Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin
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