by S. T. Joshi
There was no question in Amundson’s mind that the Gobi Desert was the most desolate place he had ever seen. The sheer bleakness of it held its own strange grandeur. It was nothing like the deserts in Hollywood movies, with their rolling sand dunes. The Gobi was carpeted with rocks. They lay scattered everywhere, ranging in size from pebbles to Volkswagens. For the most part the empty landscape was flat, but here and there a low ridge broke the monotony.
A jolt beneath his seat clicked his teeth together on the corner of his tongue. He tasted blood and cursed. The ruts in the track the driver followed were so deep, they bottomed out even the Russian UAZ in spite of its spectacular ground clearance.
The Mongolian in the front passenger seat turned and grinned, then spoke a few words to the driver, who glanced back at Amundson and laughed. Neither of them understood English, so there was no point in talking to them. They had been hired to transport him to Kel-tepu, and obviously were not concerned about what condition he might be in when he arrived.
He wrinkled his nose. The inside of the minibus smelled like a mixture of oil, sweat, and camel piss. God alone knows what it had transported before Baby Huey. Amundson twisted in his seat to study the straps that held the canary-yellow case of the multi-spectrum electromagnetic imager on its palette. The machine was the only reason he was in this desert. When Alan Hendricks, acting dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had offered him the chance to give it a field test, he had jumped at the opportunity. A successful trial would clinch the grant of tenure he had been lobbying for over the past two years.
Only later had he paused to consider what would be involved in moving Baby Huey halfway around the world to the backside of nowhere. The machine was as small and as light as modern electronics could make it, but even so, it took a lot of energy output to make electromagnetic waves penetrate solid rock, and Huey tipped the scale at more than a quarter of a ton. Beside it sat the generator he had demanded from the Mongolian authorities. He had made it clear to them that there was no way he would take Huey into the desert without its own power supply. The government had agreed to his demand. The Mongolians wanted the test to be a success almost as much as Amundson.
I should be back at MIT going over term papers, he thought, scowling through the dirty window. If this thing runs into some glitch and fails, I’m going to look like a fool, and there won’t be anyone else to blame. I’m naked out here—no assistant, no colleagues, no one to cover my ass.
It was not a comforting thought. He had been quick to claim credit for the basic design work on Huey, even though the initial concept had come from one of his graduate students, a bright Chinese named Yun. The grad student had kept his mouth shut—he wanted his doctorate and knew better than to try to upset the natural order of things at the university. But that only meant that if Huey failed, Amundson would have to shoulder all the blame.
The UAZ-452 lurched and shuddered to a stop as the driver killed the engine. Amundson pushed himself halfway out of his seat and saw through the windows on the opposite side of the minibus that they were not far from a cluster of khaki field tents, beside which were parked several trucks.
“Are we there yet?” he demanded of the driver.
The Mongolian grinned and jabbered in his own language. He threw open the side door and gestured for the lanky engineer to get out. Hot desert air rolled into the air-conditioned interior. Amundson unfolded himself with difficulty. After sitting for so long on the uncomfortable seat, stiffness had found its way into his very bones.
From the open door of the largest tent, a group of Westerners and a single Mongolian emerged. The leader, a white-haired man with a pot belly and a bearded face, extended his hand. He was a head shorter than Amundson and had to look up to meet the engineer’s gray eyes.
“You must be Amundson from MIT,” he said in a resonant voice. “I’m Joseph Laski, and I rule in hell.” He let out a booming laugh at his own joke.
Amundson accepted the calloused hand and shook it, surprised by its strength. There was soil under the fingernails.
“This is my wife, Anna, my assistant James Sikes, Professor Tsakhia Ganzorig from the National Museum of Mongolia at Ulaanbaatar, and the head of the American student team, Luther White.”
“From Pittsburgh,” the athletic young black man said with a grin. “You’ll meet the rest of the students at dinner.”
“Supper,” Anna Laski corrected with a slight smile. “We dine late.”
“No point in wasting the light,” her husband explained.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sikes said. “I can ’ardly wait to get a look at that machine of yours.”
He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a bald patch at the crown of his head.
“You’re English,” Amundson said with surprise.
“Cockney by birth, but I’ve been with the Smithsonian for near on twenty years.”
The Smithsonian had put up the bulk of the money to finance the Kel-tepu dig, which was named after a local geological feature. Satellite photographs had revealed the faint outline of buried ruins on the track of an ancient silk road. They were invisible from the ground, but had looked promising enough for the Smithsonian to gather a team of archaeologists. The students were all unpaid volunteers, of course—they always were. They worked for the experience of being part of an important expedition, and for the improvement of their résumés. From what Amundson had read about the find at Kel-tepu, they had all hit the jackpot.
A loud bang from the open rear of the minibus drew his attention. He made an apologetic face to Laski and stalked around the vehicle.
“Be careful with that!” he said in irritation.
The two Mongolians were hunched over the imager, using a kind of wrench to release the buckles on the tight straps that held it to its pallet. Another strap let go and hit the side of the minibus.
Ganzorig came around the edge of the door and spoke to his countrymen in a quiet voice. The grins fell from their faces, and they nodded seriously.
“I’m sure they’ll be careful,” he told Amundson. “I have explained how valuable this equipment is to the expedition.”
“Thank you,” the engineer said. “If it gets knocked out of calibration, it will take me a week to put it right again.”
Laski approached. The others had gone back into the tent.
“Let me show you around the site,” he said, putting his hand on Amundson’s shoulder.
He allowed the archaeologist to lead him behind the tents, where some distance away from the camp the ground had been excavated in a series of trenches and holes. From a distance it resembled a gopher village.
“You’d never know this is a river valley, would you?” Laski said companionably. “It looks flat. Even so, satellite photographs and topographic measurements show that an ancient river once ran through here, very close to where we are digging. It dried up fifty or sixty thousand years ago.”
They stopped in front of a wall of canvas erected in a rectangle some ten yards wide and forty yards long.
“We keep our prize behind this barrier to exclude windblown dust and desert animals. You’d be surprised how many creatures live in the desert. Some say there are even wolves.”
Drawing aside a flap in the wall at the near end of the enclosure, he gestured for Amundson to enter and followed close behind him. The engineer stopped and stared in amazement.
“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” Laski said with a dry chuckle. “I always like to watch the reaction the first time someone sees it.”
The ground had been excavated just inside the barrier on all sides, so that only a perimeter strip a few feet wide remained of the original desert surface. The rest of the enclosure was an elongated hole, but it was not empty. Within it lay a black stone statue. It reminded Amundson of the statues of Easter Island, but was not quite like anything he had ever seen. The lines of its primitive form exhaled brute strength. It was humanoid but not quite human in its proportions. The massive erect phall
us that lay flat along its lower belly was certainly not human. It seemed vaguely aquatic in some indefinable way—perhaps it was the thickness of the neck or the webbing between the impossibly long fingers.
The covering of soil had preserved the sharp edges of the stone carving, with a single exception. The face of the statue was no more than a featureless mask. No trace of a nose, lips, or eye sockets remained, if indeed they had ever existed.
“Have you identified the stone?” the engineer asked.
“Some kind of basalt,” Laski told him. “We’re not yet sure exactly what it is, to be honest. It has resisted identification.”
“You mean it’s not local,” Amundson said as he began to slowly walk around the hole.
“Not local, no.”
“So the statue wasn’t carved in situ.”
“Good heavens, no. The stone of the desert is too fractured to carve out a figure of this size. You’re thinking it’s like the recumbent statues on Easter Island.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Amundson murmured. He bent over to study the surface of the head.
“No, impossible. This statue was transported here from far away—how far, we can’t even guess, but there is no stone like this for hundreds of miles. And it was upright—we’ve found its pedestal buried at its base. At some point it was toppled off its support into a hole and covered with dirt.”
The burial of ancient stone carvings and ancient religious sites was not unknown. Amundson remembered reading about such a site.
“You mean like Göbekli Tepe?”
Göbekli Tepe was a twelve-thousand-year-old archaeological site in Turkey consisting of carven stone monoliths and other structures that at some point in its long history had been completely buried, but was in every other way intact.
“Yes,” Laski said, pleased at the reference. “Something like that.”
The engineer crouched and leaned over the edge of the hole as far as he could reach. He was just able to touch the edge of the smooth face of the giant.
“You’re certain it wasn’t buried face down.”
“Quite certain,” Laski said firmly. “The position of the arms and hands, to say nothing of the phallus, clearly shows that it is lying on its back facing the heavens. Even so, we excavated beneath the head. There is no face on the other side.”
“I think I see the chisel marks,” Amundson murmured, stroking the black stone lightly with his fingertips.
“You can see them better in early morning. The low angle of the sun accentuates them.”
The archaeologist waited in silence while Amundson studied the enigmatic, featureless mask. The engineer straightened his knees and turned. Lights of excitement danced in his pale grey eyes.
“It will work, I’m sure of it.”
Laski clapped him on the shoulder.
“Excellent! We’ll get started tomorrow.”
2.
DINNER—NO, SUPPER, HE CORRECTED HIMSELF—WAS better than he expected. Sikes did the cooking chores, and he did them purely from choice, Anna Laski explained to Amundson. The little Cockney had an innate talent for cooking. It was usual on an archaeological dig to eat the local cuisine, but at Kel-tepu it was the local diggers who sampled what was to them exotic dining—roast beef, pudding, dumplings, fish-and-chips, meat pies, stews, bangers-and-mash.
“The first night of the dig, the local man assigned by Gani to do the cooking made khorkhog and khuushuur—goat meat and deep-fried dumplings,” Anna told him. “I didn’t think it tasted that bad, really, but Sikes was beside himself. He practically begged Joe to make him camp cook.”
The conversation around the long dining table in the main tent was lively and free of the tensions that so often plagued academic gatherings. In part this was due to Professor Laski’s dominating personality—his enthusiasm and good spirits were infectious. In part it was also due to his gracious wife who acted as hostess at the table. But mainly it was the general atmosphere of success that pervaded the entire team. Those participating in the dig knew they were making history, and at the same time insuring the future prosperity of their academic careers. This left them with little to complain about.
Two conversations were taking place at the same time across the table, one in English among the Americans, and the other in Mongolian among the local diggers. Gani, as Anna Laski called Tsakhia Ganzorig, acted as translator at those infrequent intervals when a member of one group had something to say to a member of the other.
Amundson noticed several of the Mongolians toying with small carved stone disks about the size of a silver dollar. When the opportunity arose, he turned to the young woman seated on his right, a blonde graduate student from the University of Southern California named Luce Henders.
“Could you tell me, what are those objects?” he murmured.
She followed his eyes, fork poised before her lips, and smiled.
“You mean our good luck charms? That’s what Professor Laski calls them. We’ve been finding them all over the place, inside the graves.”
“Graves?”
Luce chewed and nodded at the same time.
“This whole site is really one huge graveyard. There are graves all around the colossus—that’s what we call the statue. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The bones are gone, but when we dig we find stone ossuaries that must have held them, with those carved disks inside.”
“What happened to the bones?”
“Time happened. Thousands of years ago this was a wet river valley. Bones don’t last under those conditions unless they petrify.”
“Is the stone of the tokens the same as the stone of the colossus?”
“We’re pretty sure it is,” she answered. “It’s not local stone.”
“I wonder if I might have one,” Amundson said apologetically. “I can use it to adjust my projector before I set it into place.”
“I don’t see why not; we’ve got dozens. Everyone’s got one. Give me a minute.”
She stood and left the tent. Amundson continued his meal. In a few minutes she resumed her seat and with a smile pressed something cold and hard into his hand. He studied it.
The black stone was surprisingly heavy and not quite circular, he noticed, but ovoid, some two inches across on its longest dimension and half an inch thick. Its edges were rounded like those of a beach stone. Into one face a simple geometric figure had been deeply carved. It was a kind of spiral with four arms. Amundson realized that it was a primitive form of sun wheel or swastika.
“Thank you,” he told Luce Henders. “This will be very useful.”
One of the grads, a red-haired Irishman from Boston College named Jimmy Dolan, noticed the black stone and pointed at it across the table with his fork.
“I see you’ve joined the cult of Oko-boko,” he said. Several other students laughed, including Luce.
“When we first started finding these stones, we noticed that they were going missing,” she explained to the engineer. “Professor Laski was upset because he thought we had a thief in the camp. He and Gani started to question everybody, and it turned out that the Mongolian diggers were taking them for good luck charms. This valley is supposed to be real bad luck or something, according to local superstition, and the Mongolians believed that the stones would protect them from the evil whatever-it-is. They got upset when the Professor tried to take the stones back, so he realized he’d better let them keep them or he’d have a mutiny on his hands and we would never get any work done. Anyway, Gani made all the local diggers promise to give the stones back when the dig is finished. You’ll have to give yours back, too.”
Amundson dropped the black stone into the vest pocket of his shirt and laid his hand across it.
“I do solemnly swear to return it,” he said.
Luce laughed, her blue eyes sparkling with something a little brighter than the table wine. Things are looking up, Amundson thought to himself, things are definitely looking up.
3.
THE ENGINEERING PR
OBLEM WAS SIMPLE. THE IMAGER had to be positioned directly above the face of the colossus, and no more than three feet away. Since the statue could not be moved, it was necessary to build a superstructure above it to support the machine.
When Amundson mentioned the problem to Sikes, the little Englishman said he had just what was needed, and came back with two aluminum ladders. The ladders easily spanned the sides of the trench in which the colossus lay. It was necessary to support them from below with diagonal bracing so that they would bear the weight of Baby Huey without buckling, but this was not difficult.
Within an hour the framework was ready and the squat yellow machine in position beside the hole. Amundson had already spent the previous evening setting its sensors for the density of the black stone, which appeared identical in every respect to the stone of the statue. It was surprisingly easy to skid the imager along the ladders, and only a bit more taxing to get it positioned precisely above the face using the built-in camera as a guide.
Laski had been right, Amundson thought as he looked at the camera image of the blank face on his monitor. The statue was oriented with its head in the west, and the beams of the morning sun slanting along its body highlighted the marks of the chisels that had been used to cut away its features. He wondered idly what strange compulsion had caused a primitive people to cast down the statue and mutilate it. Perhaps they were some warring tribe and thought they were defeating the god of their enemies. He shrugged. He was an engineer, not an archaeologist. There was no need to bother his mind with such questions, which were probably unanswerable.
Amundson found himself less nervous than he expected, considering that his future career at MIT was riding on the performance of the imager. He smiled to himself. Not all of last night had been spent on work. The latter part of the evening he had devoted to the relaxing task of exploring Luce Henders. She was interested in him only because he was the first unfamiliar male to walk into the camp in months—that much was obvious—but it had not diminished his pleasure.