Selected Detective
GOA THE OLD SALT MINE I

They stopped at a small roadside shop selling utensils about five kilometers from Berchtesgaden to buy flashlights and winter clothes, then turn left onto the main freeway and up the hill. Even though it was already night, the sky above was so clean and clear, dotted with twilight stars here and there and an icy full moon that rained down on everything around it in a silvery dim light, it was as if the landscape was made of lead. Here and there a crowd of bright rays marked isolated villages and agricultural areas, while in the lower plains at the back, the, the headlights of the cars piled their way through the darkness along the main highway between Berchtesgaden and Salzburg. There were no other cars on the road they crossed, and when they had passed through the village of Oberau, with rows of red and green alpine-roofed houses, the lights had already begun to go out, leaving the world so quiet, empty and quiet, removes all traces of humanity except the path itself and, every kilometer or so, there's a big sign that says they're on their way to something called Rossfeld-Hohen-Ringstrasse.

“You sure this is the right track?” ben-roi asked, turning the lights away into the lights close by.

Layla nodded, her fingers fixed on the map. “We rotate under Hoher Goll and continue again towards Berchtesgaden. According to his book Schlegel, the path to mining began after passing its highest point. We have to find the building that collapsed.” The Israeli grumbled and, throwing a quick glance at the rear-view mirror, he stepped on the brakes, turned the car at a sharp bend and sped it up again, producing the squeaking sound of the wheels and the body of the car, the car's headlights catch the holes in the dim light.

By this point they had been above the snow line, anything around them was sinking under a white blanket: snow on the ground, snow on the trees, and so on, the snow covered like a wall many meters high anywhere around them. The track itself remains clean, and they can continue their journey upward without obstacles, walking through sharp, higher and higher bends. The cliff-like location of Hoher Goll at the back seemed even more frightening from the front, until they finally met a flat road a kilometer or so through the dense pine forest before descending again.

At that moment, in front of them, at the peak of the long bend, the main light of the car caught the small building that had collapsed was to the left of the road, its stone walls covered in thick snowflakes. When they got there and slowed down the speed of the car, Layla pointed at a small wooden sign on the side of the road with a yellow arrow pointing upward into the trees.

“Hoher Goll Road,” says Layla.

They stopped and went out. For a moment they stood there, watching their surroundings. Silence enveloped them, steam from the cold coming out from the mouths of the two. Then, without lingering, they put on boots, jackets and gloves and turned on the flashlight and went into the forest, following what in warm weather was called a small path or track, but now it's just a field covered in virgin snow that curves over through the neighboring pine trees.

For the first few hundred meters the journey was not too difficult. The path is smooth, their feet are submerged in snow that does not exceed their ankles. Gradually, the climbs begin to get more steep and the snow gets deeper; initially reaching the calves, then the knees, and in some places, getting to the thighs, thus making their steps slow, impractical and tiring. The cold was so biting, and the crowd of trees around them grew increasingly irregular, making them stop more often to make sure that they were still on the right track.they never stood still, he said, but moving increasingly here as if deliberately trying to dispel the cold they feel. Were it not for the signs of the yellow arrows being stuck at certain intervals in the tree trunk along the route, and realizing that whatever they were doing they had to keep moving up, they had to keep moving up, they must have long lost their way.

Isaac Schlegel's book states that it only takes thirty minutes to get to the mine. With the conditions as they faced now, it was almost an hour and a half before they finally felt the ground they were on began to flatten. As if just emerging from the passageway, the two staggered towards a wider place at the foot of the back black stone wall, their bodies shrouded in snow remnants sticking from the waist down.

“Thank you, God,” said Layla, panting. At his side, Ben-Roi pulls the bottle from the pouch on his waist and, between his coughs, gulps down several times with a long gulp.

They rested for half a minute, then, still trying hard to catch their breath, moving up a few steps and lifting the lights, he said, it plays its rays in all directions on the stone surface in front of them until they find a dark, square-shaped mining entrance whose mouth is a thin wood that has been nailed to prevent anyone from entering.

They exchanged glances, unable to know the many other features behind the steam curtain coming out of their mouths, then stepped forward into the open, unable to tell, break through the snow-covered mounds of rock and keep walking until they reach the mine.

Three not-too-hard kicks and a little push were enough to knock down the thin barricade blocking the door, opening the damp corridor hidden in a longitudinal position backwards into the hillside. The roof was refuted by wood at intervals, its narrow barrier joining the darkness so dense that Layla felt she could touch it and grab its part. For a brief moment so pressing he finds himself trapped again by his recurring nightmares of underground cells, suspicious animals, the same horrors, the darkness that enveloped him before he was awakened back to the present by the sound of Ben-Roi moving forward into the tunnel. Layla followed him, the wall seemed to be pressing down on him, his heart was pounding, and it continued to be about ten meters before this Israelite suddenly stopped, his huge body line blocking the entire corridor.

“Damn it!”

“Damn it!” Layla approaches him, her beam of light merging with Ben-Roi's light beam produces a refractive beam of bright light that highlights the darkness in front of her. Forty meters in front of him in the tunnel was dead-end, covered in thick walls of rocks where the mining roof had been dug.

“Karat!”

Khalifa arrived in Berchtesgaden from the north, by road from Bad Reichenhall. The inside of the Polo was thick with cigarette smoke, where the ashtrays on the dashboard were crowded with cigarette butts. He stopped his car in front of the city train station to read the map, then prepared again, while throwing a glance at a group of men walking across the street dressed in my Lord's leather shorts, in this weather! before driving up the Berchtesgadener Ache river and up towards the mountains.

According to the map sent via facsimile by the German to Sariya, the Berg-Ulmewerk mine was accessed through some sort of small road or pathway leading up from Rossfeldhohen-Ringstrasse, the road he was following now. However, where exactly the line began, or whether there was any sign of it, is not so clear, either in the map sent via facsimile or on the map he bought at the airport. The higher Khalifa rises, the deeper the snow and the busier the pine forest, and the more worried he becomes if he does not find signs of MINING THROUGH THIS ROAD, he'll never be able to find that damn thing.

Actually Khalifa had just thought he should not turn around and just go back to the nearest village, trying to get a more detailed direction, when, appearing at the bend that seemed to be the highest point of the road, he said, his flashlight caught the face of the ruins of the stone building piled up in the open on the right side. Behind the mound a car stopped at the side of the road, with an imprinted trail slipping into the forest above. Ben-Roy's. Definitely her. Khalifa stopped, turned off the engine and got out of her car.

If he thought that in the lowlands the air was so cold, then it was nothing compared to the cold, ice-biting air that now enveloped him, the fresh air of the mountains was like ripping off his clothes so that he felt as if he was standing completely naked inside a giant refrigerator. For a moment, it was enough to make his breath falter, as if someone had poked his stomach. And even when he was well enough to slip a cigarette in his mouth and start it, his teeth were so jumbled that he had to fight hard just to be able to smoke it.

Khalifa stomped her feet for a while, looking for whatever warmth she could get for her body, then returned into the Polo and tidied up every piece of paper that could be kept in her jacket pocket. Maps, car rental letters, even Volkswagen log books then slam the door, lock it and prepare to enter the forest. His shoes sank and galloped in the snow, the pine trees surrounding him like the bars of a large cage.

They managed to move some smaller stones from the ruins of the ceiling, hoping that this was a limited collapse and somehow they would be able to get out of the trouble of breaking through the tunnel up there. There's no chance. Behind the smaller stone was a larger stone, a very large stone, a large stone slab. It took a struggle to move the rocks with ten men and suitable lifting gear. With only the two of them, and no tools to use other than their bare hands, it was impossible to do. They tried to solve the problem for thirty minutes, his searchlight shone painstakingly on the old tin bucket on the floor, then gave up.

“Wasting our time alone,” Layla said, her face contained a grain of cold-fighting sweat. “There's no way we can break through it. Impossible.” Ben-Roi did not say anything, just leaning against the wall while taking a heavy breath. Then, with the “Despicious basis,” he grabbed one of the flashlights and highlighted the passage behind him towards the small beam that was at the entrance of the mining square-shaped gray.

Layla put off for a bit, then moved forward and took out a second flashlight. As he did so, his flashlight rays crept momentarily across the floor, capturing what seemed to be a fine indentation on the rock beneath his feet, no more than a few centimeters and almost invisible because it is covered in dust and dirt that covers the floor. He pointed his flashlight down, frowned, then crouched down and, holding the flashlight with one hand, rubbed the floor with the other. The curvature is starting to show, and the other curves are too. He rubs harder. The indentations were in the form of parallel lines, a set following the direction of the corridor from the entrance to the stone ruins, another curve curved at the point where it crouched down and went straight to the wall between the two wooden supports of the ceiling.

“See this!” layla said, still rubbing the floor. By then Ben-Roi was almost at the entrance of the mine. He stopped and looked.

“There are rails here,” Layla said. “On the floor.they are headed for mining. But then, right here, the path branched.” The Israeli hesitated, then walked back into the tunnel where Layla was crouching, his flashlight joined by Layla's lamp shining a parallel curve that was cornering from the main axis of the passageway. Ben-Roi looks at him, then moves back and directs his flashlight at the area of the wall where the curve disappeared. Layla did the same. Although dirty and uneven, they now saw it more closely so as to clearly know that a certain part of the stone was lighter in color than the rest of the tunnel, and it has a vaguely different texture.