Thursday, December 23, 2010

Chapter 7

7 
SINAI DESERT

Horst Tillotson stood in the quiet camp. Because there was no firewood for miles, only high pressure propane lamps blazed away from poles set in the sand. Trailers, he thought, here we are living in air conditioned trailers in the middle of the desert. This was hardly even archaeology. Without any good natured hardships, it was somehow sterile and intellectual.

His mind wandered to other digs, especially some from the earliest part of his career. The digging would cease an hour before sunset to make time for cutting firewood. The bugs could get so bad that not even the jokes about them were funny. But those were exciting days. Those were expeditions to places with names no one knew where archaeology could be just as pure as the unspoiled people who lived there. There could never be anything as exciting as having a man with a spear and a bone in his nose watch in amazement while you used a paint brush to reveal a pottery shard. The feeling had come strongly, lately, that everything had already been excavated, that there was nothing left in the great warehouse of mysteries and treasures beneath the surface of the world.

The desert night was still and cool. One hundred million stars poked through the clear blackness of the sky, timeless reminders that all of archaeology was a mere dance, lasting a second in the time of things. He once more had the thoughts of digging out the truth on another planet. He could almost not allow himself the indulgence to consider what was over the ridge to the west of the camp. Tomorrow morning he would move the dig to the tomb site. He had already walked it a couple of times, not too many, although the crew with him was so lacking in fire that he doubted any had suspected anything.

He had picked them himself, total yes-men from the department. All of them were far more interested in securing their slow advancements by pleasing him than exerting any troubling initiative in the management of the dig. The rest were bright eyed undergraduates with enough money to pay their own way. Half of them were having sex in the tents and trailers right now instead of resting to do tomorrow's work. The kids were like puppies, constantly under his feet, hanging on every word. In between breaths, they would formulate some specious question as an act of worship, as if osmosis through proximity would get them a Nobel prize someday. He needed a toothless crew to pull off the deception that he and the old man had engineered.

He strolled easily away from the lit area of the main camp toward the ridge. Withdrawing the GPS locator from his bag, he checked the longitude and latitude again for the twentieth time. Now reaching to the very bottom of the same bag, he withdrew a handful of useless debris he had brought from the University, bits of history too small to be cataloged, too uninteresting to be missed. After a glance over his shoulder he threw them as far as he could. Even this bunch of losers he had with him should be able to find one or two of them. It would be enough to start the mayhem of a sifting operation, and from there he would easily be able to stir them into a dig. Having a Nobel prize didn't really give you any special intuition It was more the case that everyone who won one already had special intuition, a special knack for sniffing out the unknown whether in a test tube or an Aztec ruin.

Now he was standing over the tomb site itself. Twenty feet below him through the historic sands of this land was probably the body of the Savior. The contents of this tomb were more powerful than all the H-Bombs in the world. The first casualty would be the Bible. After that would be a long list of churches, unable to adapt to new things. He was not the apostate for revealing the truth. He could only be apostate for failing to reveal it. Faith would triumph for those who could believe. Chaos would fall to those who believed that tradition, rather than truth, was more important.

Still, standing here alone in the middle of the night under the spectacular desert sky, he could not avoid the thoughts about the Creator and His Son, sent to the world. So what if part of the story got a little mixed up. A lot of people who couldn't write were basically forced to remember what had happened, along with what they had heard happened, and even what they had heard that others had seen or heard. This was the body of Christ, alright. Given time the experts would agree to that and the world would support it.

The old man wanted to rekindle the fires of the Christian faith. He thought that something new, something very real needed to be added to what had become little more than an ingrown extrication of legalistic interpretations of the relics of antiquity. Robeles wanted something for today. Something that would fill the churches with people and fill the minds of people with new religious wonder.

So here I am standing on it. I swore in my youth that I would never falsify a find. This is as close as I have ever come to doing that, but driven by necessity, how could I have refused? In any case, the find is real and the evidence that led me here is real. No review board is going to nit pick my approach to this. Especially not after another Nobel Prize.

He could feel
the tomb. Everything about it was electric. This would be the absolute pinnacle of his life.

After two days at the new site, all had agreed that walking five hundred yards back to the old camp was too exerting. A small army of trucks and laborers had moved all of it to a new site on the ridge above the tomb. Sixty tired dig crew members were now sifting through the sand with shaking tables and shovels. A steady wind had come up, enough of one to catch the surface sand. Tillotson thought to himself, "At least the wind will make it unpleasant for them. Some of the young ones may actually have something similar to a real expedition experience. A hundred and eighty full days of work expended here in three days of digging, and they have found four of the fifty or so tracing relics I threw around. It's a good thing we don't have any real archaeology to do."

On the fourth day Dr. Tillotson was actually having coffee in the shade of the camp when he heard the unmistakable 'clunk' of a shovel hitting cut stone. This sound was the ultimate joy to the seasoned archaeologist aside from the fact that it would be the 'clunk' heard round the world. Not a single person, even those in the close vicinity of the occurrence, had noticed anything. He rushed over to the hole to find two young students tapping their shovels hard against what they perceived as only an obstacle to the continued sifting.

Coffee cup still in hand, Tillotson called to them loudly. "Stop! Can't you hear that stone ring hollow? Get some people over here and dig it out!" He knew that the sound of that shovel hitting the stone was the bell tolling the dawn of a new age. He was grateful that most of the crew had returned to the university for the fall semester. The "slugs" had left. The "puppies" now comprised the work crew that would unearth the tomb. It was amazing to watch them work with no more enthusiasm than they had shown yesterday. Every one of them would probably write a book about this expedition.

It was time to call in reinforcements to stand guard over the damned thing. Within a day or two this empty desert would be filled with helicopters and jeeps carrying an army of reporters. He had agreed completely with Robeles' idea that a single statement should be made, no details or what if's, no rambling thoughts about what this find might mean to the religions of humanity.