"I am the place with only three colors- blue of sky," "white of snow, black of rock." "I am the place where the temperature is often very cold." "...and where the air is uncomfortably thin..." "I am the place where life, ALL Life, is very fragile." "I am the mountain so high that no bird can fly over me although many have tried." "To the Tibetans, I am Chomolungma goddess mother of the earth." "To the Nepalese I am Sagarmatha goddess mother of the sky." "And to the rest of the world, I am Mt." "Everest." "9 American mountaineers depart the United States bound for the Kingdom of Nepal to join the Inventa Everest 2000 Environmyental Expedition." "They will team up with the largest contingent of Sherpas ever assembled for a clean-up operation." "Their goal is to unburden Mt." "Everest of over 40 years of expedition garbage and to summi t the world's highest peak." "Here the Westerners meet their Eastern guides and make their fiinal preparations." "Bob Hoffman, a former airline manager, is the expedition leader and mastermind behind the half-million dollar clean-up operation." "Apa Sherpa is responsible for managing all Sherpas on the expedition and overseeing the climbing logistics." "Pemba Nurbu will help coordinate a team of 22 clean-up Sherpas." "Professional mountain guide Jim Williams, along with Apa, will lead the 9 member climbing team..." "Each member has paid their way for a chance to summi t Everest." "Sometimes called "Mr. Everest" for reaching the top in his 10 previous climbs," "Apa will climb this year for a World-record 11 th summi t." "Apa combs the back alleys of Kathmandu in search of materials for the Base Camp Puja ceremony." "Rice, incense, kata scarves, and prayer flags are all on the shopping list." "The prayer flags are gonna go over our complete camp area... and we'll have 5 lines of prayer flags going out." "I still have mine from the '98 expedition." "Prayer flags are thought to bring good luck in Buddhist cultures..." "The blue is the sky..." "The white is the... clouds..." "clouds, yeah..." "The red is for firre..." "The red is firre..." "The green is earth..." "Yellow." "And the yellow is water." "And also each one has a prayer on it, and the Lung-la horse is the fast-carrier of the prayers to the heavens ...and it's believed that each time the wind blows the flags are sending those prayers for safety to heaven... so that's the signifircance of them." "Before the expedition can set out for Base Camp," "Apa must bring the ceremony items to a Rimopche to be blessed." "However, Rimpoches are not always easy to fiind in the bustle of Kathmandu." "Finally, after many turns, they fiind him." "Rimpoches are Buddhist holy men considered to be the reincarnates of former high lamas." "The traditional tea is served, and the puja offerings are blessed." "63 year-old Sherman Bull accompanies Hoffman on a dawn run at the Monkey Temple." "Should the surgeon from Connecticut succeed in his summi t bid, he will be the oldest human being to do so." "This will be his 4th attempt." "Having completed their preparations, the team embarks on the last air leg the one-hour flight into the Khumbu Valley and the beginnin g of the trek to Base Camp." "Coupled with gusty winds and a very short landing strip that requires good brakes Lukla airstrip gives even the most experienced Khumbu pilots reservations about landing here..." "That was some ride..." "Our pilot kept saying" ""Holy shit, holy shit, it's a holy shit"" "From here they will walk the rest of the way to Base Camp." "Porters and yaks shoulder much of the load..." "Each porter carries up to 70-pounds everything is instinctively weighed simply by touch..." "Mt." "Everest lies on the border between Tibet and Nepal, in the Sagarmatha National Park." "The word "Sherpa" does not mean "mountain porter,"" "as it is often mis-translated in the West." "It simply means "People from the East"... referring to the neighboring region of Tibet..." "The Sherpa people have been migrating to the high reaches of the Himalaya from Tibet for over 500 years..." "With a population of 1000," "Namche Bazar is the largest village in the Khumbu region." "Even today, Tibetans come weekly to this Sherpa capital to ply their wares at the Saturday market." "The team will return here at the end of the expedition, carrying all the collected refuse to be recycled or incinerated..." "Canadian, Jamie Ross is the environmyental director of the expedition." "Ross was also a member of Hoffman's 1998 expedition." "We are working with a group here called the Sagamatha Pollution control committee, and they are a group organized to oversee environmyental issues in this park which is the Sagamatha national park." "The most important thing to come out of this expedition is have a major impact on the clean-up up at Base Camp and on the mountain..." "Get a lot of trash off..." "and raise awareness of what we're doing, so that other people will do the same." "The SPCC will work with the 17 teams climbing MT." "Everest this season." "Each team must provide accurate counts of equipment going to Base Camp." "The government requires that teams must pack out expedition garbage or lose a 4000 dollar deposit." "By current Himalayan standards, this Expedition is a massive operation." "It will utilize 200 yaks... to carry 7 tons of equipment and climbing gear... and 1 ton of food to sustain the entire team for 8 weeks..." "The Tengboche monastery lies approximately half-way between Lukla and Base Camp." "The Monastery was established in 1916, and is one of the more renowned Monasteries in the Khumbu region." "Here the team rests and receives a blessing." "The team awakens to an un-seasonal snowfall." "The presence of snow at this elevation can mean an early Monsoon season." "On the tenth and fiinal day of the trek, and just eight hours walking distance from Base Camp, the team reaches the Sherpa Memorial..." "It is a very signifircant place, to, you know, just come and visit them because this is very special place for... for the climber... the climber who died on Everest and other mountain... and," "as part of the Buddhist religion, once the people died, we have to cremate on mountain, on the top of the mountain, which you can see the whole mountains..." "and the river... runnin g river... that feels..." "that will take you to the heaven... we believe in that..." "Do You Have friends here?" "sure..." "Yeah..." "It's very spiritual..." "I just love the sound of the wind..." "It's a chance to reflect..." "It's at this point for me the expedition becomes very real." "Seems to be a gateway for me..." "Where the trek fiinally ends and now we are starting into thinking about climbing the mountain..." "This is a very solemn place..." "It's where our humanity meets the top of the world and the heavens... because all these stonework's that represent that lost their lives on the mountain shows the effort and the loss..." "Well, this is a mostly..." "you'll see Sherpa climbers here..." "But these days, they are sharing with the Westerners, too..." "I knew Scott Fischer a little..." "He was one of the toughest mountaineers I ever knew..." "When you think he and Rob Hall could die on Everest, it means that anybody could die on Everest..." "It reminds us of our mortality and reminds us that we have to know when it's time to turn back, and try and always make the right judgment calls..." "Not go beyond our capabilities..." "Everest is worth climbing, but not worth dying for, that's for sure..." "There is a young Sherpa boy..." "He was on another team..." "There was only three teams in 95 on the mountain..." "And we were going on up to Camp 3 and we were at the bottom of the Lhotse Face and he was getting nearer to the camp and he didn't clip into the fiixed line..." "And he fell, and we watched him fall, all the way down the mountain..." "Leaving a trail of blood..." "By the time he hit the bottom of the mountain he was already dead..." "And it was the firrst time we had seen anyone die on the mountain..." "And it always reminds us just how dangerous that Lhotse Face is..." "I always just come up here and just spend a minute..." "There's too many up here... too many..." "While certainly no 5 star hotel and after 10 days on the trail," "Base Camp is a virtual Shangri" " La." "Home sweet Home..." "Located on the Northwestern edge of the Khumbu Glacier and situated against the West shoulder of Everest, this piece of communal real estate is free of avalanches, rock" " Slides and falling ice seracs..." "Apa." "I'm save arrived..." "Sun's out it's a gorgeous day..." "Be a hell of a lot better if you didn't show up." "I was having a good time..." "I hope my bags unpacked you son of a bitch..." "We told them to take it back down the Khumbu..." "Too much weight it killed about 3 yaks trying to get all your stuff in..." "I was expecting to have my tent up by now..." "I don't see my tent..." "Uh, Bob, where's my tent?" "Each climbing season, Base Camp must be built from scratch." "The only materials used are the rocks and boulders that are churned out by the ever-shifting glacial moraine..." "While comparatively safe, life on the lateral moraine of a glacier does have it's challenges," "It's hard, it's cold and it moves." "A 5 foot per day glacial flow slowly agitates years of biological waste deposited at the upper camps." "A continual contamination of ground water is a constant health hazard for the people living at Base Camp during the climbing seasons." "The human waste problem at Base Camp is hard to distinguish from the animal waste problem at Base Camp." "What we've found so far is that the water supplies in some places are showing moderate contamination with fecal coliform." "And fecal coliform is an indication of contamination by biological waste." "Whether it's by humans or yaks, we don't know, we can't tell that here." "But what we are fiinding is that some areas that people use for water sources are actually contaminated, and that makes us, obviously, change our water sources, be more careful with the water that we're drinking." "And, uh, trying to make sure that any human waste that's generated here is defimitely contained and treated" "so that we're not contributing to that problem..." "At this elevation the amount of oxygen in the air is half of what it is at sea level, which makes the actual act of cleaning-up more diffircult." "The Sherpas live at elevation some as high as 14,000 feet, which naturally allows them to physically accomplish what many people from sea level cannot." "We've hired an additional 22 high-altitude Sherpas to concentrate on the clean-up effort." "Our plan for camp 2, once we get it established is to have the Sherpas clean up as much of the exposed garbage as possible." "So far reports from the teams who have gotten in there have indicated that we have a very high snow and ice level up there." "It's going make fiinding this garbage and removing it a very diffircult task." "The Sherpas will then continue up to camp 4 to remove some of the hundreds of oxygen bottles that are still up there as well as tent poles and general trash." "Before proceeding beyond Base Camp, each expedition conducts a puja ceremony." "The puja asks the spirits for understanding and tolerance of Human activities..." "Asks for luck, health, fair weather, and permission to climb the mountain..." "The puja is conducted by a monk or Lama." "The alter is built of stone and is part of the Base Camp set-up." "This is the heart of the worship site or Lhap" " So..." "The climbing gear is laid near the firre." "This is so the smoke from the burning juniper branches may purify the crampons, ice axes and ropes so vital for the days ahead..." "On the morning of the puja, Sherpas and the westerners alike bring the sacramental offerings to the lap-so..." "Rice, incense,  beer, are traditional gifts to the spirits." "Near the end of the day-long ceremony, and with prayer flags in place, the center pole is raised to embrace the camp with good luck." "Finally everyone chants together while holding handfuls of flour..." ""Go up, may good fortune arise."" "hang which is a rice beer, is shared by all member of the expedition as a way of closing the ceremony." "Tomorrow the team will venture into the Khumbu Icefall and begin a week- long acclimatization at the higher camps." "Avalanches, falling ice seracs the size of houses, and aluminum ladders precariously balanced over crevasses- are all hazards in this lumbering river of ice." "More climbers have perished in the Khumbu icefall than on any other part of the mountain..." "Even the summi t." "Human beings do not perform well at this elevation due to the lack of oxygen." "An acclimatization-process is necessary to adapt the body to the thin air of this new environmyent." "Time spent at the higher camps enable red blood cells to multiply which in turn will carry more oxygen." "The climbing team continue their acclimatization while the Sherpas push up to Camp 4 to begin the cleanup operation." "Although the Khumbu icefall is regarded as the most dangerous leg of the climb, the Lhotse face is no casual walk in the park." "It is a 4000 foot near-vertical wall of ice." "Like the icefall, multiple trips up and down only increase the danger for anyone traveling..." "Because the wind-blown South Col is accessible, we wanted to go up there and clean off the hundreds of oxygen bottles that have been left... and mainly, these are the large, heavy ones that no one wanted to bring down in the past." "Some of them weigh up to 15 pounds a bottle." "In Nepal, the average annual income is firve hundred U.S. dollars per year." "At twenty-firve dollars per oxygen bottle, this man will make his income in 4 trips to the South Col." "Down the hill he will walk with 5 empty Bottles in his pack... worth $125 U.S. dollars." "Ask any Sherpa why he climbs, and the answer is nearly always the same:" ""I climb today so my children do not have climb tomorrow."" "But how did the garbage come to be here in the firrst place?" "The climb up Everest itself is so arduous... so dangerous... so cold and windy... that past climbers felt lucky to get out alive." "They thought little about the trash they left behind." "The accumulation of garbage is simply the past 40 years of climbers reaching for the roof of the world... and often hastily retreating." "This is Pemba speaking from Camp 2..." "over..." "Base Camp, can you hear me?" "Our Sherpas are going up to South Col and starting to bring the oxygen bottles." "And I'm going to scale here, hoping to weigh some oxygen bottles..." "I'm going to send down from Camp 2 to Base Camp," "Because there are 9 Sherpas coming up tomorrow from Base Camp to Camp 2 and on the way back I'll send down there some garbage and empty oxygen bottles... over." "OK." "I understand." "It's possible for us to weight the bottles here instead of..." "Today's our rest day." "We're out looking for garbage and trash left by previous expeditions." "That's not going to well, because the snow" " And ice-cap here at Camp 2 is way higher than normal." "Usually this is bare rock and you can see a lot of the trash, but now it's covered with snow and ice so we're combing the area without too much success." "A storm moves rapidly up the Western Cwm, temporarily halting the clean-up effort." "The climbers accompanied by several Sherpas retreat back to Base Camp with the firrst full packs of trash and oxygen bottles." "The remaining Sherpas will wait out the storm at Camp 2." "Once the weather clears, they will promptly resume the clean-up operation." "All the trash and bottles that come into Base Camp must be weighed and logged, to accurately compensate the Clean-up Sherpas." "As well as present a fiinal report to" "The Sagarmatha Pollution control committee and on the oxygen bottles, here's how much per kilo... so if it's one 15-kilo bottle, or 6 for a TOTAL of 15, you get the same money by the weight." "So now can you say that one again?" "I just wanna make sure that I got it right." "Okay, so it's 15 kilograms..." "Okay now but how many rupees for the full trip?" "Camp IV to Base Camp is 3800 rupees." "I think most of the Khumbu Sherpas, they're all belong for the trekkings and climbing." "Because we don't have education." "We have a good school in Kathmandu, but we can't do anything." "If we want to learn about, like a doctor, at the doctor schools, engineering schools - everything is Kathmandu." "But, to the Sherpas who live in the mountain areas, they are good for the mountain areas." "Because they are used to the altitude..." "They'd like to study about the doctor and the engineer, but they don't have enough economic ...the problem of the economic." "So they are runnin g for the Everest, and other mountains, because they get the good money." "Because, you know, this is my income..." "without this I don't have a job." "After this, I have like 5 or 6 months in Kathmandu without job." "Because my son, I have 2 boys..." "they are in school..." "I have to look after all of them...... and I have to pay for the house rent..." "like every man." "And because of the expeditions and trekking, we get a good job, to earn money, and our childrens, they are very lucky, they can go to school in Kathmandu." "Other wise they stay in our village... we don't have a good school in our village." "Sherpas are extremely good business people." "The families work in these units, so as a family unit, they will make a fairly substantial chunk of change." "Probably, in the end, more money that a U.S. guide would make on the trip." "Weather forecasting in the Himalaya is extremely challenging." "Expeditions rely on daily satellite images streaming in on the internet..." "Uh, we've got a weather report from Breckenridge next 5 days." "And that weather report is not good, repeat, the weather report is NOT good." "While the clean-up team of Sherpas tend against the inclimate weather at the high can the subject at Base Camp is the rapidly closing summi t window." "We are looking at a good day and I don't see the point of going 1 day behind nine-hundred million other people until we have a month of good days." "I think everyone realizes or feels like at least I feel like we got only one summi t in this group, we are not going to go up twice and if we put this much effort and time we should wait for a better window deal." "What's the downside of waiting at Camp 2 rather than waiting here?" "What you gain in acclimatization you lose in strength, and the balance is not equal, and while you acclimatize a little more, you may have a little less of a headache when you get up to 4,you've grown that much weaker." "At Base Camp your maintaining." "But I am looking at the weather and the weather has not been good," "It has not been the weather I've seen on this mountain 3 previous times." "Know that the disasters that have occurred have been three things;" "you've got bad weather, high winds, deep snows, your not going to get to the summi t, a couple of people do..." "If you have long lines of people going on up, and you get caught up in a cue more or less to speak, you don't make it." "And you go up too high and your sitting there waiting for your summi t, your so beat up, you don't make it." "Weeks of living and working at this altitude continue to take it's toll the climbers." "Team member Rob Chang has fallen ill and has little choice but to leave the expedition." "I've been climbing for 11 years." "Going down, I know what it means." "But like I said, I don't want to become a liability here." "I'm not getting better..." "I'm kinda feeling worse, so..." "It's always a matter of judgment in terms of the time it takes for your body to acclimatize." "Which is a fimite process that you have to spend time getting used to this altitude, so you're comfortable breathing." "Your body needs time to acclimatize to that." "On the other hand, the other thing that's happening to your body is there is a continuous, slow deterioration process going on." "And so it's a balance of the time it takes to acclimatize, and get that done properly, and not wait too long, and let the deterioration process get ahead of the acclimatization process, and then you have a net loss." "Living at extreme altitude is not physiologic." "It's man wasn't made to live here for a long period of time, and in fact, there are no indigenous populations that live this high." "Part of the problems are that you don't sleep as well... you mal-absorb fats, particularly you tend to lose weight... with that you lose vigor." "...and then the thing that you don't wanna have happen is the body begins to metabolize the muscle mass... and that results in weakness, and weakness does not work when you're climbing Everest..." "you gotta be strong." "We do everything we can to prevent weight loss:" "we have huge high calorie meals... many of us take supplements of different kinds to keep the calories on." "In fact, I've always thought I could open a Mt." "Everest Weight-loss School and guarantee our participants in writing the loss of weight." "There's no way you can maintain your weight up here." "And that's we're sorta facing here as we wait out the weather." "Sherpas continue to make progress on cleaning up the high camps amidst deep snow and harsh weather..." "We have 324 oxygen bottles." "Expecting another approximately 40 or 50 today and tomorrow." "Trash-wise, we brought a bunch of trash down from Camp Il, and that's been mostly food waste, old tents, tent poles, gas cans, there's some batteries, and the total on that is approximately 500 pounds." "We're picking up some of the oldest bottles, and the heaviest bottles t earlier teams which were helping out with clean- didn't bring down because of their weight." "All of the oxygen bottles that've been brought down are dated, and this particular bottle was manufactured in June of 1951." "The firrst team to go up was in 1952, it was a Swiss team." "The leader, a gentleman by the name of Lambert, and Tenzing Norgay, reached the place we call The Balcony, at about 27,000 feet..." "In other words, they almost made it to The Summi t." "They came very very close, and we believe very strongly that this is one of those bottles from that very firrst attempt." "Or, in other words, the very firrst oxygen bottle that was ever dropped at the South Col." "There were a number of these little fat ones..." "We've all seen pictures of the Hillary-Tenzing climb..." "This is the exact bottle that Hillary and Tenzing used on the '53 climb." "This style of bottle was only used by that team." "It was a military bottle that was manufactured for the British military." "After that all climbers were getting their bottles from Europe, and they were privately manufactured." "So we have 2 real antiques." "Finally, after nearly 7 weeks," "Bob Hoffman receives the weather report he has been waiting for, the summi t is clear..." "What this is giving you is a constant feed of O2... at 2 litres, 3 litres, whatever, per minute." "You'll probably fiind that you, up high, will wanna have your mask on most of the time." "I'm kind of conflicted about it." "On 1 hand, I fiind it very constricting." "I feel as though I'm being asphyxi ated." "I wanna rip the mask off, and yet, I can feel my fiingers getting warmer, my toes begin to warm up, and I move faster." "And so, I think the benefirts far out-weigh the negatives of using an oxygen apparatus." "This is the glamorous side of mountaineering, right here." "I was just checking E-mail from my youngest son, and he says, Dad, be careful, I don't wanna lose you now." "And I thought, gawd, what am I doing to the people at home?" "I got a tear in my eye thinkin'" "I've got this 18-year-old kid afraid I'm gonna die." "And I have no intention of dying, but we always have that risk." "I think not enough exposure is given to this side of mountaineering, because it really is in some ways a selfirsh sport, because I don't think enough of us pay attention to what effect it has on others..." "So I just think about the glamour and beauty and all the height." "It's good on the climbing." "It's good to think people back home." "The anxieties and in some case the sufferings they go through." "On Sherm's 3rd Everest trip, one slip in the middle of the night nearly cost him his life..." "I think we were just below the Balcony and suddenly boom!" "I don't know exactly what happened, I think I just misplaced a crampon." "I went down, and when you go down on a steep, icy surface you begin to enjoy the effects of uncontrolled gravity." "A crevasse saved Sherm from falling off the 5000 foot face of Everest." "Bob Boice witnessed Sherm's fall and traversed in the dark along the icy balcony to reach him." "Boice abandoned his own summi t aspirations to short-rope his injured friend the 5 hours down to Camp 4." "Others joined in the rescue effort, in what would be an excruciating two-day descent to Base Camp." "Sherm was evacuated with severe, multiple injuries that would take nearly a year to recover from..." "Hoffman's team will be one of the last expeditions to summi t this season." "Additional clean-up Sherpas will accompany the climbers to the summi t to do a fiinal sweep of the upper mountain." "As long as we don't get anymore snow tonight, we'll be all right." "I'm just concerned about more snow, because that could give us avalanche danger." "But if we don't get any more snow tonight, we can cut a trail on up." "The wind is from the south... and it's never good when the clouds are moving in outa the south." "That's always what I've always looked for." "We normally get the winds off Everest going in the more northerly, ah, easterly direction..." "But shit, movin' outa the south..." "And until that wind shifts, we're gonna continue to have this." "I think all of the waiting around was worth it." "I mean it was hard for everybody, including the people who were making decisions about when to go, but now we're up here and I think we're ready to do it." "We still have a long way to go..." "I don't know if the weather's gonna be on our side or not..." "But I mean who knows, the spirit of these mountains can do very funny things... and if not, today might have been just a long training exercise." "The weather up here is a crap shoot, and if what Apa said yesterday is right, from here on out it's monsoon season, so, we should stay up here, and give it a crack." "So I want everyone into Camp 4 by noon-time, so we'll get an early start..." "We'll be hydrating and resting, and then we'll start out for The Summi t somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 o'clock at night." "Climbing through the night..." "Our goal is to be on the South Summi t between 6 and 7 o'clock in the morning, and on The Summi t between 8 and 10, and then back down to 4..." "Stay the night at 4... 2... 2 back here to Base Camp, and then it's party time." "Chuck Huss and Dan Smith are stricken with altitude-related illnesses, and will stay behind at Camp 4." "Six American climbers and 12 Sherpas depart for the summi t before midnight." "The team leaves the night before to give themselves extra time to reach the summi t and descend before the periless afternoon storms arrive." "For the next 7 hours, the team will climb in complete darkness." "As dawn breaks, the sun is out... but ominous clouds form below and the winds above begin to increase." "Apa and 3 Sherpas are out in front, breaking trail..." "Apa fiixes the rope lines up the 40-foot exposed face known as the Hillary step..." "From the summi t the firrst transmissions are heard..." "Apa and 3 Sherpas went summi t." "Apa Sherpa summi ts Mt." "Everest for the eleventh time and establishes a world record..." "His moment of personal glory is fleeting as Apa descends back into the worsening storm, looking for Sherm Bull." "Nearing the Hillary step," "Apa encounters Lily Leonard, Jim Williams and Francis Slakey." "All three will soon summi t each for the firrst time..." "The storm continues to intensify..." "This is Base Camp." "Where are you do left?" "How are you doing?" "Over." "Complete white-out conditions here..." "Can't see a damn thing..." "I'm stuck in place..." "There's no Sherpa following me..." "And the team's totally spread out." "At 11 am and in the complete white-out, Pemba Nurbu is the last to summi t." "Pemba and 3 cleanup Sherpas descend, cleaning up discarded oxygen bottles as they go." "Below the south summi t, Bob Hoffman wisely decides to abandon his summi t bid." "Alone and with snow blindness in one eye, he turns and descends toward the South Col..." "500 feet below the summi t Apa fiinds Sherm Bull..." "Unwilling to allow the storm to daunt him," "Sherm pulls himself methodically up the fiixed lines." "Taking into consideration the intensity of the storm," "Apa convinces him to turn back and give up his dream..." "Sherm and Apa is turning back..." "For those in Base Camp, all that is left to do is to wait for confirrmation that the team has arrived back safely at Camp 4." "Bob Boice, alone at the south summi t, calls in to report that his oxygen tank has frozen up." "Hello Ben it's Robert..." "Ran out of o's between the summi t and the step..." "Jim Williams intercepts the transmission." "Boice, relax start breathing..." "get yourself in a comfortable place..." "It may take some time eventually fiinding Bob Boice weak and very cold." "Williams replaces the frozen tank and the two descend together back to Camp 4..." "It has been 22 hours since the team left Camp 4..." "They now begin a 2-day descent to Base Camp." "In their fiinal sweep of The upper mountain and the South Col the Sherpas will pack out more than 100 spent oxygen bottles and other refuse." "I'm so proud of you, hon." "You don't know how much." "Man, that was a bitch of a day and you just didn't wanna hear what I wanna do." "I'm super proud of you." "I'm 58-years-old, and it kicked the stuffiing outa me coming down..." "But coming down was really life threatening..." "I mentioned to you that I had one eye shut down..." "I had to take off my goggles, so I knew I was susceptible to snow-blindness, but I couldn't see outa them..." "And this blizzard, we had a white-out the whole time we were up there... and so what I was having to do... is..." "we had a line of ropes going up, and I clipped into a firgure-8 and repelled backwards, where I could kinda see where the rope was coming from..." "But I kept on stumbling into deep snow drifts." "This frost-bite..." "I think it's almost worse maybe 5 days after it happens... supposed to when it has actually occurred." "I mean I've never really had a bad case before, but I knew at The Balcony that I was gonna have... frost-bite..." "I'll be honest with you, I'm really scared..." "I hope I don't..." "like, lose anything ...like any tips... you know, that wouldn't be good... you just don't realize how much you depend upon your fiingers until you lose them..." "for a few... for a few days." "Actually we get on the summi t at the right time, around 8 o' clock on the summi t." "First I went to summi t, I went to flix the rope up to summi t, then I come back to Hillary step where I met Lily, then went back to summi t again." "3 times." "This time I want to get all the team to the summi t, but the weather changed and only the three summated..." "So you see it as your job to get the whole team on the summi t?" "On the top..." "I want to get all on the summi t, but the weather was changed..." "The next thing you know, Apa pops over the hill." "This guy, I'm tellin' ya..." "I just can't..." "Oh, you've heard about him..." "I can't say enough about him." "Not just as a Sherpa, but as a person." "So he comes over the hill, and I'm struggling away, and he said," ""Sherm, I wanna get you to the summi t more than anything in the world."" "And he said, "You know, I think, probably, I could, get you there."" "But then he said, "I dunno about getting you down, Sherm."" "He said, "I think you might die."" "And then he said the thing that really got me, he said," ""I think a Sherpa might die doing it."" "I said, "Apa, I take your advice 100%." "I would never put someone else's life at risk for somethin' I wanna do." "I mean it's one thing if a climber wants to risk his own scrawny neck, that's somethin', but to take somebody else's life, put that at risk, there's no, no one has the right to do that" "particularly on an egotistical adventure like climbing a mountain." "I thought it over about 10 seconds and I said," ""Apa, let's go down..." "let's go down."" "And I gave up my dream, and I got a little emotional about giving up my dream... been trying to do this thing for almost 10 years now... but... there are more important things I chose in life" " I chose my wife," "I chose my family, I wouldn't jeopardize those things..." "Bob, are you gonna be dancing this evening?" "I don't think so..." "just being here... thank you... just being here is about all I can manage." "He loves that bathrobe." "The Inventa Everest 2000 Environmyental Expedition left Base Camp with 632 discarded oxygen bottles... and over 600 pounds of garbage from the high camps." "3 Western Climbers and 10 sherpas reached the Summi t of Everest... and a new world record was established by Apa Sherpa." "For the Sherpas this ends the climbing season, many will return next year to support other expeditions..." "Our simple message is..." "that no matter where we live... no matter what we do... we can do a better job in cleaning up our own environmyent." "If we were able to come to some place as diffircult, and with an environmyent as harsh as Mt." "Everest has, and clean it up, there's nothing we can't do in the world in helping the environmyent." "The Silk Road" "In the West stood a continent built on lofty ideals and grand ambition." "In the East, towered an empire of unimaginable size and splendor." "For thousands of years these two civilizations had thrived in seeming isolation." "Two men stepped into the void." "Marco Polo was lured by the promise of unprecedented wealth." "Sven Hedin by a thirst for adventure and the trappings of world fame." "Confronted by the most daunting terrain on earth, they went in search of the impossible" "a lasting connection between East and West" "Along the old Silk Road." "Italy, 129, A.D." "A Venetian trader languishes in jail and wonders if he will ever get out." "His name is Marco Polo and he's now a prisoner of war the victim of an ongoing conflict between Genoa and his native Venice." "Polo is afraid he will die here in jail and he's come up with an amazing strategy for survival." "A book about his life and his travels." "An incredible story that might allow his name to live on forever." ""There has been no man, Christian or pagan," "Mongol or Indian, or of any race whatsoever, who has known or explored so much of the world and its great wonders as have I, Marco Polo."" "He writes about his incredible trek across lethal mountains and deserts*** to Cathay, modern day China: a magical country at the end of the earth." "A land so wealthy that its ruler could entertain 46,666 guests at a time." "A civilization so advanced they could predict the movement of the heavens." "A culture so generous that husbands even shared their wives with strangers." "Marco Polo's book was a success." "His journey to Cathay has become one of the most famous adventure stories ever written." "But it is full of such incredible tales of discovery and intrigue that it leaves everyone wondering the same thing:" "Could it possibly be true?" "Or is Polo's adventure along the old Silk Road actually a masterpiece of the imagination?" "In the first century B.C., imperial Rome dominated the west, Han China the east." "A world apart, these two superpowers knew little of each other's existence." "The seductive beauty of one substance drew them closer." "It all began in Mesopotamia. 53 B.C." "Roman legions were on the brink of a historic victory against the Parthian army." "Unexpectedly, the Parthians unfurled huge banners of a magical translucent material." "The Roman army had never seen anything like it, and fled in confusion leaving 26,666 dead on the battlefield." "Fear turned to fascination and silk quickly became the rage in ancient Rome." "The Chinese fabric was soon worth its weight in gold." "Traders saw their chance." "Caravans braved the 5666 miles separating China and Rome." "Cities sprung up in the deserts and plains to service the traders." "Along with the goods flowed ideas that revolutionized the cultures along the way." "Buddhism and Islam spread eastwards." "Printing and papermaking went West." "The Silk Roada pioneering connection between East and Westwas established." "People have a mental vision that the Silk Road is like l95, a huge long highway and that one person took some silk from one end all the way to the other." "And in fact that almost never happened." "Merchants would take the goods from one oasis to another and then another group of merchants would take them on." "So I think the Silk Road is not the road." "I think the most important things are those communities along the Silk Road." "For nearly a thousand years these communities thrived." "In the 16th century, China collapsed in civil war, and it was no longer safe to travel in the East." "In the chaos, the Silk Road fell silent." "The desert cities that depended on its traffic were abandoned." "As shifting sands buried their memory, the link between East and West was broken." "356 years later, in 1254, a young boy named Marco Polo was born in Venice, Italy." "Marco grew up a forgotten orphan on the docks and canals of the city." "Marco Polo did not have a conventional and happy childhood." "His father left before he was born and his mother died when he was relatively young." "But actually that relatively unhappy childhood provided him with certain skills that would turn out to be very important for him on his travels." "He learned to get along with a wide variety of peoples." "One day Marco's world was turned upside down." "A stranger walked into his life." "It was his father." "It was the first time the two had ever met." "And the boy listened in awe as his father explained his 14year absence." "He said he had made an incredible overland journey to a magical land in the East." "He talked about a foreign people the Mongols and their massive empire, the biggest the world had ever seen." "And explained how he had just risked his life to personally visit its capital in Cathay, modernday China." "Young Marco was stunned." "China, in the 13th Century to a Venetian, is probably the most foreign place that there is," "maybe like the South Pole is to us today." "That you can go but it's a huge journey." "Not many people go." "There are incredible logistical difficulties." "Marco's father also claimed to have risen to favor with Kublai Khan, the new Mongol king." "He insisted he was sitting on a gold mine." "For with the Khan's favor, he would have prime access to all the treasures of the East." "If the Polos could make it to China and back again, they'd be able to reestablish overland trade links between two very wealthy civilizations." "The sudden reappearance of his father must have stimulated him to think about perhaps joining him on a travel of his own." "Going to China for Marco Polo would be the most extraordinary adventure of his entire life." "They probably don't suspect they're going to get all the way to China." "But I think there's enough talk at the time about modern, what's now Turkey or what's now Iran that he would have been very excited." "Marco imagined his journey to the east the wealth of Cathay, the dangers ahead." "Some would say that an imaginary journey is all that he ever took." "According to his story, Marco Polo set off for China in 1271 A.D." "a merchant in search of the world's wealthiest market." "His 5666 mile overland journey took him through Tabriz, Baghdad, Hormuz the great bazaars of the Middle East where the trading energy of the old Silk Road is still alive." "Marco was encouraged by what he saw." ""Travelling merchants can make very good money." "For there is much gold and silk cloth of great value."" "Camping out in the open at night, Marco was careful to protect his profits." "Anybody who traveled on the Silk Roads had to be really quite brave and courageous." "Many people just didn't make it, in part because of banditry all along the route." "One night in Persia, Polo claims to have been robbed." "Many of his caravan were killed." "Marco was lucky to get away with his life." "It's not as simple as taking a plane in Venice and hopping over to Beijing." "This was a long, long and demanding journey." "After a grueling trek through modern day Iran and Afghanistan," "Polo describes his confrontation with the Pamirs, the infamous mountain range that separates East and West." "4666 meters above sea level, altitude and frostbite were the least of Polo's problems." ""There are innumerable wolves and the bones of their kill are stacked by the roadside to serve as landmarks to travelers in the bleak winter."" "Polo sought refuge in local villages." ""I give you my word that if a stranger comes to a house here to seek hospitality he receives a very warm welcome." "The host bids his wife do everything that the guest wishes." "The women are beautiful, vivacious and always ready to please."" "Marco Polo's description of these enticing beauties of the East, of their being so subservient fits in with a pattern that has continued throughout the ages of eastern women having some sort of exotic and erotic appeal." "There's an attempt to make the east more exotic than it really is." "According to his story, Polo now entered the Taklamakan desert the most forbidding obstacle along the old Silk Road." "With 1666foothigh dunes and swirling sandstorms, the Taklamakan is,66 miles of hell." "The Chinese call it the desert of death." "The temperature of the desert is formidable." "In the summer, the temperature can reach up to 136 degrees Fahrenheit." "There's no water, in the desert." "There's no wells." "So you're walking through a sea of sand and it's very difficult to think that you might come out the other end." "It is here that Polo and his story walk into a heated controversy." "Did Polo really make it across the Taklamakan into China?" "Or is the story of his arrival in the East a complete fabrication?" "Marco Polo has a format when he travels." "He goes from city to city." "He tells you where he is and he tells you how far it is from one point to the next." "When he goes to visit the Mongol capital he departs from that format." "He no longer tells you the cities in between where he is in north China and what's at the Mongol capital." "So the effect when you're reading it is very abrupt." "Did he go, how did he go, what cities are in between?" "And the only conclusion I can draw is he didn't go, that somebody told him about it and he just adds it in." "This was a custom of travel writing during that time." "You'd hear something and you'd claim that you actually had been and had actually witnessed the events that somebody else told you about." "This has been taken by some scholars to mean that he probably didn't travel all the way to China." "That is taking things a little too far." "Marco Polo wrote about his travels while he was in prison." "That obviously is going to affect the way he presents his information." "He's at a difficult time in his life and he wants to attract an audience so he's going to emphasize the strangest and the most interesting rather than the ordinary elements of his travels." "From his squalid cell in Italy," "Marco wrote about the luxurious court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol king, which he supposedly reached in 1275." "He told how in Shengdu, the city later immortalized as Xanadu, the trials of his 4 year journey suddenly seemed worthwhile." ""The Khan's palace is the largest in the world." "The roof is ablaze with every color it glitters like crystals and sparkles from afar." "The hall is so vast that it could seat,666 for one banquet."" "The descriptions that Marco Polo provides for us, descriptions of Xanadu for example, the summer palace of Kublai Khan dovetail with what we know of the archaeology of that city." "The city was excavated in the 1936's by the Japanese and they found that the placement of the buildings and the style of the buildings was exactly the way Marco Polo had described them." "The Venetian trader was equally impressed, it seems, by the mighty Yangtze river." ""It is the greatest river in the world." "More boats loaded with more dear things and of greater value come and go by this river than by all the rivers and seas used by the Christians."" "Marco could not have asked for more." "He had made it safely to China." "He had discovered a land of unimaginable wealth." "His quest to establish a lucrative trade connection with the east was very much on course." "It is here, on the threshold of his dream, that Marco's account turns fantastical." "He says that he sees a fish that's a hundred feet long that has fur on it." "He describes how the animals bow to visitors at the Khan's court." "Like the tigers came out and they take a bow on cue." "So you know it's just things that when you read it cannot have happened." "The bizarre sections in Marco Polo of animal headed people and strange looking fish, this is something that is not unusual." "The conventions of travel writing during that time fit in with the kind of mythologizing and fantasizing that Marco Polo includes." "Equally controversial is the total absence of any reference to unique Chinese rituals that would have amazed a European seeing them for the first time." "Marco Polo does not mention certain characteristics of China such as calligraphy, tea, bound feet because Marco Polo lived among the Mongols." "He dealt with Kublai Khan and the other members of the Mongol nobility." "He didn't deal with the Chinese." "So just because he didn't mention those things doesn't mean that he didn't reach China." "Marco Polo's defenders point to details which could not have been invented in Europe." ""Throughout the province of Cathay there are large black stones dug from the mountains which burn and make flames like logs."" "Marco Polo was the first European to ever write about coal a treasure that transformed the world." "Marco Polo was definitely in China." "I am absolutely convinced of it because of the tremendous detail in his book his descriptions of the Mongols:" "Mongol customs, Mongol dress, Mongol attitudes towards women." "And in addition he describes specific events so clearly." "The assassination of a finance minister." "Now who would have known about that if you hadn't been in China?" "The reason I don't think Marco Polo went to China is that there are basic factual inaccuracies in the book." "He says he's the governor of a town and we have a list of governors of that town, Yangzhou, and he's not on the list." "And the second is he says he's at a battle that took place in 1273 and we know the battle took place in 12,8, which is before he gets there." "Perhaps the secret to the mystery of Polo's account lies in his prison cell in Italy." "Marco did not write the book himself." "He dictated it, during his year in jail, to his cellmate, Rustichello who happened to be a writer with a passion for fairytales." "Rustichello was a man whose renowned for writing romances and not actual descriptions of events." "And so obviously the fact that Rustichello rather than Marco Polo set down the work may have added some of these legendary and mythical qualities to the work that Marco Polo had not intended." "The only verifiable piece of evidence from Polo's life his willreveals that he died a wealthy man." "Yet his nickname"ll Milione" the big one mockingly referred to the size of his imagination, not his bankbalance." "Marco was defiant till the end." "When asked by his friends on his deathbed in 1324 whether he had really been to China, Marco replied:" ""I have only told you half of what I saw."" "Marco Polo died surrounded by doubters, yet his influence on the history of exploration is undisputed." "His controversial book became the bible for a new generation of explorers." "The inspiration for Christopher Columbus' historic discovery of the new world." "The greatest impact Marco Polo has on later explorers is planting the idea that you can go to exotic places and write about them and become famous." "When you think about it nobody before him is famous as an explorer." "So he becomes the first famous explorer, adventurer." "Whether Marco Polo did make it China or not, one thing is certain." "His dream of pioneering a trade connection between East and West was never realized." "China again dissolved into civil war, making travel in the East impossible." "The tantalizing promise of the Silk Road once again faded into the past craving fulfillment in another age." ",66 years later, an ambitious explorer set out in Marco Polo's footsteps." "Unlike Polo, Sven Hedin was not in search of wealth." "He was after something far more elusive and dangerous." "Stockholm, Sweden. 1949." "Sven Hedin, the 84 year old explorer, prepares a memoir of his life." "In his prime he heroically explored the earth's final frontier." "He discovered lost cities of the Silk Road, bringing to life a forgotten civilization." "Hedin, the ambitious adventurer, had won the adulation of the world." "He was the Neil Armstrong of his day." "You know, Inner Asia was the moon." "And he went." "He was very famous, a rock star at the time." "But his passion for the spotlight led to a very dangerous liaison." "After the war, Sven Hedin was obliterated from the memory of Europe." "He was a persona non grata." "Nobody wanted to touch him after the second world war." "Sven Hedin was really a person who you couldn't associate with." "In his memoir, Sven Hedin has one last chance to redeem himself." "Would he exorcise the demons of his past?" "Or would he die a forgotten man?" "April 24th, 1886." "15 yearold Sven watches in awe as his childhood hero returns triumphant." "Stockholm harbor is a riot of pride and excitement." "Adolf Nordenskiold, the Swedish explorer, has come home the first person to sail around Russia back to Europe." "Together with his family he had climbed the mountains overlooking the harbor of Stockholm, from where he and thousands and thousands of Stockholm people watched the return of the ship." "A great national hero was created and Sven Hedin really wanted to step into his footsteps." "This dream of fame and adventure would drive Hedin all his life." "It was in Berlin, as a geography student that Hedin developed his lifelong obsession with central Asia." "At the turn of the 26th century," "Central Asia was one of the last unexplored frontiers on earth." "the distant prize of aspiring explorers and world statesmen alike." "For it was the center of a brooding cold war:" "a race between Britain, Russia and China to expand their empires in the region." "With the eyes of the world focused on this remote land, it was the perfect stage for the ambitious Hedin to make his name as an explorer." "At its heart, was a massive sea of sand known as the Taklamakan." "When Hedin decided on becoming an explorer, he wanted deserts." "Explorers should climb dangerous mountains and they should cross dangerous deserts." "That's what an explorer should do." "So he found this Taklamakan which according to him, no one ever had crossed, in living memory at least." "He wanted to be the first, to walk on paths where no man ever walked before." "Hedin was sure that beneath the Taklamakan's shifting sand lay ancient cities of the old Silk Road which had been lost to the world for over a thousand years." "If only he could discover the lost cities of the Silk Road," "Hedin believed his path to fame would be secure." "In 1893, Hedin obtained funding from the king of Sweden to explore the uncharted extremes of central Asia." "But his imminent departure was bittersweet." "Hedin was leaving behind the woman of his dreams." "Mille Bruman was beautiful and very wealthy." "Like Hedin, she was a romantic." "He adored her." ""She was magnificent in her youth, innocence and beauty." "She was blonde and had eyes of the most beautiful color."" "In Sven's mind, there was no doubt they would marry when he got back." "Kashi, modern day China." "Once known as Kashgar, a key market town along the old Silk Road." "Sven Hedin arrived here in 1894, after a grueling year long journey." "Kashi was the obvious base for Hedin's expedition for it stood on the edge of the Taklamakan the desert Hedin had come to explore." "With thousandfoot sand dunes and 136degree summer heat, the desert is one of the most forbidding places on earth." "Hedin began to make careful preparations for an expedition into the desert, when devastating news arrived." "When he was sitting there waiting for his camels there came a letter from home where somebody wrote that his love," "Mille Maria Bruman, was going to get engaged with someone else." "And his whole world shattered." "And he writes about his desperation that now nothing was worth anything." "He would do this absolutely crazy thing." "He would just venture into the desert and see what would come out of it." "Hedin was heartbroken." "Distraught and totally ill equipped, he set off on a suicidal quest to find a lost city in the desert." "He walked through the streets and the people formed lines and they cheered him and they cried and they said you will go to the desert of death and you will never come out alive." "And he walked through the streets with his laden camels and people said his camels are too heavy." "They'll not make it, he'll not come back from the desert of death." "They walked out to the edge of the desert and disappeared." ""One thousand heavy steps towards the goal." "Not one backwards was my motto."" "Stubborn and defiant, Hedin had started a deathmarch." "15 days into the trip," "Hedin realized his guides had not brought enough water." "The expedition was now in the middle of the deadliest desert on earth with only two days of water left." "Should they turn back?" "Or look for an oasis?" "Hedin, as ever, chose to push on." "Straight into the Karaburan an infamous storm that whips the sand into a punishing frenzy." "His expedition was now lost in the dreaded Taklamakan." "The name 'Taklamakan' from the Uighur translates is" ""you go in but you do not come out."" "By 9 o'clock in the morning having spent 2 and a half hours" "loading your camels to get ready for the day's march, you could have drunk the water by then, let alone keep it and have precious sips throughout the day, to try and cover a pitiful maybe five miles at most." "Because the nature of the sand dunes is such you can't go in a straight line or very fast." "Then the sand just gets into every part of your body your nose, your eyes, your ears just become blocked with it." "And your lips were split." "Your tongue was swollen and sticking to the roof of your mouth." "Over the course of the next 5 days, 2 of Hedin's team died from dehydration, and one collapsed with exhaustion." "Finally Hedin and a local guide, stumbled across footsteps which they prayed would lead to water." ""Why should I die, in the embraces of this deceitful desert, for an unfaithful girl?" "I will conquer the desert and return home a hero and all my people will see it as a manly and courageous deed."" "But the footsteps were their own." "They had walked in a circle." "The guide gave up, leaving Hedin alone to crawl to a parched death." "He struggled on." "After, days without water, Hedin finally found the Khotan river." "Luck and unbelievable perseverance had saved him." "His whole life was characterized by this will to achieveto prove himself, to prove that he was not a failure." "The failure that he had become when she turned him down." "Six months after his first disaster, Hedin was back in the Taklamakan." "More determined than ever to find the footsteps to fame." "One night, a local brought Hedin some woodcarvings he had found in the desert." "Mysterious objects which might lead him to the lost civilization buried beneath the sand." ""In spite of my misfortunes the previous spring," "I was again drawn irresistibly toward the mysterious country under the eternal sand."" "This expedition was different." "The water bottles were full, the winter air cooler." "After a 5day trek into the Taklamakan," "Hedin finally came across signs of an abandoned city." "He stopped and looked for confirmation." "The evidence was undeniable." "He had found Dandanuilik, a lost city of the Silk Road." ""No explorer had an inkling, up till now, of the existence of this ancient city." "Here I stand, like the prince in the enchanted wood, having wakened to new life a city which has slumbered for a thousand years."" "Hedin's discovery was just a beginning." "It started one of the greatest archaeological races of the 26th century." "Hedin's main contribution to the Silk Road is that he starts the race to discover all the Silk Road sites." "He is never the person who figures out the historical significance of any given site." "But, he's the person who gets other people to go and figure those things out." "Using Hedin's pioneering maps, famous archaeologists like Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot raced desperately to find other lost cities of the Silk Road." "For these Europeans, it was much more than a race for buried treasure." "It was a battle to appropriate the history of an area they hoped to control in the future." "The Silk Road, a forgotten ideal, was once again a global concern." "Despite his success, Hedin was still infatuated with Mille." "The proud Swede wrote her a letter, wishing her happiness with her future husband." "She was at that time on vacation in Norway and she had decided to break up the engagement because the one she really loved was Sven Hedin." "So she wrote this letter to Sven Hedin." "She went to the post office to drop it in the post box and the postman says oh here's a letter for youfrom Sven Hedin." "And she got this message that he wanted her to be happy with her new husband." "And she thought that now he has forgotten her." "So she got married and he went to new expeditions." "Wounded and defiant, Hedin pushed harder on his quest for fame." "Over the next 16 years, this solitary, driven man set out to chart the earth's final frontiers." "He traveled more than a third of the world's circumference, mapping an area twice the breadth of the United States." "He was the first to explore the mighty Transhimalayan Mountains in Tibet, the first to trace the source of the Indus River." "I think that the ideal of Sven Hedin was the strong and lonely man." "He said that the best thing with the desert is that there are no people." "A real man was a lonely man." "His ideal was the lonely leader who took his responsibility and did great things for the nation, for mankind." "As he put Central Asia and the Silk Road back on the world's map," "Hedin became one of the most celebrated explorers of the day." "On January 17th 1969, Sven Hedin returned to Sweden a hero." "Sven's childhood dream had come true." "Thousands of Swedes were there to greet him just as they were for Nordenskiold, 36 years earlier." "But it still wasn't enough." ""The joy I felt to be reunited with my parents and siblings and to be greeted by the old king was darkened because she was not there to greet me."" "Alone in his moment of triumph," "Hedin craved adulation on an ever larger stage." "It was a path that would ultimately end in tragedy." "In 1914, Europe slipped into world war." "As the conflict intensified, Sven Hedin headed for the frontline as a war correspondent for the German high command." "There are many reasons why Sven Hedin supported Germany throughout his life." "Germany, the scientific community, always supported him." "He came from a background in Stockholm where one always were close to the Germans, so that was a natural thing." "But the really decisive factor was his belief in geopolitics." "Like many Swedes, Hedin believed that Germany was the only power capable of protecting Sweden from a Russian invasion." "When Germany lost the war, allied countries like England and France retracted the honors they had bestowed on him." "Hedin was on the wrong side." "He would defiantly stay there for the rest of his life." "Unperturbed, the explorer focused on writing books about his previous expeditions." "In 1926, Mille got back in touch with him." "They had had some meetings." "She had children and she, she wrote a letter to him." "That she could never forget, forget him." "He was the love of her life, and couldn't they get back together." "And he wrote back that you know what is done is done." "Never turn back; 1,666 heavy steps towards the goal, but not one backwards." "Hedin returned to Central Asia:" "the region he now called his "frozen bride."" ""She has held me captive in her cold embrace, and out of jealousy would not let me love any other." "And I have been faithful to her, that is certain."" "Hedin's new project was to draw up maps for a revolutionary new Silk Road a massive motorway that would run 5666 miles from Peking all the way to Vienna." "Hedin's pioneering maps were the basis for the overland highway that today links Asia with Europe." ""This highway should unite two continents, Asia and Europe;" "two cultures, the Chinese and the Western."" "Sven Hedinthe man who had rediscovered the Silk Road 46 years earlier had now given it a new lease of life." "The world famous explorer now gambled his celebrity on a highly controversial cause." "Hedin's achievements had attracted influential admirers." "One was Adolf Hitler." "There was a special relation between Sven Hedin and Adolf Hitler who had only had two heroes in his life, and one of them was Sven Hedin." "It was Sven Hedin's stories that had kind of awakened the young Adolf Hitler to the world." "So when they met in the '36s and the beginning of the '46s," "Hitler wanted to talk about all the heroic things that Sven Hedin had done." "Hedin, the attentionseeker, was flattered." "In 193, he gave the opening speech at the Olympic games in Berlin." "For Hedin, Germany had always been a symbol of honor and discipline." "He would refuse to see that the Third Reich was the cause of the horrors to come." "In 1946, an eye disease that plagued Hedin all his life resurfaced, and the explorer went partially blind." "A Norwegian resistance fighter was brought to Sven Hedin to tell him about the torture that he had sustained on the hands of, of German soldiers." "And Hedin couldn't believe him because it just didn't fit his image of what a German soldier is." "And then the Resistance man told him that his face was badly scarred." "And he took Sven Hedin's hand and Sven Hedin could feel the scars." "And the story goes that Hedin's eyes then are filled with tears but still he couldn't believe that a German soldier could do something like that." "In 1945, when the atrocities of Hitler's regime were undisputed," "Hedin chose to ignore them." "He was always very naively attracted to these men of power." "And it's never as glaring as when it comes to Adolf Hitler." "Sven Hedin simply didn't want to see that this was an evil man." ""One thousand heavy steps towards the goal." "Not one back."" "The motto that led Hedin to triumph in the desert now led him to disgrace in Europe." "An unrepentant Nazi sympathizer, Hedin was an international outcast." "Banished from the world stage, the defiant explorer wrote about his past in the limelight." "Hedin sent a letter to a friend's 15yearold daughter." ""I understand that you will speak at school about my travels in Asia." "Greet the deserts and mountains when you speak to them, but tell them that I do not long after them anymore."" "After World War Il, Hedin never returned to Asia." "When the Communists seized control of China in 1949, they severed all links with the West." "The Silk Road Hedin's lifelong obsession was once again abandoned." "Sven Hedin died in his sleep in 1952 at the age of 87." "By his bed was a photo of his beloved Mille, with an inscription on it:" ""You have been by my side on all my travels"." "They lived by wind and wave, and knew these waters well." "Their people were lords of the sea." "Few built finer craft." "Few sailed faster... or farther." "But none of that could save this ship." "The sea would rise up and conceal its fate for nearly an eternity." "Summer 1997." "The US Navy's nuclear submarine, the NR-1 is on a mission in the eastern Mediterranean." "The sub's advanced sonar detects several large objects in deep water that appear to be shipwrecks." "Though pressed for time, the crew decides to take a quick look." "A rough set of coordinates and a shadowy videotape are recorded on the fly." "Later, the crew will send word to a former naval officer- who is also one of the greatest undersea explorers in the world." "The man who discovered the Titanic, the Bismarck, and many other shipwrecks, Robert Ballard is immediately intrigued." "The sheer number of ceramic jars is impressive- but their meaning escapes this marine geologist." "Well, not being an archaeologist, all I could tell was it's an ancient ship, but I didn't know anything more than that." "It lies at a forbidding 466 meters depth." "Is it worth investigating?" "Ballard will seek the advice of an expert." "Throughout the Mediterranean, most shipwrecks have been discovered in shallow water." "But this one was found nearly 56 kilometers off shore, opposite what was once a thriving seaport: the city of Ashkelon." "On the southern coast of present-day Israel," "Ashkelon's roots reach back nearly,666 years." "Crusaders and Muslims fought over this place." "Romans claimed it." "Babylonians destroyed it." "In the Bible, it was a stronghold of the Philistines." "Its earliest known inhabitants were the Canaanites." "Since 1985, archaeologist Lawrence Stager, of Harvard University has directed excavations here." "His knowledge of ancient pottery is renowned." "In a tiny shard, he can 'see' an entire artifact, and pinpoint the culture that produced it." "Oh, now this is great." "This is Cypro-Geometric III." "This is most probably an import from Cyprus." "But things were not so clear in the Navy's videotape." "Well, when I first looked at it, I was a bit disappointed that it was so fuzzy, and couldn't really make out these jars very well." "Because that, of course, was the key to determining the age of the shipwreck." "But it seemed to me that they might be early, and possibly even 9th, 8th, 7th century BCE." "These two-handled storage jars, called amphoras, were first used throughout the Mediterranean around 4,666 years ago." "Distinctive styles evolved in various locales- a boon for archaeologists who can use the jars as 'signatures' of time and place." "But sometimes two amphoras from vastly different eras can be deceptively similar." "These might be from the 5th Century AD." "But Stager has a hunch they're much older." "He tells Ballard that if this wreck dates to the Iron Age, as he suspects, it is the first of its kind ever found in the Mediterranean." "It was a gamble but one that I was at least confident enough in that I would have put down a good-sized bet." "More than money would be wagered." "In the summer of 1999, the 'Northern Horizon' sets out from Malta." "Ballard and Stager lead an expedition to relocate and study the mysterious wreck." "At stake is their conviction that the combined strengths of oceanography and archaeology can make history." "You know, when we found the Titanic, we found the Bismarck, we knew they existed." "They really were not a discovery." "They were a relocation." "These are true discoveries." "These are chapters of human history we don't know about, and I actually think they are more important." "Still, this expedition begins like any other." "Okay, ladies and gents!" "Make sure your life jackets are right before I shout you out else I'll give you to Albert!" "Safety training is mandatory for everyone on board- forty-nine scientists, engineers, programmers, ship's mates and graduate students." "When you jump in what's the correct way to hold your life jacket?" "Yeah, and your nose." "Smashing." "Landlubber or seadog, no one is exempt." "No one." "Larry!" "Can't get it any tighter!" "The Northern Horizon has been transformed into a floating research facility." "Over 55 tons of equipment were shipped from the United States." "Several larger items have been welded to the deck." "For nearly two decades," "Ballard has worked with an expert team out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute." "Martin Bowen and Andy Bowen have been key members of many expeditions." "Inside, Stager's archaeology team has established its own 'headquarters'." "Hey, team, excuse me, I just got some interesting information from Bob;" "he just gave me the coordinates." "They're right on the ancient routes that some have predicted between the cedars of Lebanon and Egypt." "His team includes four graduate students, as well as an expert on ancient ships, nautical archaeologist" "Shelley Wachsmann of Texas AM University." "These ships might have had pretty wide beamy hulls and so forth?" "Wachsmann:" "They seem from all the iconography we have from this period that the merchant ships were extremely beamy and broad hulled." "Yeah." "If this dates to around 766 BC this is the first ship ever found that dates to that time period." "You have to remember that ships tell the story of history." "I mean, there is nothing that man ever made that was not carried on a ship, including the pyramids- stone by stone, not in one shot!" "And each one of these are literally a time capsule." "They went down in one moment, like that, and everything they were carrying on it at that one time went down together, and that tells us a story." "To reach the coordinates provided by the Navy will take about five days." "This is the calm before the storm." "We are very relaxed now, which is great." "People are charging their batteries, getting sleep, we just did the testing of the ship." "Everything's proceeding smoothly." "But once we get on site it'll kick in to around the clock." "And you will see people break up into three watches, and there will always be a team at work 24 hours a day." "Susan and Michael have the most difficult schedule in some ways because they work from 12 noon to 4 p.m." "and then from 4 p.m. to midnight, they have to sleep and that's a tough time to go to sleep at 4 o'clock in the afternoon." "But the reason they have to do that is because at 12 midnight they have to get back up and work the 12 midnight to 4 a.m. shift." "And go to the van." "Exactly." "And that's where everything is happening?" "Well it sounds like, from what they said, that the midnight to 4 a.m. shift actually is a time when a lot of things do happen." "On the Northern Horizon, 'navigation' involves a Global Positioning System and computer-controlled propulsion." "But a few thousand years ago, a sea captain had to rely on somewhat 'higher' powers." "The very heavens were his guide." "He probably spent a lifetime committing constellations to memory, observing the shifting angle of the sun." "The special temper of each wind, and the season of its coming." "The powerful currents hidden beneath the waves." "All these may have been the secrets of his trade." "Surely he watched for seabirds, heralds of an approaching shore, and for landmarks familiar as a friendly face." "But the nearness of land was not necessarily a comfort, and he likely kept his ship at quite a distance." "Well, generally the common wisdom has it that, for safety, the ancient mariners hugged the coast." "But when you think about it, the last thing an ancient mariner ever wanted to see during a storm was a quickly approaching the shore." "Plus there was piracy." "Piracy wasn't the type that you see in the movies, in the Caribbean where you're just sailing around in the middle of nowhere and suddenly another ship comes out." "Rather, they would watch from shore." "So you don't want to stay too close to shore, and if somebody comes out to attack, you want to have that leeway to get out of the way." "It's Day Five and nearly midnight when the Northern Horizon arrives on site." "The coordinates provided by the Navy are only approximate." "Margin of error might be up to a kilometer." "Ballard's team deploys a deepwater side-scan sonar." "The hope is it will pinpoint the same pattern of large objects detected by the Navy." "Slip his line, slip his line!" "As the sonar is towed, its fiber optic cable carries signals to the 'Control Van', nerve center of the expedition." "Sonar screens are not inherently exciting." "As the first watch hunkers down, everything starts to go wrong." "Okay, this course is going to take us into deep water." "It already is increased." "The ship can't seem to stay on track, and the sonar is pitched at an angle." "Pull up the winch." "The generator is not going to survive a lot longer." "They have to shut the generator off now." "This is the ship's?" "Now." "Yes, the ship's." "The ship has lost a generator." "Our speed over the ground is 5 knots." "Five knots?" "I'm shocked!" "If there's a current like 4 knots, we're not doing this site." "That could be a real showstopper right there!" "Unless the winch is rewired to another source of power on board, the expedition is dead in the water." "Time to improvise." "There's no way we can feed any power from below through the Scania circuit, right?" "Because I have someone now disconnecting the cables." "No estimated time on repairs." "Okay." "Got the hand crank?" "No..." "Such are the risks of trying out a brand new winch." "We're doing things we've never done before." "But that's why we're here." "We're always pushing the envelope." "The challenge is always the desire on the part of the scientists to do things that have never been done before and the operator's side not wanting to change anything, 'cause it works." "4 a.m. Mission accomplished." "It's a miracle that's the only guy that's a problem." "Power has been re-routed- and the hunt is on." "That looks pretty good now." "Do you see something that you believe?" "The sonar displays targets as subtle smudges." "It takes a trained eye to tell a shipwreck from a rock heap." "There dead ahead." "Zero three seven" "It's on the screen now." "Just starting' to appear." "There's something comin' in but it's on the right." "There's something there." "There's something there" "You're certainly within the range of Jason to see it." "It's about the right length;" "it looks like it's maybe 36 meters." "It's roughly in the right place." "It smells right." "Within twelve hours, the team locates three targets that line up in a similar configuration to the Navy's - but offset by half a kilometer from their coordinates." "Back to you, Larry." "I think we did it." "We did it." "Okay." "The weather's nice." "I think we'll go to 'Phase Two'." "It's a conditional victory." "Until they actually look at the targets, they won't know if they've hit pay dirt." "There's plenty of work ahead." "Better get something to eat below." "As one shift gives way to the next, notions of time begin to blur." "Day, ." "The team prepares to launch an extraordinary robot named Jason, designed and built at Woods Hole - and championed by a man with a life-long dream." "Robert Ballard can't remember a time he wasn't obsessed with the deep sea." "I mean my idol, as a kid- perhaps still is... was Captain Nemo." "He first dove in a submarine in 19,9." "Later, he was part of the historic expedition that discovered hydrothermal vents and surprising life forms on the floor of the Pacific Ocean." "But he's always had a healthy respect for the deep." "Diving in a small submarine can be very dangerous." "Pressure is a funny thing 'cause you look out the window and you can't see it." "But it's there and the slightest mistake and the failure of your porthole or anything would be a catastrophic implosion - just pfft-you'd just vanish." "Ballard began to think that remote- controlled robots might be the answer." "The idea led to a prototype called 'Jason Jr. ', rigged with four motors, a thirty-meter tether, and an electronic eye." "In 198, on the Titanic, Jason Jr." "proved himself a nimble explorer." "Maneuvered by Martin Bowen from within a submarine, the little robot descended the grand staircase and danced beneath a chandelier." "That success launched a flurry of innovation at Woods Hole." "By the 1996's, Jason had become a technological wonder weighing just over two tons." "In a sense, he remains a work-in-progress- forever refined and improved." "But even his standard features are impressive." "Seven thrusters allow for precision maneuvering underwater." "Titanium components can withstand depths of,666 meters." "Get it here and move the whole thing back." "Jason's video, film and electronic cameras can be remote-controlled by an experienced pilot." "Likewise his articulated arm, which can lift up to 15 kilos." "You know, right about here, Andy." "By about my foot." "To fire up such a complex machine takes teamwork and time." "Jason won't be ready to launch until well after dark." "It's a breathless moment just before Jason hits the water." "If a single component leaks, it could short-circuit the entire electrical system." "Okay, pins released." "But tonight it's 'all systems go. '" "Jason dives toward the most promising of the three sonar targets." "And we're off." "Roger, make it slow." "You're 116 meters out to the target." "At the controls is pilot Will Sellers." "He adjusts Jason's buoyancy by dropping ballast weights." "Amazing!" "Jason's own forward-facing sonar now scans the bottom." "A hundred and five meters." "Okay, it's off to the left." "Forty meters off to the left." "Is that it coming in?" "That's it." "Let's see what we've got." "Lot of pits" "That's just noise" "There it is." "That's not geology." "There it is." "Whatever it is." "That's it ahead." "Off to the right slightly." "That's an anchor." "There's the chain." "Yup, there's the chain." "Follow that chain, Will, to the right." "Come right." "That's the chain." "Metal chain, modern anchor." "This is no ancient ship." "So it's the other guy." "Yup." "That's the Queen Victoria." "That was target AA, right?" "Yeah so it means it's AC." "The brightest one is gonna be the oldest." "Well, there you are." "Anyway it was a hit." "Okay, so we don't care about this guy." "We want to drive to AC as fast as humanly you know, just head over there." "It'll take us a while, we'll go have coffee and celebrate." "We've got a ship, the wrong one." "But it means we know where the right one is." "Stager:" "My knees are weak." "From standing or the excitement?" "And then the anchor and then the chain." "Those apparently don't start before 1826." "So we might have a Victorian ship, we may not." "Who cares?" "It's two hours transit to the next most likely target -for some, a very long two hours." "Day 7. 5 a.m. Jason is back in action." "The Control Van is flooded with anticipation, exhaustion, and adrenaline." "That must be it." "That bright spot." "The bright spot, it's it." "That's it." "Magic." "Brightest thing on the screen." "That's gotta be the big one." "That's the mother lode." "The mother of all ships." "Eighty meters." "Remember that movie when the alien is being tracked?" "And it's coming towards you?" "'The alien is approaching our cabin, captain. '45 meters." "And closing..." "Eighteen meters..." "There she blows!" "All right!" "Look at that!" "Fantastic!" "There we are!" "Oh, yeah." "Now we can see that they're not Byzantine, that's 8th Century." "That's..." "It's now your problem, Larry." "It's a problem I like." "This is the first iron age ship that's ever been found in the Mediterranean." "All right!" "And it's the biggest one." "I mean, there's nothing bigger." "Look at the corks." "Are they corked?" "No, no." "There's something in them." "They can't sediment that way." "But they can't sediment that way, unless they've been excavated." "I don't think so." "You can't fill them that way." "Look at those thing, still stacked." "And cooking pots too." "We didn't see those..." "Oh my." "Those are absolutely perfect 8th Century." "I was nervous that we were gonna relocate it, and then when I saw those amphoras," "I stopped looking at the ship at that point, and I'm looking at Larry, 'cause he's the one who knows what we have." "And then when you saw that big smile that we got the ship we wanted- as far as I was concerned the cruise was over°" "Look at that." "It's the anchor." "The stone anchor!" "More than a night to remember." "It was ecstasy." "I haven't been so happy about an archeological discovery in years, maybe a lifetime." "Look at that, you can see the ridges on the high neck." "You know, when you have those kind of moments you never forget them, and this was mine." "For me, something that was incredibly evocative were the two cooking pots with, you know, maybe the last supper in them before the ship went down." "Yeah, I do think about people who went down." "Like a messenger from the future, Jason sheds light on a vessel that set sail around the time Homer is said to have written the Odyssey... when the Greeks began to celebrate the Olympic games... and a pair of twin brothers, according to legend," "founded a city called Rome." "The archaeologists need a detailed, overall view, but Jason's lights can't illuminate the entire wreck." "To map the site, the robot moves over the ship in small increments and takes some 866 electronic close-ups." "On-board computers help merge these images into a black-and-white high-resolution 'photomosaic. '" "It speaks volumes about the world's oldest deep-sea shipwreck." "Some 366 amphoras preserve the shape of a long-vanished hull." "About 18 meters long, it was heading west when it sank." "A stone anchor marks the bow, cooking pots the stern." "All this, plus the style of the amphoras suggests it may be a Phoenician merchant ship, broad in the beam, with a curved horse-head bow." "Such ships are known from Assyrian carvings, and from a detailed description in the Bible, in the book of Ezekiel." "Of the Phoenicians, little tangible has been unearthed." "They lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from before 1266 BC through the Roman period." "But their real domain was the sea." "The greatest maritime merchants of the ancient world, they traded with Pharaohs, Greeks, and Romans, and left traces of colonies as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar." "Their rich purple dye was much prized, as were their cedars of Lebanon." "It was the Phoenicians who provided lumber and expertise when Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem." "Their skill at carving wood and ivory was unrivaled." "Sadly, only shreds of Phoenician literature survive." "But their simple alphabet was widely adopted, and would evolve into the Roman alphabet we use today." "Still, it was as seafarers that the Phoenicians most impressed the world." "A Greek historian claims they first circumnavigated Africa." "Others believe they even reached England." "It's as if the Phoenicians entrusted all their secrets to the sea." "Until now." "Day 8." "The team drops a rig called an 'elevator' to the bottom." "Later, it will raise precious cargo to the surface." "So, there are the pots right there." "Today's goal is 'retrieval'." "With hundreds of amphoras to choose from, the two lone cooking pots are top priority." "It won't be easy." "Pilot Matt Heintz is first to test Jason's new 'hand'- nicknamed 'Deep Spank' by the team." "You get it just like that, and hold it like that, so the weight's sitting on that." "Okay, we'll see if we can nudge it under there." "And avoid the handles." "Yeah." "They're not up to taking weight like that." "No one is quite sure how the pot will hold up." "First time that one's been moved in 2,766 years." "Yeah?" "I think it's the food's ready." "It's lost." "Okay, we gotta recover and change out." "For now, 'Deep Spank' disappoints." "It was a new modification that didn't work." "Engineering on the fly." "It's back to an old die-hard." "Scoops in underneath and then you close down on top." "We call it the cowcatcher." "It works." "Within hours, Jason is back on the bottom, with a priceless cooking pot in his 'cowcatcher. '" "Now this is archaeology." "Quick and beautiful." "That dog can hunt!" "It's a triumph of technology each time Jason deposits an artifact in the elevator." "But it also means the wreck site has been altered." "Careful records must be kept." "Archeology is a destructive science." "It's like tearing pages out of a book." "Once you've removed something, if you haven't recorded it you've lost it forever." "Work continues until the elevator is full." "Then begins a slow ascent that will bridge nearly thirty centuries." "There it is right here." "Bob, we made a mistake." "We shouldn't have put both cooking pots in one load since there are only two of them." "Yeah." "Is that the right place?" "Is that the right place?" "The center!" "Okay, undo yours." "Let him just come straight up." "Take the slack off" "Don't tilt it." "Just stop it when it starts to swing." "Okay, don't pull hard guys." "Let him try to get it vertical first!" "Oh those beautiful cooking pots." "Ha Ha." "Oh they're so glorious." "Okay, watch the guys." "Make sure the objects don't come down on anything hard." "Thank god they're here!" "I'll tell you, I was really happy to see those cooking pots arrive." "The amphoras, we've got more of." "What would they cook in that?" "What kind of meal." "That's the one you'd do your one pot stew in." "It isn't as though you made one thing here and one thing there." "Just throw it all in." "Refrigerator soup." "My wife's mother calls it." "Whatever is at the end of the week in the refrigerator." "Well, this is in beautiful shape." "There's something special about touching something that has been untouched by humans for almost 3666 years old," "I mean, to the time of Homer." "Wow." "That's, that's pretty far back." "Here comes the pot, so don't jump up, Dan." "Two years after scrutinizing a fuzzy video," "Stager finally enjoys a close encounter." "Few little sea creatures attached to it." "Well, my great wish came true that it was 8th Century and not something Byzantine." "You know the other possibility for it was that it could date, oh, maybe 1166, 1266 years later." "In which case we have lots of wrecks and lots of material from that period." "But you rarely if ever find this on land complete." "Even if they're more or less complete they've all been shattered and you have to put them together to make up the whole." "But out here, a whole shipload of them intact." "It's marvelous." "Bathed in a solution of fresh and salt water, the artifacts are now the concern of conservator Dennis Piechota, his son James and assistant conservator Catherine Giangrande." "Sampled and sifted for future analysis, sediments might yield traces of a meal, or fragments of the ship's hull." "I'm getting 7.2 millimeters." "Preservation of this pot will take months, but its digital doppelganger is ready for study." "It's equally possible the amphoras contained olive oil or wine." "I think I'm almost at the bottom..." "Then Giangrande spots the residue of tree resin, used for sealing amphoras of wine." "It's as fine a discovery as any to toast." "Not a bad millennium." "Terrific wine." "The superb condition of the amphoras leads Ballard to a theory about the fate of the ship that carried them." "The ship is not busted up." "There's very few amphoras that were broken." "So it wasn't like they were tossed around and flipped around." "They were swamped." "You know, when you get in trouble you tend to run with the sea, hoping you can outrun the storm and get away from it, but you can then have a very powerful wave come over the stern and just swamp you." "We call'em rogue waves." "I've been in two of them in my life." "We took one head on- right over the bridge, took off the ridge, took off the mast, all but sank us." "So my first expedition, 46 years ago this summer," "I almost went down in a storm!" "Understanding the wreck site has also consumed the computational energies of the team." "So we've got the map crunched." "Using data collected by a sensor on Jason, Dana Yoerger has produced a three-dimensional map." "It shows the wreck is sitting in an oval depression nearly two meters deep, and helps explain something that's been puzzling Ballard." "'Cause you know one of the thing we've been, the problem is the amphoras are full of mud." "And you figure out, how could they be full of mud?" "But what you've done is, it was buried." "When the ship was swamped, it probably sank to the bottom like a weight, and buried much of its hull in the soft mud." "In time, wood-boring organisms ate away any exposed hull or mast." "The amphoras' unbaked clay stoppers simply dissolved." "As wine escaped, water and sediments poured in." "Over the centuries, deep-water currents scoured the surrounding sea floor, excavating the wreck, and laying bare its amphoras." "So much revealed in so few days." "The team has earned a bit of fun." "Feet were still a little apart." "I don't know, about an 8, something like that..." "Ballard:" "Time to get all the children out of the water and get back to work." "Day 9." "The team heads for the coordinates of the third sonar target." "Three two seven..." "Three two seven and a hundred ninety one meters." "The expedition leaders have been keeping nearly 24-hour shifts." "But there's no sign of fatigue when a target appears on Jason's sonar." "Down 75 on the range." "That's a 55-gallon drum." "That was a decoy." "They always drop drums to throw people off their trail." "Let's, uh, go back to 466, just do a simple turn and see what you've got." "As Jason rotates, he picks up something far more promising." "It's trash" "Straight ahead." "Okay." "There it is!" "It's amphoras!" "Yes!" "All right!" "It's the same." "The same!" "It's a fleet!" "It's another bunch of them." "It's the same guys." "They had a bad day." "Look at that." "That wine company went bankrupt." "It's exactly the same. 8th Century." "Same guy caught the same storm, heading the same direction." "This one is more laid out, more spread out." "More scattered." "Bonus!" "Definitely!" "A survey reveals a ship earily similar in size and shape to the first wreck, facing west, and carrying the same cargo." "But here, more small personal items seem to be exposed." "Ah, Now, there's a bowl." "There's a dish or something." "These could help confirm the homeport of the crew." "Zoom down, zoom." "Keep going." "Focus stop." "Boy have we got some work to do!" "For the next few days, Jason's busy as a bee." "Oh, that's a beauty, a little cooking pot..." "This is terrific." "I thought this thing was too big to be a bowl and it's actually a mortarium and it's for grinding different kinds of spices and herbs and putting it in the stew." "Great!" "It's swinging." "Don't go overboard." "Now we're getting slightly different sizes." "Yeah, this one looks like about a gallon more than that one." "I'm not an archaeologist and Larry's not an oceanographer, but maybe our students can be half archaeology, half oceanography." "Are these the ones you want or should we put them back and get some different ones?" "I think we like these!" "You've got people who wanna study shipwrecks and people who wanna build stuff to study shipwrecks coming together." "And of course the technologies that are available lend themselves beautifully to this." "Let me look at that." "See this?" "Looks like a candlestick holder." "Yeah, well, you're looking at it upside down." "See, actually the way this would stand, Bob, is like that." "This is most likely a little chalice for burning incense, incense to the protectors, the protective deities of the sailors." "They may well have held it this way, added their incense, and others would be raising their arms like this, to Baal" "Baal Hadad or Baal Zafon, the Baal of the North." "Day 14." "Jason's final load yields a distinctly Phoenician 'calling card'." "So that's the clincher." "We've been looking for something really decisive -well that's it." "That cinches is for a Phoenician ship, a Phoenician crew, Phoenician origins for this cargo." "This wine decanter, with its fanciful wide lip, is uniquely Phoencian." "It crowns the final act of a drama that began nearly 3666 years ago." "They may well have set sail from the great city of Tyre, two ships laden with fine wine from the hinterland." "Their destination?" "Perhaps the Egypt of the Pharaohs." "Or their wine-thirsty compatriots in the newly founded colony of Carthage." "To bless their journey, they would have performed age-old rituals, invoking the gods and perfuming the air to attract their favor." "For a time, they may have felt protected by divine grace." "A gentle sea guided the rhythm of their days." "Then suddenly it seemed their gods abandoned them." "And no prayer, no offering could win them back." "For those who waited on the home shore, there was no end to this voyage." "No matter how hard they prayed, the ships would never reappear on their horizon." "The fate of their loved ones would remain a mystery." "Yet centuries later, two modern-day explorers have raised their story from the depths, and added a new chapter to our understanding of the past." "As future expeditions are planned, the promise of deep-sea archaeology seems brighter than ever." "For who knows how much history lies hidden on the bottom, just waiting to be discovered?" "Code of Maya Kings" "They would tantalize explorers for hundreds of years," "ruined cities lost in the jungles of Central America and Mexico." "Inscrutable faces etched in stone." "Mysterious writing." "Who had left these messages from the past?" "It would take more than a century to unlock the secrets of the ancient Maya." "Two extraordinary people would lead the way." "Separated by 166 years, they would unveil one of the greatest mysteries of archeology." "Code of Maya Kings" "Chichen Itza, Mexico 1842." "An American lawyer named John Lloyd Stephens wanders the empty ruins looking for clues." "He knows what he wants to find." "It has kept him going through two harrowing journeys, exploring the desolate jungles of Central America." "Kept him pushing on through mud and malaria, poisonous snakes, and insect-plagued nights under the stars." "Stephens, the lawyer, was looking for proof, undeniable evidence that these ruins were not built by the Egyptians or the Phoenicians or the Lost Tribes of Israel." "And here at Chichen Itza he thinks that he's found it at least." "Writing unlike that of any other civilization he knows." "The same writing he'd seen at other ruined cities hundred of miles away." "Proof of an ancient empire of Native Americans more sophisticated than anyone believed possible." "Stephens himself was a product of the New World." "He was born in 1865, the son of a wealthy New York merchant." "The city wasn't much more than a Dutch village, but it was the hub of a new nation." "Stephens grew up along the Hudson River watching the ships come in from around the world." "After reading law, he opened a practice on Wall Street." "Soon he got into politics, campaigning vigorously for Andrew Jackson for President." "But months of shouting to the crowds gave him a serious throat infection." "His doctor prescribed a common remedy for wealthy young men- a grand tour of Europe." "The ancient ruins of Italy and Greece only piqued his curiosity." "Stephens went on to Egypt, and spent three months floating up the Nile, visiting the temples and monuments along the way." "Only a decade before a Frenchman had deciphered the hieroglyphs, revealing the rich history of Egypt's kings and queens." "Stephens was fascinated, and he still wasn't ready to go home." "He'd seen pictures of a fantastic ancient city in Arabia," "lost for century to all but the Bedouins." "Everyone told him the journey was too perilous for an unaccompanied American," "so Stephens disguised himself as a Turkish merchant and took the name Abul Hassis." "In 183, John Lloyd Stephens was the first American to set eyes on the ruins of Petra." "In Roman times it had been one of the greatest cities of the East." "Stephens still found it dazzling:" ""A temple delicate and limpid, carved like a cameo from a solid mountain wall, the first view of that superb facade must produce an effect which will never pass away."" "Stephens letters home were so vivid and imaginative, they were published in a monthly magazine." "Soon, he was writing books recounting his exotic adventures around the world." "The lawyer had become a literary sensation." "He was a seasoned observer, he was an incredible observer." "In fact, Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame, recalled one time when he was in church, Herman Melville was, he was a kid." "He heard that Stephens was in the front row." "And when Stephens left, Melville writes," ""I thought this man must have great huge eyes that bulged through his head, he was such a good observer," because Melville had read his stuff." "Back in New York the life of a sedentary lawyer no longer held any charm for Stephens." "Instead, his mind was filled with thoughts of another journey, not so far away, but even more remote and daring." "On his way home through London, he met an artist named rederick Catherwood who'd spent ten years in the Near East." "They shared their interest in exotic travel." "Sensing a kindred spirit, Catherwood had showed him a curious book about a lost city in Central America hidden in the jungle." "The book's authors thought the fabulous ruins of Palenque had been built by Egyptians," "Carthaginians, maybe even the Lost Tribes of Israel." "Anyone but the Native Americans." "There was sort of a racism in here that said that everything great had come through the Greeks, the Egyptians, through the European tradition." "And anything different appeared relatively to be a bunch of naked savages wandering through the woods." "In 1839, no one believed the Native Americans capable of building a sophisticated civilization." "Stephens' own government had little use for them." "Only a year earlier they had uprooted thousands of Indians, sending them westward along the infamous Trail of Tears." "The thought of a great ancient civilization in Central America seemed even more preposterous." "A few travelers had reported sighting ruined cities like Palenque, but Stephens could find none of them on the map." "It was a travel writer's dream, but only this time he would have to bring back evidence of whatever he found." "But who better to accompany him than the artist Frederick Catherwood, now practicing architecture in New York?" "Only one small problem remained, the newly formed Central American Federation was fighting a bitter civil war." "Using his political connections," "Stephens secured a post as a Confidential Agent." "He figured his diplomatic coat would protect him in dangerous territory." "So in October 1839," "Catherwood bid farewell to his wife and two young boys, and now they were here, deep in the jungles of Central America." "The ruins of Copan was their first goals." "But when they found the little village of the same name, no one there had ever head of nearby ruins." "Finally, a knowledgeable Indian offered to guide them." "But that was hours ago." "Now they were beginning to think that the ruins were nothing but a legend." "When suddenly, there they were, grander than their wildest dreams, the Ruins of Copan." "Pyramids rose majestically out of the jungle." "Great stone faces peered at them from intricately carved monuments, twice the size of a man." "Stephens noticed hieroglyphs and judged them to be as fine as any he'd seen in Egypt, yet his experience told him that these carvings were unique." "The silence of the once majestic city overwhelmed him:" "Copan lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came." "I think the description of Copan is the single most poetic description of a place he visits, for it is though he is walking around inside the Titanic, and he's looking at the shipwreck of a civilization." "He walks from monument to monument." "It is through he's looking into the faces of those who have recently been ruling this place:" "America, say historians, was peopled by savages." "But savages never reared these structures, savages never carved these stones, architecture, sculpture and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest, and yet none knew that such things had been," "or could tell of their past existence." "He's the first who is really able to say," "Look at these stone figures;" "these must be portraits of their kings and queens." "And he uses the word queen which is really quite astonishing, in seeing men and women in the monuments, for 166 years later, all the men and women that Stephens saw will have been reduced by 26th century archeologists to a group of anonymous calendar priests." "Stephens has this kind of Yankee can-do observation." "The best part of many of Stephens' insights is that they prove to be absolutely true." "Yet Stephens was deeply puzzled by the mystery at the heart of Copan." "Who could have built this extraordinary city?" "The local Indians didn't seem to know." "Stephens needed their help to explore the ruins, but the owner of the land interfered." "Finally, it seemed that the only solution was to buy Copan." "So the lawyer put on his diplomatic coat, and went to the village to negotiate." "You are perhaps curious to know how old ruins sell in Central America." "I paid $56 for Copan." "There was never any difficulty about price." "I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool." "If I had offered more, he would probably have considered me something worse." "Ownership settled, the team set about surveying the ruined city, measuring and mapping its buildings." "Catherwood is a remarkable character as well." "I wish we knew more about him." "One gains some sense of the Stephens personality, just from the written word." "The Catherwood personality doesn't emerge much." "Stephens treats him very formally, and he appears as Mr. Catherwood." "At first Mr. Catherwood found it almost impossible to draw the monuments." "Their tropical luxuriance defied his restrained British hand." "Stephens mentions coming upon him in the woods one day." "Catherwood is standing in front of a big upright monument." "It is a statute of one of the Copan rulers, and all intricately carved." "Catherwood's standing there almost obscured by a pile of crumpled paper, which represents the output so far that day of unsuccessful attempts to draw this thing." "Fortunately, Catherwood had brought along a camera lucida a box with a prism inside which allowed him to trace a reflected image." "To please the perfectionist Mr. Catherwood, every detail had to be correct." "With the coming of Spring, they were ready to begin the search for the next great goal, Palenque." "The territory to the north, through the Sierra Madras Mountains, was wild and uncharted." "As one local said, the road to Palenque were only for birds." "Snakes and clouds of mosquitoes dogged their steps." "To Stephens the worst part was the local custom of carry a visitor up the steepest trail on a chair, strapped to the back of an Indian." "I rose and fell with every breath, felt his body trembling under me, and his knees seemed giving way." "The slightest irregular movement on my part may bring us both down together." "I would have given him a release for the rest of the journey to be off his back." "On and on they traveled." "It took more than a month to reach the fabled ruins that had first inspired their journey." "Palenque seemed to hang on the edge of the mountains." "It's graceful buildings dominating the plain below." "Wherever we moved, we saw the evidence of their tastes, their skills in arts, their wealth and power." "In the midst of desolation and ruin, we looked back to the past, cleared away the gloomy forest and fancied every building perfect, lofty and imposing." "Palenque's architecture was different from Copan's, but Stephens noticed many similarities, particularly the mysterious writings." "Examining it carefully, he reached a remarkable conclusion:" "There is room for the belief that the whole of this country was once occupied by the same race, speaking the same language, or at least having the same written characters." "The Indians Stephens met spoke many languages and were as mystified by the ruins as he was." "Yet, intuitively, Stephens seemed to sense a link between them." "Stephens, I think, is the first person who can make the connection between the Indians that he sees and meets and the ancient ruins." "Whereas other people want to say, oh, these pathetic peasants, these miserable Indians, they could never have built this." "We must look for some alternative solution to where these things would have come from." "He believes that here is complete continuity." "And that, I think, is one of the most radical ideas to come out of his book." "At night, Stephens and Catherwood slept in the imposing ruin they called The Palace." "The rainy season had begun, and the mosquitoes, venomous during the day, were even worse at night." "Catherwood was already racked with malaria, but somehow they kept on working," "for 22 days and sleepless nights, bewitched by the beauty of Palenque." "Exhausted, they pushed on, further north and east to the Yucatan, but Catherwood was too ill to continue." "Vowing to return, they headed home to New York." "In 16 months the two explorers had accomplished the impossible." "They had rediscovered an ancient American civilization grander than anyone had ever dreamed." "Now they were ready to astound the world with its story." "Stephens's books was incredible popular when it appeared in the summer of 1841," "Incidents of Travel in Central America," "Chiapas, and Yucatan." "Harper and Brothers had printed up a goodly print run, and it sold out pretty quickly." "Stephens writes a real page-turner." "It is such a personal view, and it becomes one of the great bestsellers of the entire 19th century." "It goes through dozens of editions." "And there is an enormous American desire to know more about this part of the world." "They were lionized after the publication." "They were quite the thing in New York." "It was reviewed everywhere." "Just an amazing publication epic, so the trip was a success and they planned to go again." "Seventeen month after they'd left Mexico," "Stephens and Catherwood were back in the Yucatan, exploring the city of Uxmal." "On this second journey, they concentrated their efforts on this one region of Mexico." "Inching their way through the jungle, they discovered many ruined cities entirely unknown, with names like Coba, Labna, and Sayil." "Stephens felt they were racing against time." "Everywhere they went, they found ruins collapsing into piles of rubble." "Catherwood even learned how to sketch from his mule to save time." "At Uxmal, the artist drew the face of a god on the side of a pyramid." "Years later, it was destroyed." "Catherwood's illustration is our only record of it." "They performed the greatest service, perhaps, in freezing in time a set of observations and images of a land that no longer exists." "They're romantic pictures, yet at the same time they're remarkably accurate." "Many of Catherwood's renderings, for examples, of the Maya at Uxmal and Magna and other sites are the first depictions that we have of what Mayan people looked like." "We had no earlier record." "In the town of Balankanche, the explorers visited an ancient well deep underground." "Catherwood was so inspired, he began his memorable sketch at the foot of the ladder." "It was the wildest setting that could be conceived, men struggling up a huge ladder with earthen jars of water strapped to back and head, their sweating bodies glistening under the light of the pine torches." "One of the last places they explored was Chichen Itza." "Its architecture moved them more than any other city on this second journey." "Most exciting of all was the revelation that this city had been linked to Copan and Palenque hundred of miles away." "It was the first time in Yucatan that we had found hieroglyphics sculptured on stone which beyond all question bore the same type with those at Copan and Palenque." "If one but could read it." "Finally, Stephens felt he had the proof he'd been looking for." "The mysterious writing was unique, unlike any he'd ever seen." "Now he could convince the skeptics that the ruined cities had been built by Native Americans." "These ruins are different than the works of any other known people." "Of a new order, they stand alone." "In the nine months of their second journey," "Stephens and Catherwood managed to visit 44 ruined cities." "And gather some treasures for an exhibit on their return." "But they paid a heavy price for their adventures." "Malaria would haunt both men for the rest of their lives." "John Lloyd Stephens would fight the dread disease for ten years before succumbing to it in 1852." "Frederick Catherwood would die tragically a few years later in a shipwreck." "This is the only image we have of him." "For there was another sad chapter to their story." "The fate of the great exhibition they held on their return to New York." "This fire started one night in July of 1842, and literally overnight it wiped out the physical originals" "The drawings, some of the archeological stuff, the limestone carvings they had brought back at great labor." "Thank goodness for the books." "And I thank the Fates everyday that somebody at Harper and Brothers Publishers in New York had the foresight to heavily illustrate the book, because what a shame if the drawings had been lost." "Fortunately, before he died," "Catherwood issued exquisite folios of some of the drawings." "They inspired generations of explores to follow the intrepid pair to the land of the Maya." "But Stephens' insights would have a different fate." "His greatest intuition-that the Maya had written the real stories of their lives on the monuments- would be ignored." "The legions of archeologists who came after him were able to decipher some of the glyphs," "but only those that spoke of numbers, dates and the stars." "Carried away by the discovery that the ancient Maya were great astronomers, archeologists fashioned a picture of them as peaceful stargazers, obsessed with calendars and time." "When John Lloyd Stephens had looked at the monuments, he had seen real kings and queens." "One hundred years later, archeologists saw only the calculations of anonymous timekeepers." "It would take a fresh set of eyes to finally unravel the secrets of Maya carvings and prove that Stephens was right." "The story of Tatiana Proskouriakoff is not well known outside the realm of Maya studies." "Yet, in that field she is a giant, a woman in a man's world who saw further and deeper than her more famous contemporaries." "What we know of the ancient Maya today, the exciting revelations emerging from dozens of excavations is built on her work." "Speaking of Copan, she was the first to describe its ruins as a puzzle." "She was the one who supplied the missing piece." "Tatiana, or Tanya, as her friends called her, was born in Tomsk, Siberia in 1969." "Her mother, the daughter of a prominent general, was a physician." "Her father, a chemist." "World War I shattered their peaceful existence." "In 1915, Tanya's father was sent to the United States to supervise arms manufacturing for the czar." "With the coming of the Russian Revolution, the family was trapped and began a new life in suburban Philadelphia." "At work on the first biography of Proskouriakoff," "Char Solomon has been uncovering these early details of her life." "Tanya's story is compelling to me because she was born in Russia at such a tumultuous time." "She came to the United States." "She acquired English as a second language, and mastered it in such a way that it became the equivalent of her first language." "She chose a profession that was dominated by men at a time when many women did not choose to go that route." "Tanya majored in architecture at Pennsylvania State University, one of the only women to do so in her graduating class." "It was 1936, the height of the Great Depression." "Tanya spent several dispiriting years looking for work, then settled for a job making drawings for a needlepoint shop." "The search for good subjects led her to the Archeological Museum at the University of Pennsylvania." "Tanya's skillful drawings attracted the attention of Linton Satterwaite, an archeologist looking for an artist to work at his dig, deep in the jungles of Guatemala." "The ruined City of Peidras Negras was a big jump from her close-knit Russian family, but Tanya was ready for an adventure." "The small party set off for Guatemala in the winter of 193,." "On their way, they stopped at Palenque, the graceful ruined city that had captivated the explorers Stephens and Catherwood almost 166 years before." "Tanya was equally entranced." "She, in older years, said that when she first saw the elegant little Temple of the Sun, she knew she had found her vocation, that there would never be anything else that would get her as much as that." "Tanya's pencil responded easily to the intricacies of Maya art." "The young Russian American had felt the pulse of an ancient mystery." "But settling in the Peidras Negras wasn't easy." "Tanya had to learn how to survey and draw the dilapidated ruins." "As an outsider, as a woman who had learned a profession and trying to find a way into it, I'm sure she was clearly little Tanya, allowed to sit there with her drafting pen and make observations about Peidras Negras." "I think she had to pay for every step she took, but she really," "I think, was someone who was able to compete effectively with the boys." "In Mayan archeology in the 1932s, 'the boys' were a pretty formidable bunch." "This was a group of people that came together, people from mostly Ivy League, Harvard and Penn and other places." "They were all great friends." "They were all, as most archeologists were at the time, people of independent means." "They could do what they durn well pleased." "Even in the bush these silver-spoon archeologists managed to live well." "At Peidras Negras, dinner was a formal occasion, beginning with cocktails." "Somewhere around 5 o'clock they would dress, and they would dress elegantly." "Tanya had a white dress, full-length dress, that she packed along with her." "She would slough through the mud to get to the dining hut, and then sort of tuck the muddy bottom of her dress down behind her feet, so that no one would notice." "There was a little bit of challenging banter also between Tanya and Linton." "He had suggested that one of the structures did not have a staircase going up one side, and she felt strong that there would have been and challenged him on that point." "So he said, well, if you really believe that there was a staircase there, then you have to dig and find me the proof, which she did." "And to her delight, she found the staircase." "Tanya began to sketch reconstructions of the ruins based on the archeological data." "Her drawings were so impressive, they earned her a sketching tour of other Maya cities." "Her first stop was Copan." "Noted Mayanist lan Graham shared an office with Tanya in her later years at Harvard's Peabody Museum." "He remembers her tails of Copan in the thirties." "Anyway, she landed, the sole female in this isolated camp." "There were some fairly spirited characters there." "One was an amazing man called Gus Stromsvik." "Gustav Stromsvik, the Norwegian archeologist who worked for the Carnegie Institution, fell deeply in love with her." "And Tanya had a period in which she tried to decide what this relationship was going to mean in her life." "Stromsvik was a very dynamic personality." "He was very outgoing." "He was a raconteur, and she loved people who could tell good stories, she loved to laugh." "So she was drawn to him." "But on the other hand, Stromsvik had a very serious drinking problem." "Particularly on Saturday nights, the life there was spent pretty wild." "Tanya seemed to handle it perfectly well." "It's amazing." "She led such a protective life in her Russian family and in her suburban life in Philadelphia." "But she had grit." "Tanya's next stop was Chichen Itza, center of the Mayan world in this golden age of archeology." "The ancient city was undergoing a renaissance, as archeologists from the Carnegie Institution pieced it back together." "Half of rebuilding has gone hand in hand with the work of" "Welcoming the throngs of visitors was the man who would serve as the spokesman for the Maya for more than 26 years, Carnegie's Sylvanus Morley, known for his oversized straw hats and ebullient personality." "At Chichen Itza, he lived in grand style in a Spanish colonial manor house." "Every evening a Chinese cook would prepare dinner for Morely and his band of archeologists." "Envious colleagues referred to them as the club." "On special evenings Morley would lead his guests to the ruins of the Maya ball court for a concert," "amplified by the court's amazing acoustics." "Tanya would join the others in the moonlight in this fitting place to conjure the spirits of the departed Maya." "For to the Carnegie Club, the Maya were a band of priestly stargazers, unlike any other people who had ever lived." "These ancient wise men had never fought wars." "Instead, they had spent their time inventing an elaborate calendar and a system of writing used for nothing but recording time." "The author of this view of the Maya was Sir Eric Thompson, an acerbic Englishman whose intellect dominated Maya studies for nearly 56 years." "No one, not even Morely questioned his authority." "As Thompson began to formulate his ideas, no one had the strength of character to resist." "Morely was the one who tried." "In Morely's early works he offers a rather different picture." "He is overwhelmed by Thompson's point of view and adopts it." "This makes it very difficult for a new voice to find a path, and particularly when one can imagine that the name of Tanya is probably generally preceded by little." "Thompson may have been able to cow the other members of the Carnegie Club, but he hadn't bargained on Tanya Proskouriakoff." "My general sense of her is absolutely contrary in a kind of way that if you said, well, it looks like rain, she would say, ah, there's not a drop of rain in that cloud." "She was the kind of person if you said," "Oh, it's too warm in here, she would immediately go turn up the thermostat and make it a little warmer." "She just had a kind of contrary personality." "I think that helped her also then say, well, if you say the Maya are peaceful, let's look at them from another point of view." "Bit by bit, Tanya began to ask different questions than her colleagues." "She also started to study the living Maya, convinced that they had something to teach her as well." "When she was in highlands Chiapas, she took some lessons learning how to weave on the hand loom that the Maya work with." "At the same time, the same young woman was helping her to learn Maya." "This is something a lot of people don't know about Tanya is that she did study Yucatex Maya." "Tanya's intuition that the living Maya could provide the valuable link to the past was borne out by a fabulous discovery in 194,." "An American filmmaker named Giles Healey persuaded a Maya Indian to show him one of their secret place." "The Indian lead Healy to Bonampak, a lost city buried in the jungle." "Peering into a building, Healy was astounded to find faces" "looking back at him from the walls." "Armies were locked in a furious battle." "Other scenes showed prisoners of war and victims of human sacrifice." "Try as Thompson might, it was impossible to convince anyone, I think, that these depicted a peaceful Maya, for in the Bonampak murals we see one of the greatest battle paintings ever created in the history of humankind." "Proskouriakoff had not been allowed to write a single interpretive word on the Bonampak paintings," "but I've always wondered if it did not play some role in shaping how she looked at the Maya world." "Sir Eric Thompson effectively barred the door at Bonampak, preventing other Mayanists from pursuing the bloody implications of its murals." "Nevertheless, the flaws were beginning to show in his vision of the peaceful Maya." "A few years later, another piece of the puzzle would slide into place." "In a bookstore in Mexico, Tanya found a revolutionary new book by a Russian named Yuri Knorozov." "Always interested in things Russian, she avidly read his new theory of Maya writing." "Eventually, it would prove the key to deciphering the glyphs." "But for years Sir Eric Thompson would condemn the new theory as Communist propaganda." "In the late 1956s, Carnegie closed down its Mezo-America program, a victim of new priorities." "But Tanya was kept on as a research associate with an office at Harvard's Peabody Museum." "Her days in the field were over, but her greatest work had just begun." "In her little apartment in Cambridge, Tanya was on to something." "When reading through Tanya's diaries, I can see that in the 1956s she made a very conscious decision to become more private in her life." "She began working much more intensively with the hieroglyphics." "In her mind Tanya had returned to Peidras Negras, the site of her first experience with the Maya." "Puzzling over the monuments, she noticed a peculiar pattern with the glyphs." "Over and over, the same glyphs were linked to dates and on each of the monuments none of the dates exceeded a human lifespan." "Suddenly to Tanya the evidence was clear:" "the monuments were marking the stages of an individual's life." "Where others had seen only cold calculations," "Tanya Proskouriakoff saw the lives of human beings." "It was a conclusion that cut to the heart of everything" "Sir Eric Thompson believed." "Tanya marshaled her facts, then showed Thompson her article before sending it to the publisher." "And when she talked with him before he had read it, he disagreed strongly with what her ideas of the Maya were." "When he took the article home and he read it, he came back the next day and said, well, actually," "I believe you're right which were very big words from someone who was considered a giant in the field at the time." "And from that time on, when you saw a Maya monument you knew that it didn't deal with gods and priests, it deal with human beings, and that was the importance." "In one sense, everything that we've done since then in hypography and in the interpretation of the hieroglyphs has been a footnote to what Tanya did." "She did the general breakthrough." "When she and Yuri Knorozov in Russia came up with through hieroglyphic keys, that was it." "We went on a roll." "Once the code breakers went to work, a more human image of the Maya began to emerge." "Written in the monuments were the stories of their lives, their ancestors, their battles and conquests." "Across the centuries the Maya came alive, kings and queens, rulers of fabulous cities" "full of the voices of the people echoing out of the past." "Things were changing at such a dramatic rate." "We can read about, I would guess, 75 or 86 percent of the inscriptions that the Maya wrote." "Given that in 19,6 we could barely read any of it, that's extraordinary." "David Stuart began deciphering Maya glyphs when he was just a boy." "Tanya Proskouriakoff is one of his heroes." "He met her shortly before she died, when she was continuing her careful scholarship at the Peabody." "In 1998, Stewart took her ashes to Peidras Negras for burial at a sight high above the ancient city she had loved." "We didn't realize how poignant the ceremony was going to be." "Most of us were students or young people in the field, in our 36s at the oldest." "And it sort of dawned on everyone that here was the remains of this great lioness, this legendary figure." "The Guatemalans who were there were very emotional about this because this was the woman who had brought the Maya back to history." "At the end of his pioneering journey to Central America in 1846, the explorer, John Lloyd Stephens had been the first to state with conviction:" "One thing I believe, that its history is graven on its monuments." "More than 166 years later, we finally knew that Stephens was right." "At Palenque, Copan, Chichen Itza, and dozens of ruins in between, the ancient Maya now speak for themselves."