Giants and Ogres (4 page)

“They gave their daughters to the God of Death

And the children they bore were monsters.”

—Inscription, Proto-Harappan, ca. 3000 BCE.

It wasn't a proper sandstorm like the ones you hear about in Saudi Arabia, where the sky turns black and the planes can't land. But it was bad enough to make me cover my face with my hands and run for shelter. In North Africa, they call it the
sirocco
, or
haboob
—an evil, striking wind. And even the words we use in Pakistan have that same aura of menace:
aandhi. Ghubar.

I can see why people view sandstorms as a bad omen. They hide things; they steal your sight, your breath, cut you like glass. But it's hard for me to think of them that way.

It was a sandstorm that drove me over the caution ropes into the ruins of site 229.

And it was there that I met Ekatu.

It started like any other winter holiday—heading north on Super Highway in a rented Pajero, my dad at the wheel, the chaos and kerosene-smell of Karachi diminishing with every mile. When your father is an archaeologist, you don't spend your school vacations traipsing through air-conditioned malls or lying on the beach. You spend them on a dig.

It could be worse, or so my father loves to remind me. It could be wet tents and ancient stepwells in South India (mosquitos), or copper plates in the Sundarbans (tigers), or cave temple carvings in Maharashtra (did I mention bats?)

In case that wasn't clear, I don't like bugs. Or large predators. Or fauna of any kind, really. I like words, like my father. Some archaeologists study pottery; some study bones, or tiny specks of pollen. My father studies inscriptions—ancient words embedded in stone, metal, or clay.

And that's what made this dig so exciting.

Six months ago, a shepherd tripped over a piece of stone in the Sindh desert, about 250 miles outside of Karachi. It turned out to be a five-thousand-year-old sandstone pillar. And it was covered with ancient text.

We pulled up at the excavation camp, and I was instantly relieved. Most of the other Indus Valley sites are well-established and full of dig teams. This one was bare bones in comparison: a line of heavy canvas tents and a handful of jeeps, packed with supplies. There was more equipment here than people, which suited me just fine.

My father, on the other hand, worries. On the drive up, he said to me, “Amal, I don't think there will be any other girls your age on this trip. I hope you won't be lonely.”

Oh, Dad. I'm pretty sure he knows that I put a lot of effort into avoiding other teenagers, but I pretended to be disappointed and stoic, and he pretended to be reassured.

I am comfortable in the desert. Not much can live here—no pye-dogs that may or may not be rabid, no monkeys to snatch food out of your hands. No small mammals with big eyes to fool you into caring for them.

Everything that's here is a survivor.

That's what archaeology is, really: the study of what survives. Scholars have to piece together whole worlds
from the scraps that the elements don't manage to destroy. Masonry. Stone tools. Metalwork. Sometimes I think of it as a kind of survival guide. See these things? These hard little relics? These mummified bodies with the warm and wet scraped out of them? They made it! Be like them.

The area around the pillar had been excavated enough to reveal the ruins of an ancient city—the rows of low brick walls cut the desert into grids. The dig team calls the site “City of Giants” because of the out-size proportions of its architectural features. There's a massive bathing pool, with stairs that would have been nearly impossible to climb, and great halls with doorways twice as high as other Indus Valley sites. Everyone's excited because something so big is probably ceremonial, which means this could be a temple complex, but who knows? My dad says it will take years just to determine the scope, much less the nature of the settlement—a lifetime, even.

This doesn't surprise me. You can spend a lifetime trying to decipher a single line of text. Just think of all the people who tried to crack the Indus Valley script in the '20s and '30s—they had to die disappointed. There
wasn't enough writing to make sense of it—just small fragments on clay seals and stamps. And there wasn't a bilingual inscription to help them translate it.

Until—just maybe—now.

On day two, my father took me into the excavation pit to show me the pillar. “See the symbols on the top?” he said. “They're very similar to what you find at other Indus Valley sites. But they're not identical. We're calling it proto-Harappan.”

I took pictures with my digital camera so I could study it later. It's closer to pictographs than cuneiform—more legs and jars and daggers, less wedge-shaped footprints of water birds on the shore.

“But here's the exciting part,” my father said. “See this other script down here? It's Sumerian, obviously written later and with less care. But this one we know, Amal. This one we can read.”

By evening, my father had worked out a rough English translation of the Sumerian text. Of course, scholar that he is, he had to qualify everything with a hundred caveats—we don't know for sure that the Sumerian is a translation; it could be graffiti for all we know; we can't test it until we find more inscriptions ….. But in the
end, he agreed to read it to me.

Words like these are hallowed. You can't read them like you're reading the back of a cereal box. You have to give them their moment. My dad and I took our seats at the folding table; we let the silence of the desert filter into the tent as he read.

It was short. Two little lines:

“
They gave their daughters to the God of Death

And the children they bore were monsters.
”

I made him repeat it. I made him show it to me in writing. And then I copied the words into my own journal.

My father began talking again, about what it might mean: about ritual and the sacred, social differentiation. I couldn't listen. I was still dazed by the wonder of it all—that a message could survive for so long, without its readers. I was thinking of all the things in the world that remain ungrasped.

Day three was beset by technical difficulties—broken water pump and a failing generator—so my father and a few of his students took a jeep to Larkana to arrange
for repairs. “Make sure Hassan Uncle knows where you are at all times,” my father said. Hassan Uncle is our site manager. He's been with us on every dig since before I can remember, and he's also my dad's best friend.

I nodded in agreement, and as soon as the jeep was out of sight, I went back into the tent to grab my journal.

Usually on a dig, I like to spend the first few days just wandering around the site so I can let it all sink in. My dad says when you study the past, you need to read the landscape just like you would a book. But there would be time for that later. For now, I just wanted to think, and I preferred to do that alone.

I walked past the dig team at the pillar, hard at work with delicate brushes and specimen cards. I kept walking until I reached the furthest boundary of the main field site. There were a few “areas of interest” further still, roped off with caution tape, but as yet unexcavated. I settled myself under a scraggly tree and started to write.

A lot of what gets archaeologists excited would bore the socks off of other people. Most ancient inscriptions are hardly high drama; they're just bits of facts that help fill in the picture of the past: the names of kings, “So-and-so built such-and-such on such-
and-such-a-date,” a recording of gifts given, monies paid or received. It's hard to get excited about a thousand-year-old tax receipt, even if it's etched in copper. But inscriptions like this one—full of ancient hopes and thoughts and fears—are truly rare.

I must have sat there for hours, pondering those hallowed words, taking notes. I've no doubt I would have been there even longer, if not for the wind.

There's a quality of silence in the desert that is almost sentient. It's the feeling you get when someone's watching you; you turn and meet their eyes with a flash of recognition.
Yes. There you are.

That's how it felt. There was this sudden, conspicuous nothingness. And then sand. Everywhere. Fast and biting and unrelenting.

I covered my face with my hands and lurched to my feet. I was struck, briefly, by how ill-prepared I was for this, which is so unlike me. How long do sandstorms last? Was I better off waiting it out or seeking shelter? I shifted my hands a bit to attempt a visual reality check and was rewarded with a mouthful of grit. That clinched it; I needed to breathe, ergo, I needed shelter.

I stumbled, blind, in the general direction of camp—or so I hoped. It's amazing, how stubbornly
we persist once we've fixed on a course of action, even when new information tells us it's pointless. The wind was so strong, and my gaze so obscured, that I was probably changing direction with every step.

And yet, when my shins met the light resistance of plastic field ropes, of course I assumed I'd made it to the excavation pit. I called out for help, thinking one of the field techs would surely hear me.

Well, it wasn't the excavation pit. I wasn't anywhere near the campsite. But someone heard me.

Someone, or something.

I thought it was the wind lifting me, like those funnel clouds you hear about in America that pick up entire houses and cars.

I waited to be dropped, or slammed into the ground. Absurdly, I spared a moment to wonder if staying under the tree would have been a better choice.

All of a sudden, everything hushed, and I was released. Gently. Precisely. On my own two feet, like a chess piece being positioned on a board.

I brushed the sand from my face and opened my eyes.

I was in a room, of sorts. A cave, or maybe a
cellar. It was dim, but I could make out the contours of a masonry wall in front of me. Perhaps it was an ancient storehouse, impressively intact but largely hidden under the sand. Then it hit me: this must be one of those “areas of interest” roped off by the survey team.

As for how I got there, I considered the possibilities: funnel cloud, djinns, or angels, and then stubbornly put it out of my mind. I could hear the muffled shriek of the wind still raging above me. The storm wasn't over, but against all odds I was safe; I would wait it out here.

That's when I heard the other sound, this one right behind me—a shuffling of feet, but louder, like the dragging of furniture over gritty floor tiles. I turned around slowly, heart pounding.

It took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. A belt, cinched over a tunic. Perfectly ordinary, I know. But you don't expect to see it that far above eye level, not when you're standing up, and so the mind resists.

I lifted my head up, and up again, from belt to buttons to massive shoulders. I tilted my head back and saw a youthful face looking down at me—clean-shaven, wide-open eyes, brow creased with worry. I could
almost have convinced myself it was a statue, if he hadn't opened his mouth to speak.

Perhaps it's a testament to my rational nature, and not to mere cowardice, that I fell to the ground in a faint.

When I came to, he was speaking to me in a language I did not know. I didn't move, but I listened, letting the timber of the words wash over me, taking comfort in their strangeness, even accepting, on some level, that they might be the last words I'd ever hear.

At some point he switched to Urdu, which I do know, and then Sindhi (which I've studied in school), and finally English. “
Aap theek hain
?
Theek ahyo
? Are you alright?”

I had no idea how to react. To my surprise, I wasn't afraid.

“You speak a lot of languages,” I said, at last. He let out a large breath—of relief, perhaps—and I lifted myself up on my elbows.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you a djinn?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Are you … a person?”

He gave a sad little smile at that. “I like to think I am—at least, a kind of person. I am Ekatu.” He placed a massive hand over his heart in greeting. I did the same.

“I'm Amal,” I said.

I'm not particularly good with people. It helps when there are protocols to follow—the hellos, how are yous, how is your family—that make most social conversations rather script-like. But as far as I knew, there was no guidebook for first meetings with giants in five-thousand-year-old storerooms. Luckily, Ekatu spoke, and spared me the awkwardness.

“You are with the diggers?” he said.

“Yes.”

“But you are … not quite grown?”

“Nearly,” I said, miffed, then relented; “I'm sixteen; I'm here with my father.”

Ekatu thought for a bit.

“I think, perhaps, that we are of an age.”

“You're sixteen, too?”

“Not in your years,” he said. “By your reckoning, I'm almost as old as these ruins. But by ours, I'm only newly mature. I am almost at the age when I could take a mate, were there others of my kind.”