Douglas Preston - Thunderhead

The dispassionate part told her that they should go back for the others, bring in the equipment, begin a formal survey.

“What the hell,” she replied. “Let’s go.”

She rose shakily to her feet, Sloane following. A quick, dreamlike walk brought them around the far end of the canyon to the edge of the great alcove. Here Nora paused. They were now looking on the ruin from the far side, at an acute angle. The morning sun only penetrated the facade of the city; the rest faded back into darkness under the heavy brow of rock, a ghostly ruin melting into purple shadow. Quivira had a gracefulness, a sense of balance, that belied its massive stone construction. It was as if the city had been planned and built as a unit, rather than growing by accretion, as most other large Anasazi cliff dwellings had. There were still traces of gypsum whitewash on the outer walls, and the Great Kiva showed traces of what had once been a blue disk painted on its side.

The four towers were paired, two on each side of the alcove, with the main city lying between and the circular Great Kiva at the very center. Each tower rose about fifty feet. The front two were freestanding; the rear two were actually mortared to the natural stone roof of the alcove.

The ruin was in beautiful condition, but on closer view it was far from perfect. Nora could see several ugly fractures snaking up the sides of the four towers. In one place, the masonry had peeled off part of an upper story, revealing a dark interior. In the terraced city between the towers, several of the third-story rooms had collapsed. Others appeared to have burned. But overall the city was remarkably well preserved, its huge walls built of stone courses mortared with adobe. Wooden ladders stood against some of the walls. Hundreds of rooms were still intact and roofed—a complicated arrangement of roomblocks and smaller circular kivas, dotted with black windows and doorways. The Great Kiva that dominated the center seemed almost untouched. It was a city made to last forever.

Nora’s eyes wandered into the dark recesses of the alcove. Behind the towers, terraced roomblocks, and plazas lay a narrow passageway that ran between the back of the city and a long row of squat granaries. The passageway was low and dim. Behind the granaries appeared to lie a second, even more constricted alleyway—no more than a sunken crawlspace, really—cloaked in darkness. This was unusual: in fact, Nora had never seen anything like it. In most Anasazi cities, the granaries were built directly into the back wall of the cave.

Although the archaeologist in her registered these observations, Nora was aware that her hands were shaking and her heart was thudding at a breakneck pace.

“Is this real?” she heard Sloane mutter hoarsely.

As they slowly approached the city, a remarkable series of pictographs became visible on the cliff face beside them. They had been laid down in several layers, figures painted over figures, a palimpsest of Anasazi imagery in red, yellow, black, and white. There were handprints, spirals, shamanistic figures with huge shoulders and power lines radiating from their heads; antelope, deer, snakes, and a bear, along with geometric designs of unknown meaning.

“Look up,” Sloane said.

Nora followed her glance. There, twenty feet above their heads, were rows upon rows of negative handprints: paint sprayed over a hand held against the rock, a great crowd waving goodbye. Above that, on the domed roof itself, the Anasazi had painted a complicated pattern of crosses and dots of various sizes. Something about it was vaguely familiar.

Then it hit her. “My God, it’s an Anasazi planetarium.”

“Yes. That’s the constellation Orion. And there’s Cassiopeia, I think. It’s just like the Planetarium at Canyon de Chelly, only more elaborate by far.”

Instinctively, Nora raised her camera. Then she dropped it again. There would be time, plenty of time, later. Now she just wanted to simply experience it. She took a step forward, then hesitated and glanced at her companion.

“I know what you mean,” Sloane said. “I feel the same way. It’s as if we don’t belong here.”

“We don’t,” Nora heard herself say.

Sloane looked at her a moment. Then she turned and began to move toward the ruin. Nora followed slowly.

As they walked into the cool darkness, their shadows merged with the shadows of the stone. A group of swallows burst out of a cluster of mud nests above their heads, wheeling out into the sunlight, dipping and crying with displeasure at the intrusion.

They walked toward a broad plaza area in front of the towers, their feet sinking into soft sand. Glancing down, Nora saw there was almost no cultural debris on the surface: many inches of fine, windblown dust had covered everything.

At the front of the first tower, Nora stopped and laid her hand on the cool masonry. The tower had been built straight and sure, with a slight inward slope. There were no doors in its face; entry must have been gained from the back. A few notches far up its flank looked like arrow ports. Peering into one of the cracks in the bottom of the tower, she saw the masonry was at least ten feet thick. The towers were obviously for defense.

Sloane walked around the tower’s front, Nora following in her wake. It was odd, she thought, how they were instinctively staying together. There was something unsettling about the place, something she couldn’t immediately put into words. Perhaps it was the defensive nature of the site: the massive walls, the lack of ground-floor doors. There were even piles of round rocks stacked on some of the frontline roofs, clearly intended as weapons to be dropped on the heads of any invaders. Or maybe it was the absolute silence of the city, the powdery smell of the dust, the faint odor of corruption that unnerved her.

She glanced at Sloane. The woman had recovered her composure and was scratching in her sketchbook. Her calm presence was reassuring.

She turned back to the tower. On the back side, at the second-story level, she could now see a small keyhole doorway, partly collapsed. It was accessible from a flat roof, against which leaned a pole ladder, perfectly preserved. She moved to the ladder and carefully climbed to the roof. Closing her sketchbook, Sloane followed. A moment later, they ducked beneath the doorway and were staring up into the gloom of the tower.

As she had expected, there was no staircase inside. Instead, running up the center, was a series of notched poles, resting on shelves. Stones projected from the inner walls, providing footholds. Nora had seen this type of arrangement before, at a ruin in New Mexico called Shaft House. In order to ascend the tower, one had to climb spraddle-legged, one foot using the notches in the poles, and the other foot using the stones fastened into the wall. It was a deliberately precarious and exposed method of climbing, keeping all four of the climber’s limbs occupied. From above, defenders could knock off climbing invaders with rocks or arrows. At the very top of the tower, the last pole ladder went through a small hole into a tiny room beneath the roof: the last redoubt in case of attack.

Nora looked at the huge cracks in the walls, and at the pole ladders, flimsy and brittle with dry rot. Even when first built, it would have been a terrifying climb; now, it was unthinkable. She nodded to Sloane, and they ducked back through the door and climbed down to the stepped-back facade of the city itself. Any exploration of the towers would have to wait.

Walking away from the tower, Nora approached the foot of the nearest roomblock. Over the centuries, windblown sand had drifted up against the front of the houses. In places, the drifts were so high a person could climb to the flat roofs that led to the upper stories, and from there into the second-floor houses themselves. Beyond the roomblocks, she could see the circular form of the Great Kiva and the stylized blue disk incised into its facade, a white band at its top.