"The storage areas must be through there. He headed for the opening, and not wanting to be left alone in the dark, I quickly followed. Something on the floor tripped me and with a half scream of horrored panic I plunged forward, barely catching myself against Flint's back.
He turned and finished pulling me upright. Breathing hard, I watched as he stooped and picked something up from off the floor. It was a clump of something.
"Thousand year old camel dung. I bet somebody out there in the world would pay good money to have this perfectly preserved specimen of camel excrement. Just think what this could tell us. It could shed new light into what a camel's life was like in the not so ancient past."
I just rolled my eyes in response to his philosophical ramblings over a clump of manure and he chuckled, tossing the clump to the side in the process.
The strange thing was that, in a way, he was right. Someone out there probably would have payed good money for an old piece of crap. What strange things humans were invariably placing value in. I followed Flint into the next room. This must have been where the caravan men stayed. The ceiling was blackened by the smoke of long ago fires.
Flint corrected my earlier assessment of the rooms' purpose. "Slaves and camel drivers were probably housed in this room. The caravan guides and guards would have something finer than this."
I nodded and we continued on through the room littered with the dusty remnants of artifacts of the once thriving caravan trade. This room alone would be a treasure trove of interest to any archeologist. I stepped up beside Flint as he stood in the portal of yet another doorway and gasped.
The ceiling was a lot higher and filling the large domed room was a cone tipped mound, the point of which stretched almost to the ceiling. For a moment I thought it was gold, but the color was wrong. Flint stepped forward and dipped a hand into the sand-like substance of the mound.
"Salt! Either the ancient commodities market was flooded with the stuff and these caravan dudes were stock piling and waiting for a better price or our ancient savvy camel traders were preparing for a blow out fire sale during an ancient bull market."
I couldn't help but smile at his comparison of olden times with the vernacular of the present. Flint was just fun to be around in general.
"There must have been ramps outside to lead the camels up onto the roof of the building. Then, they must have opened portals in the roof and dumped the salt down to have made such a large conical pile of it."