Robert waits in silence.
“The legends say that the first people in this area came in small numbers five hundred thousand years ago,” says Joseph. “That they traveled from their primary settlement to live by this creek which, then, flowed like a river.”
“From across the sea?” asks Robert.
Joseph doesn’t answer. In a few moments, he stands. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says.
Robert looks up at the looming man. “Why do I have the impression that you were about to add ‘at last’ to that remark?” he asks.
The Indian grunts. Robert cannot tell if he is smiling in the darkness but it is his impression that the Hopi is.
“Rest,” says Joseph. “Tomorrow will be difficult.”
CUT TO the net day as the difficulty manifests—a six foot boulder in the five-foot-square shaft. “Now what?” John asks.
“Dynamite,” says Joseph.
He returns shortly after with the sticks of dynamite. “I hope you’ve used this stuff before,” Robert says.
“I have,” says Joseph.
Robert restrains him for a moment. “Did you know that boulder was going to be there?” he asks.
“I thought it might be,” Joseph answers.
The charge is set and all of them withdraw.
The rumbling explosion causes Ann to have a spontaneous vision which frightens her. As Robert holds her in his arms, she shakily describes what she saw—a mother cowering in the creek bed with her two children, trying to shield them from an avalanche of ice and water thundering down the slope above.
Joseph, hearing this, nods and pats Ann roughly on the back. “This is good,” he tells her. “To see this is an honor. Don’t be disturbed.”
Robert and Ann look at each other. She rubs away some tears from her cheek. “This has been a crazy year,” she says. Robert hugs her, smiling.
The dig continues. Hours. Days. One hundred degrees on the surface. Like digging in a cold storage locker at the bottom of the shaft. Half of them get colds.
Norman is living in a semi-daze, half happy, half dismayed by the artifacts which keep appearing. He gives up trying to resist or understand what’s going on, riding the wave of each new discovery with a shrug and a hapless smile.
The radiocarbon data from the fifteen foot level are gotten back from a lab and turn out to be approximately 25,000 years old.
Next, they run across a paleosol, a fossil soil preserved exactly as it was ages ago. In it, they find crude stone tools and their flake debris.
Norman is delighted but remains confused. “I just don’t understand it,” he keeps muttering to himself.
The work becomes more arduous. They have little maneuverability in the five-foot-square shaft. The original cable becomes too short and they have to use a longer, thinner one. The motor (7/8 horsepower) works with less efficiency and the bucket can only be filled halfway. They know, too, that if the cable shears, the bucket and its contents will crash down on their heads.
One afternoon, Robert stops working abruptly and looks around, then tells them to get out of the shaft; he is working with Norman and John.
“Why?” asks Norman.
“Now,” orders Robert.
Norman tries to object but Robert won’t let him. Hurriedly, they climb to the surface, Robert pushing Norman and his brother to move as fast as they can.
They have barely reached the top of the shaft and crawled onto the ground when there is a rumbling sound below. The shaft has caved in at the bottom.
Norman has no remark to make. Like a man living in an incomprehensible world into which he has been involuntarily plunged, he only walks away from Robert and John, shaking his head and mumbling to himself.
Joseph comes up to Robert and takes him aside. “We’ve made a mistake,” he says.
Robert looks at him apprehensively.
“We forgot to ask for permission,” Joseph tells him.
Another strange experience for Robert as Joseph tells him that, since the beginning of the world, the Hopis have depended for their well-being on the Kachinas, spiritual “caretakers” who reside in the nearby mountains. This slope “belongs” to them.
Accordingly, permission must be asked in order for them to have the right to dig here.
Robert must help to do this.
Robert is past arguing about anything of this sort any longer. All he asks is that they do it away from Norman, John and the crew.
“They will not be witness to it,” Joseph says.
Robert watches him walk away; sighs. “What would Cathy say?” he wonders aloud.
That evening, Robert and Ann (Joseph has told him that she, too, has “the right” to do this) ostensibly go for a walk. Meeting Joseph they help him gather spruce boughs, then accompany him to the kiva—the underground chamber we saw early in the story.
They follow Joseph down the ladder, watch him light the spruce boughs, then join him, hesitantly at first, in a dancing chant to ask the Kachinas to let them dig unharmed. Joseph has warned them that they must do this “from their hearts” and not pretend humility or nothing will work.
It is a bizarre scene, the three figures dancing and chanting in the dim, smoky chamber. It seems as though vague, shapeless figures move about them just out of sight while Joseph says aloud, in his own tongue, then in English, “Oh, ancient people, now slumbering, guide our shovels to the truth and beauties in the old fields, that we may bear witness to your life and be your voice from the past.
“Show us too, when we are worthy, the hidden place and the beginning that we may understand.”
When the ceremony is ended, Joseph says he thinks it went all right, it should be easier now. He should have known the need for this when they were obstructed by the boulder. He believes that Ann’s vision was the Kachina’s way of reminding them. He regrets having risked their lives by not recognizing the reminder.
Before they leave, he pledges them to keep the location of the kiva a secret because it is a place of spiritual ceremony. They promise him, then Ann asks, “What’s the hidden place?”
“Not yet,” says Joseph.
“The beginning?” Robert asks.
“Of everything,” Joseph answers as he walks away.
Robert and Ann walk back toward the motor home, hand in hand. They both feel very solemn.
Until Ann murmurs, “I don’t think I’m going to tell Mom about this.”
This reduces both of them to helpless laughter.
More days passing. An endless succession of climbing and descending, digging, eating, resting, sleeping, aching. John shows signs of weakening. Joseph observes and tells Robert that this work may be too hard for his brother. Robert hates to say anything because John seems to feel such strong fulfillment being here in Arizona at the kind of dig he and his father had gone to in the past.
They dig down past the edge of an enormous boulder. If it was under the shaft, the dig would be ended.
“Thank you, Kachinas,” Ann says in a voice as casual as though she were saying, “Thank you, Paine-Webber.”
Robert grins and scratches a heart on the boulder surface, scribes the letters R and A inside it.
CAMERA HOLDS ON the heart.
More days passing. Norman and Robert becoming uneasy for different reasons.
Norman is beginning to suffer a reaction to his “honeymoon” period on the dig.
At twenty-six feet, they uncover another paleosol which correlates to a date not less than 100,000 years old. More artifacts are found. He cannot deny their existence but that existence contradicts even more past beliefs. Twenty-five thousand years was one thing. One hundred thousand is something else again.
Norman feels the pressure of a man whose world is cracking.
Robert is becoming uneasy because nothing seems to be happening at the dig except what he had always believed could only happen here—the discovery of ancient artifacts possibly pushing back the date of man’s existence in this area. He has felt strongly that h
e came here—even that he was brought here—for some important purpose. Now he is beginning to wonder if the entire thing is, after all, as Cathy seemed to indicate, a personal delusion on his part.
Accordingly, he starts becoming restless. Even Ann’s reassurances fail to help.
Norman’s harried report of what Joseph has told him provides the solution for Robert’s distress.
“I can’t stay here,” Norman starts the exchange.
Robert looks at him in surprise. “Why? What’s the matter?” he asks.
Norman hardly knows how to begin expressing his state of mind. “I am a—a—party-line archeologist, Robert,” he says. “It is difficult enough for me to accept that there were human beings living here even twenty thousand years ago.”
“I understand,” says Robert, nodding.
“You don’t,” says Norman. “I do not believe that people living here a hundred thousand years ago had domesticated dogs and horses, corn and rye!”
Robert looks perplexed. “I don’t understand now,” he says.
“Of course, you don’t understand!” Norman fumes. “What person in their right mind could understand?! Domesticated plants and animals? Pottery, leatherwork, artwork, a symbolic writing system?! God in heaven!”
“Norman, what are you talking about?”
“Your Indian friend,” says Norman darkly. “Joseph, your Hopi Prognosticator. He is now predicting—not predicting, stating—the imminent discovery of wall-carvings, paintings, wooden ankhs, cured leather, parchment scrolls with hieroglyphic writing. Is the man insane?”
Robert pats a quivering Norman on the shoulder and suggests that a good night’s sleep would do wonders.
“I just don’t know if I can stay here any longer,” Norman mumbles as he turns away.
Robert goes to see Joseph, who lives in a hut below the opposite side of the temple.
He asks the Indian, flat out, what it is they’re digging for.
Joseph has him sit across a table from him, pours him a cup of coffee.
“What would you like it to be?” he asks.
Robert is taken back by the question. Then he realizes what he hopes for: that this dig might turn out to be located on the energy matrix he now believes covers the earth.
He starts to explain what he means by this when, to his astonishment, Joseph says he knows what Robert is talking about.
“You do?” asks Robert blankly.
The Indian’s faint smile makes Robert feel apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t be so…”
Joseph’s simple gesture allays his embarrassment. “Why do you wish this site to be on the matrix?” he asks.
Robert has to admit he doesn’t know. It was simply the closest thing he could visualize to an “answer” he is looking for. He just doesn’t believe that ancient artifacts are going to give him that answer.
At the same time, he has no idea what the purpose of the matrix is other than to provide energy access points—or exchange around the globe.
What the energy is and what purpose it serves is totally unknown to him.
“You’ve been involved in ESP,” says Joseph.
“Yes,” says Robert.
“And ESP is—what?”
Robert hesitates. “An energy of some sort,” he says.
Joseph stands and crosses the small room, takes a book off a shelf and returns to the table. Sitting, he opens the book and finds what he is looking for.
“Bernard Grad wrote this,” he says.
“The man from McGill University?” asks Robert, surprised again. “The one who conducted the healing experiments with mice?”
“The same,” says Joseph.
He reads aloud: “The central focus is energy—life energy—what it is, where it is, where it moves, how it works.
“It shakes up one’s view of the universe that there is energy moving through everything. That it is all around us—in the air, in the ground.
“What is more, it is informational—the energy itself an information-bearer… self-regulating…. programmed.
“Whatever the requirement for this energy, it, somehow knows.”
Joseph looks up.
“It knows when it is used to search for water underground,” he says. “Knows when an animal uses it to find its way home over the distance of a continent. Knows when a psychic sees across a thousand miles or a thousand years. Knows when it is utilized to move objects – to seek out thoughts in others’ minds—to see things that the eyes cannot see, hear things the ears cannot hear.
“All religions and mythologies are based on this ‘Energy That Knows’. Some of these have lost most of it. Some retain a little. Some remain close.”
“And did the megalith builders create places where this energy could come through?” Robert asks.
“They recognized these places as synchronizing points,” Joseph says. “Points where the rhythms of the Earth could be harmonized with the rhythms of the universe.”
“For ESP?” asks Robert.
“The network of megalithic sites built along the matrix lines seasonally re-vitalized the Earth,” Joseph answers. “And its people.”
“But this spot isn’t on the matrix,” Robert says, knowing.
“This spot is something else,” says Joseph.
The dig goes on. Norman continues to be cranky but Robert regains his spirits.
His pleasure is diminished by the obvious decline of John’s health.
They are sitting in the motor home one afternoon, having lunch, Joseph, Norman and Ann in the shaft.
“How are you, John?” Robert has to ask.
John sighs. “A little tired, Bobby,” he says.
“Why don’t you forget your afternoon shift?” Robert suggests. “One of the crew can handle it.”
John is about to argue and Robert knows that he is stepping on fragile ground. But John’s exhaustion overcomes and he only nods and says, “I guess.”
Before he leaves the motor home, Robert gets a fresh handkerchief from his cupboard and runs across the bio-feedback control. He hasn’t used it since they came to Arizona.
As he puts it away, he looks back at John lying down. It makes him feel badly that, as his brother’s health declines, his improves.
He is almost to the shaft when he hears excited voices.
He goes down to find Joseph, Norman and Ann looking at a sight which is both awful and touching.
The skeletons of a woman and two children, the woman’s posture that of a mother trying to protect her young, her arms around them.
“Just the way I saw them,” Ann says, almost reverently.
Robert puts his arm around her in the way the woman has her arm around her child.
“These are from the Motherland,” says Joseph quietly.
Robert looks at him.
“This was an outpost,” Joseph tells them.
“The Motherland?” Ann asks.
Joseph will say no more but climbs from the shaft.
In it, he sees a priest in a vivid robe standing in a dim interior, waiting for him. He moves toward the tall figure.
To discover that the priest is holding his hands like the brass sculptured hands.
And that, floating in the air between his palms, is a crystal globe.
As Robert stops before the priest, the man’s face unseen in the shadow, the crystal globe begins to glow.
He wakes up. It is after two a.m. Rising, he goes outside.
He is almost to the dig when he sees Joseph sitting cross-legged in the moonlight, eyes closed.
Robert knows he must not interrupt whatever the Hopi is doing and, turning, he goes back to the motor home.
As he enters, John is just emerging from the bathroom.
He sits with Robert in the booth and tells him, in a soft voice, that he doesn’t think he can stay much longer.
“All this exercise and fresh air is killing me,” he says.
Robert doesn’t know what to say. He puts his hand on Joh
n’s and holds it there.
September 10. Robert drives Ann and John to the nearest airport.
“I’ll be back soon,” Robert tells his daughter, embracing her. “We can’t dig too much longer, the weather’s going to change.”
He promises to keep in touch and contact her as soon as he gets home.
“Dad, I’d like to live with you if I could,” she blurts, holding on to him tightly.
He looks at her. “Sweetheart, that is not a bad idea,” is his reaction.
Her face brightens. “Really?”
He nods. “We’ll talk about it when I get back.” “Oh, yes, yes,” she says, hugging him fiercely. His farewell to John is less happy. “John, if you need me, tell me and I’ll come,” he says. “You belong here, kid,” John tells him. “Not with me.” He still can’t embrace Robert easily. He pats Robert on the back. “Finish it up,” he says. “Find what Pop was looking for.” “I will,” Robert says.
Later, he tries to telephone Cathy from the airport but she is neither at ESPA nor her apartment.
“I hope to God she’s not back in England,” he murmurs to himself.
A shock awaits him as he comes into the motor home that afternoon. The sight actually makes him jump.
Lying on the table is something they have dug up in the shaft that day.
The rotting remnants of a priest’s robe. The one he saw in his dream.
He walks to the dig with the mail he’s picked up from the post office. There is a letter for Norman from Amelia.
“She’s coming out!” cries Norman in delight, reading it. “At last; someone to share my dementia with.”
Robert smiles and pats Norman on the shoulder, then looks for Joseph, finds him by the shaft.
He tells the Hopi that he saw the robe in a dream the night before. When he describes the dream, Joseph tenses.
“We must be getting close then.” Joseph says. “To what?” asks Robert.
Joseph tells him that a key belief in Hopi mythology is that this area contains a network of underground tunnels.
“Is that what we’ve been looking for?” Robert asks him. “Partially,” says Joseph.
Robert looks at him in silence for a while, then says, “Do these tunnels lead to the ‘hidden place’?”