He did the only thing he could: He kept going, blindly negotiating the tunnels. Not only was he getting himself hopelessly lost, but he could also hear the occasional sound in the tunnels behind him. The idea of a stalker flying out of the darkness and attacking drove him on, his fear of his pursuers greater than that of the unrelenting darkness into which he was sinking deeper and deeper. He felt so lost, and so immeasurably alone.
Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Why didn't I follow the others? I'm sure there was time! What a fool I am! The self-recrimination came thick and fast as the gloom lapped around him, becoming something tactile, physical, like a viscous black soup.
He was desperate, but a single thought kept him going. He held it in his mind, a beacon of hope to guide him on. He imagined the moment he would be reunited with his father, and how everything would be fine again, just as he'd dreamed it would be.
Knowing how futile it was to do so, but finding it gave him a measure of comfort, he would call out from time to time.
"Dad!" he would cry. "Dad, are you there?"
Dr. Burrows sat on the smaller of two boulders, his elbows propped on the larger one before him, as he nibbled contemplatively on a piece of the dried food the Coprolites had provided. He didn't know if it was animal or vegetable, but it tasted predominantly of salt, for which he was thankful. He had sweated buckets as he'd followed the convoluted route on the map, and could feel cramps coming on in his calves. He knew if he didn't have salt, and lots of it, he'd very soon be in deep trouble.
He twisted around to peer up at the side of the crevice. Lost in the darkness was the tiny track on which he'd just descended — a perilous ledge so narrow he had been forced to flatten himself against the sheer face of the rock, shuffling his way down it, ever so slowly and carefully. He sighed. He didn't want to do that again anytime soon.
He took off his glasses and gave them a thorough wipe with his threadbare shirtsleeve. He'd discarded the Coprolite suit some miles back — it was too cumbersome and restrictive for him to continue to wear, despite the reservations he still harbored about exposure to radioactivity. In retrospect, he might have overreacted a bit about the risks associated with this — it was probably just localized to specific areas within the Great Plain, and it wasn't as if he'd spent very long there. Besides, he couldn't worry about that now; he had more important things to think about. He picked up the map and studied the spidery marks for the umpteenth time.
Then, the food strip gripped in the corner of his mouth like an unlit cigar, he put away the map and, using the large boulder as a book rest, opened his journal to check something that had been nagging him. He flipped through the pages of his drawings of the stone tablets he had chanced upon soon after he'd arrived at the Miners' Station. Locating one of the last drawings in the series, he began to study it. It was a bit rough-and-ready, due to his physical state at the time, but despite this he was confident he'd captured most of the detail. He continued to peer at it for a while, then leaned back again thoughtfully.
The tablet recorded on this particular page had been different from the others he'd found; for a start, it was larger in size, and also some of the inscriptions on it were quite unlike anything else he'd uncovered a the site.
Carved into its face were three clearly defined areas. In the uppermost one, the writing was composed of strange cuneiforms — wedge-shaped letters. Unfortunately these were also the letters used on all the other tablets he'd looked at in the same cavern. He couldn't begin to decipher them. Below was another block of strange, angular, cuneiform letters, very different from those in the first section and resembling nothing he'd ever come across before in all his years of study. The third block of writing was just as bad, but here there was a bizarre succession of glyphic symbols — strange and unrecognizable pictures — all utterly meaningless to him.
"I just don't get it," he said slowly, frowning. He thumbed forward to a page where he'd already jotted some workings in an attempt to translate even the smallest section of any of the three blocks. By looking at repeated symbols in the middle and lower ones on the tablet, he thought he would be able to begin to piece together an understanding of the cuneiform scripts. Even if they were similar to Chinese logographic writing, with a prodigious number of different characters, he hoped that at least some sort of basic pattern would emerge.
"Come on, come on, think, man," he urged himself in a growl, thumping his forehead with his palm. Shifting the food strip from one side of his mouth to the other, he set about his workings again, trying to make more headway.
"I… just… don't… get… it," he grumbled. In pure frustration, he tore out a page of workings and, crumpling it up, slung it over his shoulder. He sat back and clenched his hands together, deep in reflection. As he did this, the journal slipped from the boulder.
"Blast!" he exclaimed, reaching down to retrieve it. It had fallen open at the drawing that was causing him so much trouble. He placed it back on the boulder again.
He heard a sound. A creaking, followed by a series of small clacks. It ended almost as soon as it had started, but he immediately lifted a light orb and peered around. He couldn't see anything and began to whistle through his teeth in an attempt to comfort himself.
He lowered the light orb, and, as he did so, its illumination fell on the page of the journal that was thwarting his efforts to translate it.
He bent his head closer to the page, then closer still.
"You dunderhead." He began to laugh as he scanned the hitherto meaningless lettering before him. The middle section was now getting his undivided attention.
"Yes, yes, yes, YES!"
He had been in such a bad state when he'd sketched the tablet that he just hadn't recognized the alphabet. Not upside down, anyway. "It's Phoenician script, you stupid goat! You had it the wrong way up! How could you have done that?"
He began to write hastily on the page and discovered that, in his excitement, he was attempting to use the half-chewed food strip instead of his pencil. He threw it away and, now using his pencil, quickly scribbled in the margin, guessing at the symbols where he had to because his sketching had been sloppy in places or because the tablet itself had been damaged.
"Aleph… lamedh… lamedh…" he muttered as he worked from letter to letter, hesitating as he came to those that were unclear or that he couldn't immediately remember. But it didn't take him too long to recall them as he was so proficient in Ancient Greek, which was directly descended from the Phoenician alphabet.
"By Jove, I've cracked it!" he shouted, his voice echoing around him.
He found that the writing in the middle block of the tablet was a prayer of some form. Nothing very exciting in itself, but he could read it. Having gotten that far, he began to examine the uppermost block of writing again, which consisted of a group of glyphics. The symbols immediately started to make sense, now that he was seeing the detailed pictograph the right way up.
The symbols were nothing like the Mesopotamian ones that he'd studied for his doctorate. Knowing that Mesopotamian pictograms were the earliest known form of writing, dating back to 3000 B.C., Dr. Burrows was only too aware that what tended to happen was that the pictographic signs became more and more schematic as the centuries progressed. So in the beginning the pictures would have been easily understood — such as a picture of a boat or a bushel of wheat — but with time they would develop into something more stylized, something more like the cuneiform letters in the middle and lower blocks on the tablet. Into an alphabet.