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26 b " y. T HAT'S THE OLD airshaft," Bill Fogg said. "The picture room's got to be close We stood in the center of a small square room in pitch dark but for our lamps, which served only to push the darkness back a little. Far above us there seemed to be a glimmer of light, light of a different color, the color ofdaylight. We couldn't be sure; we couldn't even be sure it was important. All that mattered was that Bill Fogg had recognized a landmark. He turned confIdently and started for a nearby entry. "It should be right across the next room to the south. " We stepped into the room. Ryan and I held our lanterns high, approaching the opposite portal with Fogg. It was partly choked with great slabs of rock. Fogg swore. "Goddam place's fallen down." His voice carried but a trace of the chagrin I felt. We walked over slowly to the pile of fallen rubble. "I was afraid all along this was what probably happened," Fogg said. "And it sure happened." We climbed over the rubble into the caved-in room. The litter was fIve or six feet deep, but here and there it was possible to stand upright on top of the pile. I looked around in despair. Nothing but this pile of rock, an empty place in the darkness, a now meaningless name. But I wondered ifit might be possible to salvage something from the meaningless rubble. "Let's sort over some of the pieces where they spilled through the entry," I suggested toJack, "and see if we can fmd any remnants of broken palm leaves. " The pieces of fallen scrap were, for the most part, small and thin-bedded. One of them bore 129 a series of narrow flutes, a section of palm leaf from near the petiole. The impression was perfect, though nothing was left of the carbonized leaf. I showed it to Fogg. He nodded knowingly. "That's part of one of them, all right." I laid it aside with a new hope. Even now, it might be possible to piece together a few fern leaves. The discovery substantiated Fogg's earlier descriptions and settled beyond doubt the identity of the room. "One of the nicest palms was over by the far entry," Fogg said. He pointed to the passage on the far side of the room. "Then there was another beauty right about where we stand. And a whopper over there next to the coal rib." It was heartrending to hear him. "Then there were ferns and hundreds of other leaves. Some like trees we have now. f~nd they were everywhere. The big palms was the prettiest, and there were more of them than I can remember. The whole roof was like a picture had been painted clean acrost it. Or carved into it." I squinted my eyes tight shut to see it. The material in this room would have outclassed all the rest of the plant collection Barnum had gathered for the whole season. Then too, the geographical factor of distance would have assured us new Mesaverde types. The scientifIc value of the lost display was impossible to estimate. If only we could have gotten here sooner. . . Ryan found another section of palm leaf, only hand size but similar to the fragment I had laid beside my lantern. It didn't fIt. We continued searching the rubble, but the leaf that had fallen here was apparently shattered beyond recovery. Traces of smaller leaves were entirely lacking. Nearly everything had been reduced to powder in the seven-foot drop of hundreds of tons of stone. It was as though a hurricane had swept through an exotic garden and left not even the stumps of its beauties. Ryan continued poking among the ruins, but I went to explore the surrounding area with Fogg; maybe the fossil zone had extended beyond the limits of this one room. We explored the ceiling of the next room north. A few broken edges of leaves close to the coal rib indicated the margin of the great mat of foliage that had lain here on the old Cretaceous swamp. The room to the south had fallen. I trudged gloomily over and through the rubble, exploring the region to the west. Everywhere the ceilings were down. We climbed back into the west end of the picture room. On top of the pile, again approaching the spot where Ryan still...

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