After the first half hour Diana forgot that she was alone with a man in an isolated canyon. She forgot to be afraid that something she might say or do would trigger in Ten the certainty that she wanted him sexually despite whatever objections she might make to his advances. For the first time in years she enjoyed the company of a man as a person, another adult with whom she could be at ease.

When the rain finally stopped completely, Diana stood, stretched cramped leg muscles and went to the edge of the overhang to look out across the newly washed land. Although no ruins were visible from the overhang itself, excitement simmered suddenly in her blood. Hundreds of years ago the Anasazi had looked out on the same land, smelled the same scent of wet earth and pinon, seen the glittering beauty of sunlight captured in a billion drops of water clinging to needles and boughs and the sheer face of the cliff itself. For this instant she and the Anasazi were one.

That was what she wanted to capture in her illustrations-the continuity of life, of human experience, a continuity that existed through time regardless of the outward diversity of human cultures.

'I'm going to the site," Diana said, picking up her backpack.

Ten looked up from the potshards he was assembling. "I'll be along as soon as I get these numbered. Don't go up those ladders until they're dry. And stick to the part of the ruins that has a grid. Some of that rabble isn't stable, and some of the walls are worse."

"Don't worry. I'm not exploring anything alone. Too many of those ruins are traps waiting to be sprung. With the Anasazi, you never know when the ground is a ceiling covering a sunken kiva. I'll stay on the well-beaten paths until there are more people on site."

A long look assured Ten that Diana meant what she said. He nodded. "Thanks."

"For what?" she asked.

"Not getting your back up at my suggestions."

"I have nothing against common sense. Besides, you're the ramrod on this site. If I don't like your, er, 'suggestions,' that's my hard luck, right? You'll enforce your orders any way you have to."

Ten thought of putting it less bluntly, then shrugged. Diana was right, and it would save a lot of grief if she knew it.

"That's my job."

"I'll remember it."

What Diana said was the simple truth. She would remember. The thought of going against Ten's suggestions was frankly intimidating. He had the power to enforce his will and she knew it as well as he did. Better. She had been taught by her father and her fiance just how little a woman's protests mattered to men whose physical superiority was a fact of life.

"If you hear the truck's horn beep three times, or three shots from the rifle," Ten said, "it means come back here on the double."

Diana nodded, checked her watch and said, "I'll be back before sundown."

"Damn straight you will be." He held two pieces of pottery up against the sunlight streaming into the overhang, frowned and set one piece aside before he said, "Only a fool or a pothunter would go feeling around in the ruins after dark."

Diana didn't bother to answer. Ten wasn't really listening anyway. He was holding another piece of pottery against the sunlight, visually comparing edges. They must have fit, because he grunted and wrote on the inside of both pieces. After they were cleaned they would be glued together, but the equipment for that operation was back at the old ranch house.

Beyond the overhang the land was damp and glistening from the recent rain. The short-lived waterfalls that had made lacy veils over the cliff faces were already diminishing to silver tendrils. Before she left the overhang, Diana glanced back at Ten, only to find him engrossed in his three-dimensional puzzle. She should have been relieved at the silent evidence that she didn't have to worry about fielding any unwanted advances from Ten. Quite obviously she wasn't the focus of his masculine attention.

But Diana wasn't relieved. She was a bit irked that he found it so easy to ignore her.

The realization disconcerted her, so she shoved the thought aside and concentrated on the increasingly ragged terrain as she began to climb from September Canyon's floor up to the base of the steep cliffs, following whatever truck tracks the rain hadn't washed away.

Summer thunder muttered through September Canyon, followed by a gust of rain-scented wind that made pinons moan. From the vantage point where the Rover had been parked, the ruins beckoned. Partial walls were scalloped raggedly by time and falling masonry. Some of the walls were barely ankle-high, others reached nearly twenty-five feet in height, broken only by the protruding cedar beams that had once supported floors. Cedar that was still protected by stone remained strong and hard. Exposed beams weathered with the excruciating slowness of rock itself.

Using a trick that an old archaeologist had taught her, Diana let her eyes become unfocused while she was looking at the ruins. Details blurred and faded, leaving only larger relationships visible, weights and masses, symmetry and balance, subtle uses of force and counterforce that had to be conceived in the human mind before they were built because they did not occur in nature. The multistoried wall with its T-shaped doors no longer looked like a chimney with bricks fallen out, nor did the roofless kivas look like too-wide wells. The relationship of roof to floor to ceiling, the geometries of shared-wall apartment living, became clearer to unfocused modern eyes.

The archaeologist who first examined September Canyon estimated that the canyon's alcove had held between nineteen and twenty-six rooms, including the ubiquitous circular kivas. The height of the building varied from less than four feet to three stories, depending on the height of the overhang itself.

The kivas were rather like basements set off from the larger grouping of rooms. The kivas' flat roofs were actually the floor of the town meeting area where children played and women ground corn, where dogs barked and chased foolish turkeys. The balcony of a third-story room was the ceiling of an adjacent two-story apartment. Cedar ladders reached to cistlike granaries built into lateral cracks too small to accommodate even a tiny room. And the Anasazi used rooms so tiny they were unthinkable to modern people, even taking into account the Anasazi's smaller stature.

Diana opened the outer pocket of her backpack and pulled out a lightweight, powerful pair of binoculars..As always, the patience of the Anasazi stonemasons fascinated her. Lacking metal of any kind, they shaped stone by using stone itself. Hand axes weighing several pounds were used to hammer rough squares or rectangles from shapeless slabs of rock. Then the imagined geometry was carefully tap-tap-tapped onto the rough block, thousands upon thousands of strokes, stone pecking at stone until the rock was of the proper shape and size.

The alcove's left side ended in sheer rock wall. A crack angled up the face of the cliff. At no point was the crack wider than a few inches, yet Diana could see places where natural foot-or handholds had been added. Every Anasazi who went up on the mesa to tend crops had to climb up the cliff with no more help than they could get out of the crack. The thought of making such a climb herself didn't appeal. The thought of children or old people making the climb in all kinds of weather was appalling, as was the thought of toddlers playing along the alcove's sheer drop.

Inevitably, people must have slipped and fallen. Even for an alcove that had a southern exposure protected from all but the worst storms, the kind of daily risking of life and limb represented by that trail seemed a terrible price to pay.

Diana lowered the glasses, looked at the ruins with her unaided eyes and frowned. The angle wasn't quite right for what she wanted to accomplish. Farther up the canyon, where the rubble slopes rose to the point that an agile climber could reach the ruins without a ladder, the angle would be no better. What she needed was a good spot from which to sketch an overview of the countryside with an inset detailing the structure and placement of the ruins themselves. The surrounding country could be sketched almost anytime. The ruins, however, were best sketched in slanting, late-afternoon light, when all the irregularities and angles of masonry leaped into high relief. That "sweet light" was rapidly developing as the day advanced.

With measuring eyes, Diana scanned her surroundings before she decided to sketch from the opposite side of the canyon. She shrugged her backpack into a more comfortable position and set off. The rains had been light enough that September Creek was a ribbon she could jump over without much danger of getting her feet wet. She worked her way up the canyon until she was half a mile above the ruins on the opposite side. Only then did she climb up the talus slope at the base of the canyon's stone walls.

When Diana could climb no higher without encountering solid rock, she began scrambling parallel to the base of the cliff that formed the canyon wall. Every few minutes she paused to look at the ruins across the canyon, checking the changing angles until she found one she liked. Her strategy meant a hard scramble across the debris slope at the base of the canyon's wall, but she had made similar scrambles at other sites in order to find just the right place to sit and sketch.

Finally Diana stopped at the top of a particularly steep scramble where a section of the sandstone cliff had sloughed away, burying everything beneath in chunks of stone as big as a truck. She wiped her forehead, checked the angle of the ruins and sighed.