“Marko!”
Leah sprinted toward the rear of the cavern, frantically searching for Marko’s mop of hair and goofy grin. He wasn’t that far away from me. She illuminated the floor of the cavern ahead and found a large, round hole that had apparently swallowed the young rock climber.
“Jesus, no,” she whispered, dropping to her knees and crawling toward the false floor. She reached the edge on her belly, terrified of what she might find.
To her immense relief, Marko lay on a ledge three meters below.
“Are you hurt?”
Marko rubbed his head. “That’s a lump I’m gonna to feel tomorrow.”
Garrett placed his hand lightly on Leah’s shoulder and peered down into the hole. “You probably don’t want to move, my friend.”
“I think he knows that.” Leah reached down and scooped up a handful of the brittle adobe. “I’ve never heard of cliff dwellers sealing a Kiva with an adobe cap.”
Leah watched as Garrett ran the tips of his fingers over the edge, rubbing bits of the powdered soil. His eyes worked over every inch of the breach. “That’s too deep for a Kiva, and there’s no reason to seal it off.”
Leah nodded. One more mystery among many. No one knew why these people, who lived on the tops of the mesa and in the river valleys for thousands of years, would have forced themselves into cliff-face caverns. She looked up into the gloomy cavern, imagining them humping their water up here from the valley, letting their children walk on ledges where one misstep meant instant death. Then, two hundred years later, these people had completely disappeared.
Like her father, Leah had devoted her life to studying the enigmatic cliff-dwellers. Her father had been a mining engineer by trade, but his passion had been archeology. Every weekend, with the blessing of her mother, who preferred tending to her award-winning gardens, he’d taken Leah out into the desert in search of the Anasazi.
She remembered sitting cross-legged inside ancient cliff dwellings while her dad told her how these magnificent people had lived in the hostile environment of the desert Southwest hundreds of years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
He’d passed on his passion for archeology to Leah and he couldn’t have been more proud when she’d earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico in Native American Archeology.
Her mother’s death from brain cancer when she was just a teen hadn’t been nearly as painful as her dad’s untimely demise, falling while roping down into a dwelling. His sudden and unnecessary death had served to give her a “swift kick in the ass,” as Garrett said.
The same quest that had cost her father’s life had already lost Leah her job as an archeologist for the Bureau of Land Management. If she were caught today in the Gila National Wilderness, illegally searching for cliff dwellings on government land, her next address would be a federal prison.
Her dad had always felt their best chance for finding unspoiled dwellings was in the relatively unglamorous Gila National Monument and wilderness in southwestern New Mexico. Unlike well-known sites like Mesa Verde, this area was heavily forested and riddled with twisting canyons and hidden cliffs. The cliff dwellers in this area weren’t called the Anasazi but the Mogollon, named after the man who’d made the original discovery.
This dwelling, with its unheard-of melding of tribes under a single roof, could well be the Rosetta stone that finally solved the mystery of all the various cliff dwellers.
Marko had gathered himself and was preparing to climb out of the pit.
“Wait,” Leah said. “While you’re down there, free-climb all the way down to the floor and take a look-see for artifacts. One more thing—”
“Yeah, I know,” Marko said, sidling down the steep rocky slope. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Gimme light,” he said a moment later from the bottom of the sub-cavern.
Leah and Garrett illuminated the sand and stone floor as best they could from above.
“Better.” Marko bent down and then jumped back against the cliff face. “Shit! The floor is covered with bones!”
“What the hell…” Leah had joined him at the bottom of the pit, where skeletal remains lay side by side along with strips of decomposed clothing. The bones were shattered in such a way as to leave no doubt as to the reason these people had died.
Marko backed away from the remains. “I thought you said cliff dwellers were peaceful.”
“This was just a child, for God’s sake.” Leah pulled her hand away. “Who’d do that to a child?”
Garrett stood beside her now. He shook his head. “I suppose they could have been buried here, but it looks to me like they were killed down here and sealed in with adobe clay.”
Marko wandered down a passageway leading away from the massacre. “I found some more of these drawings.”
“Pictographs,” Leah corrected.
Garrett nodded. “It’s starting to make a little more sense to me.”
“What is?” Leah asked.
“Think about it. What if you’ve got different tribes jammed into one small living space. Everyone speaking a different language….”
“They might use pictographs to communicate or pass along tribal stories, since conventional storytelling would be difficult.”
Garrett shrugged. “It’s as good a theory as anything else right now.”
“Remind me to pay you next time I invite you to present at one of my lectures.” Leah carefully stepped over the bones and walked over to where Marko shone his light on the wall. The first of the ancient drawings was in the shape of a mountain with a vertical face.
“That doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in this region. You’ve been on big walls,” Leah said. “Have you seen anything like that?”
“Maybe Half Dome in Yosemite, if that’s a sheer cliff like it looks.” Marko took several more steps into the darkness. “More pictures here. This looks like a person holding their hands in the air, surrendering or something.”
“Those are strange-looking mountains. I’ve got a feeling they’re located a long way from New Mexico.” Leah stepped carefully over the remains and lit up the drawing. It was a woman, her hands clearly outstretched over her head. The artist had intended the woman to have a look of terror on her face. “Hmm. She’s not surrendering.”
“What’s she doing then?”
Leah winced. “Praying, or maybe even pleading.”
Marko stepped back from the pictographs. “Okay, that’s enough for me.”
“Watch your step.” Leah turned her flashlight in the direction of Marko’s feet to make sure he didn’t disturb the bones. The beam reflected back at her, revealing golf ball-sized red rocks scattered in and among the remains.
“What the hell is that?” she breathed. The way they reflected the light, they looked almost like crystals.
Garrett knelt down and examined the stones. “Granite, I think, but I’ve never seen such a brilliant red coloring anywhere.”
“I know you kids are having fun down there,” Juan said from the top of the sub-cavern, “but the storm’s getting a lot closer.”
“Why don’t you climb on down, scaredy-cat?” Leah shouted. “What kind of archeologist is afraid of a little rock slope?”
Juan’s voice boomed back. “A fat one that’s fallen on his ass one too many times!”
The sound of thunder echoed throughout the cavern.
“Seriously,” Juan said, “time to move or we’re going to spend the night here.”
Leah looked around her for a moment. “I want some of these stones.”
“You said—” Marko began to protest.
“We’re not touching anything else. These don’t fall into the same artifact class as human remains, dwellings, or handcrafts. We’ll document the rest when we return.” Leah knelt and carefully picked up several of the reddish, crystal-like stones and placed them in her gear bag. “Okay, Juan, I’m coming up.”