Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ