Mitch’s mouth hung half open, like a surprised little boy’s. He could not speak for a time. The end of the cave was utterly still and quiet. Only the beam of light moved as he played the torch up and down the two forms.
‘We touched nothing,’ Franco said.
The blackened ashes, ancient fragments of wood, grass and reed, looked as if a breath would scatter them but still formed the remains of a fire. The skin of the bodies had fared much better. Mitch had never seen more startling examples of deep freeze mummification. The tissues were hard and dry, the moisture sucked from them by the dry deep cold air. Near the heads, where they lay facing each other, the skin and muscle had hardly shrunk at all before being fixed. The features were almost natural, though the eyelids had withdrawn and the eyes beneath were shrunken, dark, unutterably sleepy. The bodies as well were full; only near the legs did the flesh seem to shrivel and darken, perhaps because of the intermittent breeze from farther up the shaft. The feet were wizened, black as little dried mushrooms.
Mitch could not believe what he was seeing. Perhaps there was nothing so extraordinary about their pose – lying on their sides, a man and a woman facing each other in death, freezing finally as the ashes of their last fire cooled. Nothing unexpected about the hands of the man reaching toward the face of the woman, the woman’s arms low in front of her as if she had clasped her stomach. Nothing extraordinary about the animal skin beneath them, or another skin rumpled beside the male, as if it had been tossed aside.
In the end, with the fire out, freezing to death, the man had felt too warm and had thrown off his covering.
Mitch looked down at the woman’s curled fingers and swallowed a rising lump of emotion he could not easily define or explain.
‘How old?’ Tilde asked, interrupting his focus. Her voice sounded crisp and clear and rational, like the ring of a struck knife.
Mitch jerked. ‘Very old,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, but like the Iceman?’
‘Not like the Iceman,’ Mitch said. His voice almost broke.
The female had been injured. A hole had been punched in her side, at hip level. Blood stains surrounded the hole and he thought he could make out stains on the rock beneath her. Perhaps it had been the cause of her death.
There were no weapons in the cave.
He rubbed his eyes to force aside the little jagged white moon that rose into his field of vision and threatened to distract him, then looked at the faces again, short broad noses pointing up at an angle. The woman’s jaw hung slack, the man’s was closed. The woman had died gasping for air. Mitch could not know this for sure, but he did not question the observation. It fit.
Only now did he carefully maneuver around the figures, crouched low, moving so slowly, keeping his bent knees an inch above the man’s hip.
‘They look old,’ Franco said, just to make a sound in the cave. His eyes glittered. Mitch glanced at him, then down at the male’s profile.
Thick brow ridge, broad flattened nose, no chin. Powerful shoulders, narrowing to a comparatively slender waist. Thick arms. The faces were smooth, almost hairless. All the skin below the neck, however, was covered with a fine dark downy fur, visible only on close examination. Around their temples, the short-trimmed hair seemed to have been shaved in patterns, expertly barbered.
So much for shaggy museum reconstructions.
Mitch bent closer, the cold air heavy in his nostrils, and propped his hand against the top of the cave. Something like a mask lay between the bodies, actually two masks, one beside and bunched under the man, the other beneath the woman. The edges of the masks appeared torn. Each had eye holes, nostrils, the appearance of an upper lip, all lightly covered with fine hair, and below that, an even hairier flap that might have once wrapped around the neck and lower jaw. They might have been lifted from the faces, flayed away, yet there was no skin missing from the heads.
The mask nearest the woman seemed attached to her forehead and temple by thin fibers like the beard of a mussel.
Mitch realized he was focusing on little mysteries to get past one big impossibility.
‘How old are they?’ Tilde asked again. ‘Can you tell yet?’
‘I don’t think there have been people like this for tens of thousands of years,’ Mitch said.
Tilde seemed to miss this statement of deep time. ‘They are European, like the Iceman?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mitch said, but shook his head and held up his hand. He did not want to talk; he wanted to think. This was an extremely dangerous place, professionally, mentally, from any angle of approach. Dangerous and dreamlike and impossible.
‘Tell me, Mitch,’ Tilde pleaded with surprising gentleness. ‘Tell me what you see.’ She reached out to stroke his knee. Franco observed this caress with maturity.
Mitch began, ‘They are male and female, each about a hundred and sixty centimeters in height.’
‘Short people,’ Franco said, but Mitch talked right over him.
‘They appear to be genus Homo, species sapiens. Not like us, though. They might have suffered from some kind of dwarfism, distortion of the features …’ He stopped himself and looked again at the heads, saw no signs of dwarfism, though the masks bothered him.
The classic features. ‘They’re not dwarfs,’ he said. ‘They’re Neanderthals.’
Tilde coughed. The dry air parched their throats. ‘Pardon?’
‘Cave men?’ Franco said.
‘Neanderthals,’ Mitch said again, as much to convince himself as to correct Franco.
‘That is bullshit,’ Tilde said, her voice crackling with anger. ‘We are not children.’
‘No bullshit. You have found two well-preserved Neanderthals, a man and a woman. The first Neanderthal mummies … anywhere. Ever.’
Tilde and Franco thought about that for a few seconds. Outside, wind hooted past the cave entrance.
‘How old?’ Franco asked.
‘Everyone thinks the Neanderthals died out between a hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago,’ Mitch said. ‘Maybe everyone is wrong. But I doubt they could have stayed in this cave, in this state of preservation, for forty thousand years.’
‘Maybe they were the last,’ Franco said, and crossed himself reverently.
‘Incredible,’ Tilde said, her face flushed. ‘How much would they be worth?’
Mitch’s leg cramped and he moved back to squat beside Franco. He rubbed his eyes with a gloved knuckle. So cold. He was shivering. The moon of light blurred and shifted. ‘They’re not worth anything,’ he said.
‘Don’t joke,’ Tilde said. ‘They are rare – nothing like them, right?’
‘Even if we – if you, I mean – could get them out of this cave safely, intact, and down the mountain, where would you sell them?’
