The paintings were fascinating because they didn't only depict daily activities. The Chumash were deeply religious and used small, hidden places like this to document their beliefs with art. They believed that life was a game called Peon, in which the benign and destructive gods collected knowledge and experience. When the game was over, it would start again. If the benign gods had won, all living things would benefit. If they had lost, the world would suffer.

All gods, good and bad, were pictured as animals. The Chumash did not hold humankind in high regard. They considered them awkward and vulnerable, which was why they worked so hard to hunt and to live in packs and to become more like the wolf or the bat or the insect.

The Chumash believed that the chief of the gods, the Great Eagle, carried the sun, moon, and stars in its beak and talons. During the day the sun prevented the Great Eagle from being seen; at night it was hidden by the darkness. The Great Eagle was served by the Sky Coyote, who dwelt in the clouds above the earth. The Sky Coyote nourished the inhabitants of our world by making it rain. Meanwhile, roaming the earth itself in spirit, the Bear Mother protected the Chumash by keeping the monstrous denizens of the lower world at bay. The Chumash believed that this underground realm was ruled by the chief of the evil gods, a pair of giant serpents, on whose backs the world rested. Sometimes the snakes stirred, causing a great shaking. Only the diligence of the Bear Mother kept them from emerging. But sometimes the shaking woke the evil Nunashush, monstrous creatures that lived in the foot of the mountain peaks and came out at night to eat all living things.

Curiously, though the Chumash had left behind paintings of the other spirits as well as many animals of the late Ice Age, Grand had never found a rendering of the Nunashush. Most students of Chumash mythology believed that was because evil was a personal thing, different to every member of the tribe. To some it might be a wasp or a shark, to others a hurricane or a rival tribe member.

Grand disagreed. The Chumash were extremely articulate, art-wise. The shamans who created the bulk of the art-work had ascribed symbolic meaning to everything. Spiders and their webs were life and its changing nature, snowflakes were death, fish were the young, and wolves were the old. Grand believed that the shamans knew exactly what the Nunashush looked like. He felt that the holy men didn't paint them because they had found a different way to portray them. Perhaps they painted them beneath a rock from which they couldn't escape or on tree bark, which they burned in effigy.

Standing here and thinking that the last humans to see this place may have been the Chumash reminded the scientist of when his parents had taken an unhappy six-year-old to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon. Now, as then, he felt immortal and humble at the same time.

After checking to make sure there were no paintings directly below the ledge, Grand was ready. Stepping over the double ropes so they were between his legs, he turned his back to the ledge, knelt, and took one rope in each hand.

"I'm going over," he said as he stepped off the side.

Grand descended at a forty-five-degree angle. The pulleys kept the ropes from rubbing on the rock ledge as he literally walked down the face of the cliff, his strong arms constantly working the lines. Releasing the down-rope not only allowed him to descend but gave him the ability to walk from side to side. Tightening on the up-rope brought him back to center. The combination of his angle and the horizontal play enabled Grand to read the entire escarpment as he descended.

It took nearly an hour to crisscross the top half of the cave wall. Grand moved slowly so he wouldn't miss anything; Chumash paintings were sometimes just single icons that could easily be mistaken for moss, seepage stains, or a mineral embedded in the wall. As he knit his way back and forth along the cave wall, Grand occasionally recorded a note about something that wouldn't be apparent to the fiber-optic lens: the length of the escarpment, which was about thirty feet; the degree of declination, which was about ten degrees off-plumb, the wall sloping in toward the base; the dampness of the air the lower to the ground he got; and the fact that there appeared to be large, vertical cracks on both sides of the cave at ground level. Grand wouldn't know for sure whether it was an opening or a shadow until he got to the bottom, which would be soon. Typically, Grand's time limit in the harness was about ninety minutes. There was the strain on his arms, chafing from the leg loops, and exhaustion from the intense, careful concentration. The air was also thin in these high caves, adding to the strain. It wasn't that he couldn't push himself; but he was afraid he might miss something if he did. He would go back up in a few minutes, rest and change the tape, then come back down.

Just below the halfway point, on the right side of the cave, Grand suddenly stopped.

"Hold on," Grand said into the microphone. "There's something here."

Grand straightened his knees so that be could step back slightly from the escarpment He stared at the relatively smooth expanse of rock. There were definitely images there, large shapes that appeared to cover nearly the entire bottom right-hand quarter of the cave wall. From the corner of his eye Grand saw something on the opposite wall. He turned to look across the chasm. The same images had been rendered there as well.

Grand didn't know exactly what he was looking at. He was certain of only one thing.

He'd never seen anything like them.

Chapter Six

Forty-seven-year-old Malcolm Gearhart hung up the phone. After quickly finishing his second cup of coffee, the former Marine took his portable radio from the desk drawer. He slipped the radio in its belt loop, grabbed his freshly blocked cap from the hook behind the door, and left his office in the back of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office station in Goleta.

Gearhart made two stops on his way through the quiet administration center. The first was at the office of Chief Deputy Mike Valentine. Gearhart briefed the veteran law officer about the call he'd just received from the Caltrans District 7 Division Chief, Maintenance, regarding a 3611-10-two missing engineers. The only clue a repair crew had found was a portable radio lying in the road. The sheriff asked Valentine for four deputies from his LEO- Law Enforcement Operations, Investigations Division. He wanted two of them to meet him at Painted Cave and the other two to have files on the missing workers E-mailed from Caltrans. He wanted a complete breakdown: telephone records, bank transactions, credit card charges, and anything else that might point to a debt, extortion, or a potentially hostile contact-a mistress, a bookie, a bar or restaurant or gas station where angry words might have been swapped.

Valentine wrote down each of the requests because that was how Gearhart liked things done. Thorough, accurate, and carefully documented. No confusion, no repetition.

Next, Sheriff Gearhart stopped at the dispatcher's cubicle in the communications center, which was also where the 911 calls were received. It was Deputy Felice Washington who had taken the call from Caltrans. Gearhart informed the young woman that he wanted an immediate update of any news from the site or from Caltrans and that Chief Deputy Valentine should be copied on any of the updates. He wanted the data sent digitally, to the patrol car's mobile data computer, with an audio backup to the car radio to make sure the information had been received. The dispatcher entered the instructions on her keyboard and sent them to the other stations. If she were on a call or away from her post, one of the other communications officers would know exactly what to do.