“Steve,” I called out. “I think we have company!” Steve looked in the direction I was pointing.
“Trouble!” he yelled down to Hilda, as the convoy moved closer.
The vehicles pulled up, blocking the way out, and a gang of campesinos, Rolando Guerra among them, made their way toward the site. They were armed with shovels and axes, which they waved threateningly in Hilda’s direction. “Get out of here or you’re dead,” one of them yelled.
“You get out of here, or you’re dead,” Steve yelled from the top of the huaca. He had grabbed a short shovel and, balancing it on his shoulder, was holding it as if it were a rifle. The men looked up, but blinded by the sun, would see only what I could just a few minutes ago, a dark figure silhouetted against the light. “I mean it,” he yelled. “Get out of here.” Pablo, behind Steve, grabbed another shovel and mimicked Steve’s stance.
For a moment, nobody moved. I held my breath. Then one of the men, an older man who’d held back a little from the pack, said something I couldn’t make out. Slowly they all got back in their trucks or on their motorcycles, and gunning the engines, then circling around menacingly a couple of times, finally pulled away.
“Whew,” Steve said, putting down his shovel. “Sure was worried the sun might go behind a cloud!” A titter of nervous laughter swept through the group.
“That was brilliant,” I said, admiration in my voice.
“Oh, I’m not just a pretty face.” He grinned. “But to think that just a moment or two before they arrived, I was cursing because the sun was so hot. They’re just bullies, that’s all,” he added. “Nothing to worry about, really.”
I wanted to believe him, so I did.
For the rest of that day, and the next, the work on the site progressed at a steady pace, with hopeful signs, according to Pablo, all around.
The following day, however, the second accident occurred. While we were working away, there was a crack, and the ladder on which one of the men, Jesus Silva, was standing to set up the camera, collapsed. Jesus was hurled into one of the pits and just lay there, conscious but groaning in pain. It was only with real difficulty that we were able to get him out. We stretched him out on the back of the truck, and I drove as carefully as I could into town. He had, as it turned out, dislocated his shoulder and cracked three ribs, and would be off work for the balance of the season.
It was about then that the rumors of evil spirits began to surface among the Peruvian crew. “This is a bad place,” I heard one of the men, Javier Franco, telling the others. “We should not be here.”
“I don’t believe in evil spirits,” Steve told me. “Come over here.”
I walked over to where he was examining the ladder that had collapsed under Silva. I looked where he pointed. There was a crack right below the metal hinge which held the two sides of the ladder rigid when opened.
“So it was defective, is that what you’re telling me?” I said. “I feel terrible. I bought that ladder, and I thought I’d inspected it pretty carefully before I took it. I must have missed the crack.”
“Look again,” he said, and after a moment or two I saw what he was getting at. There were no splinters at the break, except right at the end. In fact it was so neat a break that one would have to assume it had been cut, almost all the way through.
“Guerra?” I asked.
“He’d be our number one suspect, wouldn’t he?” Steve replied. “Maybe I’ll just go have a chat with the mayor and suggest to him that the police have a little talk with our friend Rolando.”
After that, though, the accidents came thick and fast. Ernesto Santo, another worker, cut his hand quite badly, a freak accident involving the metal mesh on the sieve that required several stitches. Javier himself, the fellow who thought the place was haunted, accidentally walked backwards too far and slid down the side of the slope, badly scratching his leg.
I put it all down to hysteria, self-induced accidents brought on by the belief in evil spirits, but the effect had on the group was real enough. They were all Petrified. Steve then hired Tomas Cardoso, Ines’s brother, who was also a chaman, a shaman, to help protect the site from evil spirits. That kept the team working awhile longer.
In contrast to all the drama around the accidents, however, the work on the site was going exceedingly well. About a week into the work on the summit, a loud shout and a cheer went up, and we all rushed up the hill. Even Hilda, who tended to supervise from down below, climbed up painfully but as fast as she could. And there it was, a circle in the earth quite distinct from that around it. “The mancha!” Pablo yelled.
“You’re right!” Steve exclaimed, after examining it closely. “We start digging down, here!”
I’d have been inclined to just dig straight down the shaft, but that’s not the way it works in archaeology. Earth is removed, layer by layer, inch by inch, everything carefully recorded before it’s removed. The earth was, as always, taken to the sieve, which we’d set up on top of the hill.
When I expressed some impatience to Hilda, she replied, “As you can see, archaeology is inherently destructive. When we’re done here, we will have destroyed a huaca that survived for centuries before we arrived. You can never put it back exactly as it was. So it must be done right the first time, or the whole archaeological record is lost.” I could see what she meant. We were removing a large portion of the side of the hill, cutting down from the top. “Safety is of paramount importance,” she went on, “particularly when we’re working on a slope. The back dirt has to be taken well away from the site, to a place where it can’t slide back onto the workers. Cave-ins are a real concern in these conditions. You have to ensure the walls are well shored up as you go.”
I hoped the workers wouldn’t hear her saying that. It was all they would need to really set them off.
The really good news was that there was no further sign during the daylight hours of Rolando Guerra and his pals, several of whom, I gathered from the talk among the workers, were members of the Guerra family. But the signs of his presence were evident almost every morning. One day it was a pig’s head on a pike stuck into the ground, another time a skull and cross-bones painted on the side of the shed. Once the man-cha had been found, Steve hired Gonzalo Fernandez, brother of one of the other workers, to stay in the little hut at night to watch the site. With Laforet in town, Steve reasoned, there’d be a surge in looting activity. For a few days, at least, the harassment stopped.
But we didn’t for a moment think Guerra was gone.
Then one morning, there was the most terrible accident of all. There were signs that morning that someone had come onto the site at night, not from the trail but from the other side, from the road by the commune, climbing over the wall. From the top, a cap and jacket were spotted lying on the sand several yards up the incline. Someone had been digging on the far side of the huaca from where we were working. Fernandez, guarding the way from the trail and the side of the huaca we were working on, had heard nothing. Some °f the back dirt from our excavation had been dislodged and had fallen down the back of the hill. Steve climbed down to have a look at the damage, as the rest of us peered over the edge. Then Steve began tearing at the earth with his bare hands, calling for workers with shovels to come right away. They cleared away the sand as quickly as they could. To no avail. Rolando Guerra was unconscious, buried in sand, his hands still clutching a little copper statue of a Moche warrior. He died later that day in the hospital, a victim of his own greed.