Isaac Asimov: Nightfall (novel)

Siferra paused only long enough to snatch a pick and a brush from the equipment tent, which had been knocked askew by the sandstorm but was still reasonably intact. Then she went scrambling up the side of the Hill of Thombo, with Balik ponderously hauling himself right behind her. Young Eilis 18 had appeared from the shelter by the cliff now, and he stood below, staring up at them. Thuvvik and his corps of workmen were a little farther back, watching, scratching their heads in puzzlement.

“Watch out,” Siferra called to Balik, when she had reached the beginning of the open gouge in the hill that the sandstorm had carved. “I’m going to run a trial cut.”

“Shouldn’t we photograph it first, and—”

“I told you to watch out,” she said sharply, as she dug her pick into the hillside and sent a shower of loose soil tumbling down onto his head and shoulders.

He jumped aside, spitting out sand.

“Sorry,” she said, without looking down. She cut into the hillside a second time, widening the storm gouge. It wasn’t the best of technique, she knew, to be slashing away like this. Her mentor, grand old Shelbik, was probably whirling in his grave. And the founder of their science, the revered Galdo 221, no doubt was looking down from his exalted place in the pantheon of archaeologists and shaking his head sadly.

On the other hand, Shelbik and Galdo had had chances of their own to uncover whatever lay in the Hill of Thombo, and they hadn’t done it. If she was a little too excited now, a little too hasty in her attack, well, they would simply have to forgive her. Now that the seeming calamity of the sandstorm had been transformed into serendipitous good fortune, now that the apparent ruination of her career had turned unexpectedly into the making of it, Siferra could not hold herself back from finding out what was buried here. Could not. Absolutely could not.

“Look—” she muttered, knocking a great mass of overburden away and going to work with her brush. “We’ve got a charred layer here, right at the foundation level of the cyclopean city. The place must have burned clear down to the stone. But you look a little lower on the hill and you can see that the cross-hatch-style town is sitting right under the fire line—the cyclopean people simply plunked this whole monumental foundation down on top of the older city—”

“Siferra—” said Balik uneasily.

“I know, I know. But let me at least begin to see what’s here. Just a quick probe now, and then we can go back to doing things the proper way.” She felt as though she were perspiring from head to toe. Her eyes were starting to ache, so fiercely was she staring. “Look, will you? We’re way up on top of the hill, and we’ve already got two towns. And it’s my guess that if we unzip the mound a little further, someplace around where we’d expect to find the foundations of the crosshatch people, we’ll—yes! Yes! There! By Darkness, will you look at that, Balik! Just look!”

She pointed triumphantly with the tip of her pick.

Another dark line of charcoal was apparent, near the foundations of the crosshatch-style building. The second highest level had also been destroyed by fire just as the cyclopean one had. And from the way things looked, it was sitting atop the ruins of an even older village.

Balik now had caught her fervor too. Together they worked to lay bare the outer face of the hill, midway between ground level and the shattered summit. Eilis called up to them to ask what on Kalgash they were doing, but they ignored him. Aflame with eagerness and curiosity, they cut swiftly through the ancient packing of windblown sand, moving three inches farther down the hill, six, eight—

“Do you see what I see?” Siferra cried, after a time.

“Another village, yes. But what kind of style of architecture is that, would you say?”

She shrugged. “It’s a new one on me.”

“And me too. Something very archaic, that’s for sure.”

“No question of it. But I think it’s not the most archaic thing we’ve got here, not by plenty.” Siferra peered down toward the distant ground. “You know what I think, Balik? We’ve got five towns here, six, seven, maybe eight, each one right on top of the next. You and I may spend the rest of our lives digging in this hill!”

They looked at each other in wonder.

“We’d better get down and take some photos now,” he said quietly.

“Yes. Yes, we’d better do that.” She felt almost calm, suddenly. Enough of this furious hacking and slashing, she thought. It was time to go back to being a professional now. Time to approach this hill like a scholar, not a treasure-hunter or a journalist.

Let Balik take his photographs, first, from every side. Then take the soil samples at the surface level, and put in the first marker stakes, and go through all the rest of the standard preliminary procedures.

Then a trial trench, a bold shaft right through the hill, to give us some idea of what we’ve really got here.

And then, she told herself, we’ll peel this hill layer by layer. We’ll take it apart, carving away each stratum to look at the one below it, until we’re down to virgin soil. And by the time we’re done with that, she vowed, we’ll know more about the prehistory of Kalgash than all my predecessors put together have been able to learn since archaeologists first came here to Beklimot to dig.

Kelaritan said, “We’ve arranged everything for your inspection of the Tunnel of Mystery, Dr. Sheerin. If you’ll be down in front of your hotel in about an hour, our car will pick you up.”

“Right,” Sheerin said. “See you in about an hour.”

The plump psychologist put down the phone and stared solemnly at himself in the mirror opposite his bed.

The face that looked back at him was a troubled one. He seemed so wasted and haggard that he tugged at his cheeks to assure himself that they were still there. Yes, there they were, his familiar fleshy cheeks. He hadn’t lost an ounce. The haggardness was all in his mind.

Sheerin had slept badly—had scarcely slept at all, so it seemed to him now—and yesterday he had only picked at his food. Nor did he feel in the least hungry now. The thought of going downstairs for breakfast had no appeal whatever. That was an alien concept to him, not to feel hungry.

Was the bleakness of his mood, he wondered, the result of his interviews with Kelaritan’s hapless patients yesterday?

Or was he simply terrified of going through the Tunnel of Mystery?

Certainly seeing those three patients hadn’t been easy. It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. Sheerin was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.

That first one, Harrim, the longshoreman—he looked tough enough to withstand anything. And yet fifteen minutes of Darkness on his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery had reduced him to such a state that merely to relive the trauma in memory sent him into babbling hysteria. How terribly sad that was.

And then the other two, in the afternoon—they had been in even worse shape. Gistin 190, the schoolteacher, that lovely frail woman with the dark, intelligent eyes—she hadn’t been able to stop sobbing for a moment, and though she was able to speak clearly and well, at least in the beginning, her story had degenerated into mere incoherent blurtings within a few sentences. And Chimmilit 97, the high school athlete, obviously a perfect physical specimen—Sheerin wasn’t going quickly to forget how the boy had reacted to the sight of the afternoon sky when Sheerin opened the blinds in his room. There was Onos blazing away in the west, and all that huge handsome boy could manage to say was, “The Darkness—the Darkness—” before he turned away and tried to scuttle down under his bed!