Prophet of Bones (8 page)

That was when it occurred to Paul that some of these people had probably been digging here, in this same camp, for years.

Every face followed the jeep, and when it pulled to a stop, a small crowd gathered to help them unpack. Gavin introduced Paul around. Eight researchers, plus two laborers still in the cave and another two still working the sieves. Australian mostly. Indonesian. One American.

“Herpetology, mate,” one of them said when he shook Paul’s hand. Small, stocky, red-headed; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. He wore a shaggy, coppery beard. Paul forgot his name the moment he heard it, but the introduction, “Herpetology, mate,” stuck with him. “That’s my specialty,” the small man continued. “I got mixed up in this because of Professor McMaster here. University of New England—the Australian one.” His smile was two feet wide under a sharp nose that pointed at his own chin. Paul liked him instantly.

When they’d finished unpacking the jeep, Gavin turned to Paul. “So are you ready for the tour?”

Paul nodded.

The operation was larger than he’d expected. There were two different sieving setups, one dry, one wet, and a dozen tables and tents and benches, all spread out in a small clearing just beyond the mouth of the cave. A generator rumbled in the background, providing all the electricity for their lights and equipment. Construction-helmeted laborers shuffled to and from the cave, bent under their work, local villagers who spoke a language Paul couldn’t understand.

“We used to sleep in the village of Terus during the dig season,” Gavin said. “It’s just up the road. But you’ll be staying here.” Gavin gestured toward a white canvass tent.

Paul lifted the heavy tent flap and stuck his head inside. The space was clean and functional, like the room in Ruteng.

“Why don’t you stay in Terus anymore?”

“Safety issues.”

“So Terus isn’t a friendly place, I take it?”

“No, Terus is wonderful. It’s their safety we’re worried about.”

Gavin’s face produced a smile. “Now I think it’s time we made the most important introductions.”

It was a short walk to the cave. Jag-toothed limestone jutted from the jungle, an overhang of vine, and, beneath that, a dark mouth. The stone was the brown-white of old ivory. Cool air enveloped Paul, and entering Liang Bua was a distinct process of stepping down. Inside, it took Paul’s eyes a moment to adjust. The chamber was thirty yards wide, open to the jungle in a wide crescent—mud floor, high-domed ceiling. The overall impression was one of expanse, like the interior of an ancient church. He followed Gavin deeper. There was not much to see at first. In the far corner, two sticks angled from the mud, and when he looked closer Paul saw the hole.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

Paul took off his backpack and stripped the white paper suit out of its plastic wrapper. He peered down into the dig. “Who else has touched it?”

“Talford, Margaret, me.”

Paul pulled a light from his backpack and shined it into the hole. It was then that he realized just how deep it went. A system of bamboo ladders led down to the bottom, thirty feet below. He was staring into a pit. “I’ll need blood samples from everybody for comparison assays.”

“DNA contamination?”

“Yeah.”

“We stopped the dig when we realized the significance.”

“Still. I’ll need blood samples from anybody who’s dug here, anybody who came anywhere near the bones. I’ll take the samples myself tomorrow.”

“I understand. Is there anything else you require?”

“Solitude.” Paul smiled. “I don’t want anybody in the cave for this part.”

Gavin nodded and left. Paul broke out his tarps and hooks. It was best if the sampler was the person who dug the fossils out of the ground—or, better yet, if the DNA samples were taken when the bones were still
in
the ground. Less contamination that way. And there was sure to be contamination. Always. No matter what precautions were taken, no matter how many tarps or how few people worked at the site, there was still always contamination.

Paul staked the tarps down at one end and slid into the hole, a flashlight strapped to his forehead, his white paper suit slick on the moist earth. He gripped the ladder as he descended into the dark cold, the bamboo rungs flexing under his weight like thin ice. He wondered how much heavier he was than the average worker on the site. When his feet finally touched down on damp clay, he turned and squatted. The working floor was two meters by two meters.

From his perspective, he couldn’t tell what the bones were—only that they were bones, in situ, half-buried in earth. But that was all that mattered. The material was soft, unfossilized; he’d have to be careful. It was commonly accepted that bones needed at least a few thousand years to fossilize. These were younger than a lot of archaeological finds.

The procedure took nearly seven hours. He coated the bone surface with sodium hyperchlorate, then used a Dremel tool to access the unexposed interior matrix. He snapped two dozen photographs, careful to record the stratigraphic context. Later it would be important to keep track of which samples came from which specimens. Whoever these things were, they were small. He sealed the DNA samples into small, sterile lozenges for transport.

It was night when he climbed from under the tarp.

Outside the cave, Gavin was the first to find him in the firelight. “Are you finished?”

“For tonight. I have six different samples from at least two different individuals.”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought, two individuals. So far.”

“So far?”

“We’re not sure how far down the cache goes. When we remove those bones, there could be more underneath.”

“Is that common here?”

Gavin shrugged. “It’s unpredictable. The deposits will go shy on you sometimes. You’ll have a dozen feet of nothing, just sterile soil, and then you’ll brush away the next centimeter and the dig will go active for another dozen feet: rat bones, and bird, and charcoal, and stone tools. Even
Stegodon,
a kind of pygmy elephant. Sometimes more interesting things.”

“I’d say those bones were interesting,” Paul said.

“So that means you’ll stay on with us?”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “I’ll stay.”

*   *   *

Gavin handed him a bottle of whiskey.

“Isn’t it a little early to celebrate?”

“Celebrate? You’ve been working in a grave all day. Don’t they drink at wakes in America?”

That night, around the campfire, Paul listened to the jungle sounds and to the voices of scientists, feeling history congeal around him.

“Suppose it isn’t,” Jack was saying. Jack was thin and American and very drunk. “Suppose it isn’t in the same lineage with us, then what would that mean?”

The red-bearded herpetologist groaned. His name was James. “Not more of that dogma-of-descent bullshit,” he said.

“Then what is it?” someone asked.

They passed the bottle around, eyes occasionally drifting to Paul like he was a priest come to grant absolution, his sample kit just an artifact of priestcraft. Paul swigged from the bottle when it came his way. They’d finished off the whiskey long ago; this was some local brew distilled from rice. Paul swallowed fire.

Yellow-haired man saying, “It’s the truth,” but Paul had missed part of the conversation, and for the first time he realized how drunk they all were; James laughed at something, and the woman with the white shirt turned and said, “Some people have nicknamed it the hobbit.”

“What?”

“Flores man—the hobbit. You know, little people three feet tall.”

“Tolkien would be proud,” a voice contributed.

“A mandible, a complete cranium, segments of a radius, and left inominate.”

“But what is it?”

“It is what it is.”

“Exactly.”

“Hey, are you staying on?”

The question was out there for three seconds before Paul realized it was aimed at him. The woman’s brown eyes were searching across the fire. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m staying.”

Then the voice again, “But what is it?”

“That
is
the question, isn’t it?”

Paul took another swallow—thinking of the bones and trying to cool the voice of disquiet in his head.

*   *   *

Paul learned about her during the next couple of days, the woman with the white shirt. Her name was Margaret. She was twenty-eight. Australian. Some fraction aborigine on her mother’s side, but you could only see it for sure in her mouth. The rest of her could have been Dutch, English, whatever. But that full mouth: teeth like Ruteng children’s, teeth like dentists might dream.

She tied her brown hair back from her face, so it didn’t hang in her eyes while she worked in the hole. This was her sixth dig, she told him. “This is the one.” She sat on the stool while Paul took her blood, a delicate index finger extended, red pearl rising to spill her secrets.

“Most archaeologists go a whole lifetime without a big find,” she said. “Maybe you get one. Probably none. But this is the one I get to be a part of.”

“What about the Leakeys?” Paul asked, dabbing her finger with cotton.

“Bah.” She waved at him in mock disgust. “They get extra. Bloody Kennedys of archaeology.”

Despite himself, Paul laughed.

10

This latest evidence brings us to the so-called dogma of common descent, whereby each species is seen as a unique and individual creation, discrete from all others. Therefore all men, living and dead, are descended from a common one-time creational event. To be outside of this lineage, no matter how similar in appearance, is to be other than man.

—Journal of Heredity

Bone is a text. It writes its history for those able to read it.

When Paul first started at Westing, he often worked late into the evenings. Many nights in the bone room, he would lay the skeletal remains out carefully on the clean blue felt, articulating the pieces, forming an assemblage. He matched the bones in front of him to the perfect image he held in his head.

But now, as he sat alone at the bottom of Gavin’s pit, he found that no perfect image rose up in his mind. He looked at the bones, and his imagination failed him. The lights cast strange shadows across the phalanx of chalky gray-white material. Heat from the lamp made steam in the damp air. The pit smelled of earth and muck.

Somewhere above him, it was almost morning, just before dawn. In a few minutes, the rest of the camp would wake and the day would start. The team would congregate and climb down into the pit to continue the dig. Paul had woken early, needing one last look at what couldn’t possibly exist.

“What are you?” he whispered into the silence of the pit. He gently blew dust away from the surface of the bone.

Anatomy textbooks say there are 206 bones in the human body, but this is not strictly true. There exists a range of variation. The number of vertebrae in the coccyx, for example, is not fixed in the human species. Some people have more, some less. Also, there exists in some individuals of Mesoamerican ancestry an extra cranial suture. By virtue of its presence, this additional suture creates an additional bone: the Inca bone, which lies at the base of the skull in direct conjugation with the lambdoid suture and the sagittal suture.

In spite of what the Bible says, men and women possess the same number of ribs.

Bone is what remains of us after we’re gone. It’s as close as you can get to a permanent record of our lives.

It was in the silence and austerity of the bone room that Paul first learned that bones can answer you. They can whisper their secrets across a distance of millennia.

Now he adjusted the light. With a latexed hand, he brushed the dirt away. Here was the radius, impossibly small. Like a child’s arm, though beside it rested a portion of tiny jaw—the adult molars already worn smooth.

Bone is made primarily of soft collagen and crystalline calcium phosphate. Although resistant to change and to decay, it is rarely featureless. Bone is the scaffolding on which our lives are slung, and it shows the marks of this interface. The stronger a person is, the more they mark their skeleton. There are foramina, tubercles, grooves, and tuberosities, the raised marks of muscle and ligament attachments. There are signs of trauma and healing, the stresses and strains of our lives, written in bone. And other secrets.

Bone is recycled by the living body. Calcium is laid down and picked up in a repeating pattern of formation and resorption. A never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. Like nature itself.

From above came a sound, the rattle of the tarp, pulling Paul from his reverie. Then a voice called down, “Paul?”

“Yeah,” Paul answered.

“You’re up early today.” It was Gavin. “Didn’t expect to see you down there.”

“I was checking on one last thing.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“You need anything?”

“No, I’m done here.” Paul stood and gripped the ladder. He clicked off his light and climbed back up to the land of the living.

*   *   *

Days passed.

The dig continued. The rain continued. Jungle heat and jungle sounds. The hack of machetes on firewood. The chatter of men.

Flores.

In the distance, the Wae Racang River hissed white static against the rocks, an ever-present roar that played background music to the clamor of the busy camp.

By the fourth day, Paul had grown tired of watching everyone work. He had his samples carefully sealed in their protective lozenges. Until more bones were discovered, he technically had nothing to do, so he gave himself a job. He joined the local labor force and helped carry buckets of soil between the sieves.

At first the Manggarai workers eyed him suspiciously, this strange, big American with the Asian face, but as the hours wore on they gradually warmed to him.
Cebong Lewe
they called him, and later, sitting around the campfire, one of the researchers explained that this meant “bathe long,” referring to Paul’s habit of taking a dip in the river at the end of the workday. He lumbered among them, toting buckets of soil in each hand. He could carry more than they could, but he couldn’t squat, couldn’t kneel in the dirt, hunched for hours over the sieves. The workers rotated in their duties, first carrying buckets, then taking turns working at the fine-mesh grates. After only minutes at the sieves, Paul’s knees were screaming. His calves burned like fire. He was too big, too heavy to fold himself up like that. He traded jobs with one of the bucket carriers, who seemed confused by the offer of trade. Paul realized the Manggarai viewed the bucket carrying as the work and the sieving as a break.