Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs (15 page)

"We follow the Mongol custom," he said, "and let the desert take care of them."

Indy spent twenty minutes, however, searching for Loki among the dead. The injured dogs he encountered he shot; not for vengeance, but for mercy.

With the exception of Meryn, all of the camel drivers were dead. So were a score of fallen bandits that were scattered about camp; Khan's men had made sure of that, and had used their knives in order to conserve ammunition.

Indy found no sign, however, of Loki.

Khan's yurt was an eighteen-foot conical tent of layered felt that stretched over a lattice frame of willow branches, which, despite its solid appearance, could be erected or taken down in less than half an hour. Joan was amazed when she parted the felt door to see that inside, the yurt was as well-appointed as any Western living room.

There were bright rugs and lavishly carved furniture, including an imposing red lacquer chest that had a picture of the Buddha on it. The walls were hung with quilts. The rope bed doubled as a sofa, and in one corner there was an iron stove with a stack that led up through the roof of the tent. On top of the stove was a large iron pot of slowly cooking onions and goat.

"Why don't we travel with these?" Joan asked.

"Because we're stupid Westerners," Indy replied as he and Granger helped Meryn inside. "We sleep in those freezing, thin-walled tents that just about any stiff breeze can knock down, then we congratulate ourselves on being civilized."

They placed Meryn on the rope bed. Indy opened the medical kit, and as he proceeded to change the dressing and sprinkle sulfa powder on the wound, a woman and a young girl dished out plentiful helpings of the goat stew. The girl was about seventeen, with luxurious black hair, and neither of them spoke while they worked.

"Is it serious?" Joan asked.

"No," Indy said. "The bullet passed through. He will heal, in time, as long as we can keep it clean."

When Khan's daughter placed a wooden bowl of stew beside him, Indy noticed that her face was scarred, as if from a terrible case of acne, only worse.

"What is wrong with your daughter?" Joan asked.

"She is not my daughter," Khan said. "I rescued her and the woman from one of General Tzi's bands. They both would have been sold into slavery if I had not found them. They stay here now of their own will, and they are free to go if they wish."

"Tell us about this Tzi," Granger said. "Those were his troops that attacked us, were they not?"

"Of course," Khan concurred. "No one but Tzi uses wild dogs. His citadel is not far from here, perhaps three or four days. I will visit him someday, when the power of the False Lama is broken, and I will rub him out."

"Getting rid of the competition?" Granger asked. "I mean, he is a rival of yours."

"More than that." Khan's eyes filled with hatred as he spoke. "Tzi murdered my family. My wife, my three beautiful children. Princesses all. He was jealous of their affection for me, so he ate their hearts."

"Literally, he ate their hearts?" Granger asked.

"I understand that he cooked them first."

"How horrible," Joan said.

"I was driven mad with despair and wandered the desert for days until my best friend found me and brought me home to my yurt. Later, when Tzi discovered that I held another living thing dear to me, he kidnapped my best friend. He tortured him to death, then sent me his ear as a reminder."

Joan shuddered. "How horrible."

"Quite," Granger said, rubbing the stub of his own mauled ear.

"That is why I am no longer close to anyone," Khan went on. "That is why the woman and the child do not speak to me. Even though they sleep here in my yurt, I live alone."

"Khan," Indy said. "If you have vowed not to make friends with anyone for fear of endangering their life, then why did you tell me you liked me?"

Khan's answer was nonchalant. "Oh, I did not think you would survive long anyway."

"Terrific," Indy said.

"Khan," Joan asked, "what's wrong with the girl's face?"

"Smallpox," Indy answered. "She was lucky to have survived."

"He is right," Khan said. "Many of my band have suffered with this disease. Those it does not kill, it marks, like her. Once you have it, though, it never comes back."

"We have medicine for that," Indy said. "Vaccines. Shots. It would spare those of your people who have not had the disease from getting it. We all have had it, so we do not fear catching the disease. But we could share the smallpox vaccination with you, and show you how to use it, and give you other medicines that will fight infection. Many of your people will live who otherwise would have died."

"This is good," Khan said. "I have known of such remedies for some time, but never dreamed they would be brought to the very door of my yurt. This would make us stronger, in order to fight the Communists. And to kill Tzi, when he is no longer protected by evil."

Khan slapped Indy on the back.

"This is what I will do. In exchange for the medicine, I will reprovision your caravan and provide an escort to the edge of my territory, which is three days' ride from here. But beyond that I can do nothing, because the land is under the control of Tzi and the False Lama. If the spell were broken, I could do more, but I dare not. Bullets are no match for black magic, and I must bide my time until I can avenge the deaths of my wife, my daughters, and my best friend."

"I wish you the best of luck," Indy said.

"And I, you!" Khan smiled. "It has been pleasant to have a friend again, if only for a little while. I hope that we meet in your next life as well, but perhaps it would be more interesting to be enemies, no? If only I had an enemy I could admire, then I could die a happy man."

"Stick around," Granger said. "The Communists may prove to be more than a match."

One week and a dozen minor adventures after leaving the protection of Khan's band of brigands, the caravan—with the two automobiles and ten camels driven by Meryn—reached the base of the Flaming Cliffs. An imposing and gigantic structure of red sandstone, the cliffs rose from the desert plateau like a page from a child's storybook—brilliantly hued, and resembling nothing so much as impossibly gigantic fortresses, cathedrals, and spires.

Within two minutes of bringing the trucks to a stop, Granger had uncovered the first broken shells of dinosaur egg and showed them to Indy.

"This place is lousy with them," Granger said. "You can't walk a hundred feet in any direction without stumbling over them. When we first found them, we thought they were birds' eggs—imagine, just ten years ago, we didn't even know how dinosaurs reproduced."

Indy took the bit of shell and rubbed his thumb across the porous surface. It felt just like a chicken's egg, only larger.

"Maybe dinosaurs were just a type of big bird," he suggested.

"You need to work on your humor, Jones," Granger observed. "It's getting a little stale."

"Sorry," Indy said.

"Why are there so many fossils here?" Joan asked. "I mean, they have found fossils elsewhere in the world—Montana, for example, and even Kansas—but nothing to compare with what has been found around these red sandstone cliffs."

"Nobody knows for sure," Granger explained, "although much of it may have to do with the unchanging nature of this particular corner of the world. It apparently looks just as it did sixty to eighty million years ago, during the late Cretaceous, the last hurrah of the dinosaurs."

"I feel like I've stepped back in time," Joan said.

"Imagine what wonders some of those cliffs must contain," Granger said. "There are hundreds of square miles to explore here, and we have barely scratched the surface in the handful of expeditions that have come here during the last ten years."

"Has anyone actually climbed up into those cliffs?"

"Not far," Granger said. "They are too rugged."

"But they're so beautiful. Like the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Pike's Peak all rolled into one."

"Meryn!" Granger called. "We'll set up camp here. Secure the animals and then establish the mess and a latrine. I imagine we will be here a fortnight, at least."

"I can't believe we are finally here," Joan said. "It seems so remote—like we're on the bottom of the ocean or the dark side of the moon. I wish they'd let us keep the shortwave, at least. Or a camera! How I would love to have some photographs of this place."

"Can you draw?" Indy asked.

"A little."

"Then maybe you should start a sketching in the little notebook you carry and scribble in when you don't think the rest of us are looking. What is that, your diary?"

"I've kept it since I was a kid," Joan admitted. "Well, how do we begin to search for my father?"

"We start knocking on doors," Indy said. "Gurbun Saikhan is just a few kilometers distant, and we stop at every yurt we see between here and there and ask."

Gurbun Saikhan was a mound surrounded by a loose-knit collection of yurts and goat pens. The elder of the village, a toothless man who smoked an old clay pipe, came out to meet them. There was the usual meal of goat stew and token gifts—Indy had hastily picked up a supply of postcards in New York for just such an occasion—and the old man proudly placed a portrait of the Statue of Liberty next to the yurt's portrait of Buddha, assuming the huge torch-carrying maiden was the visiting Americans' preferred goddess.

Although Indy could not understand the dialect spoken in the village, he had brought with him a chalk tablet on which he scratched a succession of Chinese characters to get his point across:
Where did old white man go?

Luckily the old man was partially literate. He took the tablet and carefully wrote his reply, as if he were taking a test in school:

He went into the sky.

Indy and Joan looked at each other.

Indy could not remember the ideograph for aircraft, so instead he threw out his arms and made an engine noise. Then he looked expectantly at the old man.

"Bahai,"
the old man said, and shook his head. That much, Indy could understand.

Indy drew a flurry of new characters.
How did he go in sky?

He walked, of course.

Walked into mountains?

Yes.

Alone?

Yes.

Why?

Didn't ask.

Indy struggled with the next question.

Where in mountains did he go?

Don't know.

That was all they could get out of the old man.

As they prepared to leave, Indy spied a curious piece of jewelry hanging from the wall of the tent. It was apparently a necklace, made of a fragment of carved dinosaur eggshell on a leather thong, and it looked very old. What caught Indy's attention was that the scene depicted in the carving showed a man riding atop a triceratops.

Indy took up his tablet again.

Did you make this?

No. The Old Ones made it. I found it.

Where?

At the base of the cliffs.

May I have it?

Of course. I'll find another—they're everywhere.

"What do you make of this?" Indy asked Joan as they got in the truck. She took the necklace and studied the engraving.

"So the villagers made it," she said.

"They have no idea what a dinosaur is supposed to look like," Indy said. "And this is exactly correct."

"So it's old, it's a fossil."

"You don't understand," Indy said. "It couldn't be. The dinosaurs were all dead before man appeared on earth."

That evening, after supper, Granger examined the piece of eggshell with his magnifying glass. He puffed on his pipe, varied the distance of the shell from the lens, then turned it over.

"Well," Indy asked, "what do you think?"

"I don't know," Granger said. "It is possible that there was a Stone Age cult that lived here many thousands of years ago and worshiped the dinosaur eggs. That much was suggested from the many pieces of jewelry we found made from eggshell and the remains of various cliff dwellings we found on the first expeditions. But this carving is an anachronism; it's impossible, according to what is known of natural history."

"It seems we don't know everything," Indy said. "What if it isn't an anachronism; suppose there was not only a Stone Age culture that revered fossilized eggs, but also living dinosaurs. If there was one spot on earth where a dinosaur might have a chance of surviving into immediate prehistory—and perhaps into twentieth century—it's here. This place
is
the late Cretaceous."

"Jones"—Granger rubbed his eyes—"what a long, strange trip this has been."

"You said it yourself, not twelve hours ago," Indy said. "Who knows what wonders remain to be discovered up in those hills? That's why Starbuck went up into the cliffs, Walter, because
that's
where the trail leads."

At that moment the flap of the tent burst open.

"Meryn!" Granger bellowed. "Don't disturb us. Can't you see—"

Meryn couldn't hear him. His body fell face forward into the mess tent, a wicked-looking knife sticking from his back.

General Tzi's lieutenant, a short young man with a face that was badly marked by smallpox, strode into the tent behind the barrel of a Thompson submachine gun with a fifty-round drum clip. A half-dozen soldiers surged in behind him and began to tie their hands behind their backs.

"What do we do?" Joan asked.

"Nothing," Indy said. "At least not yet."

Indy awoke from the beating the soldiers had dealt to find himself and the others chained to a wall in a cold sandstone cavern. His Webley and his bullwhip were gone, of course, and so was his fedora.

"Are you all right, chap?" Granger asked.

"I think so," Indy said. "At least I can't feel that anything is broken—just bent."

"I thought we had lost you for a moment."

Their wrists were manacled to the wall above their heads, and the cavern was lit by an animal-fat lamp that sputtered and popped and hung by a single heavy chain from the center of the cavern's ceiling. Joan hung between them, her eyes shut.