike any they had experienced before he sent down a sandstorm powerful enough to bury the entire chasm in one night.
Irked but not disillusioned by this I approached the pedestal. The statuette was made out of pure gold. No apprehension seized me and no conflict grappled with me. I had to take this to my partners and tell them of the tales have learned.
I grabbed it without a moments thought. As I held it in my hands, remarking at its beauty a hollow wind echoed through the entire tomb. A gushing roar of a breeze that knocked me to my feet, the screaming of my acquaintances roused me to come rushing out the exit towards them where I found a sand storm brewing overhead, furious and powerful. This hurricane sounded like the enraged war cries of a mad god, though it may just have been fancy after that story, but nevertheless we scrambled out of the chasm and hid in tents as a violent maelstrom of the deserts anger whirled around us. I swear to god that I heard the bellowing of a man in the wind and could see black shapes roaming about in the sandstorm. I put it to tricks of the light or my eyes and waited for it to end.
After some hours it finished. An eerie calm descended over the desert and I slowly emerged from the tent. One of my older guides looked at me, terror and bewilderment in his eyes as he looked upon the golden totem in my shaking hands. He became angry and grabbed the figure and began to scream at me in fury 'Terra’th!' just that one name over and over again. It eventually dawned on me he was naming the figure; he was Terra’th, the god of the sand, the face upon the entrance to the temple and the colossus atop it.
What had become of the people who hadn’t made it to the tent was horrific; they lay out on the sand slain, not only by sand but by many grievous cut wounds and injuries that stained the white sand a deep muddy red. As for the citadel I had found that the desert had once again claimed back its secrecy from me and the sand had once again filled to quarry to the point that, had I not been previously standing in it, I would not have known it was there. Nothing suggested the corpse of a great people except for one detail. It was the one sign that shocked me more than the sandstorm or the murder of my people. This last sign was to me the breaking point of all I could bear. It was of one solitary mummified body, which had half emerged out of the sand dune before whatever force imbued it with movement fled its remains, a sword in its mouth and blood on its hands.
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