Tunnels 02, Deeper

here at the altar?"
    He hummed for a while, uttering the odd random word, then clicked his tongue against his teeth. "No, you're not going to tell me any more, are you? I'm going to have to talk to your friends," Dr. Burrows informed the silent panel. He spun on his heel and made straight for the panel on the far right of the triptych.
    Compared with the first panel, the subject matter was more difficult to make out. There was no single predominating image -- the scene was altogether more complex and confusing. However, as the firelight fell across it, he began to see what it represented.
    "Ah... so you're a stylized landscape... rolling fields... a stream with a small bridge over it and... what's this?" he muttered, brushing an area of the panel directly in front of him. "Some form of agriculture... trees... perhaps an orchard? Yes, I think you might be." He stepped back to peer at the top of the panel. "Curious, very curious indeed..."
    Strange columns lanced down from the upper right corner over the rest of the landscape. At the point from which the columns radiated, there was a circle.
    "The sun! Oh, it's my old friend the sun again!" Dr. Burrows exclaimed. "Just like the one on the ceiling!" The sphere's jagged rays spread out over the rest of the picture. "So what are you telling me? Are you showing me the place where the Moses figure was leading the people? Was this some great pilgrimage to the surface? Is that it?"
    He glanced back at the first panel. "A ruler leading his people to some sort of idealized nirvana, to the elysian fields, to the Garden of Eden?" He looked at the panel in front of him again. "But you're showing the earth's surface and the sun... so what's a nice picture like you doing in a place like this, way down here? Are you just a reminder of what lies up top? A subterranean Post-it-note? And who are these people -- are they really some forgotten culture, or the forebears of the Egyptians or the Phoenecians or... or perhaps something far more fantastic?" He shook his head. "Evacuees from the lost city of Atlantis? Is that possible?"
    He checked himself, realizing he was jumping to conclusions before conducting a full investigation. Lost in thought, he fell silent for a second, then sidestepped to the central panel.
    "Maybe you hold all the answers," he muttered. In what typically should have been the most important of the three panels, he was expecting to find something impressive -- perhaps a religious symbol, a crowning image. But instead, it was by far the least remarkable of the triptych.
    "Well, well, well," Dr. Burrows said. The middle panel depicted a circular opening in the ground with craggy rock borders. Its perspective allowed Dr. Burrows to see a little distance down into it, but there was nothing to note besides a continuation of the rock sides.
    "Ah!" he exclaimed, bending forward and spying some tiny human figures on the very edge of the hole. "So, you're on a gargantuan scale, I now know that much," he said, reaching over to rub the dust from the little figures, no bigger than ants. He continued to do this for a short while, finding more and more of the Lilliputian people in a procession, until he abruptly stilled his hand, then drew it back.
    At the far left of the procession, a number of these tiny human forms had their arms and legs splayed out, as if in free fall, tumbling down into the mouth of the huge opening. Strange winged creatures hovered above them. Dr. Burrows stood on his tiptoes and blew hard to try to remove some more of the dirt from these diminutive flying forms.
    "Well, that's a surprise!" he declared. Clad in loose flowing gowns, they seemed to have human bodies, but swanlike wings extending from their backs. "Angels... or devils?" he pondered aloud. Then he took several steps back. With his arms crossed and his chin cradled in one hand, he continued to regard the panel, whistling to himself all the while in his erratic, atonal way.
    He stopped whistling. "Aha!" he yelled, remembering something. He hurriedly retrieved the Coprolite map from his pants pocket and unfolded it, then held it up before him. "I knew I'd seen you before!"
    On the map, at the end of a long line representing what he assumed to be a tunnel or a track, and dotted with various symbols along its path, he saw something similar to the image in the panel. It was sketched in a much more simplistic way, with just a few pen strokes, but it, too, appeared to be some kind of opening in the