Neanderthal Read online

  In the remote mountains of central Asia, an eminent Harvard archeologist discovers something extraordinary. He sends a cryptic message to two colleagues. But then, he disappears. Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot—once lovers, now academic rivals—are going where few humans have ever walked, looking for a relic band of creatures that have existed for over 40,000 years, that possess powers man can only imagine, and that are about to change the face of civilization forever.

  NEANDERTHAL

  JOHN DARNTON

  RANDOM HOUSE

  NEW YORK

  FOR NINA, OF COURSE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A senior editor at Random House championed the manuscript of this book and helped form it in its early stages. This man is leg­endary in literary circles; he edited a long list of famous writers during his thirty-five years at the publishing house. He was re­spected by writers because he knew how to improve their work and yet keep it theirs, and he was also beloved by many of them. But his name never appeared in their acknowledgments. He would strike it out each time, being a member of the old school, which held that editors must at all costs remain invisible. In November, he died suddenly in his office. Had he been less modest, his name would have been stamped upon hundreds of books. Had all gone well, it would not have appeared here. So this is to render gratitude and homage—words that are clearly inadequate—to Joe Fox.

  I would also like to thank Arthur Kopit, friend, author and co­conspirator. It was he who first suggested telling the story in the form of a novel and who helped with major contributions of plot turns and twists late into many a night.

  I am indebted to Nicholas Delbanco, for his critical reading and comments; to Michael Koskoff for his assistance and advice; to Christopher Stringer of the Natural History Museum of Britain for his reading of key scientific passages; to Myra Shackley for invalu­able material in two comprehensively researched books on the Ne­anderthal; to Walter Parkes for helpful suggestions; and to Peter and Susan Osnos for their support and the use of their home dur­ing several summers in which much of the book was written.

  Thanks, too, to Joseph Lelyveld and Bill Keller, executive editor and foreign editor of The New York Times, for graciously giving me time off to meet a deadline; to Marion Underhill, Sue Nestor, and Tony Beard in the London office of The New York Times for their uncomplaining logistic support; to Jon Karp, my new editor at Random House, who jumped in to shape and shepherd the manuscript through its final stages; and to Kathy Robbins, my agent and friend, who is simply the best in the business.

  And then of course there are my children, Kyra, Liza, and Jamie Darnton, whose excitement and suggestions were invaluable, and the person who did more than anyone else in encouraging, listen­ing, brainstorming, rewriting, editing, hand-holding, brow wiping, negotiating, and in general being there always, Nina Darnton.

  PROLOGUE

  In 1910, Geoffrey Bakersfield-Smyth, a scholar-adventurer from Leeds who was pursuing his passion of collecting and classifying alpine flowers, chanced to enter the National Museum of Antiqui­ties and Artifacts in Dushanbe in the Khanate of Bukhara. There in the basement, amid crates of crockery, rain-soaked files, and other debris, he came upon a unique stone. It was a tablet, shaped into a rectangle the size of a small coffee table and painstakingly carved. Part of it was missing—a serpentine crack formed the outer right edge—and some of the carving was eroded. But other lines stood out in relief as sharply as boot prints in mud; they depicted human figures of some kind.

  Bakersfield-Smyth found a brief notation in a shaky hand in the museum’s dusty records room. The tablet had been found in 1874 by a peasant plowing his field in a mountain village clear across the Tajik lands. (Bakersfield-Smyth noted that the East had under­gone an earthquake in 1873 and surmised that the tablet had been tossed up from one of the underground limestone caves that honeycomb the area.) The peasant brought it in a wooden oxcart to the provincial town of Khodzant, where he left it on the doorstep of a dry goods store. There was no record of how or when the stone was transported to the museum in Dushanbe.

  Bakersfield-Smyth sketched the tablet. He picked out the grit in the cracks and indentations with a penknife and made rubbings of the carvings. He fetched his stand-up box camera and pho­tographed it. He searched the entire museum for the missing piece but could not locate it.

  In London, Bakersfield-Smyth showed his notes and photographs to P. T. Baylord, later Lord Uckston, a practitioner of the relatively new field of physical anthropology. In 1913, Baylord produced a monograph and an article in the Journal of the Royal Society for Archaeology, “The Pictograph of Khodzant.” By dupli­cating the photographs, cutting them into separate pictures, and rearranging them in a linear sequence, Baylord was able to recon­struct a historical narrative. He asserted that the tablet told the story of an ancient battle, one so significant, he theorized, that its survivors felt compelled to record it for later generations.

  Note the attempts to situate the action in time and place [he wrote]. Specifically, we see symbols that could represent moons and others that seem to represent seasonal foliage. In one frame, there is what appears to be a mountain and a peculiar outcropping of stone with ridges that make it appear to resemble the back of a clenched fist. Exactly where this mount is located is unknown, but it should be noted that the largely unexplored region of the higher Pamirs of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Jammu, and Kashmir contain numerous rock formations unusual in both gigantesque size and odd shape attributable to glacial sculpting.

  Baylord’s narrative of the battle was arresting but ultimately un­satisfying because of the missing portion; the ending, if there was one, was unknown. His story disappeared in midair, so to speak. But he was able to discern two separate lines of warriors and to de­lineate three distinct clashes. He even detected what he theorized was a body count up in one corner, though the corpses were curi­ously represented by what looked to be human eyes placed in trees. Peering for weeks on end through a magnifying glass and sculpting clay painstakingly with a surgeon’s scalpel to reconstruct the obliterated lines, he was able to re-create his tiny soldiers’ weapons, which, he wrote, “were notably primitive in nature.”

  But the work was scientifically flawed. Without the original, the tablet could never be dated. So Baylord was left in the final analy­sis with a hypothesis that was largely guesswork: that the combat­ants most likely comprised small clans of Mongols that clashed sometime in 100 or 200 B.C. And he never really took note of an in­triguing detail on the tablet—the fact that one group of warriors was unlike the other, marked as they were by strangely sloping fore­heads that ended in distinctive bulging ridges across the brow. Baylord made only a passing reference to “a band across the forehead.”

  His work created a slight stir in academic circles. It soon died down. Some thought it was a hoax. His slim little monograph survived into the second half of the century only among a handful of archaeologists who regarded it as a curio. “The Khodzant Enigma” became a favorite lecture among graduate students. The stone itself was left in the museum basement. Then came the Russian Revolution, which spread to Tajikistan, and it was lost.

  I THE KHODZANT ENIGMA

  1

  Akbar Atilla rested his AK-47 against a tree trunk and moved away from the campfire in search of a place to relieve himself. There was barely enough moon to see by; bands of clouds spread across the night sky in layers and from time to time blotted it out altogether.

  The Mujahadeen guerrillas had ascended higher and higher into the Tajik mountains in search of a secure base. Here they were safe. No government forces could reach them short of mounting a major expedition, and if they tried, the guerrillas could lie in wait in any one of thousands of crevices and pick them off. The moun­tain was an unassailable
fortress.

  He felt along the path with his feet as he climbed the rocky slope, then stopped and listened. There was the wind whirring through the fir trees and the voices of his comrades below talking quietly. Someone was telling a story.

  He loosened his tunic and reached inside for his belt. Then he heard something: a sound, unmistakable, a step behind him. He straightened and started to turn.

  The attack came quickly. He had no time to react. He felt a crash­ing blow on his head and stared up in panic as the clouds parted. There in the moonlight he saw a vague form, grotesque and savage, then a snarling face, an elongated visage with a protruding bonelike brow. He didn’t have time to scream as he felt a second blow and then encircling arms that crushed his ribs. He was carried off into the night.

  Early the next morning, the others found his rifle still resting against the tree. There was nothing else. They wondered if he had run off into the valley, maybe to join his family, maybe to work the crops. But why would he leave his weapon behind?

  The story of the disappearance was like other recent stories and so eventually made its way to a village and then to a town in the foothills. By then, imaginary details embellished the tale and there was barely a resemblance to what had actually happened. Only the central mystery remained: A man was there one minute and the next had vanished into the ether.

  The report was picked up by an American traveling through the Pamirs, who, for convenience’ sake and to avoid too many ques­tions, was called a consul. He transcribed it onto a disk and also appended a brief clipping from that week’s local paper, which had been translated by his secretary:

  HISKADETH, Nov. 8—A 24-year-old woman from Surrey, England, who was part of an Upward and Outward group climbing Mount Askasi was found dead last week. After being missing for four days, her body was located on a ledge about two miles from the summit.

  The instructor, Robert Brody, from London, said the group had been worried about the woman, Katrina Bryan, after she apparently walked away from the campsite. He said the party launched a wide search but she was not found until they gave up and started their descent.

  The group had been hiking and climbing for three weeks in the re­gion, which is rarely visited by outsiders. Locals tell stories of “mountain men” that prey on people who venture there. Mr. Brody said the group had been frightened by several mysterious appari­tions, but he refused to go into detail.

  An autopsy performed by Dr. Askan Katari showed multiple abra­sions and extensive damage to the cranium. There were “inconsis­tencies,” Dr. Katari said, without elaboration. The body is being flown to England for burial.

  The consul coded the disk, placed it in an envelope, and ad­dressed it to the college in Bethesda, Maryland, that he had been advised to use for such occasions. He sent it through the diplomatic pouch of the American embassy in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

  Matt decided to take a break. He heaved himself out of the grave-­like hole, walked over to the water jug, and was hoisting it on one shoulder when he spotted a small speck out of the corner of his eye. He lowered the jug and stared into the valley at a dust cloud swirling in the far distance. A car.

  It was the first car he had seen in four months. What was it doing in the middle of nowhere? He took off his broad-brimmed hat with its ring of sweat stains and looked up. Instantly he felt the East African sun shoot into his brain. He rolled his shoulders and felt a pleasing ache across his back muscles.

  On the barren slope below, five figures were working: his students. He liked looking down on them like this, each of them busily engaged on the dig. One pushed a wheelbarrow of rocks; another lay prone inside a trench and scrubbed a stone surface with a toothbrush. It looked exotic, in all the heat and dust, like a lunar landscape.

  He looked at his watch. Time for lunch. He loped down the hill with long strides, sliding down sideways, until he reached his tent. It was stiflingly hot inside. He tied the flaps open and flicked on a fan with a four-inch rubber blade, which did little to move the tor­pid air.

  Flies buzzed thickly. In a mirror hung from the tent pole, Matt caught a glimpse of his face. He studied the sweat lines running like rivulets across his brow and cheeks, disappearing into stubble. A thicket of brown hair hung across his forehead, topped his ears, and curled up around his collar. The dirt engraved the crow’s-feet around his dark brown eyes and the down-turning wrinkles on ei­ther side of his mouth.

  He kicked off his boots, lay on the cot, folded his arms under his head, and looked up at the luminous canvas of the tent. A shadow shifted above as the tarp overhead waved lethargically in the breeze.

  “Sleeping?”

  Nicole’s voice had a light, solicitous tone with a hint of mockery.

  “Not really. Just a catnap.”

  “It’s only one o’clock.”

  He sat up. “Well, you know, these old bones. …”

  She smiled and shook her head in exasperation. She hated it when he made references to his age. It was one more way he had of driving a wedge between them. She removed her bandanna and let her hair fall down her back. It was walnut-colored and streaked with dirt and moved across her shoulders in the fan’s breeze.

  “You saw the car,” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who could it be?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not expecting a mail drop for two weeks.”

  “Could be something important. Maybe a part for your computer.”

  “Like an instruction booklet.” Matt’s computer sat in a corner, unused as always. He had not been able to master it—he was a man of the past, not the future, he liked to say—and his incompetence made him the butt of jokes from his students.

  “It could be a message from the university. Maybe the dig’s being funded for another six months.”

  “When they hand out money they don’t send someone halfway around the world to do it. They announce it at night—in an empty room.”

  She laughed. He stood up and stretched.

  “Anyway,” he said, “whoever they are, they’re too late for lunch.” He moved toward the opening.

  “I just hope it’s not bad news,” she said. “I love it here. I’ve found my life’s work.”

  He smiled. “It’s got its moments,” he said, then bowed and gestured past the tent flap, an invitation to leave. She shot him a glowering look, and as she passed she ran her forefinger slowly across his lower abdomen, mussing his shirt and brushing his skin below the navel. Despite himself, he felt himself stir.

  Why didn’t he sleep with her? It was not that he didn’t feel desire—that, thank God, had not abandoned him. He thought back to the evening when Nicole had made her move. She simply slipped unnoticed into his tent, and he found her waiting in his cot. She was naked under the canopy of the mosquito netting, which hung around her like a transparent gown. Matt had felt a tangled rush of desire and dread. He reached into his box of gear and pulled out a fifth of whiskey and sat on a crate near the bed. They passed the bottle back and forth. She sat up, holding a blanket across her chest, and once or twice as she reached over to take the bottle she let it sag and he caught a full view of her breasts, small and firm. How long had it been since he had made love, ten weeks? Three months?

  They drank in a spirit of camaraderie until they had killed the bottle. He staggered out for a walk under the stars, and when he returned an hour later she was gone. For days afterward she was furious. Then, strangely, her anger melted and she began acting as if she had a special claim on him. At meals she sat next to him, and she looked up to him and smiled in a wifely way at his jokes.

  Once or twice she engineered situations to be alone with him to talk. He spied the moments coming and, feigning blindness, he diverted the conversation with a banter so unartful it was al­most cruel. He felt base, but it struck him as so predictable and wearying—the campfire romance between the graduate student and the safari-hardened professor—as much the lore o
f digs as the serendipitous bones in the earth. He didn’t want to go through all the declarations, the revelations, the recriminations. Perhaps I’m getting old, he mused, but I feel like embracing abstinence the way I used to revel in self-indulgence.

  Suddenly, at thirty-eight, Matt had become conscious of time. He chided himself for hypocrisy in romance; all the games, the stabs at mystery, the flirtatious routines he had perfected over the years like a politician’s hollow patter now struck him as vapid. Only once had he been able to strip away all that pretense, years ago. And that he had messed up.

  He felt restless and dissatisfied, his edges worn away like stones awash on a beach. He told himself that he treasured his solitude, which was true, but something else also was true, and he was hon­est enough to recognize it during the odd sleepless night: He was lonely.

  Still, the situation with Nicole was unstable. He had to do some­thing to acknowledge her feelings or they would explode, and that could wreck the expedition. It always amazed him how the cohe­sive sense of the group was essential to a successful dig.

  Outside, Matt looked into the bowl of the valley. The car on the plain below was closer. The dust seemed to shoot straight up like an explosion and then rain down behind in a plume.

  “Thing I like about this site,” he said. “No one can sneak up on you.”

  “Gives you time to rig the defenses.” Nicole turned and looked meaningfully at him to emphasize the double entendre. As she walked ahead on the path, he stared at the back of her frayed shorts. The bits of thread hung like whitened bangs upon the exposed flesh of her upper thigh, and as she led him along slowly he could see the outline of her panties and watch the rolling sway of her buttocks.