From the midden, Carn Scrija had seemed a distant promontory. I’d expected it would take the better part of an hour to reach it.
But distances on the moor were confoundingly deceptive, even in broad daylight. Again and again, we’d cross what appeared to be a level stretch of heather and bracken, an ancient field system hemmed in by stone walls, and without warning the moor would dip into a shadowy hollow, or rise to a stony outcropping topped by cairns or huge boulders. Now and then a shadow flickered at the corner of my vision and I’d freeze, scanning the moor for some sign that we were being followed. I’d see only a solitary crow or chough rise from the undergrowth, black wings flapping until it caught an updraft and glided silently into the blue sky.
Even more unsettling than the moor’s weirdly elastic sense of space was the noise that echoed down from Carn Scrija—a deep, bellowing hoot that with a shift in the wind would rise to a sustained, blood-freezing scream. Sam seemed completely unperturbed, but I began to wish I had earplugs.
Also, a pair of sunglasses. My face grew raw from the wind, and my eyes teared from the harsh sunlight beating down on the overgrown wasteland. Sam, on the other hand, navigated the field systems and massive stones nimbly as a hare. She’d disappear behind one massive boulder, then reappear atop another one a good fifty feet away. I wondered if those shaman lessons had paid off.
“Nearly there!”
I shaded my eyes and spotted Sam clambering down from a rock the size of bus.
“You must be part goat,” I gasped, and stopped to catch my breath.
“This is where the giants lived,” Sam said. She took a hand-rolled cigarette and a lighter from my leather jacket pocket, then ducked her head to light up. “Jack the Giant Killer? Those were Cornish giants. People thought that’s where the rocks came from, giants trying to bash each other in the head. Lots of legends like that here.” She spun on her heel and walked on, pausing to tag a boulder. “Lots of rocks.”
Soon we reached the foot of Carn Scrija. The hillside was scored with dark tracks left by runoff from the storm. Loose scree was everywhere, making the walk even more treacherous. The sun had moved westward, much closer to the horizon; directly above us, the towering natural fortress blotted out most of the sky. Something had caused Sam’s ebullience to ebb: the presence of Carn Scrija itself. She walked, hands jammed in pockets, her pale face somber.
“The main way in is here.” She stopped in front of a squarish boulder at least twice my height. “That portal I told you about, what opened in the storm—it’s up there.”
She pointed to a heap of stones upslope, about twenty yards away. The stones looked like rubble left over from an avalanche. She took a breath and added, “There’s another burial I found in there.”
“What kind of burial?”
“A skeleton. A king, maybe. It’s in the first side chamber, where the menhir was.”
“Menhir?”
“Standing stone. That’s what blocked the chamber.”
I joined her at the entry. The boulder nearly hid an alcove that opened onto a doorway like that of the barrow, only larger, formed of stones with a granite lintel laid across the top. An impenetrable crown of blackthorns topped the entire structure. A cold draft blew from the entrance, stirring the dead grass at our feet.
I stepped beneath the lintel. Beyond was a darkness so absolute that when I held my outstretched arm in front of me, I couldn’t see my fingertips.
I looked back at Sam. “I sure hope you have a flashlight.”
“Of course.” She pulled a small flashlight from her bag and handed it to me. “I have two.”
She flourished an impressive lantern, a six-inch lens attached to a large-cell battery. “Come on. I’ll go first.”
She set her bag on the ground just inside the fogou and walked on. Her shadow danced across the walls as she swept her flashlight back and forth. I hesitated and glanced back.
The hill sloped down to the open moor, where boulders and stone walls threw long shadows across the gorse and bracken. I couldn’t shake the sense that someone was there, but I saw nothing. Even the birds had disappeared. I switched on my flashlight, set my bag beside Sam’s, and followed her into the fogou.
This passage was wider than the one we’d been in yesterday, and tall enough that I could walk upright. The floor was dry, composed of packed earth and patches where winkle shells had been pulverized to bluish sand. My flashlight’s beam revealed intricately constructed granite walls—dark gray or buff-colored blocks, and occasionally unshaped slabs, all fitted together to form walls that curved gradually upward to the ceiling. Tiny stones and sand filled the cracks between the stones. It was all joined so tightly that you couldn’t slip a bit of paper between them, or a blade of grass.
“How the hell did they do this?”
“Same way you build an igloo,” said Sam. “Only this doesn’t melt.”
After several yards, the passage began to curve to one side. When I looked back, I could no longer see the entrance.
“There’s the first chamber.” Sam waved her torch to illuminate an alcove that opened off the central passage. “Three more and we come to the one I just found. What I want to show you is just beyond.”
I nodded curtly. My mouth was dry; I no longer trusted myself to speak. The air moved around us, though I could see no gaps in the wall, or anything that resembled another passage that might lead out into the air. Sam’s hair lifted from her neck, and I felt my hair rise as we passed one alcove and then the next, Sam counting off each as we passed. Otherwise, the passage was so silent I began to fight an unreasoning, terrible fear that I had gone deaf.
Sam pulled up short and looked at me, nodding.
“I know,” she said softly. “It makes your flesh crawl. In here’s the burial, but it’s just bones. Bones can’t hurt you.”
A seven-foot slab of rock, like one of the upright stones at the entrance, lay on the floor, surrounded by grit and gray dust. It had blocked a low, crescent-shaped opening in the wall, like the mouth of a beehive oven. Sam stooped, got to her knees, and ducked through. An instant later her flashlight’s beam blinded me.
“You can stand once you’re inside.” Her voice gave a hollow, booming echo; it no longer sounded like a girl’s voice, but a man’s.
I bent and crawled through the opening. The air in here was danker than that of the passage, with a very faint redolence of decay; less a smell than a fetid taste at the back of my throat. Sam’s strong hand grasped mine and pulled me to my feet.
We stood inside a round chamber, fifteen feet across. I swept my light across the walls. I couldn’t see anything until Sam turned to shine her torch beside my feet.
“There he is,” she murmured.
I looked down and immediately jerked backward, bumping into the wall. On the floor was a human skeleton—pale femurs and ribs and tibia, scapula and fibula and vertebra. It lay on its side, the bones of its arms outstretched toward the wall. Beneath the ribcage, its legs were drawn up as if in agony. Several of the tiny finger bones had shattered. The skull had detached from the top of the vertebral column, gleaming like a pallid moon in the light from Sam’s torch. There were no grave goods. No flints or ax heads, no broken pots or knives, none of the things I associated with ancient burials from movies and books.
I inched closer and swept my flashlight across the remains. Except for the broken finger bones, the skeleton seemed intact. There was no evidence of any kind of wound, or trace of animal tooth marks. The leg bones were long, as were those outstretched arms. The skull had no missing teeth that I could see.
I looked at Sam. “Why did they bury people here? Would they just leave the body in a chamber? Wouldn’t animals get at them?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t bury them. They did excarnation. Afterward they’d arrange the bones in a grave.”
I circled the skeleton slowly, tracing its outlines with my flashlight. “What’s excarnation?”
“Sky burial. They’d put the bodies up on the stones in a high place, like a cairn, or Carn Scrija, and let the birds pick them clean. That’s another reason it’s bad luck to kill a chough.”
“Excarnation.” I recalled those four bodies in the scrap of film left in the Steenbeck’s guillotine splicer, each corpse laid out on top of a large flat stone.
“It was common during the neolithic and Bronze Age,” Sam went on. She seemed reluctant to approach the skeleton, cocking her head to stare at its skull. “I think he must have been a king. He looks tall, right? People back then didn’t grow very tall.”
I knelt and trained my flashlight on the sternum. Gray shreds clung to the tines of its ribs. I touched one dusty fragment. It disintegrated into threads of blue and white. Remnants of clothing. I looked up at Sam.
“I don’t think the birds got him. I think he was walled up in here.”
Her eyes widened. I nodded grimly and drew my flashlight’s beam across the contorted landscape of bones, broken fingers scratching vainly at the stone floor. “See those threads in the rib cage? That’s some kind of fabric. I don’t care how well preserved this site is, there’s no way cloth would have survived for a thousand years.”
I stood and circled the figure once more. At its head I crouched and set down my flashlight, so that the skull seemed to glow from within. I ran a hand across the smooth curve of bone, traced its eye sockets and ear cavities with a finger. Last of all I drew my fingertips along that grinning mouth.
“They probably wouldn’t have had all their teeth, either,” I said, then froze.
Beneath the jutting pelvic bone, something shone, pale yellow, in the light. I moved closer, maneuvering my hand between the ribs until my fingers closed on something flat and slick—a laminated card. I gazed up at Sam.
“And they definitely wouldn’t have had this.”
I stood, holding it between my fingers so that the flashlight picked out a logo, unfaded despite the decades, and the printed words beneath.
Leith S. Carlisle
British Society of Cinematographers
“Poor bastard,” I said. He’d never made it to Tangiers.