Treasure!

Treasure! Lot's of gold, diamonds, gunpowder, and rotten flesh! Four un-looted (until now) chests. Luckily, Sura was there to warn me about the TNT loaded pressure plate in the floor. Sura disconnected the arming device and carefully collected the TNT for trading later. Afterwards, Sura led me down through a tunnel that she cut down to about level 15 where we found iron deposits (and lava and underground rivers). We both died down there. Then came back to the temple and in the morning set out south. But night overtook us, both without beds, and I was killed by a skeleton and a creeper got Sura.

Perhaps the orthodox approach to gettign down to the bottom of the shaft would have been to manufacture ladders (or some other device. I wasn't about to mess around with anything like that. So I just started hacking steps into the wall. Crude but effective.