The Searchers:
The party hikes up the tunnel.
The stench grows as the explorers move further from the cavern hatchway.
Nevil pinches his nose and opens his mouth, but after a few paces, he drops his hand from his nose.
''Tastes worse than it smells." The scout spits and continues on, mouth clamped shut, breathing through his nose.
On the party goes...
Cormac's torch flare has begun to gutter, pouring out smoke and a little blue light when a sudden draught blowing from some point in the darkness ahead of the party. The torch revives and the smoke clears with the increased flow of air.
A few steps forward and Cormac's torch shines on an open corridor at the upslope end of the tunnel. Beyond the arch lies a large stone chamber.
Nevil creeps ahead to check it out. Seeing no immediate danger, he motions the others closer.
Looking through the open corridor, they can all see that the floor of the large, hexagonal vault appears flooded with foul muck and pools of turgid water. This water and waste is the source of the thin stream that flows over the lower lip of the corridor and down the hallway channel (which current the party followed upstream to get here).
The chamber looks big enough to corral a dozen horses or encamp a small company of men.
Shadows hang in the far corners like in giant spiders; motionless when looked at straight on, but creeping up and down in the onlookers' peripheral vision.
Dirty water trickles into the room through three large pipes set in the walls at man-eight set in walls of the far half of the is sided chamber.
Strings of white stuff hang from rough spots along the walls, near and far.
Holding a torch into the room, Cormac sees that the pools comprise much more muck and offal than water, but several small puddles of almost clear--though still tainted-- water stand in shallow depressions scattered around the sunken pediment.
Something stirs in the central pool. A curled leaflike thing, ochre colored, slides up from the water on a thick, ropey structure. The false leaf uncurls, revealing a cluster of bright eyes.
A bulky form thrusts up from below the fleshy eye-stalk, spraying foul water almost to the corridor.
Nevil curses and jumps back into the drainage tunnel, almost knocking over Cormac in his haste to retreat.
A wide mouth filled with yellow dagger teeth opens in the lumpy body of the muck monster. Long tentacles, one one either side of the rotund body, uncurl and wave in the air. The raspy pads at the ends of these thick appendages open and close as if grabbing at something.
Rumbling, belching sounds come out of the maw.
Then words, in the Dwarf tongue,
(Still partly submerged in slime, the thing's exact size is hard to guess. But it must be larger than the biggest man in the party. Maybe as big as a pony?)
Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
-from Moby Dick (Hermann Melville)
