Canyon Sacrifice (15 page)

Chuck slid the stone door from its slot and set it aside. He slipped on his headlamp, leaned inside the small room at the rear of the cavern—and there they were: two massive Anasazi pots resting, altar-like, above the dusty floor on matching stacks of river rocks.

Other Anasazi vessels, similar in size to the black-slipped Mesa Verde pots Chuck had unearthed near Chinle, were no more than two feet high by a foot across. Anything larger, when filled with grain or water, would have been impossible for even the strongest Anasazi to transport. Yet the twin clay storage jars in the granary were nearly double that size. Each was almost three feet high, at least a foot and a half across at its widest point, and a good fourteen inches across at its base. The pots were urn-shaped, with openings at their tops of perhaps twelve inches capped by slabs of fired clay formed into perfect circles.

Though the immensity of the pots was unheard of, it was their exterior decoration that made them truly incredible. Intricate paintings and carvings, none more than a quarter-inch high, covered every square inch of the vessels. The paintings were black, while the carvings showed up as the dark gray interior of the pots against their white-slipped exterior.

Like traditional Anasazi urns with their repeated geometric designs generally an inch or two high, the two vessels in the granary featured horizontal rows of geometric designs and artistic renderings. But each row of artwork on these vessels was only a fraction of an inch high, first a row of painting, then a row of carving, then another row of painting. Though only a few millimeters tall, the designs and pictures on the pots were startlingly detailed, and no two were repeated. Tiny squares, circles, ovals, trapezoids, and lines interwoven like rope. Miniature paintings of deer, cougars, snakes, frogs, birds, and desert rams, of bows and arrows, spears, and human stick figures, of Kokopelli, the flute-playing jester of Anasazi lore, playing his instrument while standing upright, leaning far forward, leaning back, seated, and lying down. Depictions of cliffs, mountains, canyons, trees, cacti, and streams, countless representations of the sun and moon, and tiny pinpricks of stars.

As he did each time he laid eyes on the pots, Chuck wondered how many hundreds or thousands of hours must have gone into their creation. How could the potter's imagination have been so fertile as to cover the two urns with literally thousands of pictures and geometric designs without a single repetition?

Handprints and fingerprints on preserved pots indicated most Anasazi potters, like most modern Native American potters, were women. But everything Chuck's fellow Southwest archaeologists suspected of Anasazi women—that they were task-oriented, primarily concerned with completing the job at hand—didn't fit with the pots here in the small room at the back of the cavern. The beautifully decorated vessels in the alcove notwithstanding, everything the archaeological world knew about the Anasazi indicated that life for the ancient Indians of the Colorado Plateau had been short and brutish. The prevalence of child graves at Anasazi burial sites indicated a high infant-mortality rate. For those who reached adulthood,
the average Anasazi lifespan was less than thirty-five years. The unending hard work required to survive resulted in bent and twisted spinal columns for most adults, whose teeth were worn down to shapeless stumps by the time they reached their mid-twenties as a result of their grit-laden diet based on sandstone-ground maize flour.

Many archaeologists believed the Anasazi had spent their entire lives working every day, dawn to dusk, before collapsing in exhausted heaps at night. The spiritual rooms known as kivas found in most Anasazi villages and the fine craftsmanship of items such as the burial shroud Chuck had found in the mining debris pile on the South Rim belied that assertion somewhat, while the amazing pots sitting before him blew that idea away entirely. The huge, painstakingly painted and carved urns would provide Marvin Begay and his fellow young Navajo believers with what they sought—incontrovertible proof of the Anasazi people's heretofore unacknowledged cultural progression.

The question still remained, however: as fine as the two pots were, why had an ancient potter or group of potters spent so much time crafting them? The answer, without doubt, was that the urns contained objects even more fantastic than the vessels themselves.

S
IXTEEN

3 p.m.

Chuck lifted the lid from the nearest pot and set it aside. Kneeling, his head against the room's low roof, he aimed the beam of his headlamp into the pot and, as always, gasped. Dozens upon dozens of turquoise necklaces lay curled one against another like nested snakes, and the artistry of the necklaces captured in the beam of his light was, like the decoration on the pot that contained them, orders of magnitude beyond that of any other Anasazi finery ever discovered.

At least twenty of the necklaces, nestled against one another at the top of the pot, were visible in the light of Chuck's headlamp. Assuming the urn was filled with necklaces, the vessel contained perhaps two hundred in all. Every necklace Chuck could see in the light of his headlamp was meticulously crafted. They shone with every shade of turquoise imaginable, from the translucent ocean-blue of Sonoran Desert turquoise to the tortoise green of Mojave Desert turquoise and every shade between. Like the designs on the pots, each necklace was unique, differing in size and style from its neighbors. In essence, every necklace in the pot was an A. Dinaveri, in and of itself.

For the first time in all his visits to the alcove, Chuck caressed the topmost necklace with his fingertips. Barely daring to breathe, he slipped his fingers beneath the necklace, lifted it from the urn, and admired it hanging from his fingers in the light of his headlamp.

The necklace was comprised of well over a hundred individually carved turquoise beads strung on an eighteen-inch loop of tightly woven yucca cord. Each bead fit snugly against its neighbor. The beads were small at the top of the necklace and grew successively larger until the two sides of the loop reached
the necklace's most amazing feature, a pendant fashioned from a single, enormous piece of turquoise.

The pendant, the size of Chuck's palm and shaped like an oversized teardrop, was chiseled and polished to a smooth sheen that glittered in the light of Chuck's lamp. The face of the pendant was inscribed with tiny depictions of the sort that adorned the exteriors of the pots, more than a hundred minuscule inscriptions in all, none of them repeated. Every necklace in the pot featured a similar large pendant fashioned from a single chunk of turquoise, and every pendant, unique in shape and form, was as meticulously inscribed as the one dangling from the necklace Chuck held.

Together, the vessel and its contents displayed artistic sophistication light years beyond any Anasazi craftsmanship discovered to date—and that wasn't even taking the second vessel's contents into account. The second urn contained no jewelry, nor was it filled to the top. Rather, the pot was half-filled with saucer-shaped stone disks about two inches across, their faces inscribed with repeated geometric patterns of triangles, crosshatches, rectangles, and squares.

Had Arturo Dinaveri been its discoverer, the Italian archaeologist surely would have declared that the alcove, with its necklace-and disk-filled urns, was the hidden shrine constructed by the Anasazi at the Grand Canyon in honor of Chirsáuha, the Anasazi god of fertility. Chuck, however, was convinced he'd discovered not an Anasazi shrine but an ancient Anasazi bank. Following years of internal debate, he'd settled on the belief that the necklace-filled pot was an Anasazi version of Fort Knox, with the necklaces serving as a sort of gold standard for the disks in the second pot. The disks, he'd concluded, were a form of currency, though because disks like those in the second vessel had never been discovered elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau, he speculated that the collapse of Anasazi society had
occurred before the banking system had been initiated.

Whatever their true purpose, the urns and their contents would trigger decades of impassioned debate in the Southwest archaeological community, and they would provide welcome evidence of advanced Anasazi culture for Marvin Begay and his fellow young Navajo believers. Chuck would unleash all of that as soon as he unveiled his discovery to the world.

He slipped half a dozen of the topmost necklaces into individual Ziploc bags he'd brought from camp. He sat back, ogling the necklaces lined in front of him on the stone floor of the alcove. Just the raw turquoise in one or, at most, two of the necklaces would be enough to win Carmelita's release. With Carmelita safe, he would turn the remaining necklaces over to Jonathan and Elise Marbury and let the debate over the necklaces, disks, and pots begin.

He swiped at the yogurt-slimed interior of his daypack with a bandana, collected the six bagged necklaces in a single nylon sack, wrapped the sack in a hand towel he'd brought from camp for padding, and settled the bundle in the bottom of his pack. He replaced the lids on the pots and re-fitted the sandstone door in its frame. After switching out the dangling length of rope with a fresh length, he stuffed the old rope in his pack, wrapped the new rope over his shoulder and around his waist, and stepped backward out of the cavity.

He broke out in a feverish sweat and nearly vomited the instant the full sun struck him upon leaving the shade of the alcove to rappel down the face of the cliff. It was three o'clock, the hottest time of day. The air temperature in the inner canyon had to be a few ticks above 110 by now, perhaps above 115. He unwrapped himself from the rope at the foot of the cliff and made his way woozily along the steep slope to the north side of the butte. Every breath he took burned his lungs. His feet bubbled like sausages in his boots.

He down-climbed most of the three-sided chimney in the second cliff band without incident until, five feet from the bottom of the second cliff, he slipped and plummeted to the rocky slope at the base of the chimney. He hit the ground hard and tumbled downhill, his arms and legs flailing, grabbing at cacti and brush and gouging a large ragged flap of skin from the palm of his left hand. His chin slammed into a rock before he managed to bring himself to a halt. He rose, shaky and confused, and stumbled around the base of the butte, making for the east face of the ridge, his chin aching and his gouged hand dripping blood. He banged his shins into low rocks along the way, raising welts through the light fabric of his pants.

He sucked greedily at his second bladder of water, unable to control his thirst, as he staggered back around the butte. The large dose of liquid did him good. His mind cleared as he descended the cleft in the lowest cliff band and made his way across the face of the ridge to the point where Hermit Trail topped out between the Monument and Hermit creek drainages. He headed up the empty trail without pausing, willing himself onward, intent only on the few feet directly ahead of him.

Refreshed by the water, he clicked off a quick mile. Then he began to slow. The petroleum smell of the hot grease in his shoes rose into the air and filled his nostrils, sickening him. The sun beat on his back and reflected off the trail into his face.

He took another deep draw of water. The soothing liquid flowed through the plastic tube into his mouth. The tube gurgled and his mouth filled with stale air—his second bladder was dry.

Hermit's Rest was three miles and 1,500 vertical feet above him, the temperature was pushing 115 degrees, and the sun was more than four hours from setting. The numbers didn't work. There was no way he could make it out of the canyon this afternoon, in this heat, without more water. Yet there was nothing he could do but keep going. He was too far up the trail to turn
back for Hermit Creek. Dripping Spring was even less accessible on the far side of Hermit Basin. His nearest salvation was the drinking fountain at Hermit's Rest.

He could almost taste the stream of clear water arcing from the fountain, wet and cold. Time passed with agonizing slowness. Other than the constant buzz of cicadas, the day was silent. His thoughts grew increasingly unfocused as he wandered up the trail. His lips cracked and his mouth turned to sandpaper.

“Jan,” he said aloud, his tongue thick and heavy. “Carm. Rosie.”

The trail remained empty of other hikers—although, he realized suddenly, he wasn't actually on his own in the depths of the canyon. Like anyone else foolish enough to attempt hiking the inner canyon in the murderous heat of a mid-summer day, all he had to do was call 911 for help.

He fumbled in the right-hand pocket of his hiking pants for his cell phone. The pocket was empty. He shoved his left hand into the opposite pocket, grimacing as he tore back the flap of skin on his injured palm, but that pocket was empty as well.

Then he remembered. He'd plodded right past the boulder where he'd hidden his phone. His stomach fell. The phone was too far behind for him to retrieve. There was nothing he could do but trudge upward, one faltering step after another.

He'd known all along he couldn't pull off this hike. But he'd set off anyway. What had he been thinking? He couldn't remember. Couldn't remember much of anything. Couldn't think in linear fashion. Wasn't sure where he was, only that he was on a trail and that the heat literally was killing him.

He poked the open wound on his palm every few steps to jolt himself toward some degree of consciousness. Sweat no longer gathered on his forehead; he was too dehydrated for that. He was a curled brown leaf skittering aimlessly along the ground, driven onward in fits and starts by the scorching, inner-canyon breeze.