The Final Word

Reinhold Seelenfänger [Tim] announced boldly to the group, "I predict that the three words of power are Baal, Hammon and Tanit."

He further explained: "It's a standard Carthaginian religious formula, like 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost' in Christianity. Anyone who has studied Carthaginian religion would guess it at once. Wonton [Darryl], on the other hand, should go back to manning the cash register at his brother's takeaway stand."

The group, Fleur [Steven], Mezmer [Shane], Cooper [Ian], Hubert Gesäss [Kevin], Gazala [Richard], Gunter [Jeff], Bernard [Jamie], Wonton and Reinhold Seelenfänger were contemplating what to do next about the creature that was waiting down the tunnel.

Dr Jacob slumped into his bunk marmalading.

They had a plan. Cooper, Gunter, Gazala, Hubert each took a chau-chat submachine gun, and formed a semi-circle in the Blood room around the tunnel entrance. Bernard stayed slightly down the retreat tunnel with the Speed Graphic camera at the ready.

Mezmer, Wonton, Seelenfänger, and Fleur bravely stayed back upstairs, at the ladder.

Cooper carefully snuck down the tunnel and made a series of loud noises and sounds. Then he ran back to join the others. The enraged creature, with loud slapping of its feet, rushed headlong into the room.

All four fired, and the deafening sound of their submachine-guns filled the room.

Gunter and Cooper hit it well. But Hubert and Gazala, even at this close range, missed entirely.

ghoul

Although severely damaged, the creature, obvious to pain, rushed into Hubert, clawing and biting. He went down screaming. The other three kept up with their gun-fire, caring naught as half their bullets hit Hubert too. But this was enough, and the creature collapsed onto the unconscious Hubert.

Gazala pulled out her bejewelled knife (the one she retrieved from the Safar adventure) and cut its head off. This was the first time she had used this knife in anger. It sliced through the thing's neck like a hot knife through butter. Was this magic or a keen blade?

"Got you, ghoul!" she hissed.

While Gazala was dealing with the ghoul, Gunter bandaged Hubert to stop him bleeding out. He was still breathing, which was a small relief.

Fleur was summoned and she applied her medical skills on Hubert. He was soon up, but not feeling very well. 

The raucous gunfire woke something else, because on the other side of the slab-blocked door they could hear clawing and scrabbling.

Censer of Baal

But, with the stationing of guards on this slab, they could stop it from being forced open. That allowed them all - even the brave non-combatants from upstairs -  to safely work down in the tunnels. And thus they all dug out the sandy dirt from the chamber, and bucket-chained the waste up the shaft, and outside.

Eventually, they cleared enough to expose an altar, on which was sitting a small pristine gold item. Wonton and Seelenfänger identified it as a Baal censer. They both knew their Baal lore enough that to activate the censer, caraway and harissa herbs would be burned in the pipe during the ritual. 

"N'activons pas ...uh.. das Weihrauchfass von Baal ..uh.. le encensoir de Baal ... maintenant !" mused Seelenfänger in his strong German-tainted French ("Let's not activate Baal's censer now!"). 

No-one dared to touch it either. 

Mezmer did a Detect Mythos and, as predicted, it was certainly a powerful source. But then, this entire room gave a reading off the scale.

As night was approaching, they decided it would be safer to let sleeping dogs lie. And those dogs ought to sleep buried under piles of spoil. So, they brought back down a large load of dirt and sand, and covered up the the altar again, thus re-burying the censer. 

Then they all retreated upstairs and pulled up the ladder.

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In the morning, Cooper bravely searched the tunnels. He noticed that the Blood room slab door was down again, and that there were now two ghouls in the Altar room. They were facing the altar (still covered by the pile of dirt as the group had left it) in mock praying positions. He quietly returned to the other passage (where he assumed the ghouls came from), and explored there. He rounded a corner and the passage was blocked up. But, he noticed that the blockage was fresh spoil and he identified it as the same spoil that they had been digging out yesterday. There was even one of Gazala's fake (cosmetic) fingernails in this dirt. This made no sense because it was no where near the Altar room. Unless someone had carried the dirt to here.

So, Cooper summoned the brave members - Gunter, Gazala, and the still-wounded Hubert - and they all carefully came down and quietly sealed the tunnel to the Altar room (and the ghouls) with the slab door trick. However, putting it in place, it made a solid "clunk", which echoed through the tunnels. Sure enough, there was soon an angry scrabbling on the back of that slab.

But with the slab door manned, this allowed everyone to come down and to work on this new (fresh) spoil with another bucket chain. They got enough clear that Cooper could climb to the top of the pile, just below the ceiling, and look through. 

He blinked and tried to understand what he was looking at. He was looking at the altar, but from behind it. This was definitely the same altar room that they were digging yesterday. He could see their foot-prints on the floor and one of the buckets they left. But, it made no sense direction-wise; some weird-arse non-Euclidian space warp. Looking north into the altar room, as he thought he was, was actually looking south in that same room.

Neither of the praying ghouls were there, of course, they were at the back of the slab trying to scrabble through. But ... this meant that the ghouls could technically come through this hole, and that the party could not block them off.

So, they backed carefully away and had a wee talk.

When Seelenfänger was told about the direction distortions, he started to rattle off an explanation of Baal Latitude Manifold (BLM) theory "In BLM geometry, an augmented affine connection can be defined without reference to a geodesic, and many additional concepts follow this; parallel transport, covariant derivatives, and non-Euclidian directions also do not require the concept of a geodesic. However, when a geodesic is available, these concepts can be directly tied to the 'shape' of the manifold itself; that shape is determined by how the tangent space is attached to the cotangent space by the geodesic tensor, provided that the invariant structure group of the orthonormal frame bundle is itself an orthogonal group."

Seelenfänger fully admitted he had never seen a physical real-world example of BLM theory. Well, not until today.

This exposition was cut short by the brave ones. Cooper, Gunter, Hubert and Gazala ventured back down into the tunnels. They managed to catch the attention of one of the ghouls, and managed to entice it through the crawl space behind the altar, and when it came through, all four of them dropped it with submachine-gun fire [ better rolls this time ]. Gazala used her special knife on the bullet-ridden ghoul's neck to decapitate it.

While this was going on, upstairs Bernard set himself up in the make-shift darkroom tent (that the Germans had built in a corner of the marquee), and used the Zeiss enlarger. He developed some of his older photographs. When the group had first met the ghoul that ended up killing Mario, Bernard had used the camera flash to try to scare it away. These flashes ended up as photographs, so Bernard developed one of these first. But as soon as he started to print the negative, he noticed that the ghoul in the image was ... uh... moving. He quickly tore the print up and burned it.

So, he then carefully printed all photographs that didn't have ghouls in. The photos of the slabs (that Wonton had already translated) didn't come out too well either. All the writing on them was hopelessly melted. But at least there was nothing moving on them.

There were five important slabs and Wonton had translated four of them, but he'd been having a lot of trouble with slab number three. He kept getting a 503 error. So, Seelenfänger had a look at it, and he pointed out some things that Wonton had missed and that closed the deal; they got it translated.

1. The Tomb of the Dark One
2. Censer of Karnaim - wielder of undead
3. Sacrifices required each time
4. To possess the censer would require a great price
5. Three "words of power" were required

"Karnaim" was, of course, an aspect of Baal - the nasty, blood-sacrificing, baby-eating aspect.

By the time they had finished all this work, night was on them.

_________________________

The next morning, Cooper and Gunter sneaked down to the tunnels. 

Unfortunately, the final ghoul had also scrabbled through the blocked tunnel. It attacked them both, by surprise.

They managed to blast it with their submachine guns, but it got to Cooper and clawed him down. Gazala and Hubert were right behind, hurrying down the ladder to help. Gunter had no choice but to shoot into the creature and Cooper, Hubert joined in with his chau-chat, and their shots dropped the creature, but severely wounded Cooper. Cooper was right on Death's door, but Gunter's bandaging saved his life.

Hammon

Gazala decapitated this ghoul, like the others.

With all the ghouls accounted for now, the whole party (now much braver) came down to the tunnels and spent the day cleaning out all the sand and dirt from the Altar room.

On the wall of this room was the third Word of Power. Wonton got to work on it. Sure enough, it was "Hammon". So, that agreed with Seelenfänger's prediction's: "Baal", "Hammon" and "Tanit".

Now that the Baal censer was cleared of the sand, Cooper decided to pick it up from the altar. It felt cool and tingly to the touch. While he was doing this, Bernard took some photographs. When developed, even in the photographs of just the censer, Cooper's ghostly image was still standing  by the altar.

Bernard took photographs of Gazala doing the same, with the same ghostly results.

So, Wonton picked the censer up with some tongs, wrapped it and placed it in a box. Then the box was placed inside another box. He did the same with the necklace, and the skull with the gem in it, that they had found in the annex.

They were planning to leave for Tunis tomorrow. The intent was to take the items to the Musée des Antiquités du Bardo museum, where they could be put in crates inside a big warehouse (a la Raiders of the Lost Ark) where top men could work on them; top men.

__________________________

The next day was spent defacing the three power words. See next week's entry for the results of this.

"Vandalizing a priceless World Heritage site" as Seelenfänger aptly put it.

______________________________

The next morning, the supply truck arrived from the Légion Étrangère fort. 

The group told the LE soldiers that the excavations were complete and that they were planning to leave today.

1930 Mercedes 770

The soldiers accepted this information in good grace, and they would see to it that Capitain Le Beau would inform the le Ministère Tunisien de L'Intérieur. And if LE had to contact the group, they could always use The Calomnie newspaper, or use Inspector Heroux of the Tunis Gendarmes.

The soldiers let the group keep the revolvers, rifles and submachine guns, but warned them to get licences and documentation off Heroux, and they asked for all the F1 grenades back.

Then the group began the trip back to Tunis in the German staff car. It was a bit of a squash. The Mercedes 770 (7.6L 150hp) had three rows of seats, so that would seat nine: driver Cooper, next to him Mezmer and Bernard, in the second row Fleur, Reinhold Seelenfänger, and Hubert Gesäss, and in the back Gazala, Wonton, and Gunter. The marmalading Jacob got a stretcher on the roof.

Searching the Annex

Mezmer (Shane), Gazala (Richard), Dr Jacob (Chris), Hubert (Kevin), Gunter (Jeff), Wonton (Darryl), Cooper (Ian) were at the eastern dig site. Bernard collapsed marmalading. Fleur was marmalading back at the main marquee.

Cooper had just retrieved an old skull from the tunnels. It had a large diamond inside it. But out here, in the direct sunlight, the bone of the skull began to smoke. He quickly put it in a sack, and placed it in Wonton's pup tent.

Cooper went back inside the site, crawled into the tight tunnel, and explored some more. The horizontal crawl opened into a small chamber. It was filled with sand and dust which had seeped through cracks in the ceiling. So, he cleared more of the debris out. Gazala, Hubert and Gunter joined him down in these cramped claustrophobic tunnels, and set up a bucket-chain to ferry the dirt outside. 

Cooper found and cleared a headless (dry) skeleton. It had a gold medallion. When carried outside in the sunlight, this medallion also smoked. They soon discovered that the skull, with the gem, always pointed at the medallion, like it was magnetic compass. They were very careful to keep the two items apart.

When this chamber had been cleared out, there were more of the slabs of hieroglyphs on the walls. Wonton came down and analysed them. They were the same as the slabs he had already examined back in the tunnels beneath the marquee, except they had the word "annex" added. They imparted the same information:

1. Annex to the Tomb of the Dark One
2. Censer of Karnaim - wielder of undead
3. 503 error
4. To possess the censer would require a great price
5. Three "words of power" were required

On the western wall of the chamber, there was a stone cylinder plug, about the size of a dinner plate. It had a pentagram carved on it. 

"Baal"

Cooper managed to pull it out. There was a small fridge-sized cavity behind it which contained a delicate wooden coffin - like the size you would either put ashes in or bury a baby. It was so old and dry that it was incredibly delicate - much akin to the strength of balsawood. 

Cooper managed to delicately remove it, and carefully placed it into a sturdy wooden newer box. But he never opened it.

Written on western wall of this fridge cavity was the a single glyph. Wonton read it silently: "Baal". The second Word of Power? Or the name of what was in the coffin?

As night was approaching, they left the Annex, and all headed back to Marquee with their retrieved items.

During the night, down the marquee shaft, they could hear the slap slap of the skinned creatures. The ladder was up, so Cooper decide to try to drop two grenades on them. The grenades went off, but he was not sure he damaged them.

___________________________________

Suspecting that there might be additional annexes on the other cardinal directions from the marquee, the group spent half the day searching out at the same distance (5 km) north, south and west. No results.

So, then, going on the theory that there might be annexes on the points of a giant pentagram, they tried spots at 72 degrees from the Annex, both north-east and south-east. No hits here either.

"Slappy feet"

That afternoon a supply truck arrived from the main Légion Étrangère fort to deliver some more food, water and diesel. The group deliberately reported none of their findings to the soldiers.

The night passed quietly - but they heard slappy feet below. The generator was left running all the time.

__________________________________________

The next morning, they decided to explore more of the main tunnels down the marquee shaft; after all there were to two unexplored slab doors off the so-called "Blood room" (this was the room where most of the deaths had occurred; it had dried blood all over the walls and floor). They were quite-rightly worried about more creatures, so were very careful. They were careful to ensure that there were always two or three armed watchers at all times.

Mezmer and Wonton stayed up top and pontificated on archeology, while everyone else did all the risky, dangerous and dirty work down in the tunnels.

Down in the Blood room, they decided not to touch the slab door from where the creatures always emerged (the one that Cooper threw the shoe at), and so opened the other door. Since nothing leapt out, Cooper carefully explored it with mirror. There was a short passage that terminated into a room that was full of dirt and dust.

Before they explored this further, they wanted to block the first slab door so that they wouldn't be surprised by a creature. Gunter and Cooper delicately used the stone slab from the opened door and propped it up, with wooden supports, to lean against the creature door.

Then they all spent the rest of that day cleaning out dirt from that passage and the blocked room. 

It was getting dark outside, so they returned back up the ladder to the marquee for the night. The creatures did seem to be more active at night. They withdrew the ladder too.

Sure enough, during the night they heard slappy feet below. How did they get past that blocked door?

_____________________

The next morning, in the Blood room, the creature door had been opened, despite having a slab blocking it. The slab had fallen down. So, they carefully reblocked it again, and tried to prop it up better.

Down at end of passage 2, the one they were clearing out yesterday, there was now one of the skinned creatures. Its back was to them, and it was crouching down in a squat, seemingly dozing, but swaying. They all quietly backed away and went upstairs to discuss what to do next.

One idea discussed was for four of them to form a semi-circle in the Blood room with chau-chat submachine guns, and then some brave soul would retrieve to the creature. Four chau-chats all firing would hopefully be enough. But they would only get one round of shooting, and if it didn't drop, they'd be in trouble.

"Qui est le plus courageux ?"