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She looked around. At one end of the pinnacle stood a small stone structure, stout, flat roof mostly intact, covered with dirt and latillas, and with a tiny keyhole entry. Next to the hut, the small mesa-top had been paved with flat stones. She walked over and stared; the stones still bore the scorch marks and fissures of countless gigantic fires.
Nora approached the mysterious hut with a certain sense of trepidation. It had thick walls—a dark, hunched structure. She could see something piled inside the hut, a jumble of shapes. Removing the headlamp from her pack, she strapped it on. The door was so low she had to get down on her hands and knees tocrawl forward to look inside, imagining as she did the presence of rattlesnakes and black widow spiders.
The light flashed toward the heap and she gave a yelp of horror, scrambling back and banging her head on the door lintel. She fell back and lay on the ground, her head pounding, breathing hard and trying to wrap her mind around what she had just seen.
29
LEAVE IT TOWatts to have a place in one of the prettiest spots of the New Mexico mountains. Nora could see it on a nearby ridge: a perfect little log cabin with a green corrugated roof, tucked in among ponderosa pines, looking out over a meadow of wildflowers. The late afternoon light was turning everything from green to gold. Nora crept along the road in her Jeep. She wasn’t happy about interrupting their romantic weekend getaway—but, damn it, Corrie had dragged her into this, and she needed to learn of Nora’s discovery right away.
As she approached the cabin, a figure came out on the porch, followed by another—Corrie and Homer Watts had evidently seen the car approach. Nora was relieved—at least she wasn’t intruding on them at, perhaps, a most inconvenient time.
Neither looked pleased as she drew closer, until Corrie recognized her car and waved.
“This is a surprise,” said Watts, standing on the porch. “What brings you out here?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Nora, “but there’s something Corrie needs to know. It can’t wait.”
“Come on in,” said Watts, “and have a cup of coffee, glass of wine, or something.”
“Thank you.” Nora hauled her briefcase out of the passenger seat of the Jeep and followed them inside.
It was a genuine old-time hunting cabin, built of hand-adzed logs notched, fitted, and caulked with oakum. A Franklin stove sat at one end, with a fire going—at nine thousand feet, the cool afternoon was turning into a chilly evening. An elk trophy with antlers was mounted on one wall, and a crossed pair of old snowshoes made with bentwood and gut were nailed to another. An old flintlock rifle hung over the door. A cribbage board hung on a hook, and an untidy shelf contained stacks of games and cards and old, half-full bottles of whisky and bourbon. A couple of battered leather chairs and a leather sofa stood in front of the stove, with a crude wooden table that looked like it had been made with a hatchet.
“Very authentic,” said Nora, laying her briefcase on the table and opening it.
“Thanks,” said Watts. “The place belonged to my granddad and I’ve left it as is.”
“I wish this could have waited until tomorrow,” Nora said. “But it couldn’t. Not after what I read in the missing final chapters of Driver’s dissertation you gave me.”
Corrie’s eyes widened as Nora pulled the chapters out of the briefcase, along with some maps, and spread them out on the table, laying her cell phone next to them.
“Before you begin, sun’s below the yardarm—I’m having a bourbon,” said Watts. “Will anyone join me?”
Nora said, “If that’s coffee on the stove, I’ll have a hit of that.”
“Coffee for me, too,” said Corrie.
He poured her and Nora mugs of coffee and, for himself, twogood fingers of bourbon. “Okay,” he said, smiling as he put down the glass, “now that I’m properly fortified, let’s have it.”
“Before I get into the details, I need to give you a little background on what’s known as the Chaco Phenomenon.”
“Chaco Phenomenon?” Corrie echoed.
“That’s what archaeologists call the civilization that thrived, and then mysteriously collapsed, in the Four Corners region a thousand years ago. From 900 to 1200 CE. It was a remarkably sophisticated and complex culture. The many tribes—they used to call them the Anasazi, but no longer—came together and built a city of immense buildings in Chaco Canyon. These dozen or so gigantic stone structures were four to five stories high and totaled many thousands of rooms. The largest of these was Pueblo Bonito, the largest prehistoric structure in America.”
“I’ve been to Chaco,” said Watts. “Amazing place.” He took another slug of bourbon.
“But there was something they built that was as impressive as Pueblo Bonito,” Nora went on. “An elaborate system of so-called roads. These roads radiated out from Chaco like the spokes of a wheel, spreading across parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. But these weren’t ‘roads’ in our sense of the word—the Chacoans hadn’t discovered the wheel and didn’t have any beasts of burden. They had no need for straight, wide, surfaced roads. But they built them nevertheless—running in absolutely straight lines of precisely the same width: thirty feet. Instead of going around hills and zigzagging into canyons as normal roads do, they sliced through hills to stay straight. The longest of these roads, called the Great North Road, goes for over a hundred miles in a perfectly north-south direction, better aligned than even the surveying lines laid down by American engineers inthe early twentieth century. And they did all this without compasses, using only the sun and stars to fix direction.” She paused for a sip of coffee. “For these reasons, and more, scholars and historians believe these roads had some sort of ceremonial purpose beyond mere travel.”
“So the chapters were about these Chaco roads?” Corrie asked.
“Indirectly, yes. But not just the roads—the lighthouses that ran alongside them, as well.”
“Lighthouses?” Corrie asked in a slightly skeptical tone. “In the desert?”
“On the tops of pinnacles and buttes, the Chacoans laid down massive stone hearths, where they lit gigantic fires that could be seen from afar. These lighthouses were aligned in such a way that, in a single night, messages could be sent, by fire, across the entirety of the vast Chaco domain: over a hundred thousand square miles. And the roads seemed to follow the longest paths of the light.”
“So what were they for?” Watts asked. “Navigation?”