Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

When he woke the next morning, Harry went through the simple ritual that pushed the fog of sleep away. He sat on the end of his cot, shook his boots to make sure that no scorpions had found the residual warmth of the leather too tempting, and shrugged on his clothes. He appreciated the simple things of life, like clean socks, a warm cot, not being shot at.

He brushed his fingers along his scalp. He had shaved two days ago and the fuzz was not long enough to justify the razor again. When his hair had started to thin in his late twenties, he decided to shave it all off, since the military liked his hair short anyway. It helped with vanity, too. He usually wore a hat to protect his scalp and ears from too much sun. He favored one of his old camo hats, painted in desert camouflage.

Brenda did not join him as he welcomed the sun and worked his muscles. Relishing the feel of thrusts and blocks, ingrained in muscle memory from long practice, he reviewed in his mind the physics of moving the stone, which weighed at least a ton. In Kuwait he had worked with a combat engineering battalion and had learned a lot from them, impressed with how human ingenuity, levers, and pulleys could be made to move anything.

As the sun painted the land with its early morning colors, he went to Brenda’s tent and clapped his hands. “Wake up, sleepyhead!”

The mumbling from inside encouraged him to stick his head inside the tent, a three-man igloo type. She was still in her sleeping bag, showing only a mop of red hair with earphones attached to a battery-powered satellite radio. He could hear the faint sounds of ’70s folk music.

“I’ll be back in about two hours. I may have to go all the way to Farmington if I don’t find what I need in Bloomfield.”

He took another mumble from Brenda as an answer.

* * * *

His wife had gotten half his military retirement in the divorce, and he still paid child support, which left him on a lean budget. Unlike many of his fellow retirees with a divorce and kids, he did not begrudge her the money—his years of service had been hard on her. He tried to save as much money as possible, to fund travel, and refused to buy a new truck. Besides, he liked his ten-year-old full-size Dodge pickup; it fit him like a comfortable glove and he knew all its quirks. A shell on the back gave him a large cargo space where he sometimes slept on a foam pad. He usually spent summers at a dig, keeping most of his gear and mementos in a storage garage in Salt Lake City. For the last five years he had only rented apartments during the winter while working on his doctorate at the University of Utah. Now that he had earned the degree, he would have to move to wherever archaeological projects took him. He had already decided that he didn’t want a faculty position, being much too adverse to academic politics. He just liked to dig.

Twenty-four miles of gravel roads led to Nageezi. According to the map, Nageezi was the nearest town to Chaco Canyon, really no more than a collection of houses and a Navajo chapter house, a kind of town hall for the locals. A new four-lane road, US 550, led north to Bloomfield. An occasional ranch house or trailer was pretty much the only human habitation, other than a solitary trading post with some gas pumps. Closer to the San Juan River, the rolling desert gave way to steep hills covered with sage and some juniper trees. Small oil and gas wells dotted the landscape. A large power plant outside of Bloomfield spewed smoke and prosperity.

Along fifty miles of the northern bank of the San Juan River, the whole stretch from Bloomfield to Farmington to Shiprock formed an erratic sprawl of houses and businesses. Driven by the gas and coal business, the area was booming, with all the big box stores you would expect to find anywhere else in America, along with a mall, car dealerships, pawnshops, liquor stores, and the Sunray Park & Casino, built on Indian land to avoid state law.

Harry pulled into a favorite strip mall. He started two machines at the laundromat going with Brenda’s and his accumulated laundry and bought two bagels for breakfast at Marie’s Café next door. Some of the local customers directed him to a commercial rental place in Bloomfield.

By ten he was back at the dig. The tents tended to act as mini-greenhouses, so one could not really stay in bed too long; apparently Brenda had roused herself and joined the world. Her usual ponytail again tamed her red hair, and a retro Joan Baez t-shirt tugged at her breasts.

“What ya got?” she asked as she helped him unload the pipes and chain.

“It’s a tripod hoist, used to lift out car engines. And this is a brace bar, which we can use to hook under the sides of the rock and lift it. We’re going to lift up one edge and see what’s underneath.”

“Sweet. Just like Indiana Jones.” She winked at him.

“Yes, Indiana Jones. Archaeologist extraordinaire, treasure-hunter at heart, willing to destroy everything that gets in his way. That scene in the first movie still irritates me.”

“Which one?” she asked as they hauled the heavy pipes over to the dig.

“When he and the girl get trapped with the snakes in the underground room. They are surrounded by the finest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world, but to escape he destroys everything. It made for nice eye candy, but any archaeologist worth his salt would have died rather than do that.”

“I wasn’t even born when they made that movie,” she said. “But didn’t they need to stop the bad guys from using the Ark of the Covenant and save the world? Wasn’t that worth busting up a few artifacts?”

Harry felt old at her comment. He had first seen the movie as a young teenager. “I guess that the story demanded that he destroy everything,” he admitted. “But it still irritates me.”

Harry showed Brenda how to set up the hoist and secure it. They attached the hooks of the brace bar across the rock at one end so that they could open it like a lid. Harry made sure to fasten the bolts on the hooks as tightly as he could, then stood on the rock and set the hoist. He pulled up the slack on the hoist chain and, through the wonders of mechanical magic, worked the lever back and forth, using only his muscle power. The basalt rock twitched as it broke free of the surrounding dirt and slowly rose several inches into the air.

“Want to give it a try?” Harry asked.

Brenda was game and traded places with Harry on the rock in order to reach the hoist handle. “It moves so easily,” she said, slowly working the chain links through the hoist.

Harry peered under the rock. A space was opening up, but the sun was too bright to see anything in the cavity. “Can’t see a thing. We need a flashlight.”

Brenda stopped the hoist. “I’ll get one.” She scampered off the rock and raced to her tent.

Harry admired her enthusiasm, though he knew that there was probably nothing more than dirt or rocks in the cavity. He stepped onto the rock and worked the hoist to raise it a few more inches.

She returned and knelt down, shining the flashlight beneath the stone. “Ohmigod!” she exclaimed. “It’s stairs!”

“What?” Harry leaped down next to her.

Damned if she wasn’t right. There were stairs underneath the rock, made of smaller pieces of basalt, laid edgewise to their vantage point. The beam of the flashlight acted as a strobe, showing pockets of dirt on the stairs that must have drifted in over the years, particle by particle. A musty smell combined with the irritation of dust in his nostrils.

“This is extraordinary,” Brenda breathed. “This isn’t like the Chacoans at all.”

Harry grinned, feeling foolish and giddy. This is how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered King Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Brenda threw her arms around him in her excitement. He hugged her back, happy to feel the warmth of her body.

“Let’s do this right,” he said. “We need the digital camera and recorder.”

Brenda narrated their find with the recorder, while Harry used the camera. He had room for hundreds of high resolution pictures on his memory card and the attached flash was fully charged. He started clicking away, documenting the hoist, stone lid, and what he could see so far, then worked the hoist until there was a good twelve inches of clearance.

“That’s far enough,” Brenda said. “I want to get inside.”

“Wait for me to brace it.”

He found a floor jack in his truck and placed it on the edge of the stairs, pumping it up to push firmly against the lid. He hoped that it would hold if the hoist failed.

Brenda dropped to her stomach and wiggled inside, her feet churning for purchase in the sand. Her butt disappeared and then her legs.

“There’s a room down here,” she called out.

Harry knew that they should just stop right then, close the room up, and wait for Dr. Bancroft to return from Europe with the other students. She was in charge of this dig and it was her right to run this excavation. They needed to do this properly, patiently, documenting every step. Crawling in there after Brenda was just as bad as Indiana Jones, mucking up the site with their eagerness. It was just like investigators at a crime scene walking around and destroying evidence.

He knew all these things as intellectual certainties, but the urge to be the first to see, to crawl in that hole, was too strong. Patience had always been hard for him; that’s why he had never been any good as a sniper. He just couldn’t sit still that long.

He swore, figured that he was tossing away his budding career as an archaeologist, and dropped to his hands and knees. No one would ever hire him after this and he would have to go back to security work.

Harry crawled inside.

His flashlight revealed Brenda crouched at the foot of the stairs, just outside of the room beyond. The walls were made of basalt rock, carefully fitted together without mortar.

“Brenda, close your eyes and shield them with your hand,” Harry said before taking several pictures. The powerful flash left stars in his eyes and he followed his own advice after that.

Moving down the stairs to Brenda’s side, he joined her in playing their flashlight beams across the room. It was roughly ten feet wide by a dozen feet long, with walls made of the same closely packed basalt rocks, and a roof made of pine trunks. Pines grew dozens of miles away in the mountains and would have been a chore to bring there since the Chacoans possessed no beasts of burdens other than their own backs. Of course, the basalt had been brought to the canyon somehow, and that would have been another achievement of muscle and ingenuity over gravity. The room was deep enough, protected by the desert sand, that the trunks had not decayed. Or so Harry hoped.

Sand covered most of the floor, but when he looked closely, Harry saw seashells scattered all around. Seashells were occasionally traded inland by the Indians through intricate exchange networks, but he had never heard of such a large quantity found this far from the ocean.

An oblong box occupied the center of the room, laid atop a base made of basalt rocks. Harry felt a flash in his nervous system akin to an electric shock. The box was made of wood, ornately carved, and was obviously intended to hold a body.

Brenda talked rapidly into her recorder, describing everything, a flow of stream of consciousness that Harry suspected would embarrass her with its lack of scholarly detachment when they played it back later. He took more pictures, warning her to close her eyes.

“Do you think we will disturb anything if we go in?” Brenda asked.

Harry played his flashlight across the floor. “Looks like mostly just shells, but we really shouldn’t go in. A statistical analysis of the shells in this room might show us something interesting—where they came from, which shells are considered more valuable, stuff like that. We don’t want to break any of them by stepping on them.”

“Screw that,” Brenda said, taking two quick steps to reach the sarcophagus. He noticed that she stepped as lightly as possible, as if treading across fragile glass. Nevertheless, he heard the shifting and breaking of shells under her feet.

“Ohmigod!” Brenda exclaimed. “You’ve got to see this.”

Harry joined her, kissing his career goodbye. The top of the sarcophagus had collapsed, leaving behind only small pieces of wood and splinters. The bones of a man lay inside, the skeletal hands folded on his chest. At least, Harry assumed that it was a man, since the length from skull to foot bones looked to be over six feet. Harry snapped pictures. What looked like glitter covered the body, like what Brenda sprinkled on her face when she was going into town to dance and tease the boys.

“Look at that. The skull is not attached.” Brenda pointed with her flashlight.

“Yes, it looks disarticulated. Interesting to know if it was pre- or post-mortem.”

“Quit talking like an archaeologist.” Brenda scolded. “Look at that.” She pointed her flashlight to a small box next to the skull, only about four inches long and two inches wide. Inlaid into its burnished surface was a symbol, three triangles within a circle.

“That’s metal,” Harry said, feeling giddy with stupidity. Only an idiot would state the obvious. “That doesn’t belong here.”

“What is it? Steel?” She touched it. “Odd, it’s not cool. It sort of feels like ceramic.”

“Don’t touch anything. Let me take pictures.”

The room flashed with the strobe-like effect of Harry’s camera. He carefully took pictures of the box from all different angles, holding the camera out at awkwardly to avoid shifting his feet and disturbing the site any more than they already had.

“It’s so strange,” Harry said. “There are no funeral goods, just that box.”

“Yeah. Where are the objects to accompany the deceased into the next life? No weapons, no goods. Nothing. Not even a pot or a bowl.”

“Now who sounds like an archaeologist?”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

He ignored her. “I don’t understand why the lid fell apart. The rest of the coffin is in such great shape.”

“Maybe it was trying to escape,” she intoned in a melodramatic stage voice.

“Perhaps they used a different type of wood, something that didn’t preserve as well. Maybe it was too thin. I wonder what it looked like.”

More pictures.

“That little box is the true find here,” Brenda said. “We should take it out and see if it opens.”

“What?” Harry was horrified. “We’re not doing that! We’ve broken enough rules already. We need to back out of here and do this properly.”

“I’ve already touched it,” Brenda argued. “We might as well take it out and look at it a bit closer.”

Harry reluctantly nodded. It annoyed him that he found it so hard to deny her any request. “Okay, but we don’t try to open it. It’s unique. We should wait until we have it in a lab so we can preserve whatever might be in it. If it is a box then whatever is in it would most certainly be extremely fragile.”

Trying their best to step in their own footprints, they withdrew and crawled up the stairs. After the cool of the tomb, the sun-drenched desert felt like an oven. Harry lowered the lid back onto the tomb, ratcheting down the hoist. He didn’t want any desert animals to get in and mess up the site—mess it up anymore than he and Brenda had already messed it up, he corrected himself.

“It’s almost six o’clock and we skipped lunch.”

They ate sandwiches, chewing quietly, shocked out of their normal verbosity. The box sat on the table between them, like a talisman of power. They shared a sense of mutual awe, as when faced with a technically perfect piece of art or a new technology with exciting possibilities. Harry remembered visiting the British Museum in London, a treasure trove containing the loot of an empire, and being amazed by objects that he had seen pictured in books as a child—the statues of winged bulls, fourteen feet high, that guarded the throne room of Sargon II of ancient Assyria; the crumpled remains of the Ludlow Man, tanned into leather by a peat bog; and the Rosetta Stone itself. Perhaps this find would someday rank with those icons of archaeology. But who was he fooling? He had completely ignored procedure. He was not angry at Brenda, just himself.

Brenda took the digital camera and recorder and copied the images and audio to her laptop. Harry took the camera and recorder over to his own laptop and did the same, finding data assurance by having many backups.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said.

“Where’re you going?”

“Trying to salvage my career.”

Harry drove over to the sole campground in Chaco Canyon, where tourists brought along all the conveniences of home in RVs, including satellite TV. This campground also had a wireless access point, provided for free by the Park Service. Harry sat in his truck, tapped out an e-mail to Dr. Bancroft about the find, attached a few pictures, and sent it off. He took ten minutes to surf the web, checking a few of his favorite news sites, then closed the laptop and drove back to camp.