Mesa Trail ch. 25
Draft 2

"And in that moment, the moon as bright as could be, Sinbad, with his one brillian eye, looked toward the bountiful sea." – Keeper











"Now there has been only three of us that we know of who have ever walked into this place," said Inuna, now holding a second flashlight and scurrying its shiny beam around walls that continued to expand. "My grandmother used to take me here when I was very very young.  Not even my mother or father knew that I had been here.  To them, it was nothing more than one more tale of the mountains, and they did not have much time for that.  They knew of the things of immediate survival, but grandmother knew that this was the ancient place where the magic begins to stir and, as she would say, pour out of the mountain on certain days. You have to promise that you will not show anybody this place. I am simply here to find something that had been missing now for some time.  That is why I have been sent to the Mesa Trail, to see if I can find the missing piece." Josh walked around the contours of the cave as if the walls were made of chocolate but that he could not touch or taste.  What to do with all of this? The walls were entirely golden. Certain portions of the walls had crumbled and left small piles of fallen gold nuggets, but it looked as if it had been sitting in the same place undisturbed forever. "How come nobody has dug this out?" Josh asked, slipping his index finger over the surface of a pure gold wall.  "Have you seen real underground gold mines," she asked, "they begin digging on the surface and continue to dig in layers that are wide enough for the bulldozers until they continue to chop and level off more and more roadways to a bottom.  They become a pit and the mountain is gone. We have set many a watchman here over the years to do what we can to send diggers off the trail.  There has been only one other person that we know of who has been in here, but they did not claim it, and they did not dig it out.  Instead they took with them a family stone that we had lodged over there," she said, pointing to what looked like nothing more than the rest of the inside of the cave, a deep, dark gold, nearly changing color as the flashlight settled on it.  I brought you here to see if you could help me find it."  Josh looked up to Inuna, "me?"
"Yes," she said, "you are on the Bear Creek site every day. The outpost sees all sorts of things for trade.  You could ask about such a piece without anybody thinking anything." Inuna had dark brown eyes, large as the largest almonds, and they now pleaded with Josh. He was too young to necessarily ask for anything in return, so she offered something before it ever came up.