The wind screamed across the sheer granite face of Mt. Belukha. Its peak hid behind a white shark's fin of blowing snow, still five hundred meters above them. There was no sky, only the blizzard that assaulted them from all directions at once and threatened to sweep them from the ice-coated escarpment, upon which the new flakes accumulated in a layer as slick as greased glass. Progress was maddeningly slow as even their crampons and ice axes hardly secured tenuous purchase. They had passed the point of no return hours ago. There was no choice but to continue higher and pray that their ice screws held in the fractured ice. With the ferocity of the sudden storm, a descent under darkness would be suicide.
Four days ago, a chunk of ice the size of an office building had calved from the mountain with the sound of cannon fire and thundered down the northwestern slope. From their base camp in the upper Katun Valley to the south, they had watched in horror as fragments the size of semi trucks lay siege to the timberline, exploding through the wall of evergreens as though it were no more substantial than tissue paper. Two kilometers to the north, and they would have been pulverized to such a degree that their bodies would have been unrecognizable, if they were even found at all. But fear metamorphosed into excitement when the binoculars revealed the mouth of a cave roughly one hundred and fifty meters below the nearer of the twin summits. Lord only knew how long it had been sealed behind the ice.
It had taken several days to plot their ascent to coincide with the ideal weather forecast, which hadn't predicted the freak storm that swept up the valley three hours ago like a tsunami of blowing flakes.
Dr. Ramsey Ladd, Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, had to pause to summon the last of his failing strength. His arms and legs trembled as he clung to his axe handle and rope, balanced on his toes. The ledge beneath him couldn't have been more than four inches wide, but it was the largest he had encountered in quite some time. The wind whipped the fur fringe of his parka hood into his face, which felt as though it had frozen solid even with the full neoprene balaclava facemask. Ice accumulated in the corners of his goggles, narrowing his already constricted field of view. It was hard to imagine feeling claustrophobic so exposed on the mountain, and yet his chest tightened to the point that he had to concentrate to keep from hyperventilating the already thin air. He didn't dare risk shifting his weight to glance over his shoulder to confirm that the others were still behind him.
Just fifty more meters, he assured himself, and again forced his trembling body upward.
He nearly sobbed when he hooked his axe over the precipice and hauled himself up into the cave. Every muscle in his body ached. His throat was stripped raw. Ice knotted his lashes and beard, and clung to his chapped nostrils. He crawled deeper into the darkness, away from the blizzard shrieking past the orifice. When he could crawl no more, he collapsed to the granite floor, rolled out of his rucksack, and desperately drank the water from his thermal hydration bladder. His breathing eventually slowed, and he listened from the darkness as the others clambered up with the clamor of axes and crampons and performed the same exhausted ritual.
Saved from the elements, the cave had to be at least twenty degrees warmer. The echo of their slowing exhalations gave some indication of its size, which was far larger than he would have guessed from the valley below. He removed his flashlight from his pack and clicked it on. The beam shoved back the shadows and limned the granite walls.
'My God,' Ladd whispered. He stood and turned a complete circle, watching in awe as the beam spotlighted ancient pictographs distorted by a layer of glimmering ice. There were angular lines and abstract representations of stick men and beasts he couldn't immediately identify. 'Can you guys see this?'
He heard the clatter of spiked cleats behind him, but couldn't tear his eyes from the wall. The state of preservation was miraculous. He couldn't begin to fathom how old these finger-painted images were.
'Judy?' he whispered.
'The designs are different than any I've seen at the other proto-human sites we've discovered,' Dr. Judith Rivale, Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University, said. She shed her goggles and her mask to more clearly see. Her chestnut bangs were crisp with ice and hung in front of her brown eyes and wind-chafed brow. 'I hesitate to even speculate until we're able to accurately date the strata. The level of preservation is so staggering, thanks to the ice, that this could just as easily be a hundred thousand years old as twenty.'
She glanced back at the man behind her, whose parka was lined with so much fur he appeared more animal than man.
'Don't look at me,' Dr. Carlos Pascual said. As Head of Paleoarchaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, he had been called upon to authenticate and evaluate discoveries predating the Upper Pleistocene Era on every continent. Were it possible to be an expert on the inexplicable, he was as close as one could get. 'This is all positively modern to me. Whoever painted these did so long after all of the other hominin branches died off.'
'Wait a second,' Rivale said. She stepped closer to one of the walls and carefully chiseled away a section of the ice with her axe blade. 'This can't be right. These markings almost look Sumerian, like an early form of cuneiform.'
'Take pictures,' Ladd said. 'Maybe our Kyrgyz guide has seen more like this elsewhere in these mountains.'
Nelson Spears, a doctoral candidate from the University of Pennsylvania who had insinuated himself onto their expedition team, due in large measure to his father's company's financial backing and political connections, removed his digital camera from his backpack and began the process of documentation.
Ladd wandered deeper into the cave. The strobe of the flash distorted the shape of the granite walls, making them appear to alternately expand and contract, and throwing shifting shadows across the smooth stone. At the furthest reaches of his vision, he glimpsed a pyramidal stack of stones. As he neared, it drew contrast and resolved from the darkness. They weren't rocks. Vacant-eyed skulls of all shapes and sizes stared back at him from the column of light. There had to be at least fifty of them. All of their faces were turned outward, so that no matter where he stood, they always seemed to be looking at him. He stepped closer. His beam spotlighted fossilized bones long since absolved of their flesh and aged to the color of rust. Fracture lines coursed through their sloped, elongated craniums like spider webs.
'Get a shot of this,' he said.
Once Nelson had taken several pictures from various angles, Ladd carefully tried to lift the uppermost skull, but it wouldn't budge. The pyramid had petrified in that form.
'These are the most remarkably preserved remains I've ever encountered,' Pascual said. 'Look at this. The flat frontal bone, the prominent brow ridge, the protuberance of the occipital bun, the suprainiac fossa. Some of these are undeniably Neanderthal. And the rest? My God. A combination of archaic and modern human traits? Astounding. Do you realize what we're looking at here? This could be the most important paleontological discovery of our lifetimes.'
Another flash illuminated two more pyramids against the rear wall, between which a fissure split the granite. The shadows receded from his beam. As he approached, he realized that it was more than a mere alcove.
The crevice was barely wide enough to allow him passage. His jacket rubbed on the walls with the repeated sound of a quickly drawn zipper. Five meters in, the ceiling lowered and he had to duck. The circle of his beam reached a flat surface ahead, and focused smaller and smaller as he advanced. He felt the subtle movement of air against his face and smelled the damp breath of the planet: the aged scents of crumbling stone, dust, and possibly the trace residues of smoke and something unpleasantly organic. Before he reached the terminus, a hole opened in the ground. He knelt and shined his light down into a smooth chute that descended beyond the light's reach. One side had evenly spaced half-circles of shadow. He had seen similar markings before. They were handholds, chiseled into the stone, smoothed by time and frequent use.
'What do you see?' Rivale asked.
Ladd shrugged in response.
'I'm going down,' he said, and swung his legs over the edge.
'Let us belay you. If you fall and hurt yourself, we'll never be able to get you back down the mountain.'
Ladd was in no mood to argue. The moment his toes found the grooves, he tucked his flashlight into his coat
