Dmitro Borisovich said with a smile:
“I’m most honored to hear such a refined compliment addressed to my humble person… I’ve laid down my reasons as to why I believe the cave should be explored quite thoroughly. Now I’ll try to put forward another convincing argument as I’ve… er… saved the most interesting part for the end…”
“Of course! You’re incorrigible. Pray continue.”
“Here it is. You’ll see.”
Dmitro Borisovich slowly unbuttoned his overalls, pulled something out of his inside pocket, and froze. He turned his head toward the door and was apparently listening to sounds coming from outside: there was slight but persistent scratching at the door.
“Diana, is that you?” called Ivan Semenovich.
The scratching was intensified. Lida got up and went to the door to open it. A big fawn-colored boxer dashed into the room yelping. She. ran round the room, muzzled everyone’s knees, then stretched out beside Ivan Semenovich, and quieted down, eyes half-shut. Only the stump of a tail wagged persistently.
“I’m glad you’ve come home,” Ivan Semenovich said, stroking the dog’s back. The tail wagged with renewed vigor. “Now, Dmitro Borisovich, please tell us what it is that you’ve saved for the end.”
“These drawings.”
The archeologist spread out a sheaf of papers torn from an ordinary school exercise book. A short sword, a horse’s head, and a sort of covered wagon were drawn in rough, broken lines on the sheets. The last bore an awkwardly drawn human head. Everyone looked attentively at the drawings for some time. Artem was the first to speak:
“Were they done by a child?”
The archeologist burst into hearty laughter.
“What a compliment, Artemi Everything you see here was drawn by me.”
“By you?”
“Absolutely. But it was not I who carved the originals of these images in the rock. In my drawings I’ve tried to be as faithful as could be to the carvings done by ancient people. So far I’ve been lucky enough to find four such carvings. These are just copies. I don’t belive I’ll be stretching the point too far if I say that these are of Scythian origin!”
The archeologist fell silent, carefully folding the papers. Then he said:
“Tomorrow I’ll photograph them. They are extremely interesting, extremely! They bear a certain resemblance to pieces in the wonderful Scythian gold collection in the Hermitage Museum. That’s my story,” he concluded solemnly, raising his hand.
A profound silence fell in the room. Only the hissing of the miner’s lamp and the geologist’s drumming on the table was audible in the silence. One had to admit that the archeologist was very good at putting forward very convincing arguments and sound ideas. At last Ivan Semenovich looked up and saw how Lida was eyeing him imploringly and how Artem, who had even forgotten his sulkiness, was waiting impatiently for his decision. Ivan Semenovich’s face broke into a wide grin:
“All right, you’ve convinced me!”
Excited applause greeted the pronouncement. The dog opened her eyes, wondering what all the fuss was about.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” the archeologist went on to say. “We’ll have a good rest and make all the necessary preparations since we’ll be facing a complicated and arduous task. And the day after tomorrow, we’ll start on our underground expedition. We’ll limit our explorations… mostly to the archeological line of our work — for a short period.”
“But the archeological line is sure to give us some geological results,” Dmitro Borisovich remarked.
“We’ll see, we’ll see.”
“Does that mean we’ll go exploring all together?” Artem asked, wishing to make things clear and definite.
“Yes, all together. And we’ll even take Diana with us. Will you join us, Diana?”
The boxer languidly opened her eyes again, but closed them in a moment: apparently the matter did not interest Diana in the least.
Thus it was that major change came about in the work of a small group of researchers who had travelled to a remote backwater in the heart of the Ukraine. But what had brought them there in the first place?
In the late nineteenth century, deposits of copper ore were discovered on the slopes of the mountain ridge. Nobody could tell for sure how much ore there was or of what quality. A certain engineer by the name of Hlebov decided to mate some money out of it. As he had the proper connections, he had managed to receive a government subsidy — quite a considerable amount of money — to build a factory. He even saw it through to the smelting of the first copper, after which he promptly disappeared. He had never really intended to turn the thing into a large-scale operation, for he was interested in only one thing — getting money from the state.
The factory quickly fell into disrepair, and it was soon reduced to a pile of bricks and odd pieces of equipment like trolleys and rails rusting here and there. The memory of engineer Hlebov, bent on having a good time drinking, and carousing with his friends well into the early hours, still lingered among the local villagers. Hearsay had it that there were deposits of copper ore inside the ridge, but whether it was true or whether there was enough to start extracting it on a commercial scale was unknown.
Some references to copper ore in the ridge could, in fact, be found in reports of various geological surveys preserved in the archives, but the evidence was vague and contradictory. This was hardly surprising since in czarist times, nobody seemed really to care about doing any further copper mining in the region.
Capitalists and businessmen, both domestic and foreign, were more interested in the coal fields located in this general area of the Donbas, for here, coal could be extracted practically from the surface. But this ridge did not have any coal so the entrepreneurs, eager to make quick and easy money, did not think it worth their while prospecting for copper along the ridge.
Neither was archeology much favored in this area. Local villagers occasionally found artifacts from ancient times, particularly at and around the Sharp Mount. But the finds, mostly objects of bronze or bone, did not attract much attention. No one suspected that the Sharp Mount might contain treasures.
In fact, there were no indications that anything valuable was hidden in the mount, as the villagers had never found anything made of gold or other precious metals or stones. Some bronze buckles and clasps, a few trinkets of very little worth — that was all. Dmitro Borisovich once said with a smile:
“As a matter of fact, we’re lucky. No one has done any excavations here; no one has explored the place as no treasures were thought to be likely to be found here. Consequently neither despoilers who grab one pretty trinket but ruin the rest nor grave robbers have ever found their way here. Everything that the cave may yield is ours to find and take.”
“Add copper ore to the list,” said the geologist.
The two men had been friends since their youth; they had travelled a great deal together and helped each other a lot, but each of them preserved an unshakable belief in the superiority of his own science. Such attitudes could be detected in their incessant light-hearted arguments.
They had been planning to explore the secrets of the Sharp Mount for quite some time, but for one reason or another the work had to be postponed several times. Thus it was only this summer that they had decided to combine work with pleasure and spend their summer holiday at the mount.
“But let’s not overburden ourselves with geological prospecting, right?” Dmitro Borisovich warned his friend in a decisive manner.
“Of course not. Neither shall we work too hard along archeological lines, right?” Ivan Semenovich replied in the same vein.
“The main thing is to get good rest,” Dmitro Borisovich added by way of explanation.