Village had access to some kind of rock or hard substance that came in sheets. They must have been very clever people.
He saw a great yawning doorway ahead of him. The doors had fallen away and lay there half-buried in the sand. The inside of the building gaped darkly.
Jonnie walked his horse through the door and looked about in the dimness.
Debris was scattered all about, rotted and decayed beyond identification. But a waist-high series of platforms stood; they were of a remarkably white stone that had bluish veins in it. He leaned down from his horse and stared at the walls behind them. There were heavy, heavy doors set into it, two of them ajar, one of them wide open. Big wheels of still bright metal were inset into them.
Jonnie stepped to the platforms of white stone and dropped to the other side. Cautiously he approached the open niche.
There were shelves, and on the shelves, tangled with rotted remains of some kind of sacking, were mounds and mounds and mounds of discs. Some were a dull gray, almost tarnished away, but one pile was bright yellow.
Jonnie picked up a disc. It was as wide across as two fingernails and remarkably heavy. He turned it over and his eyes bugged.
Here was that bird again! Talons gripping a bundle of arrows. Hastily he pawed into the other mounds, looking at disc after disc. Most of them had a bird on one side. The face of a man, the faces of different men, were on the other.
Face of a man!
And some of them had women on them.
This was not a god symbol. This was a man symbol.
The bird with the arrows belonged to man!
The shock of it sent him reeling. He supported himself against the wall of the niche for minutes. He felt his head buzzing with the readjustment of ideas.
These doors to the niches were man-made. The Great Village was man-made. The doors of the tomb in the mountains were of similar material even if larger.
The tomb was not a god tomb. The mound out on the plain was also man-made.
Man had once built things– he was certain of it.
And it would take many men to make this Great Village. Therefore there must have been many men at one time.
He rode his horse out of the place in a deep daze. His most basic ideas and values had suffered severe shifts and it took a lot of getting used to. What legends were true? Which ones were false?
There was the legend of the Great Village and here it was. Man had obviously made it and had lived here in forgotten times.
Maybe the legend of god getting angry with man and wiping him out was true. And maybe it wasn't. Maybe it had just been a big storm.
He looked around the paths and buildings. There was no evidence of a storm: the buildings were still standing. Many even had that strange thin sheeting in the windows. There were no bodies about, but from a time so long ago, bones wouldn't last.
And then he saw a structure that had its doors firmly closed and sheets of metal fastened where the windows should be, and looking closer, he saw that a huge metal clamp sealed the place. He got down and inspected the clamp.
It was of a different age than the village: there was no tarnish on it at all. It was old, but not that old.
Something or someone at some time had pushed aside the sand in front of the doors. It was grass-grown sand but it had been disturbed.
Jonnie frowned. This building was not like the rest. It was in a fair state of preservation. Somebody had put metal sheets on the windows and the metal was quite different from any in the rest of the town: it showed no signs of corrosion.
Somebody had given this building special treatment.
He backed up to get a better overall view. It was indeed a different kind of building. Fewer windows. Block solid.
As an experienced tracker, Jonnie studied the time differences here.
Long, long after the “village” had been abandoned, somebody had made access to this place, made a path, even dug a path in and out of the doors and then fastened the doors thoroughly. But even that had been a long time ago.
Curious, he scanned the front facade. One of the metal window covers was loose. It was higher than his head so he stood on his horse and pried at it. It gave a little bit. Encouraged, he shoved the handle of his kill-club into the crack, and with a protesting whine the cover suddenly sprang loose, startling Windsplitter, who moved off.
Jonnie held on to the ledge, his feet dangling.
He pulled himself up. The transparent sheeting under the cover was still in place. He took his kill-club and managed to hit it.
The crash and tinkle of the stuff as it fell was shockingly loud in this quiet place. Experienced now with the cutting quality of this stuff, Jonnie hung on to the ledge with one arm and cleaned up the jagged bits from one side of the frame and dusted off the ledge.
He pulled himself through.
The place was so dark that it took quite a while to see anything. Light was coming through in thin cracks where other windows remained covered. At length his eyes adjusted and he dropped cautiously down into the huge room. Now that he was not blocking the window's light he could see quite well.
Dust and sand were only a filmy cover over things. There were tables and tables and tables and chairs and chairs and chairs, all marshaled in orderly rows. But they were not the interesting things.
Almost every wall was covered with shelving. The stacks of shelves even protruded out into the room. Somebody had covered them with a sheeting you could see through. Something lay under the sheeting on every shelf.
Jonnie approached cautiously. He carefully removed the fastenings to the sheeting and looked behind it.
Queer, thick rectangles stood on these shelves. Rows of them. At first he thought it was all one piece and then he found that one could remove a single rectangle. He took one off the shelf.
It almost fell to pieces in his hands!
Awkwardly, he juggled to hold it together and then succeeded. What a strange object! It was a box that wasn't a box. The covers slid sideways away from each other, enclosing a packet of thin, remarkably thin slices that had black marks on them, lots of little, tiny black marks all in orderly rows. What a strange object! How complicated!
He put the first one back on the shelf and took a second, smaller one. It too fell open.
Jonnie found himself staring at a picture.
It didn't have depth. At first it seemed to, but his finger told him it was just a flat plane. The object there was a big red circle, much bigger than a strawberry, much smoother. It had a stem. And alongside it there was a black tent with a crossbar in the middle of it.
He turned the sheet. There was a picture of a bee. No bee was ever that big, but this was certainly a bee. It too looked three-dimensional until his finger told him it wasn't. And a black thing beside it had two bulges on it.
Jonnie turned another sheet. There was a cat– a small cat, to be sure, but it was definitely a cat. And it had a curved black thing beside it like a new moon.
A few pages later there was a picture of a fox. And beside it was a black pole with two flags coming off it.
Suddenly a quiver went through Jonnie. He held his breath. He grabbed the first object he had taken and pried it open again. There was the tent. There was the bee's black mark. Yes– and there was the pole with two flags.
He held the two rectangles, his head in a whirl. He stared at them.
There was a meaning here. Foxes? Bees? Cats? Tents, bulges, new moons?
These things had meanings in them!
But about what? Animals? Weather?
He could sort all that out later. He crowded the two rectangles into his belt pouch. Anything that was connected to weather and animals had value. Rectangles with meaning in them. The idea made bright lights pop in your skull.