Right of Way

The road comes down the valley in two lines of orange flags, and it stops at the mound, where Khulan is dragging a machine over the stones.

The road belongs to a copper mine that does not exist yet, and the mine has paid Khulan's consultancy for three weeks of her, and in three weeks the mound has to stop being in the way. She drags the antenna box across it on a cart with two bicycle wheels. The box is the size of a carry-on suitcase and the color of a traffic cone, and it sends a pulse down into the stones and listens for what comes back. Behind the cart, tik, tik, tik, the survey wheel runs the distance up like a taxi meter.

Philipp walks the baseline with the tape and calls the line numbers. Solongo moves the string. Dorj sits on the bumper of the mine's Land Cruiser in a hi-vis vest over his deel. The vest says DRIVER across the back with a number under it. He eats sunflower seeds and spits the shells into a paper cup, because the mine has a policy about litter on a heritage site.

The flags come down the valley from the west in two lines of orange plastic on steel pins, a road's width apart. They pass either side of the mound and go on east to the stream, where this site code ends and the next one starts. Every flag has a stake number on it in marker. The surveyor came in the autumn and set them and left. The regulation says a registered mound keeps a buffer around it that no road may cross. This mound is on no register. The mine's map calls it KH-12. There are more of these in the valley than the valley has families, and the map has a code for every one.

East of the fence stones the small stone rings begin, more of them than a person would want to open, each one a low heap the size of a kitchen table. They run out toward the stream and stop before the flags do. The scope of work calls them satellite features and pays for two of them.

The tablet clamped to the cart handle draws what the box hears, a grey slice down through the ground she has just rolled over. The mound comes up as a mess of small bright returns, stone over stone, and on the second pass the central chamber comes up under it as a clean rectangle at depth. The slice looks like the printout a clinic hands a woman in her second month, a grey field with one smudge in it that the people in the room agree to call a person.

"There's your chamber," Philipp says. He has come up the mound with the tape still in his hand. He is from Bremen and has run radar over Roman roads and Bavarian bog bodies and a car park in Leeds and a golf course in Dubai where a client wanted to know why the fourth green kept sinking, and this is his first time in Mongolia, and he has not stopped smiling since the plane. "That's a cist burial. Slabs on top, look at the flat return. It's small. A youth, or a woman. Oh, that's lovely."

Khulan looks at the rectangle.

She has another window open on the tablet behind the radar software. It is the report. It has the mine's logo in the header and the site code and the date, and it has a sentence she wrote at a coal project in the Gobi three years ago and has used at every site since, the way a man with one good suit goes to every funeral in it. No features of archaeological significance remain within the right-of-way. At the consultancy's day rate the sentence is worth more than her father ever held in his hand at one time. She has typed it under site codes from the Gobi to the Russian border. It has never once been untrue.

Things stay where you put them. That is the whole of her trade and the reason a mine will pay for it. A thing in the ground is in the ground at the depth you left it, in the year you left it, and the box finds it there or finds nothing, and either way the ground has kept its side.

Past the last flag the ground drops to the stream. Past the stream there is a flat where the grass grows short and dark in a circle the size of a ger floor, and the circle is there because a ger stood on it every winter for longer than the mine has had a name. Khulan was born on that floor. The mine's map calls the flat Sector 4. She read the surveyor's plan in Ulaanbaatar before she signed for the work, and she laid a business card along the corridor to see where it stopped, and it stopped at the stream.

Solongo pulls the string to line nine and waves. Philipp goes down the mound to the tape. Khulan takes the cart handle and walks the roof of the chamber.