Synopsis: Amy returns to the mountain range on her own time.
I returned to the region in summer of two-thousand six. There were several sites of archeological interest in the valley, and I didn’t have much else to do. It’s really a beautiful place in the summer. The scenery kind of made me wish I was a nature or travel photographer instead. I took some time off while I was there to hike and gave myself permission to snap some photographs recreationally, which I hadn’t done in a while.
I was making my way through a narrow winding pathway through a dark stand of conifers when something caught my eye from beyond, through the trees. At first it confused me, so I kept moving toward it. As I got closer to the edge of the trees, it appeared as a bright orange blaze, like a silent fire consuming the clearing.
The trees thinned out and I found I had reached a high slope. The air was cold and bit my face as I emerged from the shelter of the pines. I stopped and gazed in awe. Never in my life had I seen so many poppies.
To this day, no one has been able to translate the scripts we found in the caves of Mt. X. The story of the people who once lived and died there may never be told. But I’m convinced I know something of them no one else does. I met their king one night. There was a blizzard and neither of us could sleep.
I don’t know what happened to him after that. He was driven by a longing for his lost people. Maybe he went to search the world over for them, or maybe he was simply looking for a warmer place to sleep. Whatever his quest, I wish him well.
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.
I had been photographing sites for years. I had been to a lot of places and seen a lot of strange things. You’re bound to encounter strange things when you make it your life’s work to pry into the buried chambers of the past. But the voice of a child in the silence startled me because there were no children at the lodge while we were staying there. And I had thought I was alone.
He was standing across the fire from me, gazing levelly through the soft amber light. Once I pulled myself away from the eyes my attention flew to the circlet glimmering on his forehead. My vision adjusted so I could see him more clearly and the impossible became unmistakable. The little king had left his bed.
Strange in retrospect, I didn’t freak out as much as you would think. The first reaction I noticed was a profound sadness that crept up from deep inside me. What did it mean to a child to be undead, uncorrupted, and abandoned in an icy cave on a high mountainside? Poor lonely little boy. Poor forgotten waif. He couldn’t sleep.
Finally, my rationality returned and I shook my head, getting up, turning away with every intention of ignoring the apparition and going back to my room for the night. But as I made my way out of the ring of rustic couches around the roaring fire, I felt someone close behind me and whirled on him.
“Leave me alone,” I snapped.
Tears glowed in his huge dark eyes as he backed away from me. “Are you going to leave too?” he asked in a voice broken with anticipation of the answer.
I shook my head, trying to reply, but my voice didn’t come. I stood frozen in speechless horror as the childish ghoul remained a few paces from me, shivering in the cold, eyes running with ancient tears but continuously gazing up at me. His beautiful face pleaded with me. He wasn’t a deceptive devil of ashes and ice, he was a troubled child. Had he come out before to haunt the mountain climbers and the people who stayed in this lodge? Had anyone ever acknowledged him?
“Go back where you came from. I don’t talk to dead people,” I said, still hoping to awaken myself from this dream.
His breath hitched. “Dead?”
He didn’t know. At that, my resolve crumbled. I reached out for him. “No. I didn’t mean that, honey. Come here.”
He lowered his head, sending flashes of firelight from the stone on his brow, and glanced, uncertain, at my hand. Then he came toward me and I gently pulled him in. His head wasn’t even as high as my chest. I wondered how old he was. The small body was warm and surprisingly solid under the robes he wore, and his hair was thick and soft, but wet with melted snow.
“Did you walk all the way from…?” I didn’t go on. Instead I led him to the couch and invited him to sit beside me in the warmth of the fire. He pulled up his feet, curling into a ball and leaning against me, gazing with still-watery eyes into the dancing flames. “You want to tell me a few things?” I asked.
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe why you can’t sleep?”
He blinked and laid his head on my shoulder. “I don’t like the dreams.”
“What dreams?”
“I dream about my people. They come into the cave and they go away again. They pretend they don’t see me. They act like they don’t know who I am. I miss them. They don’t come anymore.”
They’re dead! All his people are dead. How long has it been? How long has he been dreaming of them coming to his grave to mourn him as dead? But I didn’t ask him. Instead I asked him what any good archeologist would have asked. “What were your people like?”
He was quiet for a moment. “They made flutes from bones and played beautiful music. They were strong and built houses in the sides of the mountain and walls along the crests of the hills. They tamed the sheep and horses and planted banks of poppies just for the joy of seeing them bloom.
“And they wanted a king. They choose me to lead them. Everyone was pleased with me, and everyone knew my voice in a crowd. They loved to hear me laugh and would come and stay with me for hours just to listen to the things I told them.
“But after a while, they seemed unhappy. They stopped talking to me and talked only to each other. The men started talking about other places, and how their leaders were different. And they decided they didn’t want me to lead them anymore.”
He fell quiet and I sat thinking, trying to imagine the thriving civilization that must have been on this saddleback thousands of years ago. The poppies, the music, the horses—it was all gone now. Nothing remained but drifted snow, and the buried ruins in the mountainside. But why?
“Well,” I said at last. “Maybe they thought it would be better to have a leader who wasn’t a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
And that was when I realized he wasn’t.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and scowled at the fire. “But that was one of the things they said. They wanted a man to rule them. They wanted a king who would be wise and mighty. But years passed—many years, and I never became what they wanted. Other places they had seen had men leading them with war machines and gold and concubines. Other places they had seen had many kings in the time when they only had one. But what they wanted more than anything else was a king they could put in the ground and venerate as a man gone away. They wanted to have a treasury of dead kings. Like the other places.”
I couldn’t process all he was saying. But I kept gathering it like my files of photographs. I could analyze it later. “So, what did they do?”
For a long time, he didn’t answer. The wind moaned around the lodge and sang like a ghost in the chimney. Finally, he drew a small sobbing breath. “They put me in the cave and they told me I was dead.”
“They made you stay in the cave?”
He nodded. He rubbed his wrist across his eyes and ducked his head, unable to go on for a while. Then he took a deep breath. “They came now and then. They burned herbs and resin and carved things on the walls, but they didn’t talk to me. They didn’t even look at me. And they never stayed for very long. Sometimes they would leave me things. Bone flutes and copper bells and jars full of flowers—pretty things. But I really just wanted them to stay.” Then he looked up at me. “Are you going to leave too?”
I smoothed my hand through his long wavy hair and wrapped my arm around him. He settled against my shoulder again. “Not tonight,” I said.
So, they had always had a boy king. The same king for years—decades? Centuries? How long had he lingered in the form of a child, leading the people in the saddleback of Mt. X? How long did it take for them to become discontented with him, in his staunch unwillingness to change, to age, to die, to decay like the other kings they had seen? When had they abandoned him in the cave and when had the last of his people come to pay homage at his tomb? I didn’t ask him. He was tired. I let him sleep.
Synopsis: Amy and Lyle go over the pictures from the day’s work. A restless night follows.
“Man, that’s about enough to knock me out,” said Lyle, pulling off his heavy knit cap as we staggered into the lodge at long last. None of us could really claim to be mountaineers. People who probably could had reassured us that nothing between the site and the lodge was particularly rugged. It was more rugged than any of us.
The lodge was a sprawling building with walls like a fortress. Constructed partially from native rock and partially from massive timber, it had withstood the worst Mt. X could conjure. Yet, standing in the fire room at its heart, I could still hear the wind wailing and roaring through the saddleback. A fine grit of ice crystals raced out of the dark and dashed against the heavy glass in the windows. I untangled my musty scarf from my wet hair and unzipped my coat while Lyle conversed with our guide. The guide was a wind-burned St. Bernard of a man with a restless shock of red hair and bright blue eyes shrunken by perpetual snow-blindness. He was close-mouthed about the boy king. He only knew as much as we did.
I was waiting for my turn with Lyle. The rest of the team broke up and migrated out to their designated places in the lodge for the night. Lyle and I had developed some rapport early on this trip. I reminded him of his sister back in Edinburgh. He was the information hub for the expedition. I’ve always liked information, especially when the inexplicable happens. Surely, Lyle had a theory.
He bid the guide goodnight and turned to me. He could see the questions in my face, and now that the exertion of the hike had worn off, he seemed ready to talk about the day’s findings. “Got the photographs?”
“Do you want to review them?” I asked, repositioning the strap of my camera bag on my shoulder.
He pulled back the wet sleeve of his coat and scowled at his watch. “We’ve got time to take a look over them.”
Good. Then we can get the whole thing out in the open. I returned to my room to change into dry clothes and pick up my laptop. It was a small room with a bed that creaked like a nest of racoons and a tiny window, plastered with snow. I emptied my camera, pocketing the memory card and leaving the battery to charge. The cold drained it fast. Lyle said to meet back in the fire-room. I grabbed my laptop and went back out.
He was waiting for me at a table by the wall, surrounded by stapled stacks of paper and a glowing e-reader. He cleared a spot for my laptop and I joined him. As I opened the laptop I glanced toward the windows. “How bad is the storm?”
“Bad enough that the locals admit it’s a storm. It won’t clear up until tomorrow afternoon. That will set us back a little. But what have we got?” He moved his chair over to see the screen better. I opened the camera card.
We skipped through some general pictures of the site and moved on. He spent a while analyzing the steps we uncovered leading down into the cave the day before. He had opinions on how they were constructed, but couldn’t decide if they dated from before or after the tomb was built. They had completely uncovered the steps and were making their way into the tomb before anyone noticed the characters carved into the stone over the door. I saw them first. They were simple, angular and runic. They had found similar characters on a slab of basalt under a lake in the valley. No one had been able to translate it, and it seemed unrelated to any other finds in the area. This would be the first time we discovered a similar script.
Someone dug up a handful of pottery just inside the door, ashes here, ashes there, fragments of a bone flute and what might have been tubular bells. Then there were the markings that first tipped off the locals that this might be the tomb of a boy king. They outlined the ghostly nearly-destroyed figure of a child with a star on his forehead.
There were dozens of careful shots of the worn-down writing scratched on the walls. It looked different from the runes. More modern, perhaps. But still, there was no way to translate it. If only we could understand what was written on the mausoleum itself. Maybe it would explain a great deal.
We spent some time staring at the sheepskin with the crest painted on it. Little remained of the pigment. There were shadowy stains where we could guess it once created images and designs. We identified traces of red and blackish pigment and a grimy yellow that Lyle said had once been green. About a quarter of the crest was still visible. It was a wreath of foliage with a star hanging over it. I could make out the faded outline of a bird, or some winged creature in the middle of the wreath. It took about five minutes for Lyle to see it. He might have been stalling.
I clicked to the next image and it hit me deep in the chest like an electric pulse again. There was the child sleeping in his crypt. “He’s so perfect.” It was all I could think to say yet. I glanced sideways at Lyle. He gazed mutely into the screen.
“If the bog mummies could see this.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers together. “The construction methods on the crypt date from the bronze age. We haven’t got much reference for the script, but it’s safe to say with the changes we see in it that this tomb was in existence and possibly a pilgrimage for these people for a long time. It sure would be nice if we could translate some of it. What do you suppose they had to say about this kid?”
We moved on. No one seemed to have much to say about this kid anymore. But I would have liked to know what we all were thinking when we settled into our rooms that night.
As for me, my mind refused to stop. At about one a.m. something occurred to me. What if this society had only ever had one boy king? Supposing in some tender early time in the establishment of their civilization, somehow this child became their adored ruler? At his tragic premature passing, his people had embalmed him through some infallible method, lost to science. In that mountainside tomb, they continued to pay tribute to a dead king—their eternal ceremonial monarch, and the boy-king of legend.
A strange move for a budding civilization, but maybe a lucky one, in the end. A dead king had no reason to go to war, and no lust for conquest. Sometimes the best thing these little civilizations could do was keep to themselves.
At around two, the wind was howling unbelievably loud and the little heater in my room was barely sufficient to fight the chill of Mt. X. I decided to get up and seek out that huge central open fireplace that heated the lodge like a lurking volcano. Surely, I wasn’t the only one struggling to sleep through this wind.
The fireplace room was wonderfully warm, but deserted. So, I contented myself with the company of some hot chocolate and sank into the corner of one of the semicircular couches ringing the fire. The heat was already making me sleepier than I had been in my bed, and I propped my feet on the edge of the fire ring. The wind moaned outside in the dark and I thought of the cave in the mountainside, with the cuneiform writing and the bone flute fragments…and the ashes.
And a child’s voice woke me saying, “I can’t sleep.”
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.
