The next day they trekked through more of the unchanging landscape until early afternoon, when Senta-eh spotted an oasis of green up ahead.
It was a small area—perhaps an acre square, surrounded by a desert on all sides. In the middle was a sulfur springs.
In the twenty-first century, this was probably quite the tourist attraction. Come take a hot bath and smell like rotten eggs! Who could resist?
Bad smell or not, the bubbling spring created a beautiful little rest stop.
Monda-ak, whose sense of smell was keen, sneezed, shook his head, and sneezed again.
“What is that smell?” Lanta-eh asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Sulfur. Not very pleasant is it?”
“No. Can you drink it?”
“If you can get past the smell, it won’t hurt you. If you drink too much of it, it might make you relieve yourself a lot, but that’s about it.”
They dismounted and led their horses to the spring. Like Monda-ak, they sneezed and twisted their head from side to side. Eventually, their thirst after half-a-day’s ride got the best of them and they tentatively drank.
“How much farther?” Alex asked, feeling like he had asked that question too many times already on this journey. He was fine, but now that he knew Senta-eh was pregnant, he worried about her constantly.
Lanta-eh walked to one edge of the little oasis of green and pointed due north. Dry, dusty hills rose up in that direction. In one spot, a canyon ran between sharp rises in elevation.
“That’s the canyon I’ve seen in my dreams.”
A minute later, they were on their horses and heading north, glad to be away from the smell.
Distances are tricky when trekking through a desert. After an hour’s ride, the canyon almost seemed farther away than when they started. Still, they kept on, and by late afternoon, they rode into the cool shadows cast by the sharp inclines on either side.
It was a box canyon, open on only one end, and not a very deep one at that. There were scrawny trees and a few areas of hearty scrub brush that had managed to live in this inhospitable climate.
Alex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but seeing this tiny canyon with its near-vertical walls on both sides, he knew it wasn’t this.
“This is it?”
“This is it,” Lanta-eh confirmed.
Alex did a full perimeter sweep, including up and down the walls. If there was anything to see, it wasn’t obvious.
Lanta-eh pointed to the northeast corner of the canyon. It looked like a portion of the wall above had collapsed, dropping rocks of all sizes into a pile. “Behind there.”
She sounded so confident that Alex jumped down from his horse and ran to the rocks. When he got there, he saw a pile of rocks, nothing more.
“I said behind there. If this was easy to find, someone already would have, and it would have been destroyed or used up.”
Lanta-eh and Senta-eh dismounted and joined Monda-ak in the deepest shade of the canyon. This was Alex’s adventure and they had decided to let him pursue it.
Alex looked at the puzzle in front of him and saw no logical way to attack it, so he picked a spot and dug in. At first, tossing rocks away from the pile only revealed more rocks underneath. When he pulled rocks from the bottom of the pile, more rocks just slid down from above to take their place.
“This might take a while,” he called over his shoulder.
“No hurry,” Lanta-eh said. “We seem to have found the only shade within a few miles, so we’re good.”
Eventually, Alex managed to get his fingers behind a particularly large rock. It was too heavy for him to pick up, but by rocking it back and forth, he was eventually able to dislodge it. When he did, it created a small rockslide. Alex jumped back to avoid being hit. When he looked up at where the rocks had come from, he saw a small, shadowy area. He tried to clamber up to it, but found himself slipping back down with a shower of small rocks.
He stood back and examined the puzzle. There were a series of large rocks—boulders, almost—on the left side of the slide, but mostly smaller rocks on the right. He moved to the left and climbed from bigger rock to bigger rock. He managed to only slip twice, once taking a nasty gash out of his right calf.
Finally, he succeeded in getting within a few feet of the shadowy area. He stretched out flat on his stomach and crawled forward until his face was directly over the opening. He peered inside and saw only pitch blackness. The space in the rocks was big enough for him to fit his head, but not his shoulders. He pawed at the rocks around the opening, trying to push them out of the way without slipping down himself.
He was successful—until he wasn’t. Just as he started another very satisfying tumble of rocks and dirt, he found himself part of that tumble and landed in a heap on the ground. He had managed to grab onto one of the big rocks and pulled it down with him, so the opening was bigger than it was before. He stood, dusted himself off, and looked at the two women, who were pointedly looking the other way, trying to hide their smiles. Even Monda-ak seemed to be laughing at him.
He repeated the same scramble up the left side, then belly-crawled over to the opening, which was much larger now. Large enough for a twenty-first century-sized man to fit through. He put his head and shoulders through, but again, all he could see was
