over my feet like dirty water. The image of Joseph, Greta’s son, being pulled through the crack in the mountain appeared in my mind, flickering as if projected on a screen. A child’s desperate cry echoed in my ears. I shivered, and pulled my jacket close.
Aki walked off ahead. I steadied myself and hobbled after him, fear rising in my chest as he slipped through the narrow crack at the end of the arcade and disappeared. What lay beyond exhilarated and terrified me. I stood before this fissure, feeling my life collect into two parts, the life I had led before, and the life I would lead after I entered the village of the Icemen.
Twenty-Nine
I emerged into a tongue of land cut deep into a crevice of the mountain. Leopold had described the village as a seed pressed into a rocky furrow, and it seemed exactly that: a furtive garden in a fold of stone. The mountains angled up on all sides, shielding the village, protecting it. I understood then how the Icemen had survived. The only way in or out of the village was the narrow arcade of caves, that single crack in the wall. They were surrounded by a fortress of rock.
As Vita had told me, the village had grown since Leopold had described it in his field notes. Where once there were only caves, now there were stone huts. They were primitive shelters, cut from the mountain, the walls constructed of rough stone that appeared to be nothing more than the natural outcroppings of granite, the stone rooftops speckled with moss. This explained why the village hadn’t been discovered from above—not by helicopter or airplane or satellite. Even if a helicopter had flown overhead, the curve of the mountains hid the Icemen so completely that it would be difficult to discern life below. The mountains enfolded the valley so that everything—the stone huts, the cultivated plants, the population of archaic humans who came to greet me—remained invisible to the outside world.
I walked over an expanse of moss-covered rock toward Aki’s tribe.
I have never taken it lightly, that moment of contact with the Icemen. I knew that they were vulnerable to the modern world. Vulnerable to me. They had persevered through the millennia without contact with the rest of humankind. Only pure, inviolate isolation had protected them.
Through the vicissitudes of time and geography, through the cruel workings of evolution, through all the hazards of climate, of migrations, food shortages, sickness, invasion: we stood face to face there, then, together. It was a miracle. By all measures, they should have been extinct. Like their direct ancestors, Neanderthals, or their more distant relations, Cro-Magnon, or any of the other dozens of archaic hominids that had evolved and perished—they should have been crushed by disease and competition. If the Icemen were a rare treasure of biology, I was the most privileged person on the planet: their witness. What I did not anticipate, and what has remained a source of wonder through all the years since that day, is how our meeting would transform me.
“My name is Alberta,” I said to the gathering crowd. “Granddaughter of Vittoria Montebianco.”
At the sound of my voice, more Icemen emerged from the stone huts, men and women and a few children. They looked at me, staring at me in wonder. I couldn’t help but imagine Leopold Montebianco there, standing at my side, his jet-black hair and flamboyant cravat, surveying these pale men and women as they crowded around. I imagined the thrill of discovery he must have felt upon realizing what he had found. I felt it, too, a buzzing in the chest, the rare privilege of seeing something only a handful of people had ever seen before.
The Icemen gathered around. There were fifty of them, perhaps fewer. I scanned their faces, looking for aberrant traits, but they were all eerily similar to Aki in appearance. The defining features of their kind—the lack of pigmentation of skin and hair, the enormous blue eyes, the rough-hewn brow, the high cheekbones and long limbs—showed little variation. The full lips and the flatness of the nose, the pointed ears, the particular mold of the chin—these features were uniform. There was nothing of Leopold in any of these people. Nothing of me.
There was no variety in their clothing either. The women wore white woven tunics over loose pants, while the men wore cargo pants and leather vests that revealed their hair-covered arms. I remembered the picture of the Yeti in