MICHAEL CRICHTON

each new buildings in the heart of the city. By midday, their efforts wererewarded as they entered structures unlike any they had seen before. Thesebuildings were impressively engineered, enclosing vast cavernous spacesdescending three and four stories beneath the ground.Ross was delighted by the underground constructions, for it proved to her thatthe Zinj people had evolved the technology to dig into the earth, as wasnecessary fur diamond mines. Munro expressed a similar view: “These people,”he said, “could do anything with earthworks.”Despite their enthusiasm, they found nothing of interest in the depths of thecity. They ascended to higher levels later in the day, coming upon a building sofilled with reliefs that they termed it “the gallery.” With the video camera hookedto the satellite linkup, they examined the pictures in the gallery.These showed aspects of ordinary city life. There were domestic scenes ofwomen cooking around fires, children playing a ball game with sticks, scribessquatting on the ground as they kept records on clay tablets. A whole wall ofhunting scenes, the men in brief loincloths, armed with spears. And finally scenesof mining, men carrying baskets of stones from tunnels in the earth.in this rich panorama, they noticed certain missing elements. The people ofZinj had dogs, used for hunting, and a variety of civet cat, kept as householdpets—yet it had apparently never occurred to them to use animals as beasts ofburden. All manual labor was done by human slaves. And they apparently neverdiscovered the wheel for there were no carts or rolling vehicles. Everything wascarried by hand in baskets.Munro looked at the pictures for a long time and finally said, “Something else ismissing.”They were looking at a scene from the diamond mines, the dark pits in theground from which men emerged carrying baskets heaped with gems.“Of course!” Munro said, snapping his fingers. “No police!’’Elliot suppressed a smile: he considered it only too predictable that a characterlike Munro would wonder about police in this long-dead society.But Munro insisted his observation was significant. “Look here,” he said. “Thiscity existed because of its diamond mines. It had no other reason for being, outhere in the jungle. Zinj was a mining civilization—its wealth, its trade, its daily life,everything depended upon mining. It was a classic one-crop economy—and yetthey didn’t guard it, didn’t regulate it, didn’t control it?”195