Читать книгу Mountain Rampage - Scott Graham - Страница 13

FIVE

Chuck trailed Clarence and Team Nugget down the mine tunnel. The six students fell silent, subdued by the darkness and the tunnel’s chill. They positioned the solar-powered LED floodlights to illuminate the day’s work area and set about dismantling the final, fifteen-foot stretch of ore cart tracks and underlying floorboards. Each time they removed one of the planks, the young men crouched shoulder-to-shoulder around the newly uncovered rectangle of debris, looking for anything of interest.

At the start of their work in the tunnel three weeks ago, the students of both teams had groused about the extent to which Chuck required them to sift through the layer of gravel that comprised the base of the tunnel.

“We’re searching for a needle in a haystack,” Jeremy complained.

“Which is exactly what you signed up for,” Chuck responded. “Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. August, 1951. Hundred and ten in the shade. Louis and Mary Leakey scraping away at the side of a hill blazing day after blazing day. And what is it they found?”

“Frosty the Snowman,” joked lumpy, disheveled Carson.

“Broken bits of stone tools,” Chuck corrected. “Tiny pieces of bone. Tooth fragments. It was years before they came across the skull that made them famous.”

“Oh, my God!” Carson exclaimed with an exaggerated shiver of fear. “A skeleton!”

“Everybody loves the mystique of archaeology’s biggest discoveries,” Chuck continued as Carson traded a fist bump with Jeremy. “Olduvai in Tanzania. The Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Machu Picchu, Peru. But the truths archaeologists work to uncover aren’t tied up all neat and tidy in ribbons and bows. They’re covered by jungle growth, buried in dirt and rubble, or—” he pointed at the base of the tunnel “—hidden beneath floorboards in an abandoned mine. Gravity is an archaeologist’s best friend. Stuff falls down, other stuff covers it up, and it all lies there, waiting to be dug up and studied.”

Jeremy gave a dismissive sniff. “Nothing’s ever fallen in here.”

“The laws of gravity aren’t suspended underground,” Chuck said. “Which is why each time we remove another board from the floor is so important.” He added a note of wonder to his voice. “Who knows what might lie below?”

By now, Chuck knew the same thing the students knew: they wouldn’t find much, if anything, amid the broken rock and rubble, just as they and Team Paydirt had found little of note upon disassembling the rest of the tunnel’s floor over the last three weeks.

That, in fact, was the point, as Professor Sartore had explained to Chuck when he’d suggested the students excavate the tunnel. While the excavation of the cabin site was sure to provide a trove of finds, the tunnel would provide the opportunity for the students to realistically judge whether they wanted to go into the field of archaeology after experiencing the tedious, day-in-and-day-out work and dearth of discoveries that, in truth, comprised the bulk of archaeological inquiry.

Aside from a few rusted, Civil War-era peg nails dropped beneath the boards during the tunnel’s construction, the students had uncovered only three items of interest: a broken pickaxe tip, a soggy box of matches, and a brass lipstick container. Of the three items, only the pickaxe tip dated from the tunnel’s initial construction in the 1860s. The matches and lipstick container were from the 1950s, about the time park officials affixed the iron door to the mouth of the mine, putting an end to the increased exploration of the tunnel that had come with the completion and opening of Trail Ridge Road.

Fortunately, the teams’ finds beneath the collapsed cabin numbered in the dozens—intact bottles, rusted tin cans, broken china and crockery and glass, and a few leather boot soles, dried and curled with age—precisely the type of items the National Park Service sought, by encouraging archaeological digs in its parks, for eventual display in park visitor centers and museums.

Chuck shuttled back and forth between Team Nugget and Team Paydirt throughout the morning, assuring himself Rosie was on the mend and banishing any thoughts of how Janelle would receive him when he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. Not long before lunch, he stood with Clarence between the tripod-mounted floodlights illuminating the final stretch of the mine tunnel. They looked on as the team pried loose their sixth floorboard of the morning, this one little more than a body’s length from the end of the tunnel.

For the past few days, in a welcome attempt at overcoming the monotony of dismantling the floor of the tunnel unrevelatory plank by unrevelatory plank, Team Nugget member Samuel had taken to injecting some showmanship into the lifting of each loosened floorboard.

As his teammates prepared to remove the next plank, Samuel, green-eyed and sporting a prodigious, leprechaun-like red beard, stood beyond the other team members on the last of the intact flooring, his back to the chipped stone wall at the end of the tunnel. He spoke into his fist, assuming the role of a play-by-play announcer, his voice artificially deep.

“All is hushed,” he intoned into his imaginary microphone.

Samuel’s teammates crouched, unmoving, over the loosened plank.

“The members of Team Nugget, acting as one, work their fingers under the floorboard,” Samuel continued.

Chuck couldn’t help but smile as the five team members did as Samuel described, eliciting a quiet squeak from the loosened board as it moved in its place.

Samuel pounded the intact floor at the end of the tunnel with his boots. “What might be hidden beneath one of the last boards to be lifted from the floor of the famed Cordero Mine?” he asked. His breath, lit by the floodlights, clouded in the moist air of the tunnel. “Could it be an ancient scroll? A map to hidden treasure? A key to a long-forgotten tomb?”

He paused. The team remained still, allowing the tension to build. Chuck bit his lower lip, caught up in Samuel’s patter. It didn’t matter that five times already this morning the team members had found nothing beneath the planks they’d lifted; Samuel’s invented suspense was exhilarating nonetheless.

Samuel dropped his voice to a whisper. “And now, the Nuggeteers remove the ancient hunk of wood and peer beneath it.”

The students lifted the heavy, moisture-laden plank, holding the board level so the shadow cast by the floodlights and their headlamps hid the narrow rectangle of gravel beneath it until the last possible second.

Samuel’s voice grew louder as the students edged the plank away. “We begin to see what’s underneath the floorboard,” he exclaimed. He drummed his boots, and, while still speaking into his fist, he waved his free hand like a gospel preacher. “Yes, yes, it’s…it’s…we can almost see it now. It’s a…I can’t believe my eyes. Something shimmering. Hold up. What’s that?”

The students set the plank aside.

“Diamonds,” Samuel crowed jubilantly. “Rubies. Sapphires.” He jumped into the air and landed with a resounding thump on the floorboards at the end of the tunnel. “A treasure like none other.”

Samuel leapt again in feigned ecstasy. He landed on the floorboards with another loud thump while the five kneeling members of Team Nugget aimed their headlamps at the bare patch of ground formerly hidden beneath the plank.

Chuck leaned forward until he caught sight over the students’ shoulders of what the team members were seeing—no rubies, no sapphires, just the rocky rubble spread by miners a century and a half ago beneath the paired timbers that ran the length of the tunnel, serving as a foundation for the floorboards.

On the far side of the kneeling students, Samuel turned his face to the tunnel ceiling and cried out, “The Seven Cities of Gold, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the Holy Grail—all pale in comparison to what has been discovered here today!”

He jumped into the air, pressing his hands to the roof of the mine. “Incredible!” he shouted as he landed, his weight depressing the floorboards with a dull crunch before they gave way with a splintering crash and Samuel plunged, screaming, from view.