She realized that the murmur of conversation around her had died away. Everyone was staring at the fire, absorbed in their own thoughts. Nora glanced at the excited Holroyd, pleased that the remote-sensing specialist wasn’t having second thoughts. But Holroyd was no longer staring at the fire: he was staring beyond it, into the darkness of the cliff face.
Nora noticed Aragon look up, then Black. Following their gaze, she again saw a flash of light inside one of the caves beyond the fire, fitful but unmistakable. There was a faint clicking noise, and more yellow flashes. Then a lone figure resolved itself, gray on black, against the darkness of the cave. As it stepped forward out of the shadow of the sandstone bluff, Nora recognized the gaunt features of Ernest Goddard. He came silently toward the group, his white hair painted crimson by the fire, staring at them through the flames and smoke. He moved something within his hand, and the flashes returned yet again, flickering through his narrow fingers.
He stood for a long moment, holding each person in turn in his gaze. Then he slipped whatever was in his hand into a leather bag and tossed it over the flames to Aragon, closest on the circle. “Rub them together,” he said, his whispery voice barely audible above the crackle of the campfire. “Then pass them around.”
When Aragon handed her the bag, Nora reached inside and felt two smooth, hard stones. She drew them out and held them to the firelight: beautiful specimens of quartz, river-tumbled by the look of them, carved with the ritual spiral design that signified the sipapu,the Anasazi entrance to the underworld.
In that instant, she recognized them for what they were. Pulling them out of the glare of the fire, she rubbed them together, watching the miraculous internal sparks light up the hearts of the stones, flickering fiercely in the dark. Watching her, Goddard nodded.
“Anasazi lightning stones,” he said in his quiet voice.
“Are they real?” asked Holroyd, taking them from Nora and holding them to the firelight.
“Of course,” said Goddard. “They come from a medicine cache found in the great kiva at Keet Seel. We used to believe the Anasazi used them in rain ceremonies to symbolize the generation of lightning. But we aren’t sure anymore. The carved spiral represents the sipapu.But then again, it might represent a water spring. Again, nobody knows for sure.”
He coughed lightly. “And that’s what I’m here to say to you. Back in the sixties, we thought we knew everything about the Anasazi. I remember when the great southwestern archaeologist Henry Ash urged his students to seek other venues. ‘It’s a sucked orange,’ he said.
“But now, after three decades of mysterious and inexplicable discoveries, we realize that we know next to nothing about the Anasazi. We don’t understand their culture, we don’t understand their religion. We cannot read their petroglyphs and pictographs. We do not know what languages they might have spoken. We do not know why they covered the Southwest with lighthouses, shrines, roads, and signaling stations. We do not know why, in 1150, they suddenly abandoned Chaco Canyon, burned the roads, and retreated to the most remote, inaccessible canyons in the Southwest, building mighty fortresses in the cliff faces. What had happened? Who were they afraid of? A century later, they abandoned even those, leaving the entire Colorado Plateau and San Juan Basin, some fifty thousand square miles, uninhabited. Why? The fact is, the more we discover, the more intractable these questions become. Some archaeologists now believe we will neverknow the answers.”
His voice had dropped even further. Despite the warmth of the fire, Nora couldn’t help shivering.
“But I have a feeling,” he whispered, his voice weaker, hoarser. “I have a convictionthat Quivira will contain answers to these mysteries.”
He glanced at each of them again, in turn. “All of you are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. You’re headed for a site that may prove to be the biggest archaeological discovery of the decade, perhaps even the century. But let’s not fool ourselves. Quivira will be a place of mystery as well as revelation. It may well pose as many questions as it answers. And it will challenge you, physically and mentally, in ways you cannot yet imagine. There will be moments of triumph, moments of despair. But you must never forget that you are representing the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute. And what the Institute represents is the very highest standard of archaeological research and ethical conduct.”
He fixed Nora with his gaze. “Nora Kelly has been with the Institute only five years, but she has proven herself an excellent field archaeologist. She is in charge, and I have put my complete trust in her. I don’t want anyone to forget that. When my daughter joins you in Page, she will also report to Dr. Kelly; there can be no confusion of command.”
He took a step away from the fire, back toward the darkness of the overhanging bluff. Nora leaned forward, straining to hear, as his whisper mingled with the muttering fire.
“There are some who do not believe the lost city of Quivira exists. They think this expedition is foolhardy, that I’m throwing my money away. There is even fear this will prove an embarrassment to the Institute.”
He paused. “But the city is there. You know it, and I know it. Now go and find it.”
13
THE EXPEDITION PASSED THROUGH PAGE, ARIZONA, at two o’clock that afternoon, the horse trailers followed by the pickup and the van, threading caravan-style down through town to the marina, where they edged into the gigantic asphalt parking lot facing Lake Powell. Page was one of the new Western boomtowns that had sprung up like a rash on the desert, built yesterday and already shabby. Its trailer parks and prefabs sprawled down toward the lakeshore through a barren landscape of greasewood and saltbush. Beyond the town rose the three surreal smokestacks of the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, each climbing almost a quarter mile into the sky, issuing plumes of white steam.
Beyond the town lay the marina and Lake Powell itself, a green sinuosity worming its way into a fantastical wilderness of stone. It was huge: three hundred miles long, with thousands of miles of shoreline. The lake was a breathtaking sight, a sharp contrast to the banality of Page. To the east, the great dome of Navajo Mountain rose like a black skullcap, the ravines at its top still wedged with streaks of snow. Farther up the lake, the buttes, mesas, and canyons were layered one against the other, the lake itself forming a pathway into an infinity of sandstone and sky.
Staring at the sight, Nora shook her head. Thirty-five years before, this had been Glen Canyon, which John Wesley Powell had called the most beautiful canyon in the world. Then the Glen Canyon dam was built, and the waters of the Colorado River slowly rose to form Lake Powell. The once silent wilderness, at least around Page, was now filled with the roar of cigarette boats and jetskis, the sounds mingling with the smell of exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, and gasoline. The place had the surreal air of a settlement perched at the end of the known world.
Beside her, Swire frowned out the window. They had talked horses most of the trip, and Nora had come to respect the cowboy. “I don’t know how these horses are going to like floating on a barge,” he said. “We might have ourselves a surprise swimming party.”
“We’ll be able to drive the trailers right onto the barge and unhook them,” Nora replied. “They never have to be unloaded.”
“Until the far side, you mean.” Swire fingered the heavy mustache that drooped beneath his nose. “Don’t see any sign of that Sloane gal, do you?”
Nora shrugged. Sloane Goddard was supposed to fly directly into Page and meet them at the marina, but there was no sign of any Seven Sisters sorority types among the fleshy, beer-bellied throngs milling around the docks. Perhaps she was waiting in the air-conditioned fastness of the manager’s office.