Nightfall Read Online Free PDF Page B

the hill that the sandstorm had carved. “I’m going to run a trial cut.”
    “Shouldn’t we photograph it first, and—”
    “I told you to watch out,” she said sharply, as she dug her pick into the hillside and sent a shower of loose soil tumbling down onto his head and shoulders.
    He jumped aside, spitting out sand.
    “Sorry,” she said, without looking down. She cut into the hillside a second time, widening the storm gouge. It wasn’t the best of technique, she knew, to be slashing away like this. Her mentor, grand old Shelbik, was probably whirling in his grave. And the founder of their science, the revered Galdo 221, no doubt was looking down from his exalted place in the pantheon of archaeologists and shaking his head sadly.
    On the other hand, Shelbik and Galdo had had chances of their own to uncover whatever lay in the Hill of Thombo, and they hadn’t done it. If she was a little too excited now, a little too hasty in her attack, well, they would simply have to forgive her. Now that the seeming calamity of the sandstorm had been transformed into serendipitous good fortune, now that the apparent ruination of her career had turned unexpectedly intothe making of it, Siferra could not hold herself back from finding out what was buried here. Could not. Absolutely could not.
    “Look—” she muttered, knocking a great mass of overburden away and going to work with her brush. “We’ve got a charred layer here, right at the foundation level of the cyclopean city. The place must have burned clear down to the stone. But you look a little lower on the hill and you can see that the cross-hatch-style town is sitting right under the fire line—the cyclopean people simply plunked this whole monumental foundation down on top of the older city—”
    “Siferra—” said Balik uneasily.
    “I know, I know. But let me at least begin to see what’s here. Just a quick probe now, and then we can go back to doing things the proper way.” She felt as though she were perspiring from head to toe. Her eyes were starting to ache, so fiercely was she staring. “Look, will you? We’re way up on top of the hill, and we’ve already got two towns. And it’s my guess that if we unzip the mound a little further, someplace around where we’d expect to find the foundations of the crosshatch people, we’ll—yes!
Yes!
There! By Darkness, will you look at that, Balik! Just look!”
    She pointed triumphantly with the tip of her pick.
    Another dark line of charcoal was apparent, near the foundations of the crosshatch-style building. The second highest level had also been destroyed by fire just as the cyclopean one had. And from the way things looked, it was sitting atop the ruins of an even older village.
    Balik now had caught her fervor too. Together they worked to lay bare the outer face of the hill, midway between ground level and the shattered summit. Eilis called up to them to ask what on Kalgash they were doing, but they ignored him. Aflame with eagerness and curiosity, they cut swiftly through the ancient packing of windblown sand, moving three inches farther down the hill, six, eight—
    “Do you see what I see?” Siferra cried, after a time.
    “Another village, yes. But what kind of style of architecture is that, would you say?”
    She shrugged. “It’s a new one on me.”
    “And me too. Something very archaic, that’s for sure.”
    “No question of it. But I think it’s not the most archaic thingwe’ve got here, not by plenty.” Siferra peered down toward the distant ground. “You know what I think, Balik? We’ve got five towns here, six, seven, maybe eight, each one right on top of the next. You and I may spend the rest of our lives digging in this hill!”
    They looked at each other in wonder.
    “We’d better get down and take some photos now,” he said quietly.
    “Yes. Yes, we’d better do that.” She felt almost calm, suddenly. Enough of this furious hacking and slashing, she thought. It was time to