Tunnels 02, Deeper

I've done. I might be mistaken, but I am certain the mood has changed in the encampment. During the last twenty-four hours, there has been more activity than I've seen in the past two months. What with the additional food stores I saw them laying down, and the restrictions on the womenfolk and children from venturing outside, they are almost acting as if they are under siege. Of course, these could merely be precautionary measures that they put into practice every so often -- but I do believe something is about to happen.

    And so it seems it is time for me to resume my travels. I shall miss the Coprolites in no small measure. They have accepted me into their gentle society, one in which they seem perfectly at ease with each other, and, strangely enough, with me. Maybe it's because I'm not a Colonist or a Styx, and they recognize that I pose no risk to them or their progeny.

    In particular, their offspring are a constant source of fascination, almost adventuresome and playful. I have to keep reminding myself the young are not a completely different species from the adults.

    He stopped whistling to allow himself a chuckle, reminiscing how at first the adults wouldn't even hold his stare when he tried, fruitlessly, to communicate with them. They would avert their rather small gray eyes, their body language one of awkward submission. Such was the difference in temperament between him and these unassuming people that at times he pictured himself as the hero from a Western, the lone gunslinger who had trekked across the prairies to a town of cowed farmers or miners or what have you. To them, Dr. Burrows was a powerful, all-conquering, he-man hero. Hah! Him!
    "Get on with it, will you," he told himself, and resumed his writing:

    All in all the Coprolites are such a gentle and chronically reticent people, and I can't claim that I have gotten to know them. Perhaps the meek have inherited the earth, after all.

    I shall never forget their act of mercy in rescuing me. I have written of it before, but now that I am to leave, I have been thinking much about it again.

    Dr. Burrows stopped and looked up, staring into the middle distance for several moments, with the air of someone who is trying to remember something but has forgotten why he is trying to remember it in the first place.
    Then he flicked back through the pages of his journal until he found his first entry on arriving in the Deeps and read it to himself.

    The Colonists were unfriendly and uncommunicative as they led me a merry dance away from the Miners' Train and into what they said was a lava tube. They told me to continue along it toward the Great Plain, and that what I wanted to see was on the way. When I tried to ask them some questions, they became quite hostile.

    I wasn't about to get into an argument with them, and so did what they told me. I walked away, at a brisk pace to start with, but then stopped once I was out of sight. I wasn't convinced I was going in the right direction. I was suspicious that they were trying to get me lost in the maze of tunnels, so I backtracked and...

    At this point Dr. Burrows clicked his tongue against his teeth again and shook his head.

    ...in the process, I became completely lost.

    He whisked the page over as if he was still annoyed at himself, then scanned his description of the empty house that he'd discovered, and the surrounding huts.
    He moved past the entry as if it didn't interest him much, to a smeary, dirty page. His handwriting, never very legible at the best of times, was even worse here, and his hastily written sentences ran across the page at an array of different angles, blissfully ignoring the ruled lines. In places, his sentences were even written on top of one another, in a kind of literary pick-up sticks. At the bottom of three successive pages, the word LOST was scrawled in large, increasingly more erratic capitals.
    "Messy, messy," he admonished himself. "But I was in a bad way."
    Then a passage in the entry caught his eye, and he read it out loud.

    I can't truly say for how long I have roamed through this hotchpotch of passages. At times all hope has deserted me, and I have begun to resign myself to the fact that I might never emerge from them, but it has all been wroth it now...

    Directly below it, a subheading proudly announced THE STONE CIRCLE . On the next pages were sketch after sketch of the stones comprising the underground monument he'd stumbled across. He'd not only recorded the