A dark, muddy, musty-smelling passage, low and narrow, with a cold breeze rising up out of it, lay before them. Through swerves and curves it led onward for some unknown distance into the heart of the mountain on a gradual sloping descent. Because of his height, Simmilgord had to crouch from the start. The floor of the passage was a thick, spongy layer of muddy soil; the sides and roof of it had been carved, none too expertly, from the rock of the mountain above them. The entranceway, the Hjort told them, had now and then been blocked by the backwash from heavy storms, and had had to be cleared at least five times in the last two thousand years, most recently a century ago. When they had gone about fifteen feet in, Prasilet Sungavon indicated a crude niche cut into the tunnel wall. “I found remarkable things in there,” he said, without explanation. “And there, and there,” pointing at two more niches further along. “You’ll see.”
The air in the tunnel was cold and dank. From somewhere deeper in came the sound of steadily dripping water, and occasionally the quick clatter of wings as some cave-dwelling creature, invisible in the dimness, passed swiftly by overhead. Other than that, and the hoarse, ragged breathing of the Hjort, ill was silent in here. After about ten minutes the passage expanded abruptly into a high-roofed circular chamber, lined all about by a coarse and irregular wall of badly matched blocks of gray stone, that could very readily be regarded as a place of interment. And against the left side of it sat a rectangular lidless Dink-marble box, three or four feet high and about seven feet long, that was plausibly a sarcophagus.
“This is it,” said the Hjort grandly. “The tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn!”
“May I?” Lutiel Vengifrons said, and, without waiting for a reply, stepped forward and peered into the box. After a moment Simmilgord, more diffidently, went up alongside him.
The sarcophagus, if that indeed was what it was, was empty. That was no surprise. They had not expected to find Dvorn lying here with his hands crossed on his chest and a benign smile on his Pontifical features. The stone box was roughly carved, with clearly visible chisel-marks all along its bare sides. There did not seem to be any inscriptions on it or any sort of ornamentation.
“A tomb, yes, very possibly,” said Lutiel Vengifrons after a while. He made the concession sound like a grudging one. “But just how, I wonder, were you able to identify this place specifically as the tomb of Dvorn?”
His tone was cool, skeptical, challenging. Unflustered, the Hjort replied, “We know that he was born in Kesmakuran, and that after his glorious century-long reign as Pontifex he died here. There is no doubt of that. It has always been understood locally that this is his tomb. That is the tradition. No one questions it. No other city in the world makes any such claim. Plainly this is an archaic site, going back to the earliest days of the settlement of Majipoor. The effort that must have been involved at that early time in digging such a long passageway indicates that this could only be the tomb of someone important. I ask you: Who else would that be, if not the first Pontifex?”
The logic did not seem entirely impeccable. Simmilgord, who had his own ideas about the unquestioning acceptance of local tradition as historical certainty, began to say something to that effect, but Lutiel nudged him ungently in the ribs before he could get out more than half a syllable. For the moment it was Lutiel who was conducting the interrogation. Prasilet Sungavon continued, still unperturbed, “Of course the body had disintegrated in the course of so long a span of time. But certain relics remained. I will show them to you when we come out of here.”
“What about the lid?” Lutiel Vengifrons said. “Surely nobody would bury such an important personage in a sarcophagus that had no lid.”
“There,” said the Hjort, aiming his torch into a dark corner of the tomb-chamber. Against the far wall lay what must once have been a long stone slab, now cracked into three pieces and some bits of rubble.
“Tomb-robbers?” Simmilgord asked, unable to keep silent any longer.
“I think not,” the Hjort said sharply. “We are not that sort of folk, here in Kesmakuran. Doubtless some visitors long ago lifted the lid to make certain that Dvorn’s body really did lie here, and as they carried it to one side they dropped it and it broke.”
“No doubt that is so,” said Simmilgord, working hard to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
He could feel himself slipping into a profound bleakness of spirit. This dark, muddy hole in the ground—this miserable crude stone coffin with its shattered lid—these unprovable conjectures of Prasilet Sungavon—how did any of this constitute any sort of substantive information about the life of the Pontifex Dvorn? He wondered how he and Lutiel could possibly fulfill even the slightest part of the scientific mission that had taken them halfway across the continent from Sisivondal. It all seemed hopeless. There was so little to work with, and what little there was undoubtedly was contaminated by the passionate desire of the Kesmakuran folk to inflate its significance into something of major historical importance. Right here at the beginning of everything Simmilgord saw only disaster encroaching on him from all sides.
Prasilet Sungavon, though, stood before them smiling an immense Hjortish smile, a foot wide from ear to ear. Obviously he was very pleased with himself and the cavern over which he presided.
With a brisk professionalism that belied his gloom Simmigord said, “Well, now, is there anything else we should see?”
“Not here. At my house. Let us go.”
One room of Prasilet Sungavon’s house had been turned into a kind of Dvorn museum. Three cases contained artifacts that had been taken from the tomb, most of them by the Hjort himself, some by the anonymous predecessors of his who had poked around in the tomb in the course of the previous thousand years. “These,” he said resonantly, indicating several small yellowish objects, “are some of the Pontifex’s teeth. And this is a lock of his hair.”
“Still retaining some color after twelve thousand years,” said Lutiel. “Remarkable!”
“Yes. Verging on the miraculous, I would say. These, I am told with good authority, are his knucklebones. Nothing else of the body remains. But how fortunate we are to have these few relics.”
“Which you say can be identified as those of the Pontifex Dvorn,” Simmilgord said. “May I ask, by what evidence?”
“The inscriptions from the tomb,” said the Hjort. “I will show you those tomorrow.”
“Why not now?”
“The hour grows late, my friend. Tomorrow.”
There was no mistaking the inflexibility in his tone. Tomorrow it would have to be. The Hjort had the upper hand, and it seemed that he meant to keep it that way.
It was a depressing evening. Neither man had much to say, and little of that was optimistic. What had been put forth to them as the tomb of Dvorn was nothing much more than a muddy unadorned underground chamber that could have been built for almost any purpose at any time in the past twelve thousand years, the putative teeth and hair and bones that Prasilet Sungavon had shown them were absurdities, and the Hjort’s proprietary attitude toward the site was certainly going to make any sort of real probing very difficult. There hadn’t even been any Hjorts on Majipoor in the early centuries of the Pontificate—it was Lord Melikand who had brought all the non-human races here, thousands of years later, an amply chronicled fact—and yet here was this one behaving as though he owned the place. That was likely to be an ongoing problem.
The inscriptions from the tomb, at least, provided one mildly hopeful sign when Prasilet Sungavon let them see them the next day. From a locked cabinet the Hjort drew five small plaques of yellow stone. He had found them, he said, hidden away in the niches leading up to the tomb-chamber. Their surfaces appeared to have been damaged by unskillful cleaning, but nevertheless it was possible to see that they bore lettering, worn and indistinct, in some kind of barely familiar angular script that at even such brief inspection as this Simmilgord believed could be accepted—with a stretch—as an early version of the writing still in use in modern times.