"Alan Dean Foster - Interlopers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

smile. "It'll
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take lab studies to confirm or deny." He indicated the packaged skull. "The edges of the cavity are pretty
reg-ular, but it could have been made by a weapon."
Harbos nodded. "Or something else." His expression was sympathetic. "It's always frustrating when you find
something potentially exciting in the field and know that it won't be properly identified for months."
Straighten-ing, he moved on, keeping clear of the rim of the straight-sided excavation so as not to knock dirt
or pebbles into the hole.
Pleased with this mildest of compliments, Cody care-fully began to fold the lid of the box closed, bending the
corners of the cardboard so the top would stay shut until it could be reopened in the field lab. Somewhere, a
bird chirped. The paucity of birds in the semi-cloud forest was striking. Unlike elsewhere in the Andes, here
they kept to themselves, as if their boisterous warbling might dis-turb the sleeping mountains.
Except for the condors and the buzzards, of course. Ever on the lookout for harbingers of death, they had a
job to do that required constant patrolling of the translu-cent blue sky. Their occasional appearances
provoked ad-miring comment from those of his fellow students who hailed from the city, which he ignored.
Back home, such aerial visions were common as dirt.
He wondered how many other intact skulls might lie buried and waiting to be found nearby. By the standards
of the remarkable but little-known Chachapoyan culture, Apachetarimac was not a big site, no more than four
hun-dred meters long by ninety wide. Gran Vilaya, for one, boasted far more individual structures, and Cuelap
was more physically imposing. But Apachetarimac remained one of the most impressive, occupying the top
of a forest-clad mountain whose sides fell away sheer on three sides. Walls of cut limestone over a hundred
and twenty feet
high formed the basis of the citadel, with the interior structures rising higher still. Combined with dense
over-growth, its inaccessibility had kept it hidden from the out-side world for the last five hundred years.
Locals whose farms clung with the tenacity of dirty spider webs to the sides of nearby mountains knew of its
existence but had no reason to speak of it to the outside world. While they had made it plain they didn't care
for the busy visitors who delighted in digging in the dirt, nei-ther did they attempt to interfere with the
excavation. The presence of a pair of Peruvian federal policemen, camped on site to prevent looting and ward
off any wandering narcotraficos, also served to keep the superstitious locals from causing any trouble.
"Well, does inspiration strike, have you been bitten by a fer-de-lance, or is this paralysis due to an inability to
decide whether to go forward, back, or simply wait for instructions?"
He turned sharply. The only time Alwydd could look down on him was when he was standing in a hole. Not
that she was particularly short, but he was the tallest per-son in camp. For that matter, he was the tallest
person in this immediate region of Peru, height not being a notable characteristic of the local indios and
mestizos.
Embarrassed, he fumbled for a witty response and, as always, came up with nothing. She was much too
quick for him. Harbos could keep up with her, giving as good as he got, but no one else in camp had her
lightning wit. She was also brilliant, and beautiful, about a year away from her doctorate, and convinced that
she and not Cody ought to be Harbos's first assistant in the field. If not wit, however, Coschocton Westcott
possessed endless reser-voirs of patience. In an archaeologist, that was the far more valued commodity.
Brilliance was cheap.
He had never met so attractive a girl so indifferent to
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her appearance. From the dirt-streaked baggy bush pants to the equally frumpy beige-toned field shirt, she
looked every inch a bad copy of a silent screen clown after a particularly rough car chase. The limp-brimmed
hat that slumped down around her ears sat atop her head like broccoli on a stalk, rising to unnatural heights
in order to ac-commodate the long hair wound up beneath. A mussed pixie drifting through a khaki
wilderness, he mused. For all that, a most erotic pixie.
Forget it, he told himself firmly. Though he had never asked, and she had not volunteered the information, he