Incarnate: Mars Origin I Series Book III

by Abby L. Vandiver

  “What does that have to do with caves?”

  “Wait a minute and I’ll tell you.”

  I wrapped a towel around me and got out the shower. She followed me into the bedroom and plopped down in a chair. I grabbed my bottle of Nivea lotion off the dresser.

  “Underneath Belize there is this massive cave system. They were always considered to be important portals to the underworld for the Maya. In them you can see Maya artifacts strewn about. Evidence of them using them extensively. But that may be wrong now after what I’ve found. I may have discovered something about the Maya that no one ever knew before.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I hated to tell her that it had been rumored that there were tunnels underground in and around Ecuador. But she was right, this was the first time that I knew of that they had been found in Central America.

  “Okay, so wait back up,” I said. “No one noticed this before? The trap door or whatever it is.”

  “No. I told you.”

  “And this led to a tunnel?”

  “Yes. A tunnel system” She paused. “You know, I guess I should say that I don’t think anyone’s found it before.”

  “That’s hard to believe, Logan.”

  “I know.” She took in a breath. “There is no definitive record of anyone finding it. I looked in everything I could find on past excavations at Caracol.”

  “How many times has that place been excavated?” I had finished dressing and was putting on my shoes and socks.

  “Practically every year since 1985.” She stood up. “That is until 2010. That was the last excavation and no other sessions were scheduled here until this one.”

  “Why? Why they stop excavating? And why did they start again?”

  She hunched her shoulders. “Instead, of coming back to excavate as they had done every year for the past twenty-five years, the reports say that the archaeologist decided not to return. They decided to take the materials they’d excavated over previous seasons and study them in the lab.”

  “Oh. Well. I guess that makes sense. Did you ask for any of that research?”

  “I did. They said there wasn’t any. And they gave no definitive reason why they retreated to the laboratory and why there are no reports of the results of that laboratory research.”

  “You like that word definitive, don’t you?”

  “Ma.”

  I fluttered my eyelashes and shook my head. “I’m just saying . . .” I mumbled.

  “But, mommy I haven’t told you the best part yet.” She plopped down on the bed next to me and bumped her shoulder into mine. There was a gleam in her eye. “There are depictions of corn every fifty feet or so on the walls of the tunnel.”

  “Really?” I sat still thinking about that. “Corn. On the walls, huh?”

  “So you ready to go?” She hopped up, and grabbed my purse and room key. She pulled me up and started pushing me toward the door.

  “I am not climbing up any more steps.”

  “I told you, you don’t have to.”

  “Then where exactly are we going?”

  “To follow the corn.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It appeared that Bacabs, the four gods of the interior earth, was a clue that indicated what we were looking for was underground.

  Not a very good clue if you ask me.

  I wondered with them also being the gods of waterways were we going to have to do any scuba diving any time soon.

  So now, Logan was thinking that by following the corn – the pictures on the walls – we would end up at Maize Mountain. And what we were going to find at Maize Mountain? Logan said, “It’s in the inscription we translated, Ma. How to save the world.”

  Right.

  When Jairo had shimmied his way through the trap door underneath the observatory’s step, he had gone about a half mile, he estimated, when he found an exit to one of the huge cave systems that’s part of Belize’s underworld. That’s the way I got in.

  Thank goodness there were no steps.

  The tunnels looked as if they hadn’t been walked in for hundreds of years. It was hot, stuffy, dusty and dark. Granted it was a fantastic find, but what the undiscovered route meant was that it wasn’t safe. At least to clumsy me.

  I examined the walls and the depictions of corn and had Jairo measure the distance between each one. He measured roughly fifty-two feet, which if I remembered was one of the numbers for the Maya calendar count. They were thoroughly organized with their number system.

  At some point, though, about three miles in, we hit a dead end.

  That’s when Jairo came up with the bright idea of using the ground-penetrating radar so conveniently supplied by Justin’s benefactor to follow the tunnels from up top. The radar worked like a metal detector and looked like a lawnmower.

  “You still won’t tell me who he is? My benefactor. He’s gotta be this great person to have provided all this stuff for my excavation.” Logan said.

  “Nope. Can’t tell you. But I also won’t say a word to him about you using the radar and anything else we might need someplace other than at the site.”

  I thought that was funny. Logan didn’t.

  It appeared that the last somebodies who excavated in Caracol were a husband and wife team who were experts in the study of Ancient Maya. Those were the same somebodies who had excavated there every year since 1985 but had abruptly stopped in 2010. Their decision to study what they had found in the laboratories as had been reported, came after their work using Lidar. Lidar, a portmanteau of light and radar, used remote sensing and had the ability to penetrate the thick canopy of the forests of Belize and detect archaeological ruins.

  “Lidar won’t work.” Logan was sticking a knife into Jairo’s balloon of excitement. “It won’t penetrate the ground. It can only map out features above the ground that can’t be seen.”

  I had to agree with Logan. Lidar wasn’t going to find us underground tunnels. But I didn’t want to voice my concern out loud and be rude to Jairo who was only trying to help.

  “Logan. I know that. But we certainly can’t roll the ground penetrating radar over the whole expanse of Central America,” he said. And we certainly can’t go all gangbuster onto other sites saying, ‘Excuse me we just want to look for tunnels here.’ We map out places – undiscovered places of Maya sites with the Lidar – and then we can take the ground penetrating radar and look there.”

  “Brilliant.” I smiled at Jairo. “And then we’d have a ‘definitive’ area to search.” I looked at Logan with a smirk.

  Logan rolled her eyes at my use of her favorite word.

  “Yeah. I guess that makes sense.”

  “Of course it does,” Jairo said. “My cousin has a plane. And all the equipment we need is at the U.S/’s storage space at the Belize Institute of Archaeology.”

  “I’ll never be able to get that. The Assistant Director hates me.”

  “What did you do to him, Logan?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” She looked away. “Long story. But I’m not even exactly sure why he does,”

  “No worries,” Jairo said. “I have the permission to go there and get equipment.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t requisition it. Somebody might find out what we’re up to.”

  “I’ve got that covered, too. My cousin does the security for the storage areas.”

  Who couldn’t love Jairo?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The Gulf of Mexico

  Central America

  We decided to head north. Toward Georgia. Georgia seemed to meet all the criteria.

  According to my “scientific” estimation.

  The inscription said to “rise up from the interior of the earth” and “from the waterway” and follow the path of the fruit (corn, we surmised) of Maize Mountain. We figured the “interior of the earth” was the tunnels. Maize Mountain, according to the iconographer of the mural in San Bartolo, was on the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast was certainly all about water, so there was our “w
aterway.” The Bacabs came up from the tunnels and from the Gulf Coast and followed a path. We figured this path had to lead to a Maya place. Georgia was the only place, on the Gulf Coast, that had a Maya presence so it stood to reason that the corn path led to Georgia. And with no evidence of a trail from Central America to Georgia showing a Maya route, it made perfect sense for the Maya to have travelled in their underground tunnel system there..

  Jairo wanted to head south. Toward Ecuador, he suggested. He felt that’s where we would find something.

  I knew his motivation. And it wasn’t based on science.

  Erick von Däniken, in his second book, The Gold of the Gods, professed to have been inside of a vast subterranean tunnel system in Ecuador, purportedly so huge that it spanned the entire length of the continent. To get to it, von Däniken claimed he had to go under a river – a waterway - to get into the tunnel system. The tunnel system he was told (he never saw it) led to a library filled with metal books.

  Surely I shouldn’t be one to knock anybody and their alien theories. Basically, my hypothesis of the Ancients and the Mars origin theory was just that – an alien story. And while Jairo was trying to make a logical decision on what he believed to be fact, I just couldn’t bring myself to agree we should go south based on a von Däniken book. That was ludicrous. Plus, there had been no Maya in Ecuador.

  Logan agreed with me.

  We flew in Jairo’s cousin plane and used Lidar to map out areas of ruins that weren’t visible from the ground. And were we found evidence of ruins we rolled the ground penetrating radar across it and we found tunnels. Tunnels that ran north from Belize into Guatemala and along the Usumacinta River ending at the Gulf of Mexico. And in the tunnels we found we were able to follow the corn. It was on the walls, every fifty-two feet. We found Maya artifacts strewn throughout just like in the caves of Belize. Along the way we also found rooms and antechambers of the tunnels. All of them nearly empty. No evidence of hidden gold or silver. But in each room Logan looked for trap doors and levers. She left no stone unturned. We didn’t find what we were looking for, not that we knew what that was.

  Then they stopped. The tunnels just ended at the Gulf. We couldn’t find any evidence of tunnels systems into Mexico.

  Mexico, of course, didn’t have any large areas of unexcavated land, but there were Maya sites, but we couldn’t find anything underneath them. Still, we figured we were on the right track and we decided to grab our passports, board the plane, hop over the Gulf, and head straight to Georgia. Logan thought we’d find more tunnels there.

  I didn’t tell her what I thought.

  Chapter Forty

  Gainesville, Georgia

  We arrived in Georgia and didn’t know where to start.

  Jairo didn’t wait while we tried to figure it out he wanted to go sightseeing. He left us in the hotel room soon after we arrived

  I sat on the bed and Logan sat in the chair in one of the bedrooms of our suite. Follow the corn was all we had to go on and there was no corn to follow. No tunnels. No writing on the walls. But there was evidence of the Maya.

  Rock Track Point.

  Logan found it on the Internet and as soon as we reined Jairo in from being a tourist, we went to the Gainesville Campus of North Georgia University. We found a professor in the History and Anthropology Department that was more than happy to talk to two fellow archeologists showing interest in his local legends. We found out that in February of 2000 archaeologists discovered an unidentified site in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. They name it Rock Track Point.

  It had all the attributes of a Maya habitat.

  There were water features and dams to control water. There rock walls that appeared to form terraces. There were over three hundred stone structures. Archaeologists believed that the Maya in Mexico disappeared around 900 AD, and unlike my belief that they left on spaceships, local scientists believed they ended up in Georgia. Once there, they had assimilated into what we now know as the Creek Indians. Same architecture. Same cultural traditions. Art. Cranial deformation. Mounds. Linguistics. In fact half of the words used by the Creek Indians were Mayan.

  Logan seemed quite pleased with herself for following the corn to Georgia that is until the professor told us that in 2012, Federal authorities began prohibiting access to the site. We wouldn’t be able to get to it.

  “Why would they stop people from seeing the site?” she asked. We had made it back to the hotel. We sat in the living area of the suite.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “They probably found something there,” Jairo said. He smiled at me “Maybe Maize Mountain. Maybe Gold.” He raised an eyebrow and nodded his head.

  “It’s the government. What can you do?” I said.

  “Ma. I know you not just following the rules and doing anything?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You break the rules all the time to get what you need for research.”

  “That is not true.” I couldn’t believe she said that. But it did make me think what had I done,”

  Jairo came to my rescue. “I don’t think your mother would do that,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “You read her book. All that stuff was true.” She glanced over at me. “All true.”

  “We can’t find out anything here,” Jairo said. He was leaning against the door frame. “I think we should head south.”

  “South? Not to Ecuador, Jairo. We can’t go to Ecuador.” Logan shook her head. She seemed not to want to even listen to the idea.

  “I’m not suggesting that,” he said. “I was thinking we’d make Caracol our starting point and work our way south from there. See how far down we end up.” He gave us a nod as if to say it was decided and went and sat at the desk and fired up the computer.

  I looked at Logan. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “I don’t know, Ma. What if we’re missing something? What if we don’t go and it’s the place where it is?”

  “What exactly is ‘it,’ Logan? Our clues came from a 3,000 year old inscription. Whatever they were to find, these four mythological gods, is probably just as – imaginary.”

  “I don’t think so, Ma.” She looked at me. “Would you have given up this quickly if this was your excavation?”

  “You are a long way from your site. You’ve kind of gone rogue.” I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “My argument in this would be that I don’t believe in any of the Maya gods so I couldn’t even imagine what we could be looking for that they would have used to save their people.”

  “You don’t believe it?” She frowned at me. “But if they came here from Mars you would believe that?”

  I opened my mouth to answer but Jairo’s screech interrupted me. “I found it.” He turned around and looked at us, excitement all over his face. “We have to go here. Before we leave Georgia. We have to see the Guidestones.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Elberton, Georgia

  The Georgia Guidestones were in Elberton, Georgia, an hour and a half away from Gainesville. We drove the rented car and had to endure the manifestation of Jairo’s gleeful anticipation – non-stop talking - the whole time. He didn’t need me or Logan to participate in his conversation, he carried on all by himself.

  He wanted to see them not only because they were interesting he said, but because they fit into a Maya legend. He figured because of that Logan and I should be just as excited as he was, and couldn’t understand our causal attitude about the side trip. Logan just wanted to get back to Central America and follow more corn depictions stamped on walls of underground trails.

  The legend, per Jairo, asserted that the Maya practiced human sacrifice to please the gods so they would allow the sun to shine. But, he told us, that may not be the reason. He said that some stories told how they practiced it to be like the gods. To control life and the creation of life. By doing it they were exemplified in the image of their gods who had created them and inf
licted population control measures against them. The gods became angry when it were too many of them.

  I found that amazing especially since Logan told me that at one point they numbered nearly ten million. But I also took it with a grain of salt, Jairo had a penchant for believing in the outlandish.

  The guidestones were visible from the highway. They were huge. Stonehenge-like stone slabs set in a grassy field. Six stones in all. Each one engraved.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Jairo said. He and I had walked over to see them up close. “They’re nearly twenty feet tall and the top stone there,” he pointed up to it, “is astronomically aligned.”

  “How do you know about them,” I asked.

  “I read a lot.”

  I chuckled. I should have known that. “Looks like not everyone likes them,” I said. I was circling the stones taking in all their glory and saw how someone had defaced one of the stones with graffiti, just like someone had done to Logan’s lone stone slab in the jungle. “Who had these erected?”

  “No one knows. He swore his banker to secrecy about his real identity. Just said to refer to him as R.C. Christian.”

  “No one knows who he really was?” Logan asked walking over toward us. She had been leaning on the car not venturing out to take a look until she heard the mystery behind them. “The banker never gave up his secret?”

  “Nope. The guy who wanted them erected, this Mr. Christian, disappeared before they were even erected. And he never buried the time capsule either. See here . . .” Jairo ran his hand over an inscription on one of the slabs. “They engraved that a time capsule was buried but the place for the date is still blank.”

  I lifted up my sunglasses to get a better look. “The guy didn’t come back and bury it.” I commented more than asked. “Oh look, he says the name is a pseudonym, but pseudonym is spelled incorrectly.”

  “What are they for? What’s the purpose of the stones and their inscriptions?” Logan asked.