the tail of the Rock. Down near the water, of course, was the famous rock shelter itself, the Europa Point Cave – still mostly buried under the landslide that had killed Sheila Chan – but up here there was little to see. A parking area, some low, winding stone walls, a few trails, a historical marker, a few nondescript outbuildings, and a lot of desolate, rocky land swathed here and there with scraggly ground cover. A bus had come with a load of Asian tourists who wandered disconsolately around, obviously wondering why this desolate spot was on their tour, and politely trying to look interested as their guide pointed out Africa across the water and chattered away.
The group of archaeologists and anthropologists that stood at the cliff-top site of the dedication wasn’t much larger – perhaps thirty in all – and certainly no more animated. They had dutifully wandered the line of posters, looking at historical notes, architect’s renderings, and photos and paintings of Gibraltar Boy and his Neanderthal mother. They had solemnly watched as the governor-general turned over a gold-plated shovelful of earth, as the Freedom of the City Award, Gibraltar’s highest honor, was posthumously bestowed on Ivan (accepted in his place by Rowley), and as a bronze plaque with Ivan’s profile in bas-relief was unveiled by the deputy minister of culture, to be installed later in the entrance rotunda of the center.
And they had stood, shifting from foot to foot, listening to the inevitable speeches. The governor-general made one, the minister of culture made one, Rowley made one, and the president of the historical association made one, all extolling the manifold virtues of Ivan Samuel Gunderson. Adrian made one too, of course, and of course it was the longest of them all. Once he’d delivered the obligatory eulogy, he lapsed into one of his mellifluous, erudite lectures, going on – and on, and on – about ecological conditions at Europa Point in the Pleistocene’s waning years, forgetting, or more likely ignoring, the fact that almost everybody in his audience knew as much about it as he did.
“Inasmuch as the northern ice sheets had not yet melted, the sea levels would have been far lower at that time. Thus, our cave dwellers would have looked out, not on the water we see today, but on a marshy seaside plain harboring a rich array of game – rabbits, birds, foxes. Fish, shellfish, tortoises, all would have been there within easy reach for the taking. Up here on the coastal plateau there would have been horses and deer, and higher up on the Rock they would have found ibex. Taken all together, our First Family and their clan surely lived what would have passed for a life of ease in-”
Gideon’s attention wandered. He peered down the face of the cliff trying to pinpoint the location of the rock shelter but couldn’t find it. The particular part of the cliff face they overlooked was not a clean, vertical wall of rock plunging straight down to the sea, in which a cave would have been easy to spot, but a wide, deeply eroded gorge that had been more or less dammed up with mounded earthen detritus that ran all the way down to the water in a sloping incline. Clearly, the cave-in of four years ago had been only the latest, and probably not the last, of the Europa Point land disturbances.
“Pru, what do you say?” he murmured. “Could you show me around the site a little?”
“You mean right now, this minute?” she asked. “Please” – she inclined her head toward Adrian, who showed no sign of approaching this close, and cathedraled her fingers in front of her chest – “say yes.”
“Yes,” Gideon said, smiling. “Adrian’s not going to notice.”
“That’s for sure. Julie, you want to come too?”
“What? No, I think I’ll give it a skip. Actually, I find what he’s saying pretty interesting.”
“That’s because you’re the only one here who hasn’t heard it before. ”
Corbin, protected from the sun by a floppy, broad-brimmed hat that was tied under his chin, was standing nearby. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Corb, I’m going to show Gideon around the site down there. Wanna come?”
He turned. “What is there to see? It’s not there anymore.”
“Well, you know, just give him some idea of where stuff was, that kind of thing. Come on, you were the assistant director, you should be the one to give the tour.”
Corbin’s lips pursed. “What I was, was the chief deputy director.”
“Whatever. Come on already, you’ve heard this crap from Adrian a million times.”
“Adrian is a very great archaeologist,” Corbin said reprovingly. “He’s always worth listening to.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Pru. “Come on, Chief Deputy Director, let’s get a move on.”
Corbin glanced with something like amused resignation at Gideon – What can you do with a woman like this? – and said, “Very well,” with a put-upon but amicable sigh, and led the way.
Julie touched Gideon’s arm as he followed. “Be careful,” she whispered. “Watch your step. Pay attention when you’re climbing around. Don’t stargaze.”
“How can I? No stars.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I promise not to fall off.”
“Now where have I heard that before?”
With the path to the cave blocked by debris from the most recent landslide, getting to it required slipping under a “Danger – Do Not Cross” ribbon, clambering over some broken stone walls, and negotiating the rough earthen fill, most of which was covered with a slippery, uneven mat of ground cover. Pru, in jeans and wearing cowboy boots with heels that dug in, managed it easily, but Gideon, in Rock-port joggers, and Corbin, wearing brown oxfords, had to slip-slide their way down to the relatively level ledgelike area that was almost at the bottom. Once there, Gideon could see the cave, which had been invisible from above; a cavern perhaps fifty feet wide and, in the parts that hadn’t been obstructed by the recent landslide, about twenty feet deep.
“So this is it,” he said with the near-mystical pleasure he always felt at times like this: Here, where I stand right now, on this rocky ledge, on this very spot, Neanderthal creatures – almost but not quite humans – once worked, and played, and went about their lives. On the cave ceiling, toward the rear, he could make out the sooty smudges from their fires, still plainly visible after 24,000 years.
“What’s left of it,” Corbin said. “Well, let me give you the two-bit tour.” He walked them up and down the ledge, explaining the excavation strategies they’d resorted to (rock shelters were trickier than ordinary digs on open land), what kind of grid system they’d used, where they’d found various materials: a firepot over here, a couple of Mousterian tools over there.
“Where was the First Family burial?” Gideon asked. Corbin, dyed-in-the-wool archaeologist that he was, was deep in his analysis of the stone tool technology, and it looked as if it might be a while before he got around to the human remains.
“Unfortunately, you can’t see it anymore,” said Pru. “It was in a crevice about a foot off the floor of the cave, over there, under all that mess.” She pointed at an area to the right, where the overhang had come down altogether, so that it was no longer a rock shelter at all.
“We lost about half the cave in the landslide,” Corbin said. “There was another fifteen meters of it right there, but that’s where the worst of it hit. Unfortunately, it was where most of the important finds were made. What a shame to see it covered over like that; such an important site.”
“Well, I gather they’re planning to dig it out again for visitors,” Pru said.
“Good luck,” Gideon murmured, looking at the mass of earth in front of him. “That’s a lot of dirt.” It was as if one of those monstrous, three-story-tall earth-moving machines had been excavating some vast crater somewhere up above, and had dumped its huge bucket down here time after time, with the express purpose of burying the rock shelter. The enormous pile of soil, now pocked with struggling vegetation, completely plugged up any access to this part of the cave.
“What are those, do you know?” he asked, pointing at an unlikely row of a half dozen evenly spaced holes dug into the base of the pile. Five were deep but relatively small; about four feet in diameter. The fifth, the last one in the row, was big, a good ten feet in diameter and ten feet deep. All had been made some time ago, their margins no longer sharp-edged. And all had been dug with tools, not naturally formed; the piles of backfill lay all around them.
Before the question was out of his mouth, he realized what they were. “Is this where they dug Sheila Chan out?”
Pru responded with a somber nod. “Yes.”
“Interestingly,” said Corbin, “they do it the way we might do test-trenching. The smaller holes, those were a uniformly spaced series of exploratory probes. The deep one-”
“Is where they found her,” Gideon said.
“Yes,” Pru said again. “I was here. Well, not down here, but up above, with some of the others. I stayed the
