Professor Simons had returned the night before to his own modest home on the North Shore of San Francisco. It was a house he had spent the better part of his career living in while a professor at Berkeley over the past thirty some years. It was once a warmer place, when freshly moved into during the 1970's. A home once made vibrant by the young scholar and his artist wife who both worked tirelessly to remodel and decorate with all the trappings of a hopeful future. That future had been complete with the desire for children and the promise of happiness in old age. Yet, it now somehow only resembled a larger version of the professor's cluttered office at Cal, and there was a sad and deafening silence as he entered the dark living room alone once more.

The professor made his way through the stuffy hallway to the back bedroom. He placed his tired satchel on the floor by the nightstand. His single bed was still unmade, as he had left it three days before. He entered the bathroom and ran the hot water for a bath. It was the one place he had, years before, designated to completely relax and reflect. His evening bath for decades had become his small shrine for meditation, yet rarely did he contemplate history there or any of his industrious achievements with the university, past or present. It had become a place he came to soak his tired body, allow time to stop, and enjoy the few treasures of his early memories.

Disrobing and entering the tepid water, it was his habit to submerge himself up to his neck, and then lean his head back against the porcelain tub and close his eyes. There soon appeared one of the reoccurring visions which had come to him hundreds of times over the years:

It was his daughter, Irene, around the age of eight years old. Just two years before the accident. She was running on the beach with a puppy he had bought her that summer. In this reverie he would see and hear her laughing, animated in her yellow and turquoise bathing suit. Her young, tireless body glowed with the blue sky behind her and the unforgettable hiss of the waves in the distance. Her skin had a perennial cinnamon shade, inherited from her mother, and now was even darker from the season. He could picture her expressive face, imbued also with the girl's mother's features—her Asian eyes and an animated mouth always offering up a smile to him. In his mind now Irene was laughing infectiously while the puppy thrashed from side to side in the sand, barking. Like the spontaneous puppy and the adoring father on this uneventful but eternal day, the little girl seemed intoxicated with joy. It was an image he had conjured up so many times, never waning in its vivid intensity or melancholic power.

The professor savored the collected memory and got out of the bath to dress. He moved into rooms and turned on lights which exposed nothing but bookshelves and boxes of papers—all of which seemed to have grown out of the walls and collected on the floor. The house had remained this way, virtually empty of life, save for its sole inhabitant returning home in the evenings, since the early 1980's, when John Simon's wife and daughter were both killed in a boating mishap just outside the mouth of San Francisco Bay.

This tragic event, after several years of painful attempts by the scholar to move beyond it, resulted in his dissolution with ever starting over for a dream of wife and children. The lonely academic instead buried himself in his work further, eventually bringing great accolades to his career through publications, teaching, and a legendary single-mindedness which only helped to establish Cal's preeminence as a venue for its Center for California Studies.

Now, late in his career, Professor Simons was thrust into a find which captivated him like nothing else he had ever encountered as a researcher. There was something otherworldly about the historical possibility it offered which made him sleepless at night and gave him the gnawing trepidation that he might not live long enough to see its great mystery unfold or its significance be widely recognized.

Being given exclusive credit for taking on the early probing of the tomb's significance was somehow secondary to him after building a life's reputation upon academic excellence. There was simply something more to this find than eventual notoriety which inspired his passion for the truth. As a seasoned historian and one privy to all the fanaticism, cruelties and compassion of civilization—past and present, Dr. Simons could sense in the workings of tomb's discovery an intelligence and a passionate vision behind it. This mystery of this vision was beginning to even eluded his theories of who and why.

In his study he took down several books from a nondescript shelf and took them to his small table in the kitchen. He reached into the darkened refrigerator and took out a half-bottle of chilled Chardonnay and rinsed a wineglass he had used several days earlier. Alone, he sat with the books stacked next to him, putting them into an order he had already determined. His personal quest on the project had been continuous, night and day. And this evening was no different. As ideas would come to him he would not stop in their investigations until he had reached some closure—dropping it entirely or leading him to other areas to search. Yet all these leads were so far only the tracing of a perimeter around the core of the mystery. On this evening as he sat with his chosen books, he knew he needed to step back and look at that perimeter more closely and see if it offered anything more central which had been previously undetected.

The overarching subject which made the Bixby Bridge find so captivating was simply its allusion to the enigmatic Amazons themselves—a ghostly and disconnected theme which, on the one hand was not entirely absent in the Americas, but on the other always remained shrouded in incomplete evidence and traced to many dead ends as to its origins. The formative Amazon mystique, so popular with the ancient Greeks and an inspiration for their legends and myths, was kept alive by the collection of bits and pieces from early writings of historians, philosophers and poets in antiquity, some first recorded around 700 BCE. Unlike the artistic images of Amazons, left by sculptors and vase painters during Greece's Classical Age in great abundance, these fractured shards and written fragments by ancient writers on marble and clay inscriptions had always been tantalizingly scarce. They remained rare and exquisite only as vestiges of a semi-recorded past—at best combining mostly legend with an economy of hard facts. That connection to Professor Simon's own domain—California history, was only hinted at during his career, as he and so many researchers of other disciplines were at best only amused by any literary connection to ancient Amazons in the New World.

Professor Simons was ever-mindful that the playwrights during Greece's golden age of drama would use such entertaining sources to augment their own masterful plays around established heroes and deities. Their use of certain legendary Amazon queens or princesses—as strong, central personae in these works, always represented the more marginalized, unconventional women in antiquity, seen more as an exotic threat or foe to men, including their strongest heroes. The likes of these storylines had often advanced to the formidable myth cycles, so influential to later ages in art and literature. But those were primarily of a Mediterranean and Near-Eastern origin, with the strains and motifs of these plots easily carried into much of Europe through imported tales and legends.

Whenever approached historically in the context of North, Central and South America, scholars were only mildly intrigued by the vestiges of Amazonian elements in these areas. Like other phantasmagorical characteristics which had somehow crept onto the New World's shores in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they had been seen as nothing more than the exotica associated with any uncharted lands—tribes of giants, men with tales, fountains of youth. A tribe of all women warriors in the jungle, or on an island of the New World was entertaining, but often dismissed by academics as merely a male fantasy conjured up by the explorers themselves deprived of women on their long voyages. It had never touched down in any physical form, and was given little other serious thought or attention by scholars—until now.

Being himself on the professorial staff of UC Berkeley, one of California's most renown research centers, it was his nature and training to ask tangential questions about topics. Cal had formally taken on the study of Eurasian nomadic cultures a number of years back, and he was aware that the entire theme of a society of all women in ancient times remained debatable—but also newly probable as put forward in the literature of certain ground-breaking studies. This had been established some twenty years previously by a Berkeley research team, when their tangible archaeological discovery of women in the role of warriors was made on the Eurasian Steppes near the Ukraine.

The mere historically consistent location of these finds with Amazon lore, both in time and place, gave resurgence to the possibility that such a nomadic clan of women, forming some nexus of history and myth could have been possible. What the professor, like others had heard, but which had never been made entirely clear through previous research, was if the tantalizing recorded connections with these warrior women in legend were actually inspired by true contacts—in this case, ancient Greek wayfarers. It would seem to him perfectly debatable, as they were so authentically reported and elaborated upon by reliable ancient Greek authors who wrote of the women centuries later.

It was clear to the professor that such myths always involved encountering these women to the north and east of the Mediterranean basin, at the edge of the known civilized world. While there seemed to be some consensus of legend that they haled from Northern Turkey and the perimeters of the Black Sea, it was never really confirmed that the notion of a race of all women combatants sprang entirely from the imaginative ruminations of adventurous, lust-lorn men. This could simply have been no different in the New World when the likes of the first Spanish expeditionary forces made incursions into yet another unexplored region of the world, simply employing the imaginative fires of the past.

Whatever the professor would finally glean from these readings of historical review in his home, he eventually allowed the Chardonnay to anesthetize those efforts into an eventual and deserved sleep. But what he and his young assistant would soon search for, in separate domains of the world, was any tangible clue which might more securely link the Amazons of former legend to real history—and even more profoundly, to both worlds.

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