fastened so Lemk ignored him. At last he settled behind the control

column on the pilot's side of the cockpit and plotted the air-craft's

position.

Forty-five minutes later, Lemk banked the plane from its scheduled

flight path to New York onto a new heading, toward the frozen Arctic.

It is one of the most barren spots on the earth and one never seen or

experienced by tourists. In the last hundred years, only a handful of

explorers and scientists have trod its forbidding landscape. The sea

along the rugged shore is frozen for all but a few weeks each year, and

in the early fall temperatures hover around - 73 degrees the cold sides

for the long winter months, and even in summer, dazzling sunshine can be

replaced by an impenetrable gale in less than an hour.

Yet, shadowed by scarred mountains and swept by a constant wind, the

magnificent desolation in the upper reaches of Ardencaple Fjord on the

northeast coast of Greenland was inhabited nearly two thousand years ago

by a band of hunters. Radiocarbon dating on excavated relics indicated

the site was occupied from A.D. 200 to A.D. 400, a Short time span for

the archaeological clock. But they left behind twenty dwellings which

had been preserved by the frigid ice.

A prefabricated aluminum structure had been airlifted by helicopter and

assembled over the ancient village by scientists from the University of

Colorado. A balky heating arrangement and foam-glass insulation fought

a lopsided battle against the cold, but at least denied entry to the

never-ending wind moaning eerily around the outside walls. The shelter

also enabled an archaeological team to work the site into the beginning

stages of winter.

Lily Sharp, a professor of anthropology at Colorado, was oblivious to

the cold that seeped into the covered village. She rested on her knees

on the floor of a single-family dwelling, carefully scraping away the

frozen earth with a small hand trowel. She was alone and lost in deep

concentration as she probed the distant past belonging to the

prehistoric people.

They were sea-mammal hunters who spent the harsh Arctic winters in

dwellings dug partially into the ground, with low walls of rock and turf

roofs often supported by whale bones. They entertained themselves with

oil lamps, passing the long dark months carving miniature sculptures out

of driftwood, ivory and antlers.

They had settled this part of Greenland during the first centuries after

Christ. Then, inexplicably, at the height of their culture, they pulled

up stakes and vanished, leaving behind a revealing cache of relics.

Lily's perseverance paid off. While the three men on the archaeology

team relaxed after dinner in the hut that was their living quarters, she

had returned to the protected settlement and continued to excavate,

unearthing a length of caribou antler with twenty bearlike figures

sculpted on its surface, a delicately carved woman's comb and a stone

cooking pot.

Suddenly Lily's trowel clinked on something. She repeated the movement

and listened carefully. Fascinated, she tapped again. It was not the