Ben: Looking back, I see that I didn't describe the scene on the road very clearly. Sorry. Rather than spend a whole message cycle clarifying, I'll try to move things ahead a bit.
While Talia is considering whether to cast Speak with Animals on the snake or a bird, everyone looks over the scene more closely. While the rock slide is imposing, it turns out that it doesn't fill this entire piece of road. The road was built to extend thirty feet out from the cliff base for a length of sixty feet. The rock pile is only about twenty by forty feet. Perhaps someone cleared out the fringes of it a few decades ago so that wagons could squeeze around the edge. Even if it had blocked the road, it wouldn't be too hard to clamber over--just too much for a snake to climb.
As you stare at the rocks, Elendil notices something new. Just above where the bone is wedged, there are scratches in the lichen that covers the surface. He boosts himself up on the boulder to see what might be higher. He spots flat stone, the size of a wagon wheel near the top of the pile that looks unlike all the others, because it has no lichen at all on its exposed top. Instead, lichen can be seen in the visible corners of the underside.
The rest of the group climbs up to look this over and debate whether the stone has been recently flipped upside down. Talia climbs higher to look for the spot from which it might have come.
At the very top of the pile, against the cliff face, are two considerable boulders. It looks as though several big stones have recently been cleared out from the space between them. Squeezing into this space, Talia can see that between knee height and eye level, the cliff face itself is ornately carved, though the carvings are quite badly damaged. Below knee level, there is no cliff face at all, only a dark opening in the rock.
Whispering now, she points this out to the others. After a bit of thought and some closer examination, all becomes clear. Before these rocks fell here, there must have been a high archway entering into the cliff wall, decorated around the outside with these carvings. The rocks hid it completely, but now that a few have been moved, the very top of the arched opening is visible.
On hands and knees between the two big boulders, Elendil peers under the shadowy arch. The exposed portion is just big enough for a person to squeeze through. There is clearly some open space within and it looks like it might be possible to climb down the pile of stones and into the dark, but it's hard to say more than that without a light source. If someone were to go in, they would almost have to do so feet first, sliding down backwards on their belly and feeling around for footing.
Just a hint of a smell comes up out of the hole--unpleasant but hard to identify.
No comments:
Post a Comment