Alex Archer - Eternal Journey

“Wes, look up once in a while, okay?” Annja Creed stood back far enough so her shadow would not encroach. “We’ve been over this a few times,” she reminded her colleague.

“Yeah, yeah. No worries.” The archaeologist tipped his head up and smiled, showing an even row of bright white teeth that contrasted sharply with his well-tanned skin and scruffy beard. He winked at her.

“Ah, sometimes I don’t know Christmas from Bourke Street, Miss Creed,” he replied. “I get my head into this and I forget all else.”

Annja put Wes somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, his hair graying, but his face unlined and his eyes bright. He was dressed in the traditional khaki pants most archaeologists wore, but his shirt was a brilliant lake-blue, new and with sharp creases; he’d worn a new shirt each day of the shoot, and had polished his shoes. He’d stubbornly refused to give his age and many other details about his personal life, saying, “I don’t need the world to know all of that, Miss Creed. I’m not important. This site is, though.”

She could have gotten all the biographical information she wanted for her piece from the foundation funding the dig—about Dr. Wesley Michaels, his wife and the handful of other archaeologists. She could have gotten Wes’s age, weight, favorite beverage, and even the name of his first pet if she’d pressed. But he was right…the site deserved the spotlight.

“Besides, don’t you have enough pictures of me, Miss Creed? I thought you finished up yesterday.” Wes gave her another wink and returned to his sifting, the angle of his hat again obscuring his face.

Annja loved to hear Wes talk. He had a thick Australian accent, perhaps exaggerated for her benefit.

“Just about finished, Dr. Michaels,” the cameraman pronounced. “A few more pans, Annja, and it’ll be a wrap, as they say.”

“Thanks, Oliver.” Annja pointed to the north. “Could you get some more on the skeletons, please. That fellow working over there by himself. He’s uncovered quite a bit this morning. You can see the whole skull now.”

Oliver made a face. “More bone shots. Sure.”

The archaeologists labored in a long bowl-like depression, concentrating on a section of midden at the base of a hill, a layer of soil that was stained dark by the decomposition of refuse left behind by people who lived a long time ago. The southern section had fragments of stone tools, bits of crude jewelry and pottery chips, the latter of which obviously fascinated Wes. He was attentive with even the smallest piece.

Annja watched him with detached envy. It was a fascinating dig, and a part of her wished she was working it, not just hosting a television segment highlighting the site. Three and a half days of filming and interviews for a one-hour slot on Chasing History’s Monsters. She held back a laugh; there’d been no monsters here in this desolate stretch in a forest preserve northwest of Sydney, but she knew her producer would fabricate one. He’d come up with some beast that supposedly either lured the ancient Egyptians to Australia or prevented them from leaving—some creature that had enough myths and legends swirling around it to attract good viewing numbers.

The features of the midden drew Annja’s thoughts back. Discolorations spoke of the human impact here, such as spots where posts had been set for houses and hearths had been dug for cooking. Most fascinating were the unearthed stones covered with carvings.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, these archaeologists were certain. Others disputed it, claiming they were merely unusual aboriginal petroglyphs. She’d seen plenty of petroglyphs in books and on various Internet sites, and pictographs—paintings on rocks that usually held some religious meaning. She had to side with Wes. They certainly did look like Egyptian hieroglyphs. One of the more distinct carvings was of a slight woman with the head of a cow. One of her arms was stretched above her head; the other arm had been chopped off when the stone broke.

“Hathor,” Wes had explained. “The wife of Horus. She was an ancient goddess, dating to dynastic times, maybe earlier. Nothing aboriginal about her and Horus.”

Annja and her crew had agreed not to give the exact location of the dig. Wes and the foundation had been adamant about that. They had enough problems with errant hikers trudging over out of curiosity. Too much publicity would mean they’d have to up their security to protect against looters and tourists, and that would cut into what Wes called a “damn scant budget.”

There was a second dig about a mile away, on the other side of the ridge in a lightly wooded section. Smaller and not nearly as interesting as this, Annja thought, though certainly part of the same ancient city. University of Sydney graduate students were working there to uncover more hieroglyphs. A third Egyptian dig was taking place near Brisbane, and Annja had lobbied to visit that site, too, as it was the most recent. But her producer cited timing and money, and so she had grudgingly settled solely on Dr. Michaels’s team.

“This is all considered fringe archaeology anyway,” Doug Morrell had argued, because not all the experts agreed it was Egyptian. Not worth too much airtime, but certainly worth some, he had said. Normally, the hint of some monster triggered her assignment. This time, it was a leak that a rival television show was going to send a team to the dig. Doug had admitted wanting the scoop on the place.

Annja breathed deep, smelling the age of the things being unearthed, the dryness of the ground and the tinge of sweat from the archaeologists. She thought maybe she’d come back here on her own before the year was out and see what progress had been made.

Wes Michaels hoped to get the results of some radiocarbon dating before Annja and her crew finished. Using the known half-life of carbon 14, and measuring the amount of undecayed carbon in a plant specimen his wife had uncovered at the bottom of a bowl, Wes hoped to determine the age of the features of this site. Annja knew geochronology would also help—dating artifacts by the age of the geological formation they were discovered in. But those test results were still hanging.

Wes had explained to Annja that a handful of curators and computer programmers were cataloging what had already been taken away from the site and were storing them in a museum in Sydney. He had offered to show her some of the more interesting specimens locked away there. She thought maybe she’d take him up on that during her return trip.

“Fringe nothing, Miss Creed. I’m not an Egyptologist, but I don’t need to be to tell me that’s indeed Hathor.” Wes held up a curved piece of pottery on which was painted a complete image of the cow-headed woman. “Look, she’s on several pieces here.”

Annja watched her cameraman work at the far end of the midden, where an archaeologist who looked little more than a teenager continued to brush the dirt away from a skeleton. The rest of her crew was packing up.

“What do you know of Hathor?” Annja knelt next to Wes Michaels and noted his gaze lingering on her lithe form. He might be a married man, she thought, but that didn’t prevent him from looking.

“The mistress of turquoise, she was called. Mistress of the entrance to the valley, queen of the west, lady of the sycamore, lady of all the gods, the gold of the gods. There were more than a few names for her.” Wes returned his gaze to the pottery piece. “Goddess of women, music, beauty, love, joy…all the important things in this world were her purview. They believed she blessed women with fertility. Some say the Greeks recognized her, as well, some sort of relation to Aphrodite.”

“The primal mother,” Jennifer said as she joined them. Hair tucked under a bushman’s hat, and nose smeared with sunscreen, she was equally difficult to pin an age to. Annja thought she was overly thin, elbows and wrist bones protruding. “Hathor was said to have some erotic significance to the Egyptian culture.” She playfully nudged her husband.