Seeing them coming, I headed for a Telefonico del Peru booth, where, upon my arrival, and in what I considered a stroke of brilliance, I’d posted an out of service sign. Using Hilda’s phone card, I called Montero. “We’re on our way,” was all I said before slamming down the receiver and waving to the two men.
By nine we were back on the highway. I drove again. Steve and Ricardo hadn’t had even as much sleep as I had, so they dozed while I drove. The trip back was slower, with lots more traffic, and I had to ease up considerably in the towns, now crowded with people. A couple of times I caught myself pounding the wheel in frustration.
Just a little before noon, I pulled the truck up in front of a yellow building on the main street of Campina Vieja. Waiting there were Carlos Montero and an older, slimmer version of the man, His Honor, the mayor, Cesar Montero. They climbed into the backseat of the truck, and to make room Steve climbed into the back. Two policemen on motorcycles, exactly one half the town’s police force, pulled ahead of me, and I wheeled the truck away from the curb and back onto the highway until we reached the dirt road which led to the site. Hilda, Tracey, and Ralph all saw our dust and were waiting for us when we got there.
The truck had barely come to rest when Steve was up and out the back, yelling, “Okay, let’s roll!”
Ralph and Hilda had briefed the students just a few minutes earlier, and the place was abuzz. Three students—Susan, George, and Robert—and a couple of the Peruvian workers crammed into the back of the truck with Steve, and the cavalcade pulled away again. Ricardo sat up front with me, Tracey sat in the backseat with the two Monteros (one could only hope the mayor was not as bad as his brother), and, as we pulled away, I heard Hilda and Ralph begin directing the remaining students and crew to start filling in the excavation with the back dirt just as fast as they could.
The truck and its police escort pulled out onto the highway again, heading north. About a mile farther along, we turned left off the highway at a small marker and bounced along what was not, to my way of thinking, a road, just a dusty trail in the sand. I just concentrated on not getting off the track and bogged down. Ahead of us I could see the algarrobal, the thorn tree thicket. We circled to the right around it, and on the far side pulled to a stop, police lights flashing. Then everyone was out of the truck and running— all of us, that is, except Carlos and Cesar, who hung way back—toward what appeared to be a very ordinary hill.
Two things about that moment I will never forget: the expression on Rolando Guerra’s face, and my first sight of Cerro de las Ruinas.
Seeing what must have looked like a horde of howling banshees, Guerra reached for a rifle, but before he could do that, the police, guns out, shouted at him to get his hands up. Steve and Ricardo went up to him and shoved their credential in his face. The police quickly searched Guerra’s truck and a little lean-to on the property, and looked along the wall. There was nothing. No mounds of looted artifacts, just a pile of bricks, a trowel, a shovel, a jacket.
For a moment or two, I thought that we’d made a mistake, that we were terrorizing a simple farmer trying to protect a little piece of land. Then, for just an instant, I saw a look of pure hatred, then sly cunning flash across Guerra’s face. He was guilty of something, all right. Whatever it was he was up to, he was up to no good.
But there was no reason to detain him. The police told him the archaeologists had the right to dig the land, and that he would have to leave. In a bit of an anticlimax, Guerra picked up his tools, his rifle, and jacket, and pulled away in a beat-up old Chevy truck, without so much as a backward glance.
All of us, exhausted from the waiting, the anticipation, the adrenaline rush, looked about.
“What a mess!” Ramos said.
Over to our right was what appeared to be a bare hill, only one small bush clinging to life on the slope. I shaded my eyes to see the top. It was flattened irregularly, and the sides were streaked with deep vertical cuts that appeared to be the result of torrents of water in a time long before.
There was a large flat area in front of the hill, its surface marred by depressions of all sizes that made me think of the pockmarked surface of the moon. Scattered across the sand, which now in the late afternoon was swirling about the site, were shards of pottery, black and terra-cotta, and almost unbelievably, fragments of bone. A plait of dark hair, bleached red, lay forlornly on the edge of a crater.
“What is this?” I gasped.
“Huaqueros,” Steve said. “They’ve been digging here. That’s what the depressions are, the places they’ve dug. Some are very old, others very recent. Looters look for metals, so if they come across ceramics, or bones, they just toss them.”
“Such disrespect for the dead!” I exclaimed.
Steve nodded. “The Anasazi in the States call looters robbers of the dead. A good name, isn’t it? You aren’t entirely right about their disrespect for the dead, though,” he said, reaching down and picking up a couple of unsmoked cigarettes. “They left these, you see. Seriously,” he said, sensing my skepticism. “Huaqueros often leave an offering like this so they won’t be cursed.”
For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the plait of hair. It seemed so vulnerable, pathetic almost, lying there on the surface like that. Steve watched me. “Human hair lasts for thousands of years in the ground,” was all he said. It should never have been disturbed, I thought. For some reason, seeing that plait of hair affected me in a way that Ines’s warning hadn’t.
Cuidado al arbolada! To succeed, you must beware of the woods. Slowly I turned my head to the left. There was a wooded area, filled with carob trees, or algarroba, the branches heavy with thorns. Were these the woods? Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself.
“Do you think we’re too late?” Tracey asked, leaning down and picking up a small piece of bone. The sound of her voice pulled me back to reality. “Do you think they found and looted the tomb?”‘
“Don’t know,” Steve replied, shielding his eyes, as I had, and scanning the hill. “It’s a huaca, all right. They’ve been digging on the top. You can see the depressions. Practically flattened it too. But if they found something, and removed everything, then what was Guerra doing putting up that wall? Let’s have a look around. Maybe we’ll try a couple of test trenches at the foot of the huaca.”
“Are you saying that hill is a huaca?” I asked.
“Yup,” Steve replied. “To you it looks like a hill. But remember, the people of this area built their structures of adobe brick, which is essentially mud brick, not stone. So this was once a pyramid-shaped building. The furrows you see running down the sides would be caused by torrential rains, past El Ninos, perhaps, over the intervening centuries, which would, in a sense, melt the brick. See, there’s another little one over there, and there.” I looked in the direction he was pointing. There was indeed a smaller hill, or huaca, off in the distance, a couple more even farther away.
“Okay, let’s take a quick look around,” Steve called to the group. “We’ll start in earnest tomorrow.”
The group had barely started out when what proved to be the first of many accidents happened. “Ouch!” Tracey yelled, and started hopping around. We all went to her aid, and it was quickly apparent what was causing her distress. She’d stepped on one end of a dead branch of a thorn tree; the branch had swung up, and one of the thorns had imbedded itself in her leg, a little above the ankle, just over the top of her boot. It had gone right through her sock and into her leg. Tracey was hurting, that was obvious. Both Steve and I tried to remove it, but we couldn’t dislodge it.