The jungle heat pressed in around Tiana as she forced her way through yet another thick mass of vines with the edge of her machete. It has been three days since she had last seen a hint of a path or even an animal track and ten days since she had seen any evidence of another human being. She was well and truly lost. She had a vague sense of direction from the light of the sun which filtered through the green leaves, but apart from that she was utterly without bearings.
Seeing a fallen tree ahead of her, Tiana sat down to take a small breather and collect her thoughts. She wiped away the sweat which was beading on her brow and tried to take stock of her surroundings. The fallen tree had left a gap in the canopy and a single beam of sunlight filtered down through the jungle gloom to fall on where she sat, making her seem almost like an exhibit in a museum.
She wore simple travellers clothes which consisted of a set of sturdy woven skirts and leg-coverings as well as a wide-brimmed straw hat and leather satchel. Her dark skin glowed a little with perspiration from her morning's efforts fighting her way through the jungle and her thick curly back hair was frizzy with the humidity. Her frame was stocky but slim, her arms and legs toned from many long weeks spent hiking through this unfamiliar terrain and numerous cuts, scrapes and abrasions covered her limbs. She had the desire many times to hack and slash at the greenery around her, but her elders had warned ehr to be kind to any spirits of the forest that she encountered, or risk dooming her journey for sure.
But it seemed that her journey had already been cursed from the start and Tiana cursed the day that she had abandoned the path and tried to take a shortcut through the untamed jungle. She had been trying to make up for lost time, time that she had lost by spending too long gathering rare plants and herbs along her route. She had been sent on this journey to act as ambassador from her people to the folk that lived in the next valley, bringing gifts in an attempt to establish trade. But Tiana was also a dedicated herbalist. She had spent years learning, practising and experimenting with the numerous rare plants of her jungle homeland, trying to find new properties or uses for them.
But one thing that she clearly was not, was an effective navigator or explorer. She had thought that she would be able to cut through the jungle and follow the river which led through the valley within two days. That had been two weeks ago. She had given up and tried to backtrack on herself several times since then and had ended up getting more and more lost each time. She now had precisely no idea where in the world she was, or how to get back.
Luckily her experience with the plants of the region had allowed her to find plenty of edible food in her wanderings or she would have gone hungry, as the food she had brought with her for the journey had run out days ago. The only thing weighing her pack down was the gifts that she had been trusted with for the people of the next valley. Now they were little more than useless heavy baubles that weighed her down as she trudged fruitlessly through the thick jungle brush.
As she sat on the log in the small clearing, Tiana idly reached into her pack and pulled out one of the trinkets that she had been carrying with her. It was a large golden ball about the size of a small melon and fit snugly in her hand. Its exterior was carved with dots, lines and patterns which she had been told represented the stars in the sky and was supposed to provide a useful map to travellers. It had proven completely useless to Tiana either because she didn't have the wit to understand it, or because the canopy was so thick in this part of the jungle that she could never make out more than a couple of stars at a time. When she had started her journey Tiana had enjoyed looking at the bauble, tossing it up and catching it as it fell, enjoying the weight and heft of it in her hand.
Looking at the ball now though she was reminded that as pretty and well made as it was, it was utterly useless to her and was merely weighing her pack down unnecessarily. Although it probably wasn't solid gold, it was nevertheless extremely heavy and it had been banging irritatingly against her back all morning. In a moment of anger and with a grunt of frustration, Tiana hefted the metal ball away through the trees and its departure was accompanied by the squawking of some surprised bird.
She immediately regretted her rash action, remembering that that ball had taken some skilled craftsmen hundreds of hours of painstaking work to construct and she immediately made to follow in the direction she had hurled it. But rather than the sound of a distant thud or clatter as the ball landed, there came instead a definite but distant 'sploosh' followed by a strange echo, as if the ball had landed in a distant body of water. At this, Tiana's ears pricked up as she had run out of water three days ago and she had survived this far by drinking collected rainwater from leaves and flowers. If there was a source of freshwater nearby then she should find it and fill up her water gourd as well as retrieve the orb.
She began making her way carefully through the undergrowth, careful of where she placed her feet, and trying to peer through the leaves to find the pond or lake or river that her golden orb had fallen into. It was as she pulled aside a massive leaf the size of her torso that the scene before Tina was revealed.
She was standing at the edge of an enormous steep sided pit, at least as wide across as her whole town had been, the far side was further away than even the best hunter in her tribe could have thrown a javelin. The pit was deep too, perhaps as deep again as the tallest trees of the jungle, its stone sides covered with vines and small bushes clinging desperately to the rock. The bottom of the enormous cavern was filled with water, covered here and there by enormous green lily pads, wide enough for Tiana herself to have stretched out on with room to spare.
But the most incredible thing about the massive pit was that here and there along the sides of the stone wall were carved magnificent buildings with doorways, windows, pillars and staircases linking them. They had been cut directly into the grey rock which made up the sides and seemed to recess back far into the earth behind them. There seemed to be no sign of any people however and the empty doorways and windows were all dark and sometimes overgrown, as if abandoned centuries ago.
Tiana wondered if anyone else from her village had ever stumbled upon this magnificent hidden temple. She thought not or surely she would have heard about it before. Looking down over the edge, Tiana could see small ripples on the surface of the massive lake at the bottom of the pit. Clearly this was where her golden ball had fallen.
After a quick scout around the edge, Tiana quickly noticed a set of stone stairs which had been cut into the rock face and she began to carefully make her way towards them. The stairs ran in a long curve which ran almost a full quarter of its circumference and led directly down into the midst of the abandoned stone buildings. The climb down however was treacherous as the stairs had long since been overgrown by decades of root and vine activity so that Tiana often had to scrabble ungainly across them. She didn't know how deep the water below was, but she wasn't about to risk jumping or falling from this height just in case it wasn't enough to break her fall.
