Actual News Item: A woman in Arizona became dangerously dehydrated and disoriented in the desert while searching for the lost Dutchman's mine and had to be rescued by helicopter...for the second time!
http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from- ... -gold.html
Seems to be a little cottage industry to create dead bodies in the desert.
Don't they realise that the Lost Dutchman's mine was already found by another party of deranged and disoriented treasure seekers?
Dead Mule Diary wrote:Dispatch From the Wild West pt. 37
By Bill Honeywell
San Francisco Gazette
Yes, you read that correctly. The wall attacked him. One minute, he was making a diagram with his hands, and the next, two yellow eyes appeared in the wall beside him and a wall textured arm slashed out at Gabriel, striking a cruel blow on his side.
He grimaced and took a shocked step back. In front of him stood what to all intents and purposes looked like a part of the wall, but with arms and legs and glowing yellow eyes. Gabriel was so shocked he reflexively reached for his pistol, the same weapon he had told everyone to avoid for fear of a tunnel collapse. He fired a shot into the creature, causing it to hesitate and growl slightly. A fine spray of dust and debris fell warningly from the ceiling, but thankfully there was no cave in.
Annie was so startled by the apparition before her she dropped her lantern to the floor. That caused weird shadows to play across the walls, enhancing the eerie feeling of unreality of our situation. Recovering her nerve quickly, Annie drew her tomahawk and charged at the creature.
Hearing the commotion from the other side, Tom, Buffalo, and Tony piled back into the water filled passage and swam back to give aid to their friends.
The strange creature seemed fixated on Gabriel and struck out at him again, grazing him with those large clawed hands. The snap of its enormous maw clacked through the cavern, but fortunately missed its target.
The creature drew back its lips from its yellow fangs and hissed at Gabriel "Hoonam, give!"
Gabriel's response was to draw his old cavalry sabre and strike the creature. Annie also hit it again with the tomahawk. At each hit, the stony creature reacted in a surprised way, as though it had never been struck before.
Soon Tom, Tony and Buffalo had charged down the (fairly wide) passage and were also able to strike at the creature. The creature, realizing it was sorely outnumbered, promptly disappeared.
I'm not sure how it happened. It was no trick of the light. It was standing there, a man shaped blob of rock, then it was gone, just like that.
Some hesitated for a moment, but Tom plunged his knife directly into the now empty space where the creature had stood. He was rewarded with a grunt of pain. The others quickly caught on, and after multiple thrusts into the "empty air", the creature slumped, now visible, to the floor. As it did so, it no longer looked like a piece of the rocks at all. Rather it was a pasty grey colour with reptilian skin, like one of them gators they have in the Floridas
"What in blazes was that?", Buffalo gasped, breathing hard.
"I don't know, I don't want to know", Annie replied, clearly shaken by what she had seen.
"Right". Tony said. "Let's get our gold and get out of here. If I never see that apparition in my dreams I will count myself truly blessed. Madre Dios." Then he fervently crossed himself. In all the days of "Father Sanchez", I don't remember him ever looking so god-fearing.
We were all pretty spooked, truth to tell. It wasn't until later that I realized, when the creature said "Hoonam, give", it had been looking at me as much as Gabriel, but he was fortunately placed between the creature and I. I shivered at the thought of those claws rending my flesh. But, luckily it was dead now.
We set up a human chain to gather the gold from the island and take it up the ladder to the first floor, and from there to the entrance to the cave. We decided we would wait for nightfall to move it from the cave mouth to our wagon down below.
Moving that much gold (Gabriel estimated there was over $10,000 worth!) took a long time, just as Gabriel had feared. In fact, there was no need to wait for nightfall to move the gold from the cave mouth, as it took us the entire day to move it up to the cave mouth.
We were all pretty wet, hungry, and exhausted by the end of it. I was stationed in the hall, moving what Buffalo handed me from the flooded passage up to Tom, who spent the day going up and down the ladder with gold held precariously in a jury-rigged pack on his back.
The atmosphere of dark, damp menace down the shaft, the fight with the weird creature, and the exhilaration of finding the gold all combined to play tricks with my mind. While carrying the gold back and forth, I started to hear noises in the dark. Then, towards the end of day, I thought I saw something in the large pool. I stepped towards the pool to get a better look (which sounds foolish now, but we were all not thinking clearly at that point)
At first, I took what I had seen to be my lantern reflected back from the pool. As I watched it closely, I realized it was not one light but two. And it was not reflected lantern light. What I was seeing were two bright yellow eyes. And those eyes were staring, unblinking, into my own.
I gasped and stepped back from the pool. When I looked again, the eyes had gone. I cursed my fertile imagination and set to work ferrying what remained of the gold
