Keeping Secrets

A STONE STRUCTURE HOLDS

Writer Craig Childs discovered an ancient granary, sealed by stone and mortar and untouched for more than 700 years, wedged deep in a sandstone canyon much like this one, Tsegi Canyon, which cuts through Navajo land. JERRY SIEVE

ANCIENT STORIES SEALED ECRET

For a good seven centuries only generations of ravens had seen it. Inside of the cliffs and miles of broken boulders, it was the object that had driven my long treks, journeys that took weeks or months. My travels led to crevices and dark holes in the desert. Seven days brought me here, across this strange terrain of sandstone canyons. Seven days alone with shaded overhangs and coyote tracks. This is the land where rocks stand on end, the fine, reticulated curve of the Colorado Plateau across northern Arizona. I cannot be any more specific. Nobody else will find this one place, I pray. High walls filed one behind the next, each made of red sandstone, the color of iron earth burned by oxygen. Although clear daylight touched the rim, dusk had nearly taken the bottom of this canyon. I worked my way through an unforgiving network of branches, nature's half-cocked basket work. Hard travel. Cursing, reaching ahead, prying the stiff limbs apart. Scrapes like razors down the back.

I emerged at the other end of the brush with sticks in my hair and ears. There I found a long, open field cupped against the canyon's north cliff. It was the size of a good cornfield, one where single plots could have been rotated for about 80 years before any individual plot was reused. The cliffs prevented entrance from above. The wall of vegetation behind me formed the other barrier. Between sat this narrow space of fallen boulders and sand.

I began moving, not taking time to pull the sticks out of my ears or to brush the debris from my clothes. No time to waste before dark. I almost ran, and at times I did run, first west along the cliff wall, careful not to leave my footprints in the open. I crossed a crack through the rock where the stone benches above the rim had once sent flash floods, exposing the raw flesh of sandstone below. I let the spill and opened my mouth, craning my neck. My shoulders dropped like the beams of a settling house. Water spattered over me. I let the water fill my mouth, and when I had plenty, I swallowed, eyes closed. Water ran down my shirt, washing away debris. I came up a slope of nestled boulders that slept against the cliff. At the top were hand-built stone walls and carefully chipped fragments of glassy jasper. People had lived here, probably the people the Hopi call Hisatsinom, people gone from here for nearly 700 years. Time had covered almost everything with dust and rocks that had fallen from the cliff above.

Hardly any light remained in the evening. I turned to get back to camp. Lowering myself from a ledge, I glanced up for a handhold. Fifteen feet above were a few cut and mortared stones inserted behind a piece of cliff that had tugged loose. I studied the space from below. I could not see the stones from any other vantage point. They implied construction, something well-hidden that people had sealed into the wall.

I reached to grip a line of handholds. The roughened rock cut both palms, drawing blood. I locked my knees around the edge of the slipped cliff wall and pulled myself to the level, careful not to put weight on any of the mortared stones. From that position I could look into the gap formed between the calved piece of stone and the cliff.

In the gap stood a small structure, an ancient granary. The stones had been fit together and fine mortar had been pressed between. There were fingerprints in the mortar, old fingerprints. Narrow wood rods stuck from the roof. I ran my hands gingerly across it.

The entire cache was sealed shut. I stepped around it, finding not a single flaw, hole or fissure that could let air inside. I moved fallen rocks from the roof, revealing the flat plaster below, a compact layer of collected sand. Outlining the surface with my fingers, I found no breaks. I looked all over it, with ghost images of seed corn Another crack housed a spring up high. I stood 100 feet beneath baskets and painted clay pots clouding my vision. It does not get light in there at sunrise. When the wind blows, the dust inside does not move. Whatever had been placed inside remained there still, unmoved. The people who filled this structure, probably no later than A.D. 1350, had never returned.

When I came back to the granary's roof, I saw blood. My blood marred the rocks. Each faint smear showed an ink blot from the cuts on my hands. I had touched everything. The evidence was there. I stopped and, for the first time, thought.

My clothes were still wet from the spring. I tried to breathe slowly. The blood on the rocks made no sense. I saw no patterns in the drops. My muscles shook, and I knew I could break in and crack open the heart of this thing. I could enter into it and see what sandals, pottery or weavings had been cached; not to move them or steal them, but only to see them.

I had been looking for this for years, the undisturbed granary, dropping into the dark spaces, climbing to the invisible cracks. For years I had studied maps, followed bighorn tracks, worked down on I leave it, always remember what the place is like where you left it." The only advice I could muster.

I do not know if she kept the arrowhead or left it. I do not want to know.

The next day, I crouched beside the granary again. It was about waist-high, constructed of curved slabs, then filled around the edges with rocks and mortar. The cliff section that had come loose leaned at a 50-degree angle from the mother rock, opening a space where the granary had been built.

The structure's south and east walls were shored or composed entirely by the cliff and the slab. At the bottom, it would be two hands wide, increasing to about 3 feet by 2.5 feet at the ceiling. On the wall 6 feet away, I barely could see two extremely worn patches of white paint. They roughly translated into two painted handprints.

I studied the place throughout the day, moving like a cat from one side to the other over the canyon floor, shining my headlamp into the dark cracks, breathing carefully.

I STUDIED THE PLACE THROUGHOUT THE DAY, MOVING LIKE A CAT FROM ONE SIDE TO THE OTHER OVER THE CANYON FLOOR, SHINING MY HEADLAMP INTO THE DARK CRACKS, BREATHING CAREFULLY.

ropes, all to find what no one had touched. For the obvious principle of anonymity, I never removed anything. Not even the tiniest crumb of pottery. I always brushed away my footprints, even if the wind had been certain to take them by nightfall.

My breathing was the labored sound of someone in a panic. I leaned back, away from the granary, out over the canyon floor. I held to the cliff wall to keep from falling into the canyon.

I leaned back farther and looked into the darkening sky. The granary was almost invisible. The stars had begun to show, and soon I would be hiking blind through an obsidian night. I could not open this granary. Not tonight. I would return in the morning and decide what to do.

Not long ago, I rested in the shade of an overhang with a woman I know. She sat in the soft gravel of a wash. The fingerprints of floods had laid small round stones into lines that looped around her on the ground. Her hand held a perfect arrowhead, made from such clear stone that the color of her palm was visible beneath it. She'd found it on the ground.

Her teenage son had died in a river accident three years earlier. She talked about him, clutching the arrowhead. He had wanted to be an archaeologist, she told me. Even when her son was very young, he worried that all the bones would be taken and all the secrets would be revealed by the time he was old enough to look for them.

She cried like a soft rain as she held the arrowhead in her hand like something so sacred that words of it cannot be spoken. Even as I write these words, I doubt that I should tell you of this. She said that she wanted to keep the arrowhead. She wanted it as part of her son, a token to keep him close. With its weight in her hand, she asked me what was right. My answer, like a swift stamp, is always no. Leave it where it lies. Move nothing.

Her question was far beyond me, though, far beyond my own rules and choices. This was something out of my hands, and into hers. I said, "If you take it, just don't let it gather any dust. If you In the evening, the stars began as I sat on the ledge. My head rested in my hands.

"I would be so careful with this if I chose to enter it." I said this out loud.

I would be careful with my fingers, my words and even my thoughts. I could do no less. When the first light would enter its sealed shadows, I would not even breathe. I would study its contents, draw them into my journal with unquestionable precision. This would be good enough. It would be the lesser of evils: altering without stealing, seeing without destroying.

But it would not be perfect. I would destroy this mystery. Even if I fit the entry stone back into place and no one knew that I had ever been here, the place would be changed. The secret I had long chased would be revealed.

The woman who had lost her son-when I later told her about what I had seen here-studied my eyes, thinking of our discussion about the arrowhead.

"I hope that you decided to leave it closed," she said. "That is what I hope."

When she said this, her eyes did not have my half-starved look of curiosity. She looked past all of this. Her eyes were wise, like a shaman's. She was talking about mystery, about something entirely unsullied.

From the granary, I climbed down in the dark, walking through all the starlight on the ground. I walked past the spring, where I drank again. In a clearing, I slept and had simple dreams.

If she wants to know, it is still there. The granary is as sealed as it was when it was built. No light has entered it. No wind has found its way through.

It will stay that way, I pray. AH ADDITIONAL READING: For more of Craig Childs' unique storytelling, we suggest reading his latest book, The Desert Cries: A Season of Flash Floods in a Dry Land. Five real-life dramas play out as he details the tragic force of desert floods. To order, call toll-free (800) 543-5432, or go online to arizonahighways.com.