Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.1]

Chapter Fourteen

Upon arriving at the Big Sur site by car the following day with Professor Simons, Nicasio could see a contingent of sheriff's deputies guarding the area and at the same time systematically cutting down the many marijuana plants, now swaying almost two meters high in the fresh sea breeze. The professor had been quite accurate. It was a magnificent view down to the dark blue and turquoise Pacific, some four-hundred feet below.

This he took in as they approached the sun-bleached camouflaged covering he had seen in the photos. Dr. Simons talked to an officer who seemed to be in charge of the operations, and for which the professor produced some identification. He was then given the clearance to proceed in opening the tomb cover over the unusual mound once again. Nicasio and the professor passed through the wide tear in the tarpaulin and then inched downward along a narrow stairway of polished stones before entering a west-facing portal to the main dome. Nicasio carried a digital camera, some graph paper notebooks, a small shovel and a heavy box-frame device covered on one side by wire screen for sifting earth. The professor had a large battery-pack portable lamp, a digital video camera and a utility bag filled with dental picks, knives, a measuring tape. Brushes and a small trowel were sticking out of his pockets-tools of the trade for an archaeologist.

Once inside the greater subterranean structure, the professor turned on the powerful hand-held lamp, illuminating the interior marble walls. It was truly a beehive dome arching above them. Both were impressed with the forest green, polished surface of the tight-fitting stones, each a parabolic block cut to fit its relative position in the upward curving and vaulted burial chamber. The stones appeared seamless due the phenomenal dressing of each marble piece and the flawless construction of the still unknown craftsmen or laborers who assembled them.

The professor began filming their steady passage toward the central, white marble sarcophagus several meters away. Nicasio could not help but feel that history was in the making as he knew better than most that there was no such Greek, tholos-style structure anywhere discovered to exist in North, Central or South America. But central questions persisted in further baffling his knowledge and even his imagination. When exactly was this sepulcher constructed in this remote coastal wilderness area? And by whom? Of course, the over-arching question remained: What personage, if any, was the structure intended for?

The professor temporarily turned off the camcorder to address Nicasio, a little out of breath.

"This green marble can be identified. Every marble type in the world has distinctive characteristics of color and striations, even a unique chemical composition. This will give us some points of origin for these materials, at least geographically.

Nicasio just wiped his brow and nodded as he rested.

"I don't believe these stones originated from anywhere on this coast," Dr Simons continued, ". . . they had to be carried in. An almost impossible feat in itself at this location." He then paused, as he himself took a moment to catch his breath.

Nicasio was still spell-bound by the sight unfolding before him. As the camera was re-employed and they slowly approached the central box, roughly the size of a human lying prone, the spotlight caught the brilliance of the pure white object and its amazing embossed designs.

The professor zoomed in. There they were again, the curvaceous women warriors galloping across the four coordinate panels of the sarcophagus. And there again, as in the photos back in Simon's office, was the broken lid, leaning up against the structure as if it had just been unsealed and hastily removed. Again the camera went off so the professor could candidly speak.

"We are blessed, my young friend to be here to record this. This thing is simply too improbable to exist with any historical precedence." His professor's voice was labored from excitement.

The younger scholar could smell the dampness of the enclosed, marble chamber and tried to imagine how long ago it had been created. What had actually happened here? His mind could also not leave the question of who had originally disturbed the reliquary, for which so much artistic and technical industry had combined. It was obviously created to hide, and at the same time celebrate someone's previous life. He had in his past experience and university coursework participated in digs up and down the California coast, from the Spanish missions to the nebulous, almost invisible encampments believed to have been left as the vestiges of California's earliest explorations to the south in Mexico. But this was nothing like he had ever encountered, even in his own meticulous research and fieldwork at Drake's Bay.

"Yes, impossible," Nicasio added finally, and with a slight echo to his voice. "Yet, we're actually standing in it."

The remainder of the day the two men photographed, measured, and documented the parameters of the tomb. They spent many hours sifting through the debris and soil from the structure's floor and perimeter. In all, the sanctuary was perfectly parabolic, vertically to a height of fourteen and one-half feet, and circular in base, horizontally, it had a fifteen and one-half foot diameter at the floor level. The sarcophagus was typically trapezoidal in shape, cut from a solid piece of white marble, and with dimensions like those found throughout Europe during Medieval and Renaissance times. Its design approximated its prototypical origins in classical Greece and Rome.

For hours the men labored measuring the individual green stones from the base to the apex. They also spent considerable time straining with the box screen, filtering buckets of earth and debris which had accumulated on the floor over an inderterminable age. The sediment did not appear to have been brought in by the tomb robbers from the entry way to the sarcophagus, but rather appeared uniform over the entire floor. It was as if the debris had been there since its assembly. Nicasio collected the aggregate material on the floor with a hand broom and put it into bags. The overall thickness of the debris covering the area was approximately one inch throughout the marble base evenly.

These bags of dust and small stones were carefully screened by both men throughout the afternoon. It appeared to the professor that who ever built and sealed the tholos had not gone to the trouble of sweeping it out pristinely after its assembly, as one would expect-perhaps, suggesting there had been some haste to get the job completed or that the work party had no excess energy for such a task. Nevertheless, the day's work of filtering the floor debris yielded some small gems-clues Professor Simons kept in Ziploc bags for further analysis.

Though Nicasio was exhausted by day's end, the sheer excitement of being a part of such an enigmatic inquiry left him feeling intellectually charged. His professor seemed equally spent, but no less energized as they got into the humble Volvo station wagon at sunset and headed back toward the civilization of Carmel and Monterey. Both men were physically and emotionally drained during the drive back. They were also just too consumed in their own private thoughts to speak.

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