“How should I know?” said the one on the left, with appropriate unconcern. Actually, he knew that they were, and he knew the others knew. Who else could they be? Not tourists, certainly. There weren’t any tourists in Torralba.
When the authorities had built the ugly little
For one thing, why would anyone travel all the way from Madrid or Zaragoza just to see some old bones? Now, if they had some old saint’s little-finger bone, that would be different. But these were just elephants’ bones, or so they said.
Only Ignacio knew there weren’t any elephant bones there, no matter what the authorities said. If those things were elephant bones, what had they been doing under the ground? Who could bury an elephant in that soil? He had been in that little building a thousand times, and he should know. Once he had borrowed Joaquin’s hammer to chip off a piece, and had satisfied himself that it was made of stone.
Besides that, everyone knew there weren’t any elephants around Torralba, and there never had been any. Elephants came from China. Even he, who couldn’t read and had never been to school, knew that. And even if there
And as for those rocks the authorities said were cavemen’s tools, that was the most foolish of all. Was every chipped rock you could hold in your hand a tool? Then the authorities were welcome to come and dig all they wanted out of the wheat fields every year. That would make everyone happy.
Still, when he had been mayor four years ago and they had offered him the “honor” of being custodian of the
Already today he had gotten a
But the professor was going to be angry. He had already sent Ignacio a telegram two days ago—to receive his first telegram, he had had to live for eighty-two years—saying he was coming with his students to see the site. Well, let him be angry. Ignacio would claim he never received it. How was the professor to know?
Across the square, one of them spoke hesitantly to old Vicente, who pointed toward Ignacio. The man thanked old Vicente courteously and began to come across the square, followed by the others. So that was the professor. A big man, but with a soft smile. Better to make him angry than the other one.
Ignacio would have no trouble pulling the wool over his eyes. In his mind, he rehearsed what he would say: Telegram, senor? To
Being denied admission to the little museum had been a severe disappointment for Gideon, so much so that he had angrily accused the old man of lying. At once ashamed of himself— although he was sure he was right—he had tipped him ten pesetas and then walked with the class up to the site to see if the day could be salvaged.
He found that it could indeed. For Gideon, it was enough just to be there, standing on the very site itself, delivering the lecture of a lifetime, the lecture of an anthropology professor’s dreams.
They stood in the middle of a flat depression a few hundred feet in diameter, at the foot of an arid, steep hill. In the distance, small, parched wheat fields ran irregularly up a broad, sloping hillside. Aside from those, the only sign of man was the squat little concrete-block museum at the edge of the depression. Five hundred feet away, a line of delicate trees marked the all-but-dry bed of the Ambrona River and provided the only relief in a scorched, shimmering landscape of dun, beige, and ochre. The sky was covered by a thin, gray-white cloud-sheet that muted the sun’s brilliance but offered no protection against its heat.
Around him was a semicircle of fifteen rapt students, so enthralled that note-taking was forgotten.
Professor Gideon Oliver was giving it his all: “It was on the spot on which we stand, then, that
The rich words, describing an unimaginable expanse of time, thrilled him as much as they did the students, and his voice vibrated and soared with emotion.
“It would have been this time of year, during the fall migration to the lowlands. Thirty of them—
“Where we are now was a bog; this barren hillside was covered with trees and long grasses. Driving the elephants was a gigantic grass fire. The wind was blowing toward the southeast, and the elephants were swept down the hillside into the bog. Over there”—he pointed again, this time toward the trickling river— “other fires had been set to prevent them from crossing to solid ground.”
Gideon paused and took a deep breath, savoring the struggle that was as alive as the twentieth century for him. “And so here they stayed,” he said in a deeper, quieter voice, “panicked and stumbling in the deep mud; giant males, females… infants. At the edge of the bog stood the hunters, the fire-setters. They had only to wait—and they were patient—for the mired elephants to become helpless. Then, one by one, they were killed with stones and wooden spears. The next day they were butchered. It was the earliest known evidence of such an enterprise in the