ring bolts to the slab itself and hooked steel chains to them. We jammed a brace of steel H-sections across the tunnel to anchor the chains and with two heavy ratchet winches we began to haul the slab bodily out of its seating.
We knelt side by side, each of us straining against one of the winches, taking up the pull one pawl at a time. With each click of the ratchet the strain on the chains increased until they were as rigid as solid steel bars. Now the handles of the winches were almost immovable.
‘Okay, Ben. Let’s both get onto one of them,’ Louren panted. His golden curls were dark and heavy with sweat and dirt, plastered against his skull, and the sweat highlighted his great shoulder muscles and the straining, swollen biceps as we heaved together at the winch.
‘Clank! ’ went the rachet and the chain moved a sixteenth of an inch.
‘Clank!’ Again she moved. Our breathing hissed and whistled in the silence.
‘All the way, partner,’ Louren gasped beside me.
‘All the way, Lo.’ And my body arched like a drawn bow, I felt the muscles in my back begin to tear, my eyes strained from their sockets.
Then with a soft grating sound the great slab of sandstone swung slowly out of the face, and then fell with a heavy thump to the floor of the tunnel, and beyond it we saw the square black opening.
We lay together side by side, fighting for breath, sweat trickling down our faces and bodies, our muscles still quivering and twitching from our exertions and we stared into that sinister hole.
There was a smell; a stale, long-dead, dry smell as the air that had been trapped in there for 2,000 years gushed out.
‘Come!’ Louren was the first to move, he scrambled to his feet and snatched up one of the electric bulbs in its little wire cage, the extension cable slithered after him like a snake as he went forward. I followed him quickly, and we crawled through the opening.
It was a jump of four feet down to the floor of the chamber beyond. We stood side by side, Louren holding the light above his head, and we peered around us into the moving mysterious shadows.
We were in a long commodious passage that ran straight and undeviatingly 155 feet from the cavern end to terminate against a blank wall of stone. The passage was eight foot six inches high, and ten foot wide.
The roof was lined with lintels of sandstone laid horizontally from wall to wall, and the walls themselves were tiled with blocks similar to the one we had removed from its seating. The floor was paved with square flags of sandstone.
Let into the walls on each side of the passage were stone-lined cupboards. These were seven feet wide and five feet deep and reached from floor to roof height. Each of these recesses was fitted with shelves of stone slab, rank upon rank of them, three feet apart and upon the shelves stood hundreds upon hundreds of pottery jars.
‘It’s some sort of store room,’ Louren said, holding the light high and moving slowly down the passage.
‘Yes, probably wine or corn in the jars.’ I have never learned not to guess aloud. My heart was hammering with excitement and my head swivelled from side to side, as I tried to take in every detail.
There were twenty of these recesses, ten on each side of the passage, and I guessed again.
‘Must be two or three thousand pots,’ I said.
‘Let’s open one,’ Louren was consumed by a layman’s impatience.
‘No, Lo, we can’t do that until we are ready to work properly.’
There was a thick soft shroud of pale dust over everything, it softened the outlines and edges of all shapes. It rose lazily around our legs like a sea mist as our movements stirred it.
‘We will have to clean up before we can do anything else,’ I said, and sneezed as the dust found its way into my nostrils.
‘Move slowly,’ Louren told me. ‘Don’t stir it up.’ He took a further pace and then stopped.
‘What’s this?’ Scattered along the passage floor were dozens of large shapeless objects, their identity concealed by the blanketing dust. They were lying singly, or in heaps, strange fluid shapes that teased my memory. Compared with the orderly ranks of jars on their shelves, the objects were strewn with a careless abandon.
‘Hold the lamp,’ I told Louren, and crouched over one of them. I touched it gently, running my fingers through the velvety dust, brushing it softly aside until I recognized what it was and I drew back with an involuntary exclamation of surprise.
Through the soft mist of dust and ages a face stared up at me. A long-dead, mummified face over which was stretched dry tobacco-brown skin. The eyes were empty dark holes, and the lips had dried and shrunken to expose the grinning yellow teeth.
‘Dead men,’ Louren said. ‘Dozens of them.’
‘Sacrifices?’ I pondered. ‘No, this is something else.’
‘It looks like a battle As though they have been killed in a fight.’
Now that we knew what they were, it was possible to make out the way the bodies were piled upon each other like the debris of a hurricane, or were thrown loosely about the stone floor. A corpse in a mantle of grey dust sat with his back to the wall, his head sagged forward on his chest, and one out-flung arm had knocked four of the jars from their shelf - they lay on the floor beside him like fat rolls of French bread.
‘It must have been a hell of a fight,’ I said with awe.
‘It was,’ said Louren softly, and I turned to him with surprise. His eyes glowed with some intense inner excitement, and his lips were parted, a reckless half smile on his lips.
‘What do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘How do you know that?’
