They left her with her cosmetics and her mirror.

And then they sealed the kurgan and moved on.

They did not know that the water would come, and that it would freeze, and that the ice would hold for two and a half thousand years.

They did not know that a team of Russian archaeologists in the late twentieth century would melt that ice with buckets of hot water and find, preserved inside it, the moment they had made.

But the ice held.