“Okay. That’s the last one.” Logan stood up and grabbed the picture off the printer. Her eyes darted over to Jairo. She leaned in and whispered, “Did you tell him you were married.”
“What?”
“Logan, I’m sorry. Did you want something to drink,” Jairo came to the back, cutting into our conversation.
“No. I’m fine, Jairo.” She turned and looked at me. “I think we should go.”
“Go?” Jairo looked at me. “Why? I thought you wanted to decipher the inscription on the slab?”
“We can do that at my trailer.”
At her trailer? Wasn’t I banned from the trailer?
“Don’t go, Logan. Let me help,” Jairo said, almost pleading. “I want to help. Look I have all these books.” He waved his hand the length of the bookcase and picked one off the shelf. “This one is all about Mayan hieroglyphics.”
“We can stay,” I said.
Logan shot me a look.
“We can stay,” I said firmly. I leaned in closer to Logan. “Is that why you keep mentioning your father? Did you think I’d forgot about him because I’m around Jairo?” I smiled patronizingly and patted her on her back “It’s okay. I know I’m married,” I said with a smirk. “Now don’t be silly. Be professional. And don’t be rude.” I smacked her on her arm.
She drew in a sharp breath. “Fine.”
Jairo was pulling books by the armful off of his shelf and dropping them on the table. He seemed quite happy with his collection.
I went over to the table to get a looksee. I moved the books from on top of one another to view the titles. I noticed one of the books he was so proud of was Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? It looked worn and dog-eared like it had been read many times.
No wonder he liked my book.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“What’s this?” I picked up one of the pictures off the dining room table and pointed to a hieroglyphics. She had just started going over them.
Logan held her breath, and closed her eyes. She opened them and looked at me and then closed them again. “I don’t know, yet,” she said in a sing-songy voice.
I held up one hand, I didn’t know if she saw me. “Okay. Let me know if you need some help.”
I walked back into the living room and sat down. Jairo followed me. Before he could sit down, Logan called me.
“I do need some help, Ma. Can you come in here?”
I sauntered back into the dining room. She narrowed her eyes and gave me a sideway glance. I just shook my head and stood next to her. I knew what she was up to – jarring my memory. I’d been married for more than thirty years. How could I forget that?
“What’cha need?”
I really did want to help her.
“I don’t know if these are clues to the carving on the side of the slab. I need you to help me figure it out.”
“I’ll try, but I told you I’m not good with clues.”
“I am.” Jairo popped up behind me. “I’d love to help.” He squeezed by me and picked up one of the pictures.
Logan exhaled and glanced at me. She pulled out a chair from under the table and sat. She put the picture so close to her face it nearly touched her nose. Without looking up from the picture, she asked, “You know anything about Mayan hieroglyphics?”
“A little,” he said. “That’s the reason for all the books.” He picked up a picture and pointed to a glyph. “For instance, this is the symbol for what the Shellhas System denotes as God D.” He looked up at Logan. “The god Itzamna.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yes.” She chuckled.
That’s right. “But I already knew that the slab had something to do with Itzamna.”
“And here,” he pointed to something on the picture, “is God H.”
“God H?”
“Yeah. The Maya deities of the Earth’s interior and also of its waterways. Bacab. The Bacabs father was Itzamna, the creator of humankind.”
“Bacab,” she said quietly. She picked up another picture, similar to the one that Jairo held and looked at it closely. Logan let a smile escape. “It sure is.”
“Let me see it,” I said. I figured I may as well learn about this stuff. Logan pointed to the two symbols for me. “Oh. Okay.”
“I’ve got a book on them.” Jairo dug through the pile he’d unloaded onto the table.
“Them?” I asked.
“Yes, there were four of them. One name. Four deities.” He pulled out the book and handed it to me. “And I’ve got a magnifying glass for you, Logan. Hold on.” He left scurrying off back behind the curtain to the alcove.
“You got a notebook in that knapsack?” I asked Logan. She shook her head. She was concentrating hard on the picture. “Jairo, bring a notebook too,” I called to him. “One I can keep. If you have it.”
The notebook was more for Logan than me. Although it was nice to flip through the pages and read on the research I was using it for, my eidetic memory kept everything I read stuffed safely inside my brain.
“Thanks.” I took the notebook from Jairo when he got back. I noticed he had one for himself. I dug a pen out of my purse, pulled up a seat and starting jotting down what we’d got so far. First thing I wrote was “Follow the Corn.”
“Let me see that.” I pointed across the table. “Is that another book about the Bacab?”
“Just Bacab, Ma? That’s the only thing you’re going to look at?” Logan said. She pushed it over to me. “Jairo, where’s the book you’ve got on hieroglyphics?”
“I have lots. But I’ve got a good one by the computer. Let me grab it.”
Okay . . . I looked at my daughter. Maybe I could learn more than just about Bacab.
I got up and grabbed a few of the other books. I put the two on Bacab on the bottom. I’d look at them last. I laid the notebook on the table and the pen on top of it and opened up a book and started thumbing through it.
“Okay,” Logan exhaled. “One line at a time.” I heard her mumble. She reached out and with her fingertips and slid the notebook I’d been using over and started writing.
Jairo picked up a picture and cracked open a book as well.
My first book was about the Popol Vuh. Apparently, that was the bible of Maya culture. It was comprised of narratives of mythical and historical events. The Maya creation story and genealogies. And like Logan said, everything corn.
The book’s creation story piqued my interest. I remember that Logan told me one myth was that man was created from corn. It relayed that animals were created first, followed by humans. Just like the Holy Bible. Although, in my years of excavations, I found that most religions had stories similar to biblical accounts. But what was fascinating to me, was that the Popol Vuh said that there were two sets of humans. The second set was made from wood “but didn’t have souls or minds.”
That was almost exactly what the AHM Manuscripts had said about a man the Ancients had created. They acknowledged that God created man, but then wrote that they had made their own, too. Not a cloned one, but they created one. I had deduced that the man they created was the Neanderthal. I saw the words from the manuscript float in front of me:
We placed our crude imitation of man on the third planet. We watched and observed. We were never to get it quite right though, the creatures did not develop as we hoped. They were incapable of speech, or a brain that could support or comprehend the knowledge we possessed. Truly our first attempts were more animal-like than human, but, in our eyes we had triumphed.
Their arrogance had been the start of their fall.
I closed my eyes.
Could the Maya creation story be about the same thing that was in my manuscripts? I glanced up at Logan, afraid she might be able to read my thoughts. She’d have a fit if she knew I was associating her slab with my manuscripts.
“Ma.”
I jumped.
“What are you doing?”
“Learning about the Maya.”
Could she read my thoughts?
Learn it real quick? Help Jairo? Was it okay to be nice to him now?
“Uhmm. Sweetie. It takes years to learn-”
“Ma.”
Okay, that excuse wasn’t going to work.
“Jairo, would you hand me a book. And one of those pictures, please?” I said.
Darn my photographic memory.
Chapter Thirty-Three
And it was said to the Bacabs by Itzamna, their creator,
When the sky should descend
And fall down upon the earth.
All would be carried away.
Then you shall rise up from the interior of the earth,
And from the waterway.
Follow the path of the fruit of Maize Mountain.
Save your people, Itzamna said to Bacabs.
Bring to destruction those that seek to destroy your world.
That’s what Logan’s stone slab read.
More or less.
It was one o’clock in the morning. Really two a.m. for me because I had changed time zones when I arrived. It seemed like I had been there for a week instead of just two days. I spent all day in the jungle then I’d done a crash course in Mayan hieroglyphics. I’d spent the last three or so hours working with Logan and Jairo deciphering the glyphs of her stone slab. Well, all we could make out from the pictures. I wasn’t even sure if we had got most of it right. We ended up laying all the photos on the table like a jigsaw puzzle and those nine lines was what we got. There were a few symbols left to decipher but I was too pooped to pop.
“What’s Maize Mountain?” I asked yawning.
Logan had just read the translation out loud again for the hundredth time. She’d been reciting it every time we figured out something new. It didn’t matter how many times she read it, none of it meant anything to me.
“It’s where the ancient Maya stored the corn seeds,” Jairo said. “Corn can’t grow wild. It has to be planted.”
“I read about that,” I said. “That’s really interesting. So the ‘fruit’ of Maize Mountain is corn.” I looked at Jairo and he hunched one shoulder insinuating that was a given. “So then, Logan,” I said yawning, “Mommy hates to be an I-told-you-so kind of mommy – but, I told you so.”
“What, Ma? What did you tell me?”
“Your slab says ‘Follow the Corn,’ in English.” My words came out with a yawn. “Wouldn’t have known the stone slab said it too, in Mayan no less, if we hadn’t of translated the rest of it.”
“Follow the corn?” questioned Jairo.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s kind of the reason that I’m here.”
I saw her slump in the chair out the corner of my eye. I grabbed the last book in my pile, the one on the Bacabs and flipped through it.
I was so sleepy my eyes were starting to water and I was having trouble keeping them opened. I swiped away the tears so I could see the book. “So it seems your Bacabs were supposed to ‘follow the corn’ and ‘save their people’ not that that helps us figure anything out,” I said turning the pages of the book.
“Hey, listen to this,” I said. “There’s a mural that depicts a scene showing four babies,” I glanced up at Logan and Jairo. “I’m guessing Bacabs - with their umbilical cords still attached, surrounding a fifth figure. The fifth figure is-” I looked at Logan. “The Maya maize god – that’s Itzamna, right?” I didn’t wait for answer. “The Maize god is depicted as rising from Maize Mountain.”
Logon held the notebook where she had written the translation up close up to her face and was reading over the words again, her lips moving, her voice barely audible.
“Look, Logan. The Bacabs, their daddy Itzamna, and Maize Mountain. All the stuff contained on your stone slab,” I said and poked her. “All the stuff we just translated. Look.”
Logan slowly turned from her gaze at the paper in her hand and looked at the book I held out. When her eyes finally met the picture of the mural, she said, “Give me that.” She took the book from me. “I’ve seen that before.”
Jairo got up, walked around the table and looked over her shoulder. “In the astronomical observatory at your site.”
Logan craned her neck back so she could see him standing over her. “You’ve seen it too?” He nodded. “Mom, where is this?”
“Uhm . . .” I recalled from memory, “San Bartolo”
“In San Bartolo? Really?”
I stifled a yawn. “It’s a small archaeological site located in the Department of Petén in northern Guatemala.” I saw the description under the picture in my mind. “It is roughly fifty miles northeast of Tikal.” I quoted verbatim. “So what, that’s about a hundred miles from here?”
“I’d have to check. But we need to go there.”
“I thought you saw this on a wall at your excavation site?”
“I did. But I want to find out about this one. Mine isn’t this big or colorful. I’m not overlooking anything else anymore. There may be a link I should know about.” She looked at the both of us. “Who’s up for a road trip?”
Me and Jairo raised our hands.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Tikal, Guatemala
I needed rest like a junkie needed a fix.
But I couldn’t fall asleep. I tossed and turned, wrapped up in the sheets, I popped upright in the bed.
Sheesh.
I looked over at the clock. Nine a.m.
Logan had decided we’d wait until the weekend to go to San Bartolo. She didn’t want to take any more time away from being at the site. I was thinking I should go back home, but she insisted she needed me. I couldn’t stay here forever, though. I had work to do at home. Plus, I owed Senator Cook some information. I couldn’t wait to hand it over to him and take the burden off my shoulder.
I hadn’t even contemplated long or hard on whether I should give it to him. Finding out that part of mankind’s history had caused me enough grief. I spent years hiding it, and hiding from it. I was ready to give it up.
I looked toward the window. Sunlight was peeping through a slit in the drapes.
I decided to stay a few more days. How often do children admit to needing their parents?
Logan had gone back out to the stone slab and taken more pictures. She had wanted to get a better shot of a few glyphs we couldn’t make out. She had brought them to me.
I plopped back down on the pillow and saw the new pictures laying on the desk.
I guess I could take a look at those . . .
I threw back the covers, and swung my legs over the side. “What the heck. I can’t sleep anyway.” I stumbled into the bathroom, threw some water on my face and brushed my teeth. Running my wet fingers through my frizzled hair, it dried my hands. I walked back and sat at the desk and took the magnifying glass Jairo had lent us and stared at one of the pictures. Then I cracked open the book on Maya hieroglyphics.
I sat in the chair for an hour and had figured out all but two of the remaining few symbols we’d had trouble with. The new pictures made a world of difference. I jotted down the new words. It was the last line of the inscription. Actually I’d thought I’d figured out the other two, but it just didn’t make sense.
Maybe my mind is just too foggy.
Yawning, I stretched and decided to take the pictures, notes and book back to bed with me. I crawled in and got under the sheet and tried to get comfortable – folding the pillows, flipping them, stacking two under my head. Finally I found the perfect position.
Oh shoot.
I looked over at the desk. The magnifying glass.
I’m not getting back up.
I stared at the picture and then stared at the wall. I focused again on the picture. I picked up another picture to see the symbol from a different angle, squinted my eyes and then closed them. I saw all the symbols floating around in the black of my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes, and exhaled noisily.
I can
’t figure this out. I’m too tired.
I picked up the paper and stared at the words I’d written. What words would make this into a coherent sentence? It couldn’t be what I think it is. That doesn’t make sense.
I picked up the book again. I flipped through the pages of the book and thought maybe a dedicated read would help so I flipped to the first page of the book and started reading from there. That lasted about twenty minutes and I was back to flipping through.
I threw the covers off and went and got the magnifying glass, climbed back into bed and stared at one of the symbols. Nothing. So I stared some more.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes and felt myself drifting off. The magnifying glass dropped out of my hand.
Forget this.
I pushed everything over to one side of the bed.
“I’m taking a nap.” I dragged myself out of the bed to go to the bathroom first.
What in the world was I doing trying to translate Mayan hieroglyphics, anyway?
I sat on the toilet, held my head in my hand, closed my eyes and sighed.
Then my eyes popped opened.
“Oh my, God.” I shouted. “I know what it says.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Caracol, Belize
Her mother, Justin Dickerson, wasn’t a well-renowned archaeologist, but she was smart. She asked the right questions, and knew where to go to find out the answers. Justin spoke seven languages and according to her had decoded the Voynich Manuscript, which no one had been able to do in over six hundred years.
Her mother was Logan’s first thought when she found the slab. This might be something big she remembered thinking. Something significant. She had hated to ask for help. But it turned out a good thing she did.
Her mother had just called and said she had figured out the remaining hieroglyphics. Logan was elated that her mother was able to do it. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about what it said, though.
But she couldn’t linger on those thoughts right then. She was expecting a visitor and from his demeanor on the phone he sounded unhappy. And, Logan thought, slightly intoxicated.
Incarnate: Mars Origin I Series Book III Page 13
