Part: 1/5
Wordcount: 1,120
Synopsis: A photographer working on an archaeological site uncovers a mysterious tomb.
They had found the tomb of a boy king. Almost all cultures have a legend of a boy king at some point, like the lady warrior, or the prophet bard. The most notable thing about this lost mountain people was that they always had a boy king. Or so tradition said. What became of these monarchs when they grew up, no one knew.
We waited until winter. It had been a summertime avalanche that uncovered the site. Everyone was familiar with the seasonal rhythm of the mountains. We wanted things to be a bit more stable before we ventured up to the saddleback of Mt. X to excavate. I couldn’t blame the local people for not recognizing the momentum of their discovery. I didn’t either—not until I had spent my whole flight reading through the stack of reports on the ancient people who lived and died in that mountain range six-thousand years ago.
The walls of ice and rock stifled the roar of the wind. I huddled in the shelter of the glacial battlements the avalanche had partially broken down. Fiddling with my camera on my knee, I watched the slow progress of chisels on the ancient seal of the royal mausoleum. I had photographed so many sites before, but I never had the sophistication it took to see the profundity in faded clay beads and shards of pottery. Skeletal remains were only marginally more interesting. I never did understand what was so sacred about ancient fire-pits. Ashes, of all things, seemed to astound archeologists the most.
But here I was again, stiff as a corpse frozen where I perched on the icy boulders, watching, waiting for my turn to step in and record the findings. I pulled my dripping braid out of the multilayered collar of my coat, the color of winter-kill, and matted with ice from the climb. Just then, a heavy strip of rust-eaten metal cracked and fell away from the seam of the coffin. A brief silence hung in the cave and then everyone moved forward to get a grip on the edge of the lid. I stood, slipping the strap on the camera around my neck and approaching.
Wheezing and muttering to each other, the team raised the massive stone lid and shuffled to the side to set it down on the floor of the cave. I had expected to see a second lid revealed by the first—perhaps gold-plated and ornamented with an idealized death-mask. Instead there was a curtain of sheepskin, painted with some manner of crest.
I raised the camera, adjusting lens and flash-bulb as the rest of the team congregated again around the tomb. The nail heads crumbled away as they lifted the edge of the hide onto a sheet of plexiglass. Others freed it from the opposite side as they slid the sheet under it. Bits of leather flaked off and cracked even with their tedious caution. Slowly they lowered a second sheet to cover it, flattening the warped and brittle material between the sheets of glass. With the same extreme care, they lifted the hide from the opening of the coffin and I stepped in again, camera at the ready.
What appeared to me in the echoing hollow of the coffin chilled my blood deeper than the mountain wind could bite.
With the seal dated almost four-thousand years back, nothing could have made less sense than what we all saw that late afternoon in January of Two-thousand Five. But no one remembers any differently than I do, and I’ll never forget.
He was the most beautiful child I had ever seen—eight or nine years old by my estimation—with markedly fine and regal facial features, almost resembling a young woman more than a boy. The hair that some reverent hands had arranged over his shoulders was lush and black, curling and glossy with the oil of life and health. His soft pearlescent skin filled out his face and smooth white hands, but death’s grim veil aged him beyond his living years. My fingers were ridged on my camera, but I leaned closer to observe the delicate tinge of mauve along the lines of the tremendously long lashes, and the hint of rose in the lips. He was dressed in a long white robe and an ornate silver circlet held a brilliant jewel in the center of his high forehead.
The first comment I heard from the team was, “It’s a hoax,” another claimed it was not a body at all, but a glass figure to represent him, perhaps containing the bones. But it was the body. And by the end of the discourse, we all believed it was the body—somehow flawlessly preserved under the strange conditions of the mountainside tomb.
“We certainly can’t move it,” Lyle was saying into his radio. “We’re going to find a way to seal the tomb back up until we can get some chemical analysts up here. We need to try to keep the conditions steady. It would be a shame, after four-thousand years—”
“We’re not going to be able to replace the seal until we can get some plaster shipped up here. That could take a day or two,” someone said behind me.
“We’ll see what happens then. It least it’s not going to get above fifteen degrees for the next couple of days.”
Should they replace the lid? The lid was fragile, and without the seal, did little good. They stretched a tarp over the opening and staked it down. For the rest of the evening, we hovered over the lid, “photograph this, Amy.” “We need a picture of that.” Patterns and pictograms, nonsense in cuneiform. That child in the mausoleum Lyle leaned his back against looked like he had died minutes ago, but if we scoured the binder full of reports and collected images, perhaps we could identify the approximate era when this script was written.
Dusk fell. We packed up and trudged back down the slope to the lodge. It was a bit of a hike to the saddleback. We probably shouldn’t have stayed out so long. Along the way the team discussed other digs, other times we’ve ventured into dangerous extreme places in the name of history and anthropology. They talked about the scripts we had found and theorized about their origins. But mostly, they talked about ashes.
No one talked about the remains.
All the while I kept slowing and lagging behind the others. Sometimes I stopped altogether and looked back at the bleak face behind us. I kept feeling like we had unthinkingly left something behind. But we couldn’t have. We were quite thorough clearing our equipment away. We left nothing but the tarp.