Gamay eased back into the water and swam across the pool, then along the wall to a slight bulge in the limestone. Holding on to the ledge with one hand, she reached up and found a hole big enough for her fingers. Using the amulet as a crude adze, she chipped away until the space was big enough to give her fingers a grip. Then she pulled herself up so her knee was balanced on the ledge and chipped another hole somewhat higher.
Once she was able to stand .to her full height the work went quicker. She inched up the face of the wail. Clinging to the sheer rock face with her face pressed against the hard surface gave her an intimate knowledge of the limestone's character. As she suspected, the wall was cracked and gouged. She used natural handholds or simply enlarged existing holes. Her hair was covered with powdery white dust. She had to stop occasionally to wipe her nose on her shoulder. One good sneeze would blast her into space.
How did Spiderman make it look so easy? She would have given anything for a couple of Spidey's webshooting wrist bands. Hanging on was tough in itself; what exhausted her the most was having to work with her arm extended over her head. Her shoulder ached, and often she had to let her numbed arm dangle until the blood came back into it. She wondered if she would ever work the kink out of her neck.
Halfway up the wall she looked down: The white smudge of Chi's shirt was barely visible in the gloom. He'd been watching her progress.
Are you all right, Dr. Gamay?" he said, his voice echoing.
She spit out a powdery gob. Unladylike but who cares. "Piece of cake."
Damn, she wished that yellow-fanged cretin hadn't stolen her wristwatch before stuffing them underground. She had lost track of time. The light coming into the cave was more slanted and dimmer than when she started. The sun must be setting. The tropical night fell with the swiftness of a guillotine blade. Soon the cave would be pitch black. Making a grab for the vines would be tough even with light to see them by In the darkness it would be impossible.
Dr. Chi must have sensed her doubts. Again his encouraging voice came from below, calmly telling her that she was doing fine, that she was almost there. And all at once she was there, where the ceiling curved into the domed roof. She swiveled her head slowly and saw she was level with the tips of the vines. She moved higher to give herself the margin of error she needed if her leap was to succeed. Now she was under the curving wall.
The strain was telling on her tired fingers. She had to move fast or not at all.
Another quick glance. The vines hung about six feet out from the wall
Think your moves through. But be fast! She mentally rehearsed. Spring off the wall, twist her body in midair; grab a vine, and hold on.
As she told the professor. Pieceacake.
Her fingers felt as if they were being torn from her hands. She angled her shoulder away from the wall.
No more time. Now.
She took a deep breath and leaped.
She spun around as her body described a parabola, her hands reaching hungrily for the vine. Brushed, then caught it. Dry and brittle. She could tell from the stiffness that it wasn't going to hold her weight. Snap! Grabbed with her free hand for the other vine. Felt it break.
And fell.
Still holding the useless pieces of vegetation, she hit the water. No time to move her feet or head around for a clean dive. She landed on her side with a sickening splat! When she broke the surface her left arm and thigh stung from the impact. She bit back the pain and. swam in an awkward sidestroke to the edge of the pool.
Chi's hand, surprisingly strong, took her by the wrist and helped her out of the water. She sat for a moment trying to rub die sting out of her thigh.
Are you all right"
"I'm fine," she said between gasps. The fall had knocked the air out of her. "Phooey, after all that work." She handed the amulet back to Chi. "Guess the gods had other plans for us." .
"From what I saw they would have had to give you wings."
"I would settle for a parachute." She broke into laughter. "I must have been quite the sight flying through the air holding on to these things." She tossed aside the useless vine fragments clutched in her hand.
"I don't think Tarzan need fear any competition, Dr. Gamay"
"Nor do I. Tell me again about the passageway, the one with water in it."
The professor took her hand. "Come," he said.
The chamber was almost totally in darkness, and Chi could have been leading her into the jaws of hell for all she knew. At one point he stopped, and a second later the flame from his butane lighter flared and threw grotesque shadows on the rough walls.
"Watch your head," Chi cautioned, leading her into a passageway. "The ceiling gets lower, but we don't have far to go."
After a few minutes the tunnel eventually widened and gave Gamay more headroom. The passageway sloped down slightly, abruptly ending in a blank wall. Below the wall was a small pool.
"The tunnel dips below the water table here," Chi explained. "Whether it goes up or down after that, I don't know"
"But it's not impossible that this tunnel might lead to the surface."
"Si. The ground of the Yucatan is simply a limestone . slab honey combed with natural caverns and tunnels carved out over the eons by water action."
Gamay shivered, not so much from the cold and damp but at the claustrophobic prospect of swimming into the waterfilled earth. She willed her fears away, but some lingered.
"Professor Chi; I know this is a long shot. I'm going to see if this leads anywhere. I can hold my breath for about two minutes, which will give me time to swim a fair distance."
"It is very dangerous."
"Not any more so than waiting for those jokers up above to decide when they're going to wall us permanently into this place. After my dentally challenged friend has some fun, of course."
Chi didn't argue. He knew she was right.
"Well," she said, "time for a dip."
She slid into the pool and started a sequence of noisy hyperventilation exercises to fill her lungs with oxygen. When she had absorbed air to the point of dizziness, she ducked underwater and scoped out the tunnel opening. She rose to the surface and reported her find to Chi. "It angles down, but I don't know how far it goes."
He nodded. "Make sure you allow enough air to return." Chi leaned over and handed her his butane lighter. "You may need this where you're going."
Gamay was already into her deep breathing exercises, so she tucked the fighter into her shorts, gave him the okay sign, and dove into the blackness. Counting seconds off in her headone chimpanzee, two chimpanzeelike a child estimating the closeness of lightning, she swam just below the ceiling. She had decided to push herself to the limit. Swimming forward for nearly two minutes, she could cover thirty or forty yards before having to turn around for a lung bursting dash back.
As it turned out she didn't have to burst her lungs at all. She was barely past her sixtieth chimpanzee when the ceiling angled up sharply and her extended hand broke out of the water, followed an instant later by her head. She exhaled and took a tentative breath. The air was musty but good.
Gamay couldn't believe her good luck. About time they got a break. The tunnel must dip then come up like the waterseal trap under a kitchen sink She was familiar with plumbing from the almost constant renovation work around her Georgetown house. She laughed at the thought of swimming in an oversized drain, but her mirth was also prompted by relief. The sound of her voice echoed in the darkness, quickly sobering her with the reminder that she wasn't out of this mess yet. Not by a long shot.
She dug Chi's lighter out of her pocket and held it high, Statue of Liberty fashion. After several tries the lighter flint sparked and the flame hissed into life. Treading water Gamay pirouetted and saw that she was at the bottom of a steepsided circular hole. She sidestroked around the perimeter, thinking this is what it must feel like to be a kitten down a well. How on earth would she climb these sides? She didn't relish a repeat performance of her Icarus-like plunge into the ceno
te.
She floated over to a shelflike waterlevel protuberance and raised the lighter. There was another ledge a short distance above the first. Her heart raced with excitement. Steps! There might be a way out of this pit after all. Losing no time she pulled herself out of the water and climbed the steps that spiraled around the inside of the stone cylinder.
Soon she was over the rim of the well. Using the lighter again, she explored her surroundings. She was in a small cave. Her eye fell on the narrow furrow in the stone floor, and she followed it to a low ceiling passageway. She held the lighter dose to the opening and watched the flame flutter. Air was blowing through. Stale and warm. But still air.
Within seconds she was back in the well. She hyperventilated a few times then swam back the way she had come. Surfacing, she blurted, "I think I found a way out."
The professor's voice answered in the hollow darkness. "Dr. Gamay. I was afraid you were gone for good. So much time had passed."
"'Sorry to keep you waiting. Wait'll I show you what I found. Can you swim?"
"I used to do laps every day in the Harvard pool." He paused. "How long will I have to hold my breath?"
"Just the other side of the wall. You can do it."
They found each other's hand, and Chi splashed into the basin. With their heads close together, Gamay instructed him in breathing exercises. Between breaths he said, "I wish now my ancestors were Incan rather than Mayan."
"Pardon?"
"Large lung capacity from the thin mountain air. I'm basically a flatlander."
"You'll do fine, even for a flatlander. Ready?"
"I'd prefer to wait until I grow gills, but since that's not possible, vamanos!" He squeezed her hand in signal. Gamay sank beneath the surface, quickly found the continuation of the tunnel, and practically yanked the professor through the passageway. The journey took less than half the time of her earlier trip, but the professor was huffing and puffing when they surfaced, and she was glad the distance wasn't any greater.
She flicked the lighter. The professor's head bobbed a few feet away. He was sucking in big gulps of air. Somehow he had managed to keep the baseball cap on his head.
"Steps are over here," Gamay said, towing him behind her. She helped him to the top of the well.
Looking around, Chi said, "My guess is that the inhabitants of the city used this well as an emergency supply when the cenote and the river dried up after the rainy season." Chi got down on his knees and peered into the well. "When the water was high they could simply dip into it with their vessels. When the level dropped completely out of their reach they carved the steps. Like that coffee commercial. Good to the last drop."
He stood and traced the track in the floor. "The marks of many feet," he said in wonder.
Gamay was as interested in ancient civilizations as Chi, but the lighter flame was growing smaller and dimmer. When she pointed this out to the professor he picked up several pieces of charred bark from the floor and wove them into a serviceable torch that cast off smoky flames.
"Castor oil plant," he explained. Back on his dry land element, he took the lead. "Well, Dorothy, shall we follow the yellow brick road?" he said with an airy wave of the torch.
Glancing back to make sure Gamay was behind him, Chi ducked through the opening in the wall and into a rough tunnel. Chi's head comfortably cleared the low soot-encrusted ceiling, but Gamay had to bend over as she ascended the crooked and steeply pitched passageway. After only a few minutes the tunnel ended abruptly at the bottom of a narrow shaft. Gamay could stand again.
A crude ladder led up the shaft. Chi tested the rungs, pronounced the ladder rickety but safe, and climbed to the top of the shaft, where he knelt at the rim and held the torch as a beacon for Gamay.
The ladder miraculously held, and Gamay joined him at the opening of another passageway. This one led to a cavern about twice the size of the cave with the well in it. And like that chamber, there was only one way out. The tunnel was about a yard wide and slightly more than that tall. They navigated the twists and turns of the gradually ascending passageway on their hands and knees. The enclosed space would have been hot and stifling even without the smoke and heat from the torch, and at times Gamay found it hard to breathe. It was difficult to tell length and direction, but she guessed that the tunnel ran for about sixty feet, doubling back on itself at one point.
She had been crawling with her head down, glancing upward from time to time to make sure she didn't get too close to Chi although that was unlikely. He scuttled through the tunnels like a mole rat. The torchlight vanished unexpectedly, and she bumped into the professor's legs. She stood to see what the holdup was.
"Wait," Chi said, and put his arm back for emphasis.
He seemed frozen in place. In the torch's light Gamay quickly saw why The tunnel had ended at a ledge overlooking a yawning chasm. Three logs had been laid across the abyss. The early engineers who built the span had reinforced it with cross supports and thoughtfully attached a pole for a railing on one side.
"I'll go first," Chi said. Gingerly he put his weight on a log, and when it held he pressed forward. A quick few steps, and he was across.
"It's . not exactly the Golden Gate," he said apologetically, "but it seems to be fine."
The word seems hung in the air and overshadowed the rest of the reassuring sentence. Gamay balefully eyed the crude span. She really didn't have any choice. Reassuring herself that she only weighed thirty-five pounds more than the professor, she tripped across the bridge like a highwire walker. It was steadier than she anticipated, and the rough logs didn't roll. Still she was glad when she reached Chi's outstretched hand and put her foot back on solid rock.
"Well done," he said, guiding her to another shaft leading upward. Gamay almost panicked when she didn't see a ladder, but Chi pointed out the steps worn into the wet and slippery rock. They were barely big enough for her toes and-fingers, and she had to use every bit of rock-climbing muscle and skill. The infrastructure around here was made for slightly built Mayans, not tall Anglos, she grumbled to herself.
At the top of the shaft was another low tunnel. Gamay's throat felt like the Sahara desert on a hot day. Her climbing, swimming, and crawling exertions were catching up with her. Her eyes stung from cinders, and her knees were raw from crawling. At one point she and the professor had to squeeze through broken rock. Gamay might have stopped for good had it not been for an exultant shout from the professor.
"Dr. Gamay, we're out!"
Seconds later they stood in a chamber so large the light from the torch wasn't bright enough to illuminate the high ceiling. She rubbed the soot from her eyes. Were those columns? She borrowed the torch only to laugh softly when the light fell not on columns but on huge stalactites. The cavern was irregularly circular. Passages branched off from the chamber. One opening was semicircular in shape and twice as tall as a man. In contrast to the rough opening they had just come through, the portals were smooth and even, the surface of the floor unexpectedly flat.
"You could drive a car through this!" Gamay exclaimed.
"There are legends of underground highways that ran between villages. I always thought they were simply exaggerations, that some of the locals had seen natural tunnels and mistaken them for artificial ones. But this . . ."
They were brought to a halt where a section of fallen roof blocked the way, and turned back to the main chamber, stopping first to explore a side passage. They entered a miniature plaza whose rectangular tiled floor was surrounded by real columns, not stalactites. The vaulted ceiling was smoothed and plastered, as was the wall, which was adorned with murals of red figures in profile.
"Incredible," Gamay said. "Is this some sort of underground temple?"
Chi walked along the walls squinting at the figures whose paint seemed as fresh as if it had been applied the day before.
"The figures are Mayan, but, then again, they are not," the professor whispered.
Pictured was a procession of profiled figures carr
ying goods on shoulders and heads. Vases, baskets of bread, gold containers, odd shapes that could have been ingots.
"The boats again." Gamay pointed out merchant ships and war vessels similar to those carved into the walls of the structure Chi showed her earlier.
A whole story unfolded as they walked along the walls. Ships coming in. Unloading. The goods being taken off in procession. Even a painting of a man holding a list, obviously a teller. Soldiers standing guard. It was an ancient documentary of some great event or events.
Their attention turned to the center of the room and a large round stone pedestal supported by four heavy columnar legs. On the table was a cut box of purplish crystal-specked stone, similar in appearance to the temple structures on the summits of Mayan pyramids.
Gamay bent low and looked through the square opening in the side of the box.
"There's something inside," she said. She reached in with trembling fingers, lifted out the object, and set it on the mirrored surface of the table. Chi had found more castor branches to replenish the torch, and it burned brighter than ever.
The device, for that is surely what it was, consisted of a boxy wood housing inset with a metal wheel which in turn was strengthened with cross braces. Within the wheel was a large gear that apparently rotated around a central axle, and meshed with its teeth were several smaller gears.
"What is it?" Gamay said.
A machine of sorts."
"It looks like . . . no, it can't be."
"Don't keep me in the dark, Dr. Gamay"
"Well, it resembles something I've seen before, an artifact taken off an ancient shipwreck, made of bronze as this appears to be but terribly corroded. It was thought to be an astrolabe, a navigational device to determine the attitude of the sun and stars. Someone did a gamma radiograph. They found gear ratios that related to astronomical and calendar data. It was far more complex than a simple astrolabe. There were thirty gears, all enmeshed, even a differential gear. It was basically a computer."
"A computer. Where did you see it?"
She paused. At the National Museum in Athens."
Chi stared at the machine. "Impossible."
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