What remains is the physical fact of her: the bones, the preserved tissues, the tattoos, the clothing, the objects placed around her.

And what the ice gave us: a moment from 2,500 years ago, frozen in place, waiting for someone to melt it and look inside.

The moment is still extraordinary.

The woman is still there.

And the questions she opens — about who she was, about the world she came from, about how a culture leaves its marks on the bodies of its members and sends those bodies into the ground with horses and silk and golden birds — are still, thirty years after her discovery, worth asking.

The ice held her story.