Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer

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СКАЧАТЬ the sheer hill on his left, then he peered over past Star toward the right and the water she was indicating. “Wow, it does look like a lot.”

      They didn’t bother to lock the truck, but headed immediately across the highway for the stairway. A huge sign on the left of the first rise of the stairs announced this was the “little faces” national site. A welcome booth was to the right, but it was locked up. No one was around. They started up the wooden staircase and at the first landing paused and leaned on the rail looking back over the road and now over the trees.

      “Wow!” said Star.

      “Good night!” said Basil.

      They were confronting an astonishing sight—a huge body of water stretched in either direction, its far shore, for it had to have one, lost in the distance.

      “Wait! We’re not in Haiti?” Star cried in a sudden moment of confused panic. “You didn’t turn the wrong way and stumble over the border—did you?”

      “Of course not!” snapped Basil.

      “Well, that looks like the ocean,” Star snapped back.

      “No, it doesn’t! We just stayed in a city called ‘Descubierta!’ How could they have a city with a Spanish name if we were in Haiti?” he sneered. “It’s the lake we saw on the map in the guidebook—what did you do with the book?”

      “It’s in the truck!”

      Basil stared at her in his most commanding manner. Star stared back, unimpressed. Neither moved. Eventually, muttering something Star definitely did not want to hear, Basil lumbered back down the stairs, crossed over to the truck, leaned into the back, and began rummaging around in a pile of assorted odds and ends that either hadn’t been worthy of suitcase space or were assigned there in order to be “handy.” Somewhere under that mess, he fished out the book, identifiable as much by its battered appearance as by the stamp on it, which read, “Hamilton-Wenham Public Library, Hamilton, MA 01982,” one of Star and Basil’s many brief supply stops (in this case with a five-fingered library card) in the wavering trajectory of their uncelebrated flight.

      He climbed back up with exaggerated effort, opened the book, and stuck it in her hand. “It’s a lake,” she admitted, and he was mollified.

      Both of them continued their staring, more and more thunderstruck as they tried to form a mental measure of what was before them.

      “This is colossal!” Star exclaimed.

      “This looks undeveloped!” Basil observed.

      “I think our idea might be here somewhere,” Star ventured.

      “I think so too,” mused Basil. “But, we’ve got to find it. Let’s go back to that talky guy at the hotel and see if we can stir up a scam.” He started back down the stairs.

      “Hold on!” called Star. “What about the faces?”

      “Who cares about the faces?” yelled Basil back from the bottom of the stairway. “Come on!”

      “I’ll tell ya who cares,” Star shouted back, “that ‘talky guy at the hotel’—that’s who!”

      “Oh, yeah! You’re right! We can’t go back if we don’t look at those faces he was all worked up about.” He clamored back up the staircase. Another zigzag and they were up near the top. The mountainside indented a bit and in the hollow under a small overhang was a series of circles etched into the walls that looked like children’s carvings—little round ovals with dots that were obviously meant to be eye sockets with straight or curved lines for mouths. Some looked to them like they were “smiley faces.” To the right, at the edge of the cliff, stick figures and more faces on a huge rounded boulder, wedged into the mountainside, showed a commanding view of the sweep of the lake behind it with a small patch of thick trees before the shoreline began.

      “How’d they get out there to do that?” Star marveled.

      “Yeah, what’s it all mean?” wondered Basil. “Some of these look fake, like jokers imitated them, like that one with the ears and the big round circles for hair and the stick arms and hands, but I dunno.”

      “Why are they just out here?” asked Star. “We haven’t seen anything like this in the mountains. How old are they? The people who put them up—what were they trying to say to the lake?”

      “Or maybe to people coming in off the lake—maybe a warning,” wondered Basil, “but they look friendly enough.” He shook his head. “The government’s already got these here for free, so the lake is where we should be concentrating. That’s got acres and acres of shoreline—beachfront property! There’s got to be an angle here.”

      Whatever the angle was, Star and Basil were getting less help than they expected from the innkeeper back in Descubierta. They kept plying him with questions about the lake: Did anybody own it? Did anybody use it? Who had the rights?

      But he kept wanting to talk about the Taino Indians and the little faces and the fact that these simple carvings had been gracing this particular hillside for, maybe, a thousand years.

      Finally, Basil broke in. “Look,” he said, in his best Spanish. “The Indians are great! The little faces are great! But the lake is great too! We,” he indicated Star and himself, “want to do something great with the lake.” Not much variety of expression, but he finally had the proprietor’s attention.

      “You want to buy the lake?”

      “Well not the whole thing,” explained Basil, “but, you know, some of the beach front—to help somebody set up something . . . like a hotel—wait,” he realized he was talking to an innkeeper with whom this idea might compete. “Not a hotel,” he corrected himself quickly. “Maybe a park.” “Theme park” was beyond him, so he added: “Water park.”

      Señor Feliz became very serious and suddenly very quiet. He looked at both of them mournfully. “Oh, Señor, Señora,” he said, and all but patted their hands in a growing dismay. “You do not know the power of the lake or you would not be talking so. Before you make any plans or invest any money, you must go and see the lake for yourselves.”

      “But we saw the lake,” countered Basil quickly, “from the stairway at the little faces.”

      “No, no!” said the proprietor. “You saw the size, yes, but you did not see what the lake itself is doing. You must travel now to the south—around the other side of the lake. You must see for yourselves. Here is what you must do. Go now—it is still early—watch for the desvio.”

      Both of them looked at him blankly. Star opened her little dictionary and asked him to spell it. He did. “It’s detour,” she said to Basil.

      “Yes, daytuur,” tried Señor Feliz phonetically. “You watch for that and do not miss it. Take that road and you will come out by the great city of Jimani. After that you must go left down by El Limon. Do not miss either the daytuur or the later left turn. If you miss the left at Jimani and you work your way to Mal Paso, you will cross over into Haiti.”

      Star shuddered. Being xenophobic, she and Basil could not think of Haiti as anything but a mass of spirit-possessed voodooists, thin, with crazed eyes, beating ceaselessly hypnotic rhythms designed to turn all strangers who haplessly stumbled across her borders into zombies. They had СКАЧАТЬ