The next day, Hermione woke up and found herself in Tom's arms. His steady, long breaths brushed against the nape of Hermione's neck, warming her and bringing a refreshing sensation to her dry skin at the same time.
"Wake up," Hermione said as she turned around and faced Tom, first poking him in the soft flesh of his ribs and then reaching out and pinching his nose.
After this teasing, Tom woke up. It was nice to open his eyes and see Hermione's smiling face to start the day. Tom noticed that Hermione's lips seemed to have dried out in the desert sand, so he intimately moistened them for her.
When they finished, they both laughed.
The others had also woken up. When Tom and Hermione stepped outside the house, Doctor Hunter was standing there with his student Alan, smoking a cigarette.
Upon hearing footsteps, they stopped talking and turned to look.
Tom was startled to see Doctor Hunter because he found it hard to reconcile the sullen, disheveled man before him with the spirited doctor he had known. Will's death had hit him hard. Will had been his first student, and Hal Hunter had poured his heart and soul into him, only to lose him in this ancient city. Regardless of their personal relationship, Will's death was also the death of Doctor Hunter's career.
When Doctor Hunter saw Tom approaching, he straightened himself and bowed before him. It was clear that Alan had told Doctor Hunter what had happened yesterday. Doctor Hunter was wise enough to surmise that there must be a connection between the strange dog that had saved his life and the boy standing before him.
With Tom and Hermione awake, it was time for the remaining members of the expedition to gather and sit down for a meeting.
Their first order of business was to take stock of the supplies they had brought during yesterday's escape, and in the desert, provisions were indispensable.
"The camels are all scattered." Old Yushadu delivered the dreadful news. Without camels, it would be impossible to leave the desert in one piece.
"Let's seek help." Doctor Hunter took out his satellite phone, only to discover that the ever-reliable satellite phone wasn't working here. He remembered, as Alan had told him, that all electronics here were out of service.
"The electronic devices are malfunctioning..." Hermione remarked, recognizing the anomaly, a feature that reminded her of Hogwarts.
The seven of them also discovered something worse: not only had they lost their means of transportation, but they had also lost the provisions carried on the camels. Not everyone had taken their backpacks during yesterday's desperate escape, and the seven only had four backpacks in their hands, most of which contained clothes and other items.
The remnants of the expedition were desperately short on fresh water and food.
Tom was also a bit confused because he had been so focused on escaping with Hermione yesterday that he hadn't taken his own backpack! But Hermione smiled at Tom, went to the four bags, pulled out her own backpack, and then took out Tom's small backpack from her own bag.
She waved the backpack in her hand with some delight and happily said, "I took your backpack when I ran away!"
Tom: Σ(っ°Д°;)っ
Hermione Granger can always be relied upon.
He took his backpack and in front of everyone, he pulled out a bunch of provisions.
Mineral water, lunch meat, fermented rice, dehydrated vegetables, solid fuel...
When she pulled out a large pack of toilet paper, Alan couldn't help himself: "Are you Doraemon?" He said what most people were thinking.
Tom's supplies were the answer to an urgent need. After some discussions, the group decided to search the city for the remaining camels and then venture back to yesterday's campsite to see if they could retrieve some more provisions.
There were no disagreements about the first half of the process, but afterwards, there were some disagreements. Both Alyosha and Yushadu believed they should find the camels and provisions and leave the city immediately, but Alan was a bit upset: they had found the ruins, escaped the magical creatures with their lives intact, and were they going to leave empty-handed?
Who knows if they would be able to enter next time? He had studied an ancient oriental text called "The Story of the Peach Blossom," in which a fisherman found a village hundreds of years ago, only to find it again the next time. The story was so impactful that when Alyosha said, "the ancient city is here anyway, we can find it next time we come," he mustered the courage to object.
While they were arguing, Sara shouted, catching their attention.
"What's that?" she cried, pointing at the yellow sand.
She drew everyone towards her, and they all took out their binoculars to look.
The center of the city's ruins was peculiar, a vast expanse of sand about three kilometers wide. When they arrived here the previous night, it was so poorly illuminated that they didn't notice anything in the sand. Today the storm had subsided, the sun was shining, and visibility was good. This led Sara to notice something unusual in the sand: there seemed to be something there, but it was too far for them to see clearly.
They looked through the binoculars and saw a stone slab in the middle of the sand.
Alan crouched at the edge of the sand, grabbed a handful of sand, and let it slip through his fingers.
"Very fine sand." He stood up, picked up a stone, and threw it onto the sand, which immediately sank.
"You can't cross it..." he muttered, "this sand, you step on it and sink in a second."
"Quicksand." Old Yushadu knew what it was with a glance.
"But what about the slabs?" Sara asked, "If it's quicksand, how can the slabs float on it?"
The slabs floated on the quicksand naturally because there was something beneath them supporting them, so the sand was probably constructed like a large bowl with a pillar in the center, the slabs on top of the pillar, and the sand on the sides of the pillar. The aim must have been to protect the slabs so that they couldn't be easily accessed.
"The stone slab that has been protected with great effort..." The expedition was instantly intrigued by the fact that the slabs had been protected by... it wasn't just about digging a hole and putting a lock on it, but protecting them with 3,000 meters of yellow sand!
In ancient times, it would have been an insurmountable solution.
"But how can the city approach the slab?" Sara pondered a very real problem.
"There must be a special route or mechanism." Dr. Hunter came back to life, his mind racing, "Look for something special nearby..."
"That won't be necessary." Tom interrupted, "We can fly there."