Rocks were honed to all edge by raging waterfalls. Sunlight dappled the doctor's word-swollen diary pages marred with claw marks and bullet holes. Locke deciphered a litany of coded entries leading to the lost city. The commander with unique expertise pressed his lips into a resolute line, then slipped into a shadowy gulley of boulders behind the tumultuous water wall. A natural gas-fueled eternal flame illuminated a set of stone gears ranging in diameter from more than two feet to less than an inch etched with geometric designs. Fine mist and sweat beaded on the traveler's forehead. His face a mask of concentration he kept his unblinking eyes firmly fixed upon his work while he rotated the toothed wheels in combination. One wrong turn would trigger a barrage of spears. "Where she stops nobody knows." Steeling himself, the last tumbler clicked into place to unlock a sheening passage door emblazoned with a mandala.

"No quicksand? No fish to swim up your pee stream? What a shock." The scientific adventurer climbed a gently ascending stairway embellished with relief carvings of painstaking workmanship overgrown with root systems and trailing moss. Thick sheets of arachnid meshes snapped against his legs as he sighed wearily, "You're never more than five feet from a spider."

"What about Antarctica?" asked the voice in his head.

The man's diminutive matte black silhouette paused at the top of the wide staircase to behold a vast archaic temple of untold riches bathed in living light as though he were on a pilgrimage through a fantastical autumnal woodland fused with warm tones of gold.