"Jeff Hecht - The Rumor of the Ruined City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

on a slab of rock in a nearby town. The local wise men had said Noah's Raven
made the prints, and Hitchcock himself had suspected a giant bird. "Jurassic
dinosaurs, nearly two hundred million years ago," explained our tall and
dignified guide. He told us so much that my mind was growing numb when he
showed us a gray slab the size of a desktop crossed by tire tracks. "Here's a
fossilized Cambrian tidal flat," he said with a deadpan smile.
I had learned enough geology from Anna to know the Cambrian period
ended over half a billion years ago. I looked at the rock, and I looked at the
curator, then I looked at Anna and the mad Russian. They seemed to be in on
the game, so I hid my ignorance in a joke. "So who took the motorbike half a
billion years back in the time machine?"
"Climactichnites," he chuckled. He said the fossil tracks had been a
mystery for over a century. The first were found in 1860, before inflated
rubber tires were invented. More were found later, but only recently did two
paleontologists claim an explanation for the prints. They said a flat animal
about the size of a human foot had inched its way across a tidal flat, one
side pushing the other, each step raising a ridge that looked like the print
of one groove in a tire. "They found one track with an impression of the
animal at its end," he concluded.
The Russian looked at him with an enigmatic smile. "I am not certain.
We say Problematica have as many interpretations as there are eyes."
****
By six o'clock, the professors had relaxed to become Anna and Nikolai,
and we were on the turnpike, heading west through the Berkshires as the sun
slipped down in the sky. Anna and I had talked about going back to the site
alone, but taking Nikolai made it easier to justify. As I drove, she told how
continental collisions, rifting, erosion, and glaciers had shaped the
mountains. Geologists thought they understood that story well. Anna had not
expected to stumble on a geologic enigma while repairing hiking trails on the
southern fringe of the Adirondacks.
"What were you hunting?" Nikolai asked.
"Nothing in particular," Anna replied. "I always watch for fossils.
Vern was looking for old settlements; his family came from near there. We both
belong to a nature club that runs service trips that are partly vacations; we
met up here."
"The luxury of vacations we did not have when I was young, after the
war," sighed Nikolai. "We had to have a purpose. It was a field camp I had for
students, when I had become a professor. Our maps showed good Cambrian and
Ordovician sites. Two students came to me the second night in the field, when
everyone else was sitting around the fire drinking, and said they had found
some fossilized ruins. They were young, and knew little geology, but I was
glad they wanted to learn, not just get drunk. I thought they had found an old
mining camp or hunter's cabin, but I wanted to encourage them. I went with
them early the next morning, before anyone else woke up. When they showed me,
I knew they were right."
It had been that way with us. I, the one who knew almost nothing about
rocks or fossils, had stumbled upon the site as we painted red blazes on a
trail. I had stopped to look out over the reservoir my mother always called
"the Sacandaga," which filled the valley where my grandmother had grown up.
Instead, I found a rock face with a pile of rocks embedded in it.