Spectral Evidence

War zone archaeology is the best kind, Hynde liked to say when drunk—and Goss couldn’t disagree, at least in terms of ratings. The danger, the constant threat, was a clarifying influence, lending everything they did an extra meaty heft. Better yet, it was the world’s best excuse for having to wrap real quick and pull out ahead of the tanks, regardless of whether or not they’d actually found anything.

The site for their latest TV special was miles out from anywhere else, far enough from the border between Eritrea and the Sudan that the first surveys missed it—first, second, third, fifteenth, until updated satellite surveillance finally revealed minute differences between what local experts could only assume was some sort of temple and all the similarly-coloured detritus surrounding it. It didn’t help that it was only a few clicks (comparatively) away from the Meroitic pyramid find in Gebel Barkal, which had naturally kept most “real” archaeologists too busy to check out what the fuck that low-lying, hill-like building lurking in the middle distance might or might not be.

Yet on closer examination, of course, it turned out somebody already had stumbled over it, a couple of different times; the soldiers who’d set up initial camp inside in order to avoid a dust storm had found two separate batches of bodies, fresh-ish enough that their shreds of clothing and artefacts could be dated back to the 1930s on the one hand, the 1890s on the other. Gentlemen explorers, native guides, mercenaries. Same as today, pretty much, without the “gentlemen” part.

Partially ruined, and rudimentary, to say the least. It was laid out somewhat like El-Marraqua, or the temples of Lake Nasser: a roughly half-circular building with the rectangular section facing outwards like a big, blank wall centred by a single, permanently-open doorway, twelve feet high by five feet wide. No windows, though the roof remained surprisingly intact.

“This whole area was underwater a million years ago,” Hynde told Goss. “See these rocks? All sedimentary. Chalk, fossils, bonebed silica and radiolarite—amazing any of it’s still here, given the wind. Must’ve formed in a channel or a basin...but no, that doesn’t make sense either, because the inside of the place is stable, no matter how much the outside erodes.”

“So they quarried stone from somewhere else, brought it here, shored it up.”

“Do you know how long that would’ve taken? Nearest hard-rock deposits are like—five hundred miles thataway. Besides, that’s not even vaguely how it looks. It’s more...unformed, like somebody set up channels while a lava-flow was going on and shepherded it into a hexagonal pattern, then waited for it to cool enough that the up-thrust slabs fit together like walls, blending at the seams.”

“What’s the roof made of?”

“Interlocking bricks of mud, weed, and gravel fix-baked in the sun, then fitted together and fired afterward, from the outside in; must’ve piled flammable stuff on top of it, set it alight, let it cook. The glue for the gravel was bone-dust and chunks, marinated in vinegar.”

“Seriously,” Goss said, perking up. “Human? This a necropolis, or what?”

“We don’t know, to either.”

Outside, that new chick—Camberwell? The one who’d replaced that massive Eurasian guy they’d all just called “Gojira,” rumoured to have finally screwed himself to death between projects—was wrangling their trucks into camp formation, angled to provide a combination of look-out, cover and wind-brake. Moving inside, meanwhile, Goss began taking light-meter readings and setting up his initial shots, while Hynde showed him around this particular iteration of the oh God Can Such Things Be travelling road-show.

“Watch your step,” Hynde told him, all but leading him by the sleeve. “The floor slopes down, a series of shallow shelves...it’s an old trick, designed to force perspective, move you further in. To develop a sense of awe.”

Goss nodded, allowing Hynde to draw him toward what at first looked like one back wall, but quickly proved to be a clever illusion—two slightly overlapping partial walls, slim as theatrical flats, set up to hide a sharply zig-zagging passage beyond. This, in turn, gave access to a tunnel curling downwards into a sort of cavern underneath the temple floor, through which Hynde was all too happy to conduct Goss, filming as they went.

“Take a gander at all the mosaics,” Hynde told him. Get in close. See those hieroglyphics?”

“Is that what those are? They look sort of...organic, almost.”

“They should; they were, once. Fossils.”

Goss focused his lens closer and grinned so wide his cheeks hurt. Because yes yes fucking yes, they were: rows on rows of skeletal little pressed-flat, stonified shrimp, fish, sea-ferns, and other assorted what-the-fuck-evers, painstakingly selected, sorted, and slotted into patterns that started at calf-level and rose almost to the equally creepy baked-bone brick roof, blending into darkness.

“Jesus,” he said out loud. “This is gold, man, even if it turns out you can’t read ‘em. This is an Emmy, right here.”

Hynde nodded, grinning too now, though maybe not as wide. And told him: “Wait ‘til you see the well.”

The cistern in question, hand-dug down through rock and paved inside with slimy sandstone, had a roughly twenty-foot diameter and a depth that proved unsound-able even with the party’s longest reel of rope, which put it at something over sixty-one metres. Whatever had once been inside it appeared to have dried up long since, though a certain liquid quality to the echoes it produced gave indications that there might still be the remains of a water-table—poisoned or pure, no way to tell—lingering at its bottom. There was a weird saline quality to the crust inside its lip, a sort of whiti

sh, gypsumesque candle-wax-dripping formation that looked as though it was just on the verge of blooming into stalactites.

Far more interesting, however, was the design scheme its excavators had chosen to decorate the well’s exterior with—a mosaic, also assembled from fossils, though in this case the rocks themselves had been pulverized before use, reduced to fragments so that they could be recombined into surrealistic alien patterns: fish-eyed, weed-legged, shell-winged monstrosities, cut here and there with what might be fins or wings or insect torsos halved, quartered, chimerically repurposed and slapped together to form even larger, more complex figures of which these initial grotesques were only the pointillist building-blocks. Step back far enough, and they coalesced into seven figures looking off into almost every possible direction save for where the southeast compass-point should go. That spot was blank.

“I’m thinking the well-chamber was constructed first,” Hynde explained, “here, under the ground—possibly around an already-existing cave, hollowed out by water that no longer exists, through limestone that shouldn’t exist. After which the entire temple would’ve been built overtop, to hide and protect it...protect them.”

“The statues.”

Hynde nodded.

“Are those angels?” Goss asked, knowing they couldn’t be.

“Do they look like angels?”

“Hey, there are some pretty fucked-up looking angels, is what I hear. Like—rings of eyes covered in wings, or those four-headed ones from The X-Files.”

“Or the ones that look like Christopher Walken.”