The Shrine of the First Gathering

[ostrogoth1]

This is my first attempt at a post and or a story. It was inspired by a magazine article about an archaeological dig which gave me a slight rise (so to speak). Suggestions and comments are most welcome.

[COLOR=#000000]The rumbles of the peaks began low but gradually increased to a throbbing crescendo. In another instant all the nearby mountains rumbled loudly and all the earth began to shake. This caused all the villagers from the different clans to come running out of their huts and homes out of fear of falling stones and boulders. Shortly after these events began, a tall iridescent cloud rose all the way up unto the heavens from the greatest of the mountains ?..the one they called Father [/COLOR]Ararat or in the local dialect [COLOR=#000000]Agri Daci[/COLOR].


[COLOR=#000000]Soon it became apparent that a large number of villages were almost totally destroyed around Father Ararat and the villagers desperately needed assistance. This would be no easy matter due to the extremely challenging terrain but the world?s peoples mobilized to help. The United Nations assembled teams made up of mountain climbers, athletes, and construction workers gathered almost overnight and were flown by plane and then helicopter to base camps near the summit of Father Ararat. That is also when the stories or rumors first began to circulate.

When the helicopters flew over the summit of Father Ararat, a number of large cairns had been uncovered by the immense tremors. It was also discovered that within the ring of large cairns there were rings of concentric limestone pillars. Somewhat remarkable was that the myths recounted by the local villagers had hardly been passed onto to the outside world before the violent shocks and seismic activity had uncovered this huge monumental complex. The rings of cairns easily exceeded the size of several of the pyramids or the great ancient city of Jericho.[/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000]Thomas was the American team leader and was a large stocky man who had won the Olympic Ice climbing event which was one the[/COLOR] ultimate tests of speed, power and agility where the fastest time determined the winner[COLOR=#000000]r. The bulldog like Sergei hailed from the Russian Federation and had just missed winning the top medal at the Olympics to Thomas. Abheek was from Kashmir and led the Indian team and was as fearless as his name denoted. Other groups of rescuers from the other countries would aid the three largest teams from America, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of India.[/COLOR]</SPAN>
Sergei and his team were the first to reach the village near the summit of Father Ararat. There they met a shepherd who had attempted to climb the mountain to gather in his flocks and according to the translator came back to the village in awe babbling about how huge and tremendous ?they? were. It was not clear at first if there was perhaps a language barrier or if the man had partaken of drugs and was hallucinating. Sergei and his team asked for a helicopter flyover of the recently uncovered shrine area and the request was granted.
The helicopter crew flew over the shrine area and was able to film the many limestone pillar megaliths. Review of the videos revealed that all the many monoliths contained bas-relief representations of humans and animals but unlike most pre-historic sites which contained various female fertility objects, all of the almost life-like bas-reliefs were most distinctly male?.and each one of the bas-reliefs showed a combination of human and animal form exhibiting a tremendous engorged phallus. These limestone pillars would require much closer and more thorough investigation
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[toby182]

You can Preview your post before posting it up to see if the html coding works

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by toby182

You can Preview your post before posting it up to see if the html coding works

A few things:

(1) the stuff in square brackets is BBCode, not HTML. (Gets converted to HTML by the forum software; it's used by lots of different forum software, because PHP has built-in parsing for it.)

(2) The BBCode is perfectly valid -- but the "color" tag has been deactivated here (with very good reason, because coloring your text is likely to cause problems for some of the people reading it).

(3) This story ended up getting posted twice, and the second time doesn't have the codes in it, so obviously the author noticed already.

Oh, and:

(4) I wrote a bookmarklet which lets you eliminate those pesky color tags, if you're in a browser which supports bookmarklets. Make a bookmark where the URL is:

javascript:(function( ){var%20x=(document.getElementById( %27posts%27)).innerHTML; x=(x.match( %2F%3C!--%20post%20#(\d+)%20--%3E%2Fi) )%5B1%5D; x=document.getElementById( %27post_message_%27+x);var%20y=new%20String( x.innerHTML); y=((y.replace( %2F%5C%5Bcolor=%22?%5Cw+%22?%5C%5D%2Fgim, %27%27) ).replace( %2F%5C%5B%5C%2Fcolor%5C%5D%2Fgim, %27%27)); x.innerHTML=y;})( );

(You should eliminate the spaces when you paste/type that in; some browsers may choke on them. They are there only because if I don't include some, vBulletin will add them at random places which will make all browsers choke.)

[ostrogoth1]

Thanks for your good counsel. Sadly most of my computer skills are from an antediluvian period....I will try to update them in an attempt to avoid annoying others in the forum. Had opportunities to study computer science at my university in the late 1960s but worked in a meat packing and went to graduate school in other domains.

[tekuno]

The bookmarklet only works for people viewing the story, not the author. (Sorry, I should have made that clear.)

But as the author, you can remove all the color tags by choosing the "edit post" option and then, when the window comes up, selecting all the text and clicking the little button in the upper left of the editing area (the two "A"s with the red "X" over them). That will remove ALL formatting BBCode from the post, which include the color tags, but it's probably easier to go back and re-apply the occasional bold, italic, or aligned text (if any) than to go through and remove all the color tags.