“That should do fine,” Sam said.
Remi said, “Now it’s our turn to tell
GUATEMALA CITY
Sam and Remi disembarked in Guatemala City and went through customs. They were about to leave the airline terminal when Remi’s satellite phone rang. She answered, and said, “Hi, Selma. You must have tracked our plane.”
“Of course. We’ve found something amazing and I thought you should know.”
“What is it?”
“Do you remember a sort of lump inside the cover of the codex?”
“I do,” Remi said. “It’s sort of a rectangle shape. I figured it was a patch.”
“It’s a sheet of parchment, folded, and then placed under the outer layer and covered with the fig-bark fabric. David and I removed it two hours ago. It’s a letter, written in black ink, in Spanish. It says, ‘To all of my countrymen, blessings. This book and other books of the Mayan people concern their history and their observations about the natural world. They have nothing to do with the devil. They must be preserved as a way to understand our charges, the Mayan people.’”
“Who’s it from?” asked Remi.
“That’s the surprise. It’s signed ‘Fra Bartolome de Las Casas, Prior of Rabinal, Alta Verapaz.’”
“Las Casas?
As the old car moved along the road, it seemed always to be laboring. Alta Verapaz ranged in elevation from one thousand to nine thousand feet. At times, the car seemed to grind upward as though it were dragging itself up by a rope coiled around its axle. At others, the car careened downward while Sam fought for control. They were able to make snack and bathroom breaks in the small towns along the way. Remi, whose Spanish had been getting plenty of practice, used these opportunities to ask about the road ahead. On one of the stops Sam said, “What do you think of our adventure so far?”
She said, “I’m glad we just spent weeks climbing a volcano and then walking from town to town, doing heavy labor.”
“Why?”
“Because now my body knows that no matter how hard this ride is, I should enjoy every second of it, because, when it ends, life could get a whole lot harder.”
At Coban, they spent a night at a small hotel, and slept deeply. They were up early to prepare to leave for Xuctzul. The people they met seemed to be a mixture of Mayan farmers and Hispanic visitors. They knew that the farther from big cities they went, the more likely that they would reach places where people not only didn’t speak English but didn’t speak Spanish either. When they were back in the Cherokee, they found the roads got narrower and rougher by the mile.
After another hour Remi looked at the map and then her watch. “We should be in Xuctzul soon.”
Five minutes later, they drove through the village. It was only about a hundred yards long.
Sam and Remi stepped out of the car at the edge of the village and stood in the gravel road. Sam and Remi looked at each other. The silence was profound. Off in the distance, a dog barked, and the spell was broken. A few people came out of buildings and looked in their direction as though the arrival of a car was an occasion for curiosity. One by one, they lost interest and went back to their homes.
The gravel road turned into a rutted cart path.
“I hope the Jeep is up to this. At least there seems to be a trail, but we’re in for a bumpy ride,” said Sam.
“I hope what trail we have is going in the right direction. I’m not looking forward to blazing one through the jungle,” Remi replied. “I was hoping the machetes were just for show.” Remi looked up at the sky, then at Sam. “It’s a long time before we run out of daylight — at least six hours.”
Each took a drink of water from his or her canteen, took out a machete, put it where it would be easy to reach, and then they began to drive up the trail.
For a time, Sam would periodically check his satellite phone’s GPS to be sure they were still heading in the direction they intended. The trail was winding and required steady climbing as it took them into the highlands of Alta Verapaz. Before darkness came they stopped and pitched their tiny tent, with its floor and zippered netting to keep the insects out. They cooked some dehydrated rations on a small fire and then slept. In the morning, they searched for water and found a couple of gallons that had been caught in a half-hollowed log. They filled two plastic containers, put in their military-grade purification tablets, and secured them in the back of the Jeep.
For each of the next five days they followed the same routine, checking the GPS each day to be sure they were on course. As they drove farther from the populated areas, they were surrounded by squads of chattering monkeys in the trees overhead, flocks of birds flying over at dawn and dusk, and many smaller birds that were invisible in the dense foliage calling out to one another. On the third day, the trail took them down from the crest of a high hill into a valley surrounded by smaller hills, the trail opening up to a surface that had been leveled by human activity.
There were big trees growing in places, and fallen leaves had turned to a thick humus and then become dirt, and then smaller plants had died, rotted, and then been overshadowed by taller neighbors. And even those trees had died, fallen, and rotted, several long generations of them. But the strip of land where this had happened was still flat. Remi and Sam looked at the low hills that rose on their right and then the ones on their left. They got out of the Jeep.
Sam put his compass on a level spot, raised its mirror, and used it to sight along the space at the foot of the hills on their right. “Perfectly straight,” he said.
He paced off the width of the flat space, from one hill to the one opposite. “Fifty of my paces,” he said. “Let’s try it farther along. I’ll grab the pack with the machetes and folding shovels.”
Sam and Remi walked two hundred yards, then set the compass again and sighted along the foot of the next hill, and the one beyond it. Sam paced the width of the flat strip.
“I assume it’s fifty,” said Remi.
“Of course.”
“What do you think the hills were?”
“From what I’ve read, they could have been anything. They used to put up buildings on top of the earlier ones.”
“Which do you prefer?” she said. “Would you rather dig down below our feet to establish that it’s paved or climb up there and dig to see if the hill is a building that was overgrown by the jungle?”
“If we’re way up there, we might be able to see for a distance,” he said.
“That’s what I think too,” she said. “It might be nice to look above the treetops, for a change.”
They left their packs, took their machetes and folding shovels, and climbed. The hill they chose was the center one on the right side. It appeared to be the highest. The hill was steep, rising to a height of about a hundred twenty-five feet, and its slopes were thick with plants and small trees, which they used as handholds.
When they reached the apex, Sam unfolded the shovel and began to dig. After about four shovelfuls, his blade hit stone. He used his machete to test a few spots nearby and the sound was the same. Remi walked a few yards to get past a thicket of saplings, growing on the top of the building. “Don’t get lost,” Sam said.
“Come here,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.”
He took the machete and shovel with him and went through the thicket to find Remi, looking out over the tops of the jungle trees. From here, the canopy looked solid, but there were a few places where it was sparse. She pointed down at the level area they had left. “It’s like a wide road. It starts here and runs between the hills in a straight line. But it runs only a few hundred yards.”
“And over there,” Sam said, “another flat strip comes in at an angle and meets it.”
“There’s another over there,” said Remi. “Five — no, six — strips, coming in from six directions to meet at one spot.”
“It looks like an asterisk with a high wall circling the center,” Sam said.
“You could fly over this area a hundred times and not really see it,” Remi said. “The trees make everything seem natural. The shapes are rounded off, but I’ll bet this hill we’re standing on is a pyramid.”
“It’s something big anyway,” Sam said. “Well, I guess we know where we have to go.”
“Of course,” she said. “The place where the roads meet.”
When Sam and Remi reached the bottom of the steep hill, Remi said, “This is creepy.”
“What’s creepy?”
“You know they’re not hills, they’re huge buildings covered with dirt and plants. And these trees around us would be the only things that aren’t creepy except that they’re growing in the middle of this road. I feel like the people who lived here are watching us.”
“Trust me, they’re not.” He looked over his shoulder. “Nope. Not one ghost. But, just in case, let’s leave the Jeep here.”
As they walked, Remi said, “Look at those trees. The cover was all pretty much the same until we got here. Now look. The trees are all in a straight line.”
Sam stood beside her and sighted along the flat strip, where trees of all sizes and many species all ran along the center in a line. He stopped, shrugged off his pack, and began to dig a hole in line with the trees. The dirt was a rich, composted loam that came up easily. Shortly, he had a hole three feet wide and about three feet deep. “Take a look,” he said, and stepped out of the hole.
Remi jumped in, looked down, and used her machete to probe the surface. “It’s V-shaped and has a stone lining. It looks like an irrigation ditch.”
Sam looked around him, turning his body slowly. “I think it might be something else.”
“What?”
“Think back. Dave said that whatever else was going on in the Mayan world during the late classic period, it was made worse by droughts — two hundred years of them at least.”
“What do you think this was?”
“I think this flat space wasn’t a road. The Mayans had no wheeled carts, or tame animals to pull them, so why make it fifty paces wide? And it doesn’t go anywhere. It looks like a plaza, except there are six of them in all directions. I think this place was designed to collect rainwater.”
“Of course,” she said. “Both sides have a subtle slope down to the groove in the center and the groove would direct the water where they wanted it.”
“And that would explain why there are six strips leading inward from all sides. The place where they meet is the catch basin,” Sam said. “The six strips aren’t roads. They’re for catching rain and keeping it from washing away and sinking into the ground.”
“Let’s go see if we’re right,” said Remi. They hurried along the strip toward the spot where all six converged. At times, the brush and saplings came together to make their progress difficult. Here and there, the surface of the strip was bare even of leaves, cleared by some inundation during the rainy season.
At last, they came to the end. The strip ran to the foot of an ancient stone wall about fifteen feet high. The V-shaped ditch led to an opening in the bottom of the wall, where there was a hole about ten inches wide. They walked around the circular wall and saw that each of the other five strips met the wall in the same way, bringing the water in through small openings at its foot. They found that the wall was not a circle with a gap in it for a door or gate. It was a spiral, so that the circular wall stretched for a full three hundred sixty degrees, and then continued ten degrees past the beginning spot so it overlapped for about ten feet to form a narrow, curved corridor ending in an entrance. Sam and Remi sidestepped along the corridor and found themselves inside the circular wall. In the center was a pool of water.
They stepped to the edge and looked down. The pool was quite clear, about thirty feet deep. The bottom received no direct sunlight, at least not after the sun was low. The high stone enclosure around the pool included a walkway near the top that could be reached by a flight of steps.
“Why do you suppose they built a wall?” asked Remi.
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “Maybe during the last days of the city they needed to protect their water. Maybe it was the last line of defense if the city was taken. You could do worse than control the water supply in a siege. And, look, this place is only about thirty feet wide. It would be easy to defend. The walls are about six feet thick at the bottom.” He walked along the wall and picked up a loose rock, then looked across the enclosure. “This rock seems to be a plug. The other holes have fitted stones blocking them too. That would protect the water from poison.”
“I think its time to let Selma and Dave know that we found it,” said Remi.
“You’re right,” said Sam. “Let’s take a few pictures and send them first thing so Dave can tell us what we’ve found.”
Remi took pictures of the well, the pool, the curved entryway, and then stood on the battlement and took pictures in every direction. She added them to the pictures she had taken from the pyramid and on the strip and sent them. Then she waited a minute and called Selma.
“Selma here. Fire away.”
“We’ve found it. We’re on the site, and I’ve just sent you some pictures. Tell Dave Caine that the map is right. There’s a pool of water here with a stone margin around it and a high wall above it. It’s clear, and it seems to be quite deep — thirty feet or more.”