It was the most perfect Anasazi city Nora had ever seen; more beautiful than Cliff Palace, as large as Pueblo Bonito.
Sloane looked at Nora. And then she, too, slowly turned to look across the canyon. Her face went deathly pale.
Nora closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, then opened them again. The city was still there. She gazed slowly across the vista, drinking it in. Wedged into the middle of the city, she could make out the circular outline of a Great Kiva: the largest she had ever seen, still roofed. An intact Great Kiva . . . nothing like it had ever been found.
She could see how the alcove itself was set back from the bench, making it invisible from below. The great sandstone cliff above billowed out in a huge convex curve that leaned at least fifty feet beyond the bottom of the alcove. It was this fortuitous artifact of geology and erosion that allowed the city to be hidden, not only from above and below, but also from the opposite canyon rim. She had a fleeting, desperate thought:
Suddenly her knees grew weak and she dropped slowly to the ground. Seated, she continued to stare across the valley. There was a rustling sound, and Sloane knelt down beside her.
“Nora,” came the voice, the slightest trace of irony leavening the reverence, “I think we’ve found Quivira.”
25
SHOULD WE?” SLOANE MURMURED TO NORA.
There was a long pause. Nora’s eyes followed the benchland as it curved around the canyon. In places where the bench became a narrow ledge of slickrock, she could see that a shallow groove had actually been worn into the sandstone by countless prehistoric feet. One part of her registered all this quite dispassionately; another part was far away, still in shock, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the discovery.
The dispassionate part told her that they should go back for the others, bring in the equipment, begin a formal survey.
“What the hell,” she replied. “Let’s go.”
She rose shakily to her feet, Sloane following. A quick, dreamlike walk brought them around the far end of the canyon to the edge of the great alcove. Here Nora paused. They were now looking on the ruin from the far side, at an acute angle. The morning sun only penetrated the facade of the city; the rest faded back into darkness under the heavy brow of rock, a ghostly ruin melting into purple shadow. Quivira had a gracefulness, a sense of balance, that belied its massive stone construction. It was as if the city had been planned and built as a unit, rather than growing by accretion, as most other large Anasazi cliff dwellings had. There were still traces of gypsum whitewash on the outer walls, and the Great Kiva showed traces of what had once been a blue disk painted on its side.
The four towers were paired, two on each side of the alcove, with the main city lying between and the circular Great Kiva at the very center. Each tower rose about fifty feet. The front two were freestanding; the rear two were actually mortared to the natural stone roof of the alcove.
The ruin was in beautiful condition, but on closer view it was far from perfect. Nora could see several ugly fractures snaking up the sides of the four towers. In one place, the masonry had peeled off part of an upper story, revealing a dark interior. In the terraced city between the towers, several of the third-story rooms had collapsed. Others appeared to have burned. But overall the city was remarkably well preserved, its huge walls built of stone courses mortared with adobe. Wooden ladders stood against some of the walls. Hundreds of rooms were still intact and roofed—a complicated arrangement of roomblocks and smaller circular kivas, dotted with black windows and doorways. The Great Kiva that dominated the center seemed almost untouched. It was a city made to last forever.
Nora’s eyes wandered into the dark recesses of the alcove. Behind the towers, terraced roomblocks, and plazas lay a narrow passageway that ran between the back of the city and a long row of squat granaries. The passageway was low and dim. Behind the granaries appeared to lie a second, even more constricted alleyway—no more than a sunken crawlspace, really—cloaked in darkness. This was unusual: in fact, Nora had never seen anything like it. In most Anasazi cities, the granaries were built directly into the back wall of the cave.
Although the archaeologist in her registered these observations, Nora was aware that her hands were shaking and her heart was thudding at a breakneck pace.
“Is this real?” she heard Sloane mutter hoarsely.
As they slowly approached the city, a remarkable series of pictographs became visible on the cliff face beside them. They had been laid down in several layers, figures painted over figures, a palimpsest of Anasazi imagery in red, yellow, black, and white. There were handprints, spirals, shamanistic figures with huge shoulders and power lines radiating from their heads; antelope, deer, snakes, and a bear, along with geometric designs of unknown meaning.
“Look up,” Sloane said.
Nora followed her glance. There, twenty feet above their heads, were rows upon rows of negative handprints: paint sprayed over a hand held against the rock, a great crowd waving goodbye. Above that, on the domed roof itself, the Anasazi had painted a complicated pattern of crosses and dots of various sizes. Something about it was vaguely familiar.
Then it hit her. “My God, it’s an Anasazi planetarium.”
“Yes. That’s the constellation Orion. And there’s Cassiopeia, I think. It’s just like the Planetarium at Canyon de Chelly, only more elaborate by far.”
Instinctively, Nora raised her camera. Then she dropped it again. There would be time, plenty of time, later. Now she just wanted to simply experience it. She took a step forward, then hesitated and glanced at her companion.
“I know what you mean,” Sloane said. “I feel the same way. It’s as if we don’t belong here.”
“We don’t,” Nora heard herself say.
Sloane looked at her a moment. Then she turned and began to move toward the ruin. Nora followed slowly.
As they walked into the cool darkness, their shadows merged with the shadows of the stone. A group of swallows burst out of a cluster of mud nests above their heads, wheeling out into the sunlight, dipping and crying with displeasure at the intrusion.
They walked toward a broad plaza area in front of the towers, their feet sinking into soft sand. Glancing down, Nora saw there was almost no cultural debris on the surface: many inches of fine, windblown dust had covered everything.
At the front of the first tower, Nora stopped and laid her hand on the cool masonry. The tower had been built straight and sure, with a slight inward slope. There were no doors in its face; entry must have been gained from the back. A few notches far up its flank looked like arrow ports. Peering into one of the cracks in the bottom of the tower, she saw the masonry was at least ten feet thick. The towers were obviously for defense.
Sloane walked around the tower’s front, Nora following in her wake. It was odd, she thought, how they were instinctively staying together. There was something unsettling about the place, something she couldn’t immediately put into words. Perhaps it was the defensive nature of the site: the massive walls, the lack of ground-floor doors. There were even piles of round rocks stacked on some of the frontline roofs, clearly intended as weapons to be dropped on the heads of any invaders. Or maybe it was the absolute silence of the city, the powdery smell of the dust, the faint odor of corruption that unnerved her.
She glanced at Sloane. The woman had recovered her composure and was scratching in her sketchbook. Her calm presence was reassuring.
She turned back to the tower. On the back side, at the second-story level, she could now see a small keyhole doorway, partly collapsed. It was accessible from a flat roof, against which leaned a pole ladder, perfectly
