On the island's southern edge—where Lara and the Norse sibling found the structure that they suspected was part of an ancient wall —the diggers hit something that made even the most seasoned archaeologists go quiet.
A stretch of wall.
Not the flimsy kind that rusts away in a decade, but a buried perimeter wall, thick and deliberate, as if someone long ago had drawn a hard line and meant it to last forever.
Excavation crawled at a punishing pace.
No backhoes, no drills, no roaring machines—nothing that could rattle the ground and shatter whatever secrets still slept beneath it. Every inch of soil had to be removed by primitive tools or loosened by hand.
The National History Commission doubled the workforce, but the tools looked like they belonged to another century: shovels, spades, mattocks, pickaxes.
