by Ray Bradbury
Two of the other graduate students were well qualified to run a simple dig for themselves. One was put in charge of the untouched second kiva, the other of a trench cutting into the general mass of the ruin from the north. Franklin felt uncomfortably supernumerary, but he recognized that that was an advantage in pursuing his main purpose of keeping a close watch on the expedition’s director.
After supper on the evening of the eighth day, Dr. Hillebrand announced rather shyly that he would be gone for about four days, “to follow an old custom you all know about.” The younger men smiled. Franklin kept a blank face to cover his quickened interest.
This was a famous, or notorious, eccentricity of the old man’s, and one in which Drs. Klibben, McDonnell, and the rest put great hope. Every year, early in the season, Dr. Hillebrand went alone to a ruin he had excavated early in his career. There was some uncertainty as to just where the ruin was; it was believed to be one known to the Navajos as Tsekaiye Kin. No one knew what he did there. He said he found the surroundings and the solitude invaluable for thinking out the task in hand. It was usually not long after his return from it that he would announce his decision to dig in such-and-such a spot, and proceed to uncover the painted kiva, or the Kettle Cave fetishes, or the Kin Hatsosi blanket, or some other notable find.
If Franklin could slip away in the station wagon and follow the old man, he might get just the information he wanted. So far, Dr. Hillebrand’s activities on the expedition had evidenced nothing but his great competence. If the old man ever performed mad antique rites with stolen specimens, it would be at his secret place of meditation. Perhaps he got up and danced to the ancient gods. One might be able to sneak a photo . . .
Dr. Hillebrand said, “I shan’t be gone long. Meantime, of course, Dr. Franklin will be in charge.” He turned directly to his junior. “George, there are several things on which you must keep a close watch. If you will look at these diagrams— and you, too, Phil . . .”
Franklin and Fleming sat down beside him. Dr. Hillebrand expounded. Whether the ancient devil had done it intentionally or not, Franklin saw that he was neatly hooked. In the face of the delicacy and the probable outcome of the next few days’ work, he could not possibly make an excuse for absenting himself when the head of the expedition was also absent.
Dr. Hillebrand took off early the next morning in his throbbing Model A. He carried with him a Spartan minimum of food and bedding. It was good to be alone once more in the long-loved reaches of the Navajo country. The car drove well. He still used it because, short of a jeep, nothing newer had the clearance to take him where he wanted to go.
He drove slowly, for he was at the age when knowledge and skill must replace strength, and getting stuck would be serious. When he was fifty, he reflected, he would have reached T’iiz Hatsosi Canyon from this year’s camp in under four hours; when he was thirty, if it had been possible to travel this country in a car, he would have made even greater speed, and as like as not ended by getting lost. He reached the open farming area outside the place where T’iiz Hatsosi sliced into the great mesa to the south. There were nearly twice as many hogans to be seen as when he had first come here; several of them were square and equipped with windows, and by some of them cars were parked. Everything was changing, but these were good people still, although not as genial and hospitable as their grandparents had been when he first packed in.
He entered the narrow mouth of T’iiz Hatsosi Canyon in the late afternoon, and by the exercise of consummate skill drove some four miles up it. At that point, it was somewhat wider than elsewhere, slightly under two hundred feet across at the bottom. The heavy grazing that had so damaged all the Navajos’ land had had some effect here. There was less grass than there used to be—but then, he reflected, he had no horses to graze—and the bed of the wash was more deeply eroded, and here and there sharp gullies led into it from the sides.
Still, the cottonwoods grew between the occasional stream and the high, warmly golden-buff cliffs. Execpt at noon, there was shade, and the quality of privacy, almost of secrecy, remained. In the west wall was the wide strip of white rocks from which the little ruin took its name, Tsekaiye Kin, leading the eye to the long ledge above which the cliff arched like a scallop shell, and upon which stood the ancient habitations. The lip of the ledge was about twenty feet above the level of the canyon, and approachable by a talus slope that was not too hard to negotiate. Some small evergreens grew at the corners of the ledge. From the ground, the settlement did not seem as if it had been empty for centuries, but rather as if its occupants at the moment happened not to be visible. The small black rectangles of doorways and three tiny squares of windows made him feel, as they had done over forty years ago, as if the little settlement were watching him.
South of the far end of the ledge, and at the level of the canyon floor, was the spring. Water seeped richly through a crack in the rock a few feet above the ground and flowed down over rock to form a pool at the base. The wet golden-brown stone glistened; small water growths clung to crevices. In the pool itself, there was cress, and around it moss and grass rich enough to make a few feet of turf.
Here Dr. Hillebrand deposited his bedroll and his food. He estimated that he had better than two hours of daylight left. He cut himself a supply of firewood. Then he took a package out of his coffeepot. The package was wrapped in an old piece of buckskin. With this in hand, he climbed up the slope to the ruin.
The sense of peace had begun once he was out of sight of the camp at Painted Mask Ruin. It had grown when he entered T’iiz Hatsosi Canyon; it had become stronger when he stepped out of the car and glimpsed through the cotton-woods his little village, with its fourteen rooms. By the spring, it had become stronger yet, and mixed with a nostalgia of past times that was sweetly painful, like a memory of an old and good lost love. These feelings were set aside as he addressed himself to the task of climbing, which was not entirely simple; then they returned fourfold when he was in the ruin. Here he had worked alone, a green young man with a shiny new Doctor’s degree, a boy-man not unlike young Fleming. Here he had discovered what it was like to step into a room that still had its roof intact, and see the marks of the smoke from the household fire, the loom ties still in place in the ceiling and floor, the broken cooking pot still in the corner.
He paid his respects to that chamber—Room 4-B; stood in the small, open, central area; then went to the roofless, irregular oval of the kiva. All by himself he had dug it out.
Could Dr. Franklin have been there then, spying unseen, he would have been most happy. From under a stone that appeared firmly embedded in the clay flooring Dr. Hillebrand took an ancient, crude stone pipe fitted with a recent willow stem. He filled it with tobacco, performed curious motions as he lit it, and puffed smoke in the six directions. Then he climbed out of the kiva on the inner side and went behind the double row of habitations, to the darker area under the convex curve of the wall at the back of the cave, the floor of which was a mixture of earth and rubbish. Two smallish, rounded stones about three feet apart inconspicuously marked a place. Sitting by it on a convenient ledge of rock, he puffed at the pipe again; then he opened the buckskin package and proceeded to make an offering of ancient turquoise beads, white and red shell, black stone, feathers and down, and corn pollen.
Sitting back comfortably, he said, “Well, here I am again.”
The answer did not come from the ground, in which the bones of the speaker reposed, but from a point in space, as if he were sitting opposite Dr. Hillebrand. “Welcome, old friend. Thank you for the gifts; their smell is pleasing to us all.”
“I don’t know whether I can bring you any more,” the archeologist said. “I can buy new things, of course, but getting the old ones is becoming difficult. They are watching me.”
“It is not necessary,” the voice answered. “We are rich in the spirits of things such as these, and our grandchildren on earth still offer them to us. It has been rather for your benefit that I have had you bringing them,
and I think that that training has served its purpose.”
“You relieve me.” Then, with a note of anxiety, “That doesn’t mean that I have to stop visiting you?”
“Not at all. And, by the way, there is a very handsome jar with a quantity of beans of an early variety in it where you are digging now. It was left behind by accident when the people before the ones who built the painted kiva moved out. It belonged to a woman called Bluebird Tailfeather. Her small child ran off and was lost just as they were moving, and by the time she found him, the war chief was impatient. However, we can come back to that later. I can see that you have something on your mind.”
“I’m lonely,” Dr. Hillebrand said simply. “My real friends are all gone. There are a lot of people I get on nicely with, but no one left I love—that is, above the ground—and you are the only one below the ground I seem to be able to reach. I—I’d like to take your remains back with me, and then we could talk nights.”
“I would not like that.”
“Then of course I won’t.”
“I was sure of that. Your country is strange to me, and travelling back and forth would be a lot of effort. What I saw that time I visited you was alien to me; it would be to you, too, I think. It won’t be long, I believe, before I am relieved of attachment to my bones entirely, but if you moved them now, it would be annoying. You take that burial you carried home ten years ago—old Rabbit Stick. He says you treat him well and have given him the smell of ceremonial jewels whenever you could, but sometimes he arrives quite worn out from his journey.”
“Rabbit Stick,” Dr. Hillebrand mused. “I wondered if there were not someone there. He has never spoken to me.”
“He couldn’t. He was just an ordinary Reed Clan man. But he is grateful to you for the offerings, because they have given him the strength he needed. As you know, I can speak with you because I was the Sun’s Forehead, and there was the good luck that you were thin k ing and feeling in the right way when you approached me. But tell me, don’t the young men who learn from you keep you company?”
“Yes. There is one now who is like a son to me. But then they have learned, and they go away. The men in between, who have become chiefs, you might say, in my Department, have no use for me. They want to make me emeritus—that is, put me on a pension, take over my authority and my rewards, and set me where I could give advice and they could ignore it They have new ways, and they despise mine. So now they are watching me. They have sent a young man out this time just to watch me. They call him a student of the ways of your grandchildren; he spent six weeks at Zuni once, and when even he could see that the people didn’t like him, he went and put in the rest of the summer at Oraibi.”
“New Oraibi or Old Oraibi?” the Sun’s Forehead asked
“New Oraibi.”
The chief snorted.
“So, having also read some books, he thinks he is an ethnographer, only he calls himself a cultural anthropologist And he is out here to try to find proof that my mind is failing.” He smiled. “They’d certainly think so if they saw me sitting here talking to empty air.”
The Sun’s Forehead chuckled.
“They certainly would. They wouldn’t be able to hear me, you know.” Then his voice became serious again. ‘That always happens, I think. It happened to me. They wanted to do things differently, when I had at last come to the point at which an Old Man talked to me. I reached it in old age—not young, as you did. They could not take my title, but they wanted to handle my duties for me, bring me enough food to live on, hear my advice and not listen to it. Struggling against them became wearying and distasteful, so finally I decided to go under. At the age I had reached—about your age—it is easy to do.”
“And now you say that you are about to be detached from your bones entirely? You are reaching the next stage?”
“Let us say that I begin to hope. Our life is beautiful, but for a hundred years or so now I have been longing for the next, and I begin to hope.”
“How does it happen? Or is it wrong for me to know?”
“You may know. You are good, and you keep your secrets, as our wise men always did. You will see a man who has become young, handsome, and full of light. When we dance, he dances with great beauty; his singing is beautiful, and you feel as if it were creating life. Then one time when the katchinas themselves are dancing before us—not masks, you understand, the katchinas themselves—you can’t find him among the watchers. Then you seem to recognize him, there among the sacred people, dancing like them. Then you think that the next time our grandchildren on the earth put on the masks and dance, that one, whom you knew as a spirit striving to purify himself, who used to tell you about his days on the earth, will be there. With his own eyes he will see our grandchildren and bless them.” The chief’s voice trailed off, as though the longing for what he was describing deprived him of words.
“To see the katchinas themselves dancing,” Dr. Hillebrand mused. “Not the masks, but what the masks stand for . . . That would keep me happy for centuries. But then, I could not join your people. I was never initiated. I’d be plain silly trying to dance with them. It’s not for me.”
“For over forty years I have been initiating you,” the Sun’s Forehead said. “As for dancing—you will no longer be in that old body. You will not be dancing with those fragile, rheumatic bones. There is room for you in our country. Why don’t you come over? Just lie down in that crevice back there and make up your mind.”
“You know,” Dr. Hillebrand said, “I think I will.”
Both the Kleinman Professor of American Archeology and the spirit who once had been the Sun’s Forehead for the settlements in the neighborhood of T’iiz Hafcsosi were thoroughly unworldly. It had not occurred to either of them that within six days after Dr. Hillebrand had left camp Dr. George Franklin would organize a search for him, and that four days later his body would be found where he had died of, apparently, heart failure. Above all, it had not occurred to them that his body would be taken home and buried with proper pomp in the appropriate cemetery. (But Philip Fleming, close to tears, resolutely overlooked the scattering of turquoise and shell in the rubbish between the crevice and the kiva.)
Dr. Hillebrand found himself among people as alien to him as they had been to the Sun’s Forehead. They seemed to be gaunt from the total lack of offerings, and the means by which they should purify and advance themselves to where they could leave this life for the next, which he believed to be the final one, were confused. He realized that his spirit was burdened with much dross, and that it would be a long time before he could gather the strength to attempt a journey to the country of his friend.
His portrait, in academic gown and hood, was painted posthumously and hung in the entrance of the museum, to one side of the stela from Quirigua and facing the reproduction of the famous Painted Kiva mural. Dr. Klibben adroitly handled the promotions and emoluments that fell under his control. Philip Fleming won his Ph.D. with honor, and was promptly offered a splendid position at Harvard. Moved by he knew not what drive, and following one or two other actions he had performed to his own surprise, Fleming went to Dr. Hillebrand’s grave, for a gesture of respect and thanks.
It had seemed to him inappropriate to bring any flowers. Instead, as he sat by the grave, with small motions of his hands he sprinkled over it some bits of turquoise and shell he had held out from a nceklace he had unearthed, and followed them with a pinch of pollen given him by a Navajo. Suddenly his face registered utter astonishment; then careful listening.
The following season, Fleming returned to Painted Mask Ruin by agreement with Dr. Klibben, who was delighted to get his Department entirely out of Southwestern archeology. There he ran a trench that led right into a magnificent polychrome pot containing a store of beans of high botanical interest.
Within a few years, he stopped visiting the grave, but he was sentimentalist enough to make a pilgrimage all alone to Tsekaiye Kin at the beginning of each field season. It was jokingly said among hi
s confreres that there he communed with the spirit of old Hillebrand. Certainly he seemed to have inherited that legendary figure’s gift for making spectacular finds.
THRESHOLD by Henry Kuttner
It was quiet in the comfortable little apartment, twelve stories above the traffic of Central Park West. Venetian blinds reflected soft lights. Conventional prints were on the walls, a neutral-colored rug on the floor, and a decanter of whiskey was amber and crystal in Haggard's hand as he reflected ironically on the setting. Distinctly out of place, he thought, for an experiment in black magic.
He poured liquor for Stone, who had just arrived, out of breath and puffing nervously on a cigarette. The young attorney leaned forward in his chair and accepted the glass.
"You're not drinking, Steve?"
“Not tonight," said Haggard, with a twisted little smile. "Drink up."
Stone obeyed. Then he set down the glass and opened a brief case he had been holding on his lap. From it he took a flat, oblong parcel.
"Here's the book you wanted." He tossed it across the room.
Haggard didn't open the parcel. He placed it carefully on an end table, next to a capped thermos bottle standing there. His gaze lingered on the latter.
There was something innately cold about Stephen Haggard. Owner of a struggling advertising agency, he seemed quite unmoved by the trials that beset others and were apparently unable to affect him. Handsome, thirty-four, with rather thin lips and very level black gaze, he moved imperturbably through life. The man seemed incased in a gelid sheathe of some frigid stuff. He was ice and iron.
