Tunnels 02, Deeper

face of the rock, shuffling his way down it, ever so slowly and carefully. He sighed. He didn't want to do that again anytime soon.
    He took off his glasses and gave them a thorough wipe with his threadbare shirtsleeve. He'd discarded the Coprolite suit some miles back -- it was too cumbersome and restrictive for him to continue to wear, despite the reservations he still harbored about exposure to radioactivity. In retrospect, he might have overreacted a bit about the risks associated with this -- it was probably just localized to specific areas within the Great Plain, and it wasn't as if he'd spent very long there. Besides, he couldn't worry about that now; he had more important things to think about. He picked up the map and studied the spidery marks for the umpteenth time.
    Then, the food strip gripped in the corner of his mouth like an unlit cigar, he put away the map and, using the large boulder as a book rest, opened his journal to check something that had been nagging him. He flipped through the pages of his drawings of the stone tablets he had chanced upon soon after he'd arrived at the Miners' Station. Locating one of the last drawings in the series, he began to study it. It was a bit rough-and-ready, due to his physical state at the time, but despite this he was confident he'd captured most of the detail. He continued to peer at it for a while, then leaned back again thoughtfully.
    The tablet recorded on this particular page had been different from the others he'd found; for a start, it was larger in size, and also some of the inscriptions on it were quite unlike anything else he'd uncovered a the site.
    Carved into its face were three clearly defined areas. In the uppermost one, the writing was composed of strange cuneiforms -- wedge-shaped letters. Unfortunately these were also the letters used on all the other tablets he'd looked at in the same cavern. He couldn't begin to decipher them. Below was another block of strange, angular, cuneiform letters, very different from those in the first section and resembling nothing he'd ever come across before in all his years of study. The third block of writing was just as bad, but here there was a bizarre succession of glyphic symbols -- strange and unrecognizable pictures -- all utterly meaningless to him.
    "I just don't get it," he said slowly, frowning. He thumbed forward to a page where he'd already jotted some workings in an attempt to translate even the smallest section of any of the three blocks. By looking at repeated symbols in the middle and lower ones on the tablet, he thought he would be able to begin to piece together an understanding of the cuneiform scripts. Even if they were similar to Chinese logographic writing, with a prodigious number of different characters, he hoped that at least some sort of basic pattern would emerge.
    "Come on, come on, think, man," he urged himself in a growl, thumping his forehead with his palm. Shifting the food strip from one side of his mouth to the other, he set about his workings again, trying to make more headway.
    "I... just... don't... get... it," he grumbled. In pure frustration, he tore out a page of workings and, crumpling it up, slung it over his shoulder. He sat back and clenched his hands together, deep in reflection. As he did this, the journal slipped from the boulder.
    "Blast!" he exclaimed, reaching down to retrieve it. It had fallen open at the drawing that was causing him so much trouble. He placed it back on the boulder again.
    He heard a sound. A creaking, followed by a series of small clacks. It ended almost as soon as it had started, but he immediately lifted a light orb and peered around. He couldn't see anything and began to whistle through his teeth in an attempt to comfort himself.
    He lowered the light orb, and, as he did so, its illumination fell on the page of the journal that was thwarting his efforts to translate it.
    He bent his head closer to the page, then closer still.
    "You dunderhead." He began to laugh as he scanned the hitherto meaningless lettering before him. The middle section was now getting his undivided attention.
    "Yes, yes, yes, YES!"
    He had been in such a bad state when he'd sketched the tablet that he just hadn't recognized the alphabet. Not upside down , anyway. "It's Phoenician script, you stupid goat! You had it the wrong way up! How could you have done that?"
    He began to write hastily on the page and discovered that, in his excitement, he was attempting to use the