208TH DAY OF THE 472ND YEAR OF CIVILIZATION

I awoke when the sun began to hit the side of my tent. Strangely, I’d heard none of the noises of desert creatures I’d become accustomed to during the night, and the sunrise was accompanied by silence, aside from the sound of my tent’s walls flapping in the wind. I broke camp quickly after eating a breakfast of protein paste (sunflower seed flavored), and continued my sunward path. After walking for hardly twenty minutes, I came across a concrete box of some kind protruding roughly a foot from a large sand dune. Circling it twice revealed no clear entrance, although I discovered a carving on the peri-sunward side of the structure. Some of the letters were completely worn away by the elements, but I could make out the following:

I FO MA I N

I believe it originally read “INFORMATION” (an Ancient word for knowledge). I concluded that this box must actually be a buried building, likely containing a repository of data about the site. I decided to leave the excavation of the building to my (cowardly) apprentices, and set one of my marker flags on the anti-sunward side of the structure before continuing.

The sun was past its zenith when I came upon a large boulder with a carving on the anti-sunward side — slightly recessed, likely to prevent it being eroded by the windblown sand. Closer inspection revealed it was the Ancient symbol skull-and-crossbones [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Skull_and_Crossbones_2.svg/870px-Skull_and_Crossbones_2.svg.png?20200609165925]. This symbol has troubled the archeology community for nearly the entirety of its existence. It appears to be both a symbol used to indicate danger and a popular motif, appearing on everything from stickers to baby clothes. An ongoing argument surrounds whether the symbol was co-opted by popular culture because of its association with danger, or whether our interpretation of its use on signs is completely incorrect. Based on the wording of the sign I passed yesterday, I am forced to assume that the symbol is used here to discourage entrance. I placed another marker and continued walking.

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As the sky began to redden I reached another disruption to the placid desert scenery, this time a large metal disk embedded in the ground. It was almost completely covered in sand, and I would’ve missed it entirely had the angle of the sun not caused a slight glint through a gap in the sand, which caught my eye. Clearing it off revealed it is roughly thirty-four hands (or 240 Ancient “inches”) in diameter and ¼ of a hand thick, at which point it is adhered to concrete of the same diameter. The carvings appear to be about half the depth of the metal, and depict the Ancient word for danger, a message I could not translate in its entirety but seems to refer to something discarded and contains a warning against digging, crude images of human faces (one appearing to exhibit fear, the other disgust), and two symbols I did not recognize (drawn below).

nuclear-symbols [https://i.imgur.com/ueGrM48.png]

I feel like I’ve seen the second symbol before, but I do not recall where (perhaps in a presentation at a conference?), let alone what it means.

After sketching the symbols I made camp near the disk as the sun dipped below the horizon. The night was cold, as desert nights often are, but the sand below me felt unusually warm.