2 p.m.
Two decades after first reaching the alcove, standing on the ridge with Cope Butte rising ahead of him, Chuck fought the growing fogginess in his brain. How did Carmelita’s kidnapper know his exact location? He ran a mental inventory of the contents of his pockets and pack. The only technological device he had with him was his cell phone.
That had to be it.
Miguel knew how to disguise his voice using some sort of high-tech computer application—the same technological know-how enabled him to track the location of Chuck’s phone.
Every time Chuck had boasted about his Grand Canyon find over the years, he’d been careful to describe its location in vague terms, saying only that it was somewhere below Hermit’s Rest between Hermit and Monument basins. There was no reason to alert Miguel to the alcove’s exact location now, he decided. After peering up and down the empty trail, he tucked his phone out of sight beneath a waist-high boulder near the viewpoint. He left the trail and made his way across the rugged east face of the ridge.
He worked his way to the top of the cleft in the first cliff band. From there, he continued around the steep slope to the chimney that led to the top of the second cliff band on the north side of Cope Butte. As he had the first time and each visit since, he wedged himself into the three-sided break in the forty-foot cliff and climbed upward. Though the three tight walls were shaded, they were hot to the touch. Moving fast, he reached the top of the chimney in little more than a minute. He paused to shake the burning pain from his hands before traversing back around the slope to the east side of the butte’s summit massif.
A length of mottled-brown climbing rope, invisible from more than a few feet away, dangled from the mouth of the cavity to the base of the cliff. The desert-camouflaged rope held when he gave it a yank and leaned away from the cliff, putting his full weight on it.
Chuck left his original length of rope after his first descent from the alcove twenty years ago. He’d left a new rope in place of the preceding one each visit since. The last time he’d visited the cavern had been while working the latrine site at Hermit Creek more than two years ago—two-plus years of sun, wind, and rain having their way with the exposed length of rope now hanging before him. Of the three elements, sunshine was the most damaging. Day in and day out for the last two years, the sun’s ultraviolet rays had struck the rope’s nylon fibers, rendering them increasingly brittle and prone to breakage.
Chuck leaned back to study the route to the depression thirty feet above him. He’d barely managed his only unaided climb to the alcove as a wiry college kid twenty years ago, and he did not have the specialized climbing gear necessary for a protected solo climb to the cavity. His only option was to trust the rope. He gave it one more tug, took hold of it with both hands, and started climbing.
The bare rock wall, exposed to the sun, was blistering to the touch. He clasped the rope to his chest and used his feet to bear as much of his weight as possible, taking hold of outcrops only when necessary. While clinging to the rope and taking a short break halfway up the face, he heard the telltale pop-pop-pop of individual fibers giving way where the rope turned ninety degrees downward at the lip of the alcove.
Spurred upward by the sound of the failing rope, he reached the cavern seconds later and knelt on its floor, catching his breath and rubbing his singed fingertips together. He was dizzy and disconcerted in the stifling heat, but he was sweating heavily, which meant he wasn’t fully dehydrated.
The stone structure at the rear of the cavity appeared as it had when he’d first seen it, the intricate front wall, the sandstone-slab door with its leather knob. And there, still in place where he’d tucked it at the side of the closed door, was the dried grass stem that would have fallen to the floor of the alcove unnoticed had anyone opened the door since his last visit.
Chuck made his way to the rear of the cavern. Carmelita’s kidnapping notwithstanding, he was eager, after all these years, to lay hands on his discovery.
Though he’d always known he would disclose his find to the world someday, he’d put off doing so year after year, enjoying the secret, and recognizing that the news would change his life forever—akin, certainly, to the way the life of Waldo Wilcox, an elderly Utah rancher, had been disrupted after the rancher had disclosed the existence of extensive ruins left by Fremont Indians, contemporaries of the Anasazi, along Range Creek in south-central Utah.
Range Creek Canyon, encompassed within the boundaries of the rancher’s large private holdings, contained dozens of undisturbed Fremont ruins, a fact the rancher kept secret for more than half a century. Only with mortality staring him in the face did he tell officials of the artifact-filled canyon’s existence, after which he sold his ranch to the government, fearing the destruction he expected would come to the canyon if he left it to others to stumble upon after his death.
The sale of the ranch with its heretofore-unknown trove of artifacts made national headlines. Within months, archaeologists and treasure hunters overran the formerly secret canyon, leading the rancher to voice his regret at ever having told anyone about it.
Chuck had no specific need to publicly unveil the existence of his discovery for its protection. Its remote location in a national park guaranteed it never would stand in the way of development. Nor was anyone else likely to follow Chuck’s arduous route up the face of the remote butte just to peek inside the cavity. But Chuck knew his find would prove so transformative to current Anasazi scholarship that it demanded revelation. It was that knowledge as much as anything else, he suspected, that had led him to drop hints about his discovery at the start of his career, as if he knew, on some subconscious level, that if he bragged about the wondrousness of his find enough times to enough people, he’d eventually be required to tell the world of its existence by a gathering of forces beyond his control. Now, twenty years later, those forces had gathered.
Chuck slid the stone door from its slot and set it aside. He slipped on his headlamp, leaned inside the small room at the rear of the cavern—and there they were: two massive Anasazi pots resting, altar-like, above the dusty floor on matching stacks of river rocks.
Other Anasazi vessels, similar in size to the black-slipped Mesa Verde pots Chuck had unearthed near Chinle, were no more than two feet high by a foot across. Anything larger, when filled with grain or water, would have been impossible for even the strongest Anasazi to transport. Yet the twin clay storage jars in the granary were nearly double that size. Each was almost three feet high, at least a foot and a half across at its widest point, and a good fourteen inches across at its base. The pots were urn-shaped, with openings at their tops of perhaps twelve inches capped by slabs of fired clay formed into perfect circles.
Though the immensity of the pots was unheard of, it was their exterior decoration that made them truly incredible. Intricate paintings and carvings, none more than a quarter-inch high, covered every square inch of the vessels. The paintings were black, while the carvings showed up as the dark gray interior of the pots against their white-slipped exterior.
Like traditional Anasazi urns with their repeated geometric designs generally an inch or two high, the two vessels in the granary featured horizontal rows of geometric designs and artistic renderings. But each row of artwork on these vessels was only a fraction of an inch high, first a row of painting, then a row of carving, then another row of painting. Though only a few millimeters tall, the designs and pictures on the pots were startlingly detailed, and no two were repeated. Tiny squares, circles, ovals, trapezoids, and lines interwoven like rope. Miniature paintings of deer, cougars, snakes, frogs, birds, and desert rams, of bows and arrows, spears, and human stick figures, of Kokopelli, the flute-playing jester of Anasazi lore, playing his instrument while standing upright, leaning far forward, leaning back, seated, and lying down. Depictions of cliffs, mountains, canyons, trees, cacti, and streams, countless representations of the sun and moon, and tiny pinpricks of stars.
As he did each time he laid eyes on the pots, Chuck wondered how many hundreds or thousands of hours must have gone into their creation. How could the potter’s imagination have been so fertile as to cover the two urns with literally thousands of pictures and geometric designs without a single repetition?
Handprints and fingerprints on preserved pots indicated most Anasazi potters, like most modern Native American potters, were women. But everything Chuck’s fellow Southwest archaeologists suspected of Anasazi women—that they were task-oriented, primarily concerned with completing the job at hand—didn’t fit with the pots here in the small room at the back of the cavern. The beautifully decorated vessels in the alcove notwithstanding, everything the archaeological world knew about the Anasazi indicated that life for the ancient Indians of the Colorado Plateau had been short and brutish. The prevalence of child graves at Anasazi burial sites indicated a high infant-mortality rate. For those who reached adulthood, the average Anasazi lifespan was less than thirty-five years. The unending hard work required to survive resulted in bent and twisted spinal columns for most adults, whose teeth were worn down to shapeless stumps by the time they reached their mid-twenties as a result of their grit-laden diet based on sandstone-ground maize flour.
Many archaeologists believed the Anasazi had spent their entire lives working every day, dawn to dusk, before collapsing in exhausted heaps at night. The spiritual rooms known as kivas found in most Anasazi villages and the fine craftsmanship of items such as the burial shroud Chuck had found in the mining debris pile on the South Rim belied that assertion somewhat, while the amazing pots sitting before him blew that idea away entirely. The huge, painstakingly painted and carved urns would provide Marvin Begay and his fellow young Navajo believers with what they sought—incontrovertible proof of the Anasazi people’s heretofore unacknowledged cultural progression.
The question still remained, however: as fine as the two pots were, why had an ancient potter or group of potters spent so much time crafting them? The answer, without doubt, was that the urns contained objects even more fantastic than the vessels themselves.