Spelunking

Journal Of Dr. Ashley Mitchell

October 17, 2009

I was called in to this dig last week by one of my old students from when I taught at university. They said that it was something that they needed my expertise on. 

Rachel was an excellent student that I had always felt had great potential. She went on several digs with me and required very little care. She handled herself like a professional, so when I received the call from her, now that she has been out, working in the field for almost six years now as a professional archeologist, as well as a prestigious university professor herself, I assumed that it was something serious and that I should get on the next plane out to her. 

She said she had been digging in the United States. It had started as a standard dig, hoping to find some fossils, hopefully some dinosaur bones, out in the deserts of Arizona. She had told me that while investigating a strange formation, one of her students had accidentally stepped on a weak patch of ground. 

There had been a storm in that area of the desert earlier that week, which was why they had gone there to begin with. The storm had changed the landscape and brought out some new finds that hadn’t been there before. 

Apparently when this digger stepped in the wrong place, the ground gave out below him. He fell hundreds of feet, losing his life, sadly, of course.

The cave that he had fallen into was unknown. Before I journeyed out here, I did research trying to find some mention of it, but was unsuccessful. It didn’t exist as far as modern man knew. This is something that is very unlikely to find nowadays. 

Needless to say, I was on the very next flight out of London.

The cave is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like it before.

We descended in and brought camping supplies with us. 

It’s enormous. The magnitude of the place is unreal. How it hasn’t caved in after all of these years is a mystery to me. We’ve been walking the cave now for two days and still have yet to find an end. There are patches of the cave that are what you’d expect, small tunnels and narrow passes, where it takes a certain type of person to be able to shove themselves through, but at other times, you break out into amazing chambers as large as football fields.

October 18, 2009

We have found very little life down here. The quiet of the place is unsettling. We cover miles a day and yet we have still yet to find an end to the cave system.

October 20, 2009

Our quest took a random decrease. It’s as though every step we take is going further and further downhill, as though we’re going to come out on the other side of the world. The passage has also seemed to begun zig zagging. We’re no longer just going straight, but rather we seem to be going back and forth, as though it’s an enormous ramp, leading us somewhere.

October 22, 2009

We’re close to running out of supplies. Most specifically, water. We’re starting to think that we’ll need to turn around very soon, whether we reach the end or not. Tomorrow should probably be the last day if we want to be able to get back out.

Strange phenomenons are occurring. It at first got cold when we entered the cave; which made sense, but now it’s getting warmer and warmed every day we’re down here. We’ve joked several times that we’re approaching the center of the Earth.

October 23, 2009

Just when we were considering turning around, we came to the end. I don’t know what we thought we’d find at the end of the system, but we did not expect what we found. 

At the end of our nine days down here, we would expect that we’d reach an exit, or a wall, something that made logical sense when it came to caves, but instead, we found a set of doors.

The doors stands no less that forty feet. Its handles are twenty feet above our heads and it seems to be made out of some sort of cold black substance. We thought at first that it might be onyx, but the texture doesn’t seem right. It’s warm to the touch. It has some sort of runes on it that I have never seen before. I have studied ancient writing for years, but these symbols seem foreign to me.

We’ve camped out in front of the door, trying to figure what we should do, now that we found it. We worry that we can’t go back now that we’re here. We need to figure out what the door goes to. Curiosity is a terrible thing, and it has taken a hold of all of us.

Rachel’s boyfriend, Mark, an archeologist himself, but more into the idea of blowing stuff up to make discoveries than others in the field, has discussed the idea of using dynamite to see if we can break through the strange door. The other five people in the party, not including Rachel and myself feel that there has to be a better way and strive to keep the door intact. It is, for no other reason that appearance, a priceless artifact all its own.

Mark is continually trying to convince us that blowing it up is the best way. It has been hours. I understand, being a man myself, the desire to blow things up. I think it’s some sort of desire to show dominance over it, but I’m still refusing.

We’ve began pushing off meals.

We’re hoping that, whatever is behind these doors, there may be some food as well.

I’m starting to allow myself the belief that Shangri-La may be behind those doors. Tomorrow we start trying to open them.