Douglas Preston - Thunderhead

Sloane drifted over silently, glancing first at Nora, then the sandpile. Again, Nora realized that protocol dictated they return for the others, establish a formal pattern of discovery. But she also realized that nobody, not even Richard Wetherill, had found an Anasazi city like this one. The urge to explore was too strong to resist.

They scrambled up the sandpile to the first-story roofs. Ahead of them lay a row of darkened, keyhole doorways. As Nora glanced around, she saw, arrayed along the edge of the roof, partly buried in sand, eight gorgeous St. John’s Polychrome pots in perfect condition. Three of them still had their sandstone lids.

The women paused at the nearest doorway, once again feeling the strange hesitation. “Let’s go inside,” Sloane said at last.

Nora ducked through the doorway. Gradually, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she could see the room was not empty. On the far side was a firepit with a stone comal. Beside it were two corrugated cooking pots, blackened with smoke. One had broken open, spilling tiny Anasazi corncobs across the floor. Packrats had built a nest in one corner, a junk heap of sticks and cactus husks thickly laid with dung. The acrid scent of their urine permeated the room. As Nora stepped forward, she saw, hanging on a peg near the door, a pair of sandals made from woven yucca fibers.

Sloane switched on her flashlight and played its beam toward a dark doorway that beckoned on the far wall. Stepping through, Nora saw that the second room had a complicated painted design running like a border around the plastered walls. “It’s a snake,” she said. “A stylized rattlesnake.”

“Unbelievable.” Sloane ran the beam along the design. “As if it was painted yesterday.” The light came to rest in a niche on one wall. “Look, Nora, there’s something there.”

Nora stepped over. It was bundle of buckskin, about the size of a fist, tightly rolled and tied.

“It’s a medicine bundle,” she whispered. “A mountain soil bundle, from the look of it.”

Sloane stared at her. “Do you know of anyone finding an intact Anasazi medicine bundle?” she asked.

“No,” said Nora. “I think this is the first.”

They stood in the room for a few moments, breathing in the ancient air. Then Nora found her eyes drawn to a third doorway. It was smaller than the others, and appeared to lead to a storage room.

“You first,” Sloane said.

Nora dropped to her hands and knees, crawled through the low doorway, and stood inside a stuffy space. Sloane followed. The yellow pool of light moved about, stabbing through a veil of dust raised by their entry. Gradually, objects and color emerged from the dimness, and Nora’s mind began to make sense of the chaos.

Against the back wall, a row of extraordinary pots was arrayed: smooth, polished, painted with fantastical geometric designs. Sticking out of the mouth of one pot was a bundle of prayer sticks, carved, feathered, and painted, gleaming with color even in the dull light. Beside them was a long stone palette shaped like a huge leaf, on which had been placed a dozen fetishes of different animals fashioned from semiprecious stones, each with an arrowhead tied to its back with a string of sinew. Next sat a bowl filled with perfect, tiny bird points, all flaked out of the blackest obsidian. Nearby was a stone banco, on which a number of artifacts had been carefully arranged. As Nora’s eyes roamed the dimness with growing disbelief, she could see a rotten buckskin bag from which spilled a collection of mirage stones, some cradleboards, and several exquisite bags woven from apocynum fiber and filled with red ochre.

The silence, here in the bowels of the ruined city, was absolute. There’s more in this one room, Nora thought, than the greatest museums have in their entire collections.

She followed the beam of light as it revealed ever more remarkable objects. The skull of a grizzly bear, decorated with blue and red stripes of paint, bundles of sweetgrass stuffed into its eye sockets. The rattles of a rattlesnake tied to the end of a painted stick, human scalp attached. A large sheet of mica, cut into the outline of a hideously grinning skull, its teeth inlaid with blood-red carnelians. A quartz crystal carved in the shape of a corn beetle. A delicately woven basket, its outside feathered with hundreds of tiny, iridescent hummingbird breasts.

Instinctively, she sought out Sloane’s face in the dim light. Sloane looked back, amber eyes wild. The composure that had returned so quickly was gone again.

“This must have been the storage room for the family who occupied these roomblocks,” Sloane finally said, voice trembling. “Just one family. There could be dozens of other rooms like this in this city. Maybe hundreds.”

“I believe it,” Nora replied. “But what I can’t believe is the wealth. Even in Anasazi days, this would represent an inconceivable fortune.”

The dust raised by their entry drifted in layers through the cool, heavy air, scattering the yellow light. Nora took a deep breath, and then another, trying to clear her mind.

“Nora,” Sloane murmured at last. “Do you realize what we’ve found?”

Nora tore her eyes away from the clutter of dim objects. “I’m working on it,” she said.

“We’ve just made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.”

Nora swallowed, opened her mouth to reply. But no sound would come, and in the end she simply nodded.

26

TWELVE HOURS LATER, THE CITY OF QUIVIRA lay in shadow, the late afternoon sun blazing its last on the valley cliffs opposite the ruin. Nora rested on the ancient retaining wall below what they’d come to call the Planetarium, feeling as drained as she had ever felt in her life. She could hear the excited voices of the rest of the expedition ringing out of the city, distorted and magnified by the vast pregnant hollow of rock in which Quivira stood. She glanced down at the rope ladder and pulley system, rigged by Sloane to provide quick access to the ruin. Far below, in the grove of cottonwood trees where they had made their camp, she could see the smoke of Bonarotti’s campfire and the gray rectangle that was his folding serving table. The cook had promised them medallions of wild javelina with coffee barbecue sauce and—amazingly—two bottles of Château Pétrus in celebration. It had been, she thought, the longest—and greatest—day of her life: “that day of days,” as Howard Carter had described it when he first entered King Tutankhamen’s tomb. And they had yet to enter the Great Kiva. That, she had decreed, would be delayed until they had made a rough survey and recovered some sense of their perspective.

From time to time, during the course of the day, Nora had found herself searching among the sandy ruins for footprints, inscriptions, excavations—anything that would prove her father actually reached the city. But the rational part of her knew that the constant currents of wind and animal tracks would have long ago erased any marks of his passing. And it could well be that he, like Nora herself, had been so overwhelmed by the majesty of the city as to feel any modern inscription to be a sacrilege.

The group emerged from the ruin, Sloane bringing up the rear. Swire and Smithback came toward Nora and the rope ladder. Swire simply slumped down, flushed beneath his leathery tan, but Smithback remained behind, talking animatedly. “Unbelievable,” he was saying, his voice loud and grating in the ruin’s stillness. “Oh, God, what a find. This is going to make the discovery of King Tut’s tomb look like a . . .” He stopped, temporarily speechless. Nora felt inexplicably annoyed that his thoughts would coincide with her own. “You know, I did some work in the New York Museum of Natural History,” he began again, “and their collection couldn’t begin to hold a candle to this place. There’s more stuff here than in all the museums in the world, for chrissakes. When my agent hears about this, she’s going to get such a—”