Mikhail Abdulov hit the lake floor with only the gentlest of thuds, stirring up little clouds of brown silt around his heavy metal boots. Were it not for the lights in his great dome of a helmet, or the lights aboard the ROV Jeannette following him down, all would have been a very dark, very deep blue, so much so that Mikhail would hardly have been able to see what was around him. Not that there was much to see; most of the "terrain" around him was little more than bare, jagged rocks jutting up from the silty lakebed, only clung to here and there by stubborn brown specimens of algae that refused to admit it was too dark for them down there. Mikhail didn't even see any fish in the vastness of water above and around him; though probably, he simply scared them away, Mikhail thought. His was a frightening visage, after all: a big, bulky diver, dressed in what looked like the steampunk version of an astronaut's spacesuit, followed around by a cube of machinery and bright lights 5 feet to an edge, whose tether extended all 200 meters upward to the surface of the lake.
"Привет, Михаил? Ты в порядке?" A voice came through the comm link in his suit, Jeannette turning its lights and cameras curiously to him. In English, it meant "<Hey, Mikhail? You doing alright?>"
"<Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just settling back into another day of work down here.>" Mikhail radioed back, stretching a little bit before starting his trudge along the lakebed. "<How far of a walk do you think it is to the site?>"
"<From here? You saw on the way down; maybe a hundred meters or so. Next time, we oughtta make the buoy's tether much shorter, I say. It'd make our placemarking that much more accurate.>"
"<Agreed, so long as it isn't too short, of course.>"
"Alright, guys, you can stop flexing now," another voice commented over the radio, this time in English. "You guys are the only ones that speak Russian! We all know at least a bit of English here, enough to chat that way, right?"
"Well, yeah, but, practice, y'know?" The other voice complained, this time in perfect English. "I gotta practice if I wanna actually learn the language, Arthur!"
"Emanuel is only one 'flexing' now," Mikhail added, in his own much more broken, accented version of English. "His Russian is now gotten better than my English, also."
"I'm sure it has. That's kinda his talent, if you haven't noticed," Arthur replied. Emanuel Yupanqui was the linguist of the expedition, the only native Peruvian on the core team, and a natural polyglot, with fluency in English, Spanish, and Quechuan (ie. the Incan language), and partial fluency in several more languages. His self-set goal on big, lengthy expeditions like these was to learn to communicate with each member on the team in their native language, and in the case of the Soviet defector Mikhail, that language was Russian. "Just make sure we don't miss anything important if you two wanna chat it up in Russian. This is kinda a big day!"
"They aren't even at the site yet, Yank!" Another voice, this one female, came over the radio. Mikhail recognized it quickly as belonging to the ship's captain, the tough-as-nails Israeli engineer Talia Mizrahi. "No need to get all fussed before any real action's started."
"I know, I know, but dammit, I'm excited!" came the voice of Arthur Doyle through Jeannette's tether. "You can't find what appears to be an entire temple, together with a ton of auxiliary buildings, in ruins at the bottom of a lake, and not, as an archaeologist, lose your mind over it a bit! Right!?"
"Who is piloting ROV?" Mikhail asked with a look over his shoulder at Jeannette, the boxy frame of which had come to rest on the lakebed. He wasn't stopping to wait for it.
"I'll get it," Talia said with a sigh, and soon the little turbines of the submersible spun to life, letting it swim ahead of Mikhail to the dig site.
"אה, זה נחמד לראות מישהו עושה את הדברים הגבריים כאן, נכון?" Emanuel said to Talia in his best Hebrew, at which Mikhail thought he could actually hear Talia rolling her eyes, though she said nothing in reply.
Soon enough, Mikhail himself arrived at the temple ruins and got to work. Truth be told, most of the work itself was actually rather dull, despite (or perhaps because of) the apparently enormous significance to archaeology Dr. Doyle believed it would have. Everything that could be done relatively quickly and easily had been finished yesterday, that mostly being to photograph everything as it had appeared undisturbed on the surface of the lakebed in great detail, and to take measurements and surveys of the overall layout of the temple site. This was very useful, Mikhail had been assured, but it ran against the major limitations that most of the site had been buried in silts and sediments accrued over the ages, and that any artifacts that might have existed on the site could hardly be examined through ROVs like Jeannette, or the bulky JIM suits a diver would need to visit down there. Therefore, today would be the first of probably very many days spent just unearthing the whole thing, and cataloguing/collecting all the various small artifacts JIM and Jeannette could find. This was the source of most of the dreariness in Mikhail's work, since the "excavation tools" JIM and Jeannette had were no fancier than the aquatic versions of shovels, pumps, fan brushes and rock hammers, and a bin aboard Jeannette to carry all the artifacts JIM would load into her.
Still, nobody would accuse Mikhail of not working for his pay now that the USSR was behind him, so he dutifully and diligently spent the next several hours working alongside remote-controlled Jeannette to get the temple excavated as quickly but carefully as he could (the only limit was him, after all, what with the suit being equipped with about 24 hours' worth of life support). It didn't take long to find a rhythm with the work: for each room in turn, he'd dig up the worst of the sediments with the shovel, stir up most of the rest with the fanbrush, and have Jeannette behind him pumping out the sediment and sediment-filled water with the dredger. Here and there a gentle use of the rock hammer was necessary to remove sediments that had partially solidified, and here and there they'd find some noteworthy small artifact whose location and resting position they'd painstakingly document and photograph with Jeannette's cameras before Mikhail loaded it up aboard her.
They also found skeletons. Lots, and lots, of skeletons. It was like Pompeii; for some skeletons, some poor old fellow would be going about his day, doing some odd business in the temple, when all of sudden he'd lie down and be skeletonized, or at least so his pose and positioning seemed to suggest. Others skeletons seemed to have some awareness of what was going on and struggled a bit, but then died just the same, and were never again disturbed. Many of their deaths appeared to have come quite brutally; bones would be smashed up and cracked and broken in in all the strangest places, with the cause of the breaking not always clear, though at times it was made obvious they had been crushed by falling debris by virtue of that debris still being there, by their bones.
The crew on the whole had a very mixed reaction to the skeletons. Thorough documentation of each was a given, and all agreed that the worst thing to do with any of these found bodies was to disturb them, and so many still remained buried or at least partially buried when it was declared Mikhail was done with a room and should move on; but emotionally, reactions ranged from mortification to deep intrigue to hardly caring. Mikhail, for one, could hardly be bothered to consider these beyond what they meant for him to get the job done; he was tired, after all, and still had a lot of work yet to do. Emanuel, on the other hand, found the consideration of so much sudden death deeply unsettling; he was obviously the least comfortable and most eager to move on when a number of the skeletons were found. In stark contrast was Dr. Doyle, the archaeologist, for whom skeletons were a packaged part of the career and represented much more potential for amazing discoveries than awful memento mori; he spent a great deal of time on the radio just speculating in awe on what sort of natural disaster could possibly cause the destruction we were seeing and wondering with much excitement on the life and possible activities of any particular body when it died suddenly, and of course he was thirstiest for photos, photos, and more photos for every last inhabitant of Davy Jones' locker. Talia's reaction was likely the most balanced of the group, but Mikhail wouldn't know; she didn't have much to say regarding the bodies and all.
For instance, one particular room had caused quite a stir when the group came upon it. It was a very large and central chamber in the temple, with a central stone pedestal that had since fallen over and crushed the chest of whomever had been speaking at it when disaster struck. Many, many skeletons were in this room, apparently gathered there to watch the dead man speak something of importance before falling over dead. Their positioning was, in a sense, rather poor, since one of the walls of the chamber had fallen and dropped lethal boulders onto many in that crowd.
"¡Dios mío, this is awful!" Emanuel exclaimed at one point, when most of the bodies had been at least partially uncovered. "There's gotta be at least 20 distinct people in here! What the hell did they do!? To deserve something like this!?"
"Would guess nothing, like everyone else," Mikhail replied without the slightest bit of care. "Doctor, keep digging, or no?"
Arthur didn't answer immediately. Jeannette, probably under Talia's control, had stopped the dredger for a moment and just floated silently around the room taking pictures and pictures of the ruined chamber and the half-exposed skeletons it entombed. "Doctor?" Mikhail asked again.
Suddenly, there was a loud clap through the radio, and Arthur announcing with great surprise an epiphany he had just had. "Oh man, I think I might actually know what this chamber is!" he exclaimed with revelatory wonder. "Mikhail, uh, stop messing with the audience for now and try digging around the guy up front. Don't mess with the man himself too much, just the area around him and his pedestal. Keep a sharp eye out for artifacts, especially any precious or semiprecious stones you find."
"...okay," Mikhail replied after a moment's hesitation, obediently trudging over to the pedestal and around a few scattered bits of wall or ceiling here and there.
"You know this place?" Emanuel asked incredulously.
"Yeah, and so do you, actually," Arthur replied. "Probably, if my theory checks out. You remember that thing you translated for me a few years ago, about a wish-granting jewel and the sinking of a mythical fifth major island on Lake Titicaca?"
"Well, yeah. It's what started you on this whole idea to explore the lakebed for archaeological stuff in the first place."
"You just had to borrow a captain and a crewmate of hers that already done it in the Dead Sea," Talia interjected. She'd just quietly been helping Mikhail with dredging while Arthur and Emanuel were talking.
"What about that story?" Emanuel pressed.
"You remember that passage near the end? The island had sunk suddenly, crushing the central dude with a pedestal on the way down?"
There was a pause in the transmission for a while. "You're not suggesting that's actually what happened, are you?" Emanuel asked incredulously.
"Yeah! Well, no, of course it wasn't some magic prayer that did all this somehow, but maybe there was some real event that inspired the story, you know? You see those all over in archaeology! The Euphrates floods, and bam, Noah's a tale!"
"Sure, I guess. So now we're looking for a magic gemstone, then?"
"Or just an idol, or talisman, or something. It doesn't have to be perfectly accurate, Emanuel, few things in archaeology are, but if we find something it'd go a long way toward establishing the veracity and authenticity of that manuscript, which is a pretty big win in my eyes!"
"Is something like this, doctor?" Mikhail interrupted. He'd just fan-brushed some silt off a flat, smooth, metallic-looking stone with a slight reddish hue and rounded circular shape. Jeannette dutifully dredged up that silt before zooming in for a closer picture, Mikhail not having moved it or picked it up yet.
"...maybe something like that, yeah," Arthur said uncertainly. "It's right where it should be, but, I dunno, I was just expecting... more?"
"Whatever metal or mineral that is, it hasn't been subject to any corrosion at all in at least 400 years of sitting in the water down there," Talia pointed out. "I'd say that's something, at least."
"Yeah, yeah, good point, it's probably our winner," Arthur confirmed. "Anyway, you know the drill: tag it and bag it!"
And so, Jeannette once again took a nice, large set of photographs of the artifact and its surroundings, Arthur thought out loud about the implications of further confirmation on the veracity of testimony in the Alvarez document, Mikhail labeled the stone and tossed it into a container with the artifacts aboard Jeannette, and that was that. Mikhail went right on back to work excavating room after room, and a few hours later, with a nice several temple chambers successfully cleared out, he called it a day, jettisoned a little ballast off-site, and floated back on up to the surface world. Jeannette was right behind him, struggling only a little bit with the weight of the artifacts she was bringing up.
