|
38.
He made one more foray down into the central part of the island, the sunken village.
Clambering over the undergrowth, he saw signs of fresh water below. Was there perhaps a spring somewhere in this depression, though it was no more than a few hundred feet across and contained half a dozen stone houses packed tightly together? Nobody could answer his question now. They were all gone, buried in a moss-choked columbarium at the end of the village street.
Tucked away into dozens of wall niches, under a large rock overhang, were the funerary urns of the inhabitants. Alex had to stoop to climb in over the mossy rocks. He counted several dozen niches, all of similar size. At one time all the niches had been covered over with stone slabs, but most of the slabs had fallen down. Almost all the slabs had illustrations and inscriptions, carved in a primitive manner most likely using harder stone to chip at softer stone. The slabs had been held in place by narrow ledges cut by human hand, but winds and earth tremors had rocked them loose. Tongues of moss ran down the recessed cliffside, oozing from open wall niches like a kind of water of time. The middle niches were the oldest, and the urns inside were the most pitted. Pushing carefully in until his head and shoulders were in one of the niches, Alex found that the number of urns continued inward for at least ten feet, each urn being about a foot high and half as much around. The word amphora came to mind, from Alex Kirk’s meme trove, except these urns had rounded instead of conical bottoms. They must have burned their dead, Alex thought, for only ashes could fit in a vessel that small. When he saw into the back of the niche, he was shocked, because the style was different—more ornate, smoother, finer made, and so delicate they crumbled to the touch. That was when he realized he was looking at a culture that had existed her for centuries, maybe a thousand years or more, before vanishing. He saw a number of interesting things, and then one shocking find.
He left the village, feeling more overwhelmed at what he knew than puzzled by the enormous amount he didn’t know. The passage of time, the coming and going of lives, the drizzle of countless lifetimes like sand through an hourglass, weighed on him with a depressing heaviness. There was something else that he reflected on, which had not occurred to him, but which he realized afterward. There was no sense of family about the urns. Each bore at most a name, written in language he could readily understand from Alex Kirk’s memories: Robert, Martha, Sandra, Keith, Leith, Vasco, Lars, Kim, Shinko, and so on. Furthermore, some of the names repeated. He counted several Keiths, several Brians, several Johns, several Janes, innumerable Marys, two or three Workus. But no family names. It was as though they all belonged to one great family—even the Alexes, who might have taken the name Kirk. The shocking find was that the most common names were Robinson and Friday. And variations like Robin or Robinette and other days of the week. Did it mean there had been many brought into the world as he himself had?
He had a feeling the answers to some of his questions lay near, but he wasn’t sure he’d feel any better once he learned more about the truth.
|
