...the shafts were endless and the ways narrow... before long it was hard not to be lost. Our torchlight waned and as the end grew small, so did our hope.

Traps set by both nature's hand and ancient beings seemed to be springing from all sides. Each step our feet took marked us for danger. Sometimes we crawled on our bellies for the ceiling was so low -- scuttling, sidestepping, while sucking in our guts to squeeze through the tight ways. And when the light did go out we heard the clicking pitter patter of antennaed legs and thricing pincers beginning to awake... It was our doom at that damned place of cut stone and dead slaves. Even after thousands of years it still carried the stench of the dead. And we were to be one of them. Colossal shelled scarabs, their domes swelling with age, came from below. The sand was seemingly chopped and sucked down all at once. With a sudden flash of pincers, three of our members were lost under the sand. Fearing for our lives, we sped like lightning, tripping frantically through the darkness. With our hands against rock as our only guide, we twisted and turned through the shafts.

Then lo, there was a sand-hole, a tunnel to an unknown destination. We well knew this tunnel may very well take us into cave pocket with no way out, into the maw of even more vengeful pincers, or maybe into nothing but a quicksand pit where we would die of suffocation. Regardless, we swallowed our fears for the mere chance of a way out; as behind us --- death by the dreaded green-jawed horrors was certain. With a gasp, prayer, and jump, we shot through the chute. 

And there we ended up, me with a broken leg and my last remaining partner blinded. We were spat out at this godforsaken place somewhere deep below the desert. God knows if he can find us a way out with his eyes cut up. We never should have entered that place, but nevertheless deep into the mountain we went, mocked by the scorpions amongst the rocks above as we ventured toward our grim fate, all because Ajab's music revealed its secrets while we were camped under the stars.