Indiana Jones and the Secretof the Sphinx

by Max McCoy

  Only, this was not the corpse of a city that Indy remembered finding—this was a living metropolis, and it was still in its youth. People filled the streets and moved in the shadows of buildings that Indy had seen only as heaping ruins amid the encroaching jungle. The structures were magnificent limestone monuments, trimmed in green and terracotta. The number of buildings, however, were fewer than the ruins of modern-day Cozan would indicate there to have been. Behind him was the Temple of the Serpent, but it was smaller—it was much lower and had fewer courses than he could recall.

  Indy stepped down from the temple onto the broad flagstones of the busy main thoroughfare. Although he gaped at the people he passed—robust, brown-skinned people dressed mostly in tunics made from fibers of the maguey plant—none of them so much as returned Indy's stare.

  Many of them hastily bartered corn, fruit, and spitted meat at the thatch-covered stalls on either side of the street, while others seemed to be nervously awaiting some event. They glanced up at the sky from time to time, or noted the diminishing length of their shadows on the flagstones with the same expression as a businessman on Wall Street would glance at his wristwatch.

  The sun was almost overhead.

  Whatever event was being anticipated, it was obvious that it would take place at noon.

  Although here in British Honduras one would expect to find Mayans, Indy mused, these people had the sharper features of the Aztecs of Central Mexico. Yet, there were none of the easily recognizable trademarks of Aztec culture. Indy could not identify their speech, but he knew it was not Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The predominant feature of the glyphs that decorated the Cozanian monuments was a stylized spiral that unwound to the right; it could be a representation of the conch shell, Indy thought, or perhaps a star or comet. Nothing was known of the history of Cozan, except that it had once been a great city but had been abandoned because of some evil, and even that came from folklore; before Indy had discovered the city for himself, he'd doubted its existence.

  The city's name, Cozan, was borrowed from a sixteenth-century translation of a little-understood Mayan phrase in which the Spanish word for heart, corazon, figured prominently. Sometimes it was rendered as del mal corazon, or heartless; at other times the Mayan place name for the lost city defied translation, but the closest one would be the "heart of evil."

  The warriors, who seemed to be everywhere, carried obsidian blades at their belts and, slung over their shoulders, wicked-looking throwing sticks made from oak branches. They strolled the avenue in pairs and occasionally stopped to warn a merchant or a citizen that they should be finishing their business, because the ceremony was about to start.

  The class distinctions went far beyond warrior and citizen, Indy discovered. Another class made up at least a third of the population. Their faces were dusted with blue powder, making them appear like ghosts following behind their masters and mistresses. Their eyes were vacant, devoid of hope, and Indy guessed why: Blue is the color of sacrifice.

  Indy had often dealt with the remains of sacrificial victims, and with few exceptions they had always seemed to submit themselves willingly for the good of the community, often after a period of a year or so in which they were treated like heroes and honored as royalty. Even when their hands were bound behind their backs, or when a ligature was found around the vertebrae of their necks, there were indications that they had submitted voluntarily, rather than having been murdered. These slaves, who were apparent war prizes, were not looking forward to their contribution to the great chain of being.

  "Excuse me," Indy said, going from one citizen to another.

  "Pardon me, may I have a moment?" Apparently, none of them could see or hear him.

  Indy reached out to touch a passing warrior, and the man jumped back as if he had been stung where Indy's fingers had made contact with his arm. Convinced he had been bitten by an insect, he waved a hand in front of his face and kept moving.

  Then, at the sound of a conch shell trumpet, the throng fled the center of the street and took up positions along each side. The blue-faced slaves fell to their knees and lowered their foreheads to the ground. The warriors stood at attention, obsidian-tipped spears at the ready.

  A shaman crab-walked toward the pyramid, dusting the street with a branch. In his other hand he held a mace made from a human thighbone with a smooth river rock lashed to the end. He was nude except for a breechcloth, and elaborately tattooed with the nationalistic right-facing spirals Indy had already seen on the glyphs. He wore a gruesome mask made from the front half of a human skull and decorated with jade and obsidian. Sticking like a rhino's horns from the forehead and nasal cavity were two wicked-looking flint points.

  This monster with a human hidden beneath often rushed the crowd, shaking the mace at them and driving them back in terror. Whatever god of death or destruction this joker was supposed to represent, Indy decided, the citizens obviously believed he was the real deal.

  Indy tapped him on the shoulder and was delighted to see the medicine man spring backward, alarmed at an apparent manifestation of real magic. He savagely shook his mace in Indy's direction, but kept moving toward the temple.

  Following the shaman was a phalanx of priests, dressed in cotton tunics dyed in terra-cotta and green and emblazoned with the Cozanian spirals. The center priest carried a hat-sized oak box in his hands.

  Behind the priests, on a litter borne by slaves, came a strikingly beautiful woman. She wore a simple cotton gown, and was unadorned with jewelry or any other sign of class or authority. She was tall, perhaps six feet, and the muscles in her exposed arms and calves suggested that she was athletic. She reminded Indy of a jaguar because of her sleek black hair and broad face and her liquid green eyes.

  Their eyes seemed to meet as the litter swayed past.

  For a moment, Indy was sure that she had seen him. Her expression was one of puzzlement and alarm, and she sat up and looked over her shoulder at the spot where the stranger had stood. This time, however, her eyes searched the crowd without finding him.

  Behind the litter limped a half dozen blue-faced slaves driven by a group of soldiers. The slaves were of both genders, young and old, and their feet were bound with a length of rope, which was just long enough to allow them to walk, but no more. As they shuffled past the crowd threw garbage at them and shouted insults. The children in attendance were encouraged to dash out and swat at the slaves with sticks. They did so with glee, then raced back to the protection of their mothers' legs.

  When the procession reached the bottom step of the pyramid, the litter was gently placed on the ground. The Queen stepped from her throne with the grace and agility of a big cat, then proceeded to climb the steps. She was followed by the priests and the others, and finally the rest of the city surged onto the pyramid. Indy followed along with the flow of the crowd up the side of the pyramid, and when he reached the apex he was astonished to find not a temple but a concave area containing a sacred well. In twenty or thirty centuries, course after course would be added to the pyramid and this area would actually become the subterranean pool at the bottom of the Temple of the Serpent.

  The high priest placed the wooden box he carried on a stone altar and lifted the Crystal Skull from it. It looked as finished as the day Indy had discovered it. The priest held the skull aloft, and the crowd averted their eyes as the sunlight gathered in the prisms behind the eye sockets and shot dancing rainbows of light over their heads. Only the Queen—and, of course, Indy—did not look away. Then the priest began speaking in a ritual monotone, and Indy guessed that he was reciting a history of the skull. The skull-masked shaman went into a pantomime. Although Indy did not understand one word of the speech, from the playacting Indy guessed that they had found the skull in the jungle one day as well, perhaps at the bottom of a sacred well or a cave littered with the bones of unimaginably old human sacrifices. Since that time, the skull had apparently become the state religion, a religion based on war and conquest—and an unquenchable
appetite for human sacrifice.

  Fascists, Indy said to himself. I hate these guys.

  As the priests concluded the recitation, another of the priests removed the wooden box and the Crystal Skull was placed on the stone altar, gazing out over the sacred pool. As the high priest began to chant a sacred song, the Queen waded into the pool, her arms outstretched. Her cotton gown swirled around her. Then, when she was chest-high in the water, she stopped and placed her hands atop her head.

  Something moved in the water around her.

  A pair of anacondas wrapped themselves around her torso and lifted their heads from the water. They were not big snakes as anacondas go—they were perhaps twelve or fifteen feet in length—but at any moment Indy expected to hear the cracking of her rib cage as the snakes squeezed the life out of her.

  Instead, the snakes serpentined around the Queen's torso like a pair of tame cats. The Queen's mouth went slack, and her eyelids fluttered in religious ecstasy.

  Then the snakes left her and made instead for the bank of the pool, where the slave sacrifices knelt beneath the obsidian blades of the warriors.

  "Hey!" Indy shouted, moving closer. "Get up! Get out of there! At least make a run for it."

  Indy pulled out the Webley, drew a careful bead on the head of the larger of the snakes, and fired. The Webley barked, but the slug did no damage. He squeezed off the remaining rounds in the cylinder, but there was not so much as a splash of water behind the snake to indicate that a slug had even been fired.

  The snakes took the closest victim first. They slithered up his legs, wrapped themselves around his abdomen, and began to squeeze the life out of him while he shook with fear. When they were finished with him, they rolled him into the cenote, the sacred pool. Then they went to the next in line and began to repeat the process.

  "Fight!" Indy said. "Why don't you fight?"

  One of the slaves in the middle of the sacrificial line, a powerfully built young woman whose mouth was still swollen from a recent beating, kept her head down but watched the approach of the snakes from beneath half-closed lids. Indy saw her take a deep breath, watched the muscles in her arms and legs tense, and helplessly shouted encouragement when she turned and sent a knee into the groin of the warrior who guarded her.

  The soldier gasped and the slave girl snatched the obsidian sword from his grasp. In one two-handed movement she brought the blade slashing up against his throat, nearly decapitating him. As the guard's body fell to the ground she released a war cry that was so alarming the birds fled the surrounding trees.

  She slashed the ropes that bound her ankles. But instead of racing down the steps of the pyramid toward freedom, she turned instead in the direction of the high priest. She plunged the blade into his stomach, then leaped into the cenote and splashed frantically toward the Queen. Although the sun was now hidden by a cloud, the Crystal Skull blazed even more fiercely than before.

  The Queen smiled and opened her arms as if to embrace her.

  Then a half dozen baseball-sized stones struck the slave girl's body, propelled with mechanical force by the warriors with the heavy sticks. The stones broke bones wherever they struck her body: her back, her ribs, her left arm. But despite these injuries, she maintained her forward motion and managed to draw the sword with her unbroken right arm.

  The slave girl was about to bring it down upon the smiling Queen's head when a last stone struck the base of her skull, and all life went out of her body. The sword fell impotently into the water. She fell facedown in the water, with a growing rose-colored bloom around her head.

  Indy turned away.

  The Crystal Skull glowed so brightly on the stone altar that it seemed on fire. Then, the jaw dropped and a black cloud began issuing from its mouth.

  Indy's vision blurred as the cloud engulfed him.

  When he could see again, he was standing in front of the heaping ruins of the Temple of Serpent. The jungle was once more in command. But on the ground at his feet was a granite rock the size of a baseball, covered with hair and fresh blood.

  Epilogue

  He found the professor on the Quadrangle, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, eating a sandwich from a sack lunch beside him. The man was just past fifty, but already he had the distracted mannerisms of age. Or, perhaps he had always had. His graying hair was a bird's nest of tangles. His clothes were rumpled and somewhat mismatched, and when he crossed his legs Indy noticed he wasn't wearing socks. As the professor slowly ate his sandwich, his unfocused eyes were fixed above the spires and rooftops of Princeton University.

  Indy stood uncomfortably some yards from the bench, his fedora in his hands, unwilling to disturb the professor's apparent reverie. But the expectant, worried look on Indy's face was enough to warrant the older man's attention.

  "Come," the professor finally said with a wave of his hand and a glance toward Indy. "Are you going to stand there all day or are you going to speak?"

  "I didn't want to disturb you," Indy said sheepishly.

  "And you think your staring is not disturbing?"

  "Pardon me," Indy said. "It was rude."

  Indy turned to go.

  "Wait, wait," the older man said. "Come and sit beside me. I'm the one who is being rude now, I'm afraid. What is on your mind? Something interesting, I hope. Perhaps you are merely an autograph seeker? I do not understand this American obsession with fame."

  "No, professor," Indy said as he sat down on the bench, his hat still in his hands. "I haven't come for your autograph, or for your picture. I've come for your advice."

  "Advice," the man said and chuckled. "Everybody wants my advice these days. I'm afraid you have come to a very poor source for that. I have been accused of being a not very practical person, of spending too much time in my head and not enough time in the world. Do you know what I was thinking just now? I was thinking of how beautiful the clouds are, and how I would stare at them through the classroom window when I was a child."

  "Did you like school?"

  "I hated it," the professor said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I wanted to be in the clouds. School was dull, regimented, and sucked the very life out of young minds. I was a very unhappy little boy. What a shame we do this to our young."

  Indy smiled.

  "The advice I seek," he said, "is of a very impractical nature."

  "Have I seen you before?"

  "Yes, sir. I teach archaeology here. My name is Jones, and we have met once or twice. My friend Marcus Brody introduced us."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't remember," the professor said.

  "I'm sure you had more important things on your mind."

  "Like clouds," the professor said and smiled mischievously. Then he finished his sandwich, dusted the crumbs from his hands, and rummaged in his lunch sack. He extracted a bright red apple, which he offered to Indy.

  Indy was hungry. He placed the fedora on the ground between his feet. Then he polished the apple on his pant leg, regarded the shine of the bright red skin for a moment, and sank his teeth into it.

  "What is this very impractical advice you seek?"

  "Time," Indy mumbled as he wiped apple juice from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. "Why is it always now? Is it possible to return to the past, or to move ahead to the future? What exactly is time, anyway?"

  The professor smiled.

  "Time," he said, "is what you measure with a clock."

  Indy waited patiently.

  "That's it?" he asked when he realized nothing more was forthcoming.

  "What more do you want?" the professor asked.

  "I don't know," Indy said. "Answers, I suppose. After all, you are the world's greatest authority."

  The older man scowled.

  "That is fate playing a trick on me," he said. "I have questioned authority all of my life, and now I find myself an authority."

  Indy was disappointed.

  "I was hoping you could give me some ... validation," Indy said. "I have had some unusual experi
ences, in which miracles seemed possible. Time travel, even."

  "You're asking me to tell you that you're not crazy," the professor said. "But I can't help you. I am merely a scientist, just another human being like yourself. The answers you seek, my son, are inside of you."

  Indy nodded.

  The professor smiled.

  "One of the most incomprehensible things about the universe," the older man said, "is that we can comprehend it at all. But we are still in childhood, and as our understanding grows, so does our responsibility. We are all travelers in time, Dr. Jones. Live in the present, keep looking to the future, but always remember the past. And never forget to listen to your heart."

  Afterword

  Does magic work?

  That question continues to nag, despite advances by science during the last three hundred years that would otherwise seem to lay the question to rest—with a resounding "No!"—once and for all. But the question is more than academic; it gets into the thorny area of belief, straddling the dark middle ground between superstition and religion.

  There is a distinction between stage magic, which is used to entertain, and that which is done in an earnest attempt to influence natural or human events. Nobody makes that distinction clearer, or is more cynical of attempts at real magic, than professional magicians such as James Randi. Randi, through a foundation bearing his name, has a standing offer of more than a million dollars to anyone who can, on demand, demonstrate "any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability of any kind under satisfactory observing conditions." Although some have attempted, none have succeeded in winning the reward.

  Randi's attitude, and that of the late Carl Sagan, author of The Demon-Haunted World, exemplifies the paradigm embraced by most scientists. If something cannot be verified by the experimental method, the hard line goes, then it does not exist. Anecdotal evidence that suggests the existence of ESP and other fringe beliefs is merely a manifestation of the human need to tell stories and sustain the understandable but childish habit of magical thinking. Indeed, there does appear to be a deep-rooted need for stories that perpetuate the belief in magic or otherworldly doings, as any researcher in "urban folklore" can tell you: Statues that weep blood, ghostly hitchhikers that disappear upon arrival at their destination, and alien beings that commit abductions with sexual overtones hark back to tales told in earlier centuries.