We noticed some dark openings nearby. They were very low and covered with sand, but I cleared one of them with a shovel and crept into it, holding a lighted torch, which I rightly judged to be indispensable to the discovery of the secrets of the Nameless City. Once inside, I realized that the space carved into the rock was indeed a temple. We saw clear signs that here, in these fertile places, as they were before they were turned into a desert, people lived, and this temple was a place of worship for them. There were primitive altars, pillars, niches, surprisingly low; though I could not find sculpture or frescoes, there were many individual stones with obviously man-made forms that turned them into symbols.
The ceiling of the chiseled hall was very low, and I found it strange that we could hardly stand upright on our knees. But the area of the hall was so large that our torch lit only part of the dark space. In the far corners of the hall I felt a shiver, some of the altars and stones reminded me of forgotten rites, horrible, disgusting and inexplicable in their essence, what kind of people could have built and attended such a temple? I crawled back inside, eager to see what else the temples would reveal.
Night was coming, but the things I saw made me curious, which eventually overpowered my fear, and I stayed among the long, moonlit shadows that had filled me with dread when I first saw the Nameless City. At dusk I cleared another opening and crawled into it with a new torch; inside I found more stones and symbols, as obscure as those in the first temple. The room was just as low, but much less spacious, and ended in a very narrow passage filled with grim, mysterious idols

Many thanks to this wonderful author for such extraordinary work singularitystranger on VK!🩵
The beautiful snake next to me is Abby