He had accidentally stumbled upon a small cleft in the rocks and, investigating, found that it opened out into an underground passage.
Armed only with a small prospector’s lamp he had walked along the tunnel, which was about eight feet high with smooth, carefully crafted walls, for about half an hour. Suddenly, he had noticed a strange light up ahead.
‘It was green – a sort of sinister green light… it got brighter as I walked along, and then the tunnel opened into a large cave.’
In the cave, David was greeted by the extraordinary sight of a number of mummified bodies lying either on the floor or propped up against rocks. The fluorescent light which glowed over everything seemed to make the bodies even more gruesome, and their distorted poses gave us the distinct impression that death had crept up on them unexpectedly.
Along one wall were a number of statues that seemed to sparkle dimly in the green light, as if they might be made of gold. The faces, too, appeared to be strangely similar to those of ancient Inca gods he had once seen. David also noticed that the corpses were dressed in strange garments that looked as if they might be leather.
Yet he told himself he had never seen anything quite like it before. His only thought was that it might have been a treasure house of some kind. ‘I felt as if I had stepped into somewhere very ancient,’ he said later. ‘That the people had somehow been laying like that quite unchanged from the very earliest times. But how long I just couldn’t even begin to guess.’
Despite his driving obsession to continue, David felt too nervous to stay in the green-lit room for long. For one thing he could see no source for the strange light. And for another, several of the bodies were grouped around a hole in the far wall of the cave which looked like a continuation of the tunnel. Although he couldn’t be sure, he had the uncomfortable feeling that they might have been its guardians – as well as the keepers of the gold statues – when they were still alive.
He had accidentally stumbled upon a small cleft in the rocks and, investigating, found that it opened out into an underground passage.
Armed only with a small prospector’s lamp he had walked along the tunnel, which was about eight feet high with smooth, carefully crafted walls, for about half an hour. Suddenly, he had noticed a strange light up ahead.
‘It was green – a sort of sinister green light… it got brighter as I walked along, and then the tunnel opened into a large cave.’
In the cave, David was greeted by the extraordinary sight of a number of mummified bodies lying either on the floor or propped up against rocks. The fluorescent light which glowed over everything seemed to make the bodies even more gruesome, and their distorted poses gave us the distinct impression that death had crept up on them unexpectedly.
Along one wall were a number of statues that seemed to sparkle dimly in the green light, as if they might be made of gold. The faces, too, appeared to be strangely similar to those of ancient Inca gods he had once seen. David also noticed that the corpses were dressed in strange garments that looked as if they might be leather.
Yet he told himself he had never seen anything quite like it before. His only thought was that it might have been a treasure house of some kind. ‘I felt as if I had stepped into somewhere very ancient,’ he said later. ‘That the people had somehow been laying like that quite unchanged from the very earliest times. But how long I just couldn’t even begin to guess.’
Despite his driving obsession to continue, David felt too nervous to stay in the green-lit room for long. For one thing he could see no source for the strange light. And for another, several of the bodies were grouped around a hole in the far wall of the cave which looked like a continuation of the tunnel. Although he couldn’t be sure, he had the uncomfortable feeling that they might have been its guardians – as well as the keepers of the gold statues – when they were still alive.
Clearly David found an ancient necromantic ritual site. Probably a historical precursor to the modern arcanoscience known as “Juche Necromancy”.