Part: 4/5 (read part one)
Wordcount: 1,121
Synopsis: The next morning calls everything into question.
I wasn’t troubled when I awakened the next morning by the fire alone. I knew it had been a dream. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that the whole expedition hadn’t been a dream.
The morning broke pale and still. The winds of the previous night had changed the landscape around the lodge, heaping snow twelve feet high here, and thinning it almost to bare rock there. I hardly recognized the scenery as what we had traversed yesterday on the way back from the cave.
After breakfast we all geared up and bundled up to return to the dig. I pushed eerie memories of the night before into the back of my mind and focused on checking my photography equipment. I supposed they would want to look for more firepits in other chambers of the cave. Personally, I was more interested in the layout of the cave itself than any of the artifacts. Lyle said there might be quite a few chambers in the cave that had been blocked by ice and fallen rock. Maybe more tombs.
The trudge back to the cave was even more exhausting than it had been yesterday. We had to stop twice along the way. I slung my camera-bag over my shoulder and climbed a craggy boulder at our second stop. At the top I sat down and stared out over the bleak glaring vista of Mt. X. We were about a quarter mile above the timberline. I wondered what the mountains were like in the summer.
I heard Lyle and the guide talking below, standing a bit apart from the rest of the group. “What do you do with a six-thousand-year-old corpse, anyway?” the guide wondered.
“I don’t know a thing about mummies,” said Lyle. “I suppose we’ll need to leave it to the experts. This is…unprecedented, I’m pretty sure. Never heard of anything like it in my life.”
“I’ve always thought this mountain was a little strange,” said the guide. “I’ve seen a lot of mountains, but nothing quite like Mt. X.”
“How’s that?”
“I can’t put my finger on it.”
They resumed their trek and in about five minutes they reached the cave. Snow was drifted high around the entrance and they had to plow through it a bit before they could access the doorway again. I carefully followed Lyle down the ancient steps into the muffled silence of the cave. A lot of the openings that had allowed up some natural light yesterday had been covered with snow overnight. Brilliant lanterns supplied the need now as we ventured deeper into the caves.
The lights glared on the tarp stretched over the stone sarcophagus in the center of the chamber. I didn’t stare it at. They called me from this corner to that to take pictures as they uncovered the remains of a mosaic floor, a set of sealed stone jars, more fragments of copper bells. There was a gap between the back wall and a massive deposit of ice. They widened it with chisels and the blunted blows of icepicks and hammers. The restless beams of flashlights danced through the glacial mass.
“There’s a doorway back here,” Lyle told me stepping back out into the main chamber. “Doesn’t look like a big room, but it’s something.”
I joined them exploring the new room. Firepits, markings on the walls, the remains of a torch of some kind—this day would be filled with my usual fare. There was some comfort in that. Maye we would even find some bones if we kept looking. It was so much easier to analyze skeletal remains than what was lying out there in the sarcophagus.
It was almost time for lunch break when I returned to the main chamber. The sun had broken through the clouds outside and light filtered through the ice and snow where the rock split and cracked to let it in.
“A lot of new data from this little trip,” I said, coming up beside Lyle and replacing my lens-cap. “I didn’t know these people even existed.”
“Yeah. This should trigger quite a bit of follow-up study.” He reached down and lifted the edge of the tarp over the sarcophagus. He glanced up at me. “I want to check and be sure the elements aren’t getting to it,” he said.
I nodded. Once again, I prepared to view the content of the ancient coffin as he gathered the cover back. And once again, neither of us were prepared for what we saw.
It was empty.
I don’t remember what I did in the time following our shocking discovery. For all I know, I might have simply stood there in the middle of the chaos and panic, staring at the empty box. They questioned each other. They accused the locals. They once again tried to deduce how they could have been hoaxed. It hadn’t been a real body. Someone must have opened the coffin before they got there. Other things that made even less sense.
The rest of the day went on like this. We completely ruled out the possibility of anyone stealing the corpse. We were the only people up here and no one would have gone to all that trouble to do something that might destroy the most extraordinary discovery of the century, which we all would have been credited for. No animal could possibly have dragged it off into the snow overnight. No one had seen so much as a bird the whole time we were there, and there was zero evidence of the tarp having been tampered with.
“Six thousand years, and the body dissolves into thin air overnight. A rotten shame,” said Lyle as we stood near the fire-ring warming our frozen fingers with mugs of coffee.
Neither of us spoke for a while. We had said everything. Everyone had said everything several times and now everyone was quiet. They had gone off to study what remained of our extraordinary finds. They were off in the corners of the lodge classifying the fragments of things—things the mountain people had brought the boy king. Bone flutes, copper bells, jars…pretty things. But what were they truly worth, in the end?
“So,” said Lyle. “Here’s the story: mass hallucination. Altitude sickness. How’s that sound?”
“No good. I’ve got pictures,” I snarled.
“Go ahead and keep that to yourself. We’re going to glean a lot from this expedition. It’s a pretty fair dig, isn’t it? Who’s the wiser? The tomb was empty when we found it. What’s there to explain? Maybe the boy-king was a legend after all. You and I know what you and I know.”
He didn’t know the half of it. I still haven’t told him.