by Tom Bane
The minibus pulled up and the doors hissed opened as if they were steam-powered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It was the twenty-first of June, and the summer solstice was at hand. With the aid of a local guide, Suzy and Tom were hacking their way through the jungle. Their guide took delight in pointing out any snakes slithering into the dense undergrowth, and in shouting abuse at the spider monkeys flashing across the canopy above their heads, shaking branches and pelting them with sticks and debris. The air was heavy with humidity and heat, making the trek like stepping through an overheated sauna. Having had to tuck in every possible piece of clothing to prevent attacks from undesirable pests was making the journey even more uncomfortable.
All the physical discomforts were forgotten, however, when Palenque appeared before them, as if by magic, the dense undergrowth abruptly giving way to a ruined city about the size of downtown Oxford. Emerging, vast and impressive from the steam and mist, it was both stunning and haunting at the same time. Some tourists who had made their own way through the jungle were milling around in small groups, and Suzy felt a little safer than she had in Israel. She was still not sure who to trust, but could see no one who looked in any way threatening, let alone like an assassin. Maybe she had finally managed to shake off her stalkers. Perhaps they were no longer worried now she was away from the Middle East. Or perhaps Tom was right. By not contacting Piper, perhaps she had managed to keep her location secret. But, then again, if Tom was the potential enemy there would be no need for anyone else to be watching. Realizing she was in danger of crippling herself with paranoia, she took a long, deep breath to pull herself together. Looking around, she tried to absorb the mystery and tranquility of the ancient ruins, making a beeline for the largest step pyramid, which stood like an epic Hollywood film set against the natural backdrop of the lush surrounding jungle.
“Let’s start here,” Suzy pointed at the pyramid of Pacal. Known as the Temple of Inscriptions, the pyramid was the highest structure in Palenque, towering overhead at two hundred and thirty feet, with a base platform big enough to cover more than five football fields.
They started to climb, Tom counting each step out loud.
“No need to count,” Suzy interrupted. “There are sixty-nine.” Tom chuckled.
“Yeah? OK, tell me something interesting about King Pacal instead then.”
“Oh I can do that,” she laughed. “I did a lot of reading on the plane. He inherited the throne through his mother’s line when he was twelve or thirteen years old, similar to the boy king Tutankhamun. When he was buried inside the pyramid, five of his male subjects were buried with him so they could accompany him on his journey to the underworld, and there was also a female skeleton found in the antechamber. King Pacal had claimed that he and his family were directly descended from the Sun god.”
“Really? Certainly all sounds very Egyptian.”
“Yes, but the only real piece of evidence to connect the two cultures is the cocaine found in the Egyptian mummies. Anyway, this is where Pacal built his vast city with the temple of the Sun, the temple of the Cross, and the temple of the foliated Cross. The Mayans believed that the age they lived in was not the first in the history of the world. They believed that, including theirs, there had been five eras, and that each of the eras had its own sun, linked to one of the five elements. They called their era and the one we are living in now ‘the age of the fifth sun.’”
By now they had climbed all sixty-nine steps to the top of the pyramid’s nine levels and they started to descend into the dark interior. It dawned on Suzy that Ben Sanders had probably walked these very same steps. Treading carefully, step by step, Suzy and Tom made their way down through the triangular descending passage, creeping deeper and deeper into the depths of the pyramid. Originally designed to be secret, the passage was now the main route for dozens of intrepid travellers every day, for those brave enough to confront the claustrophobic darkness and crushing heat. As they descended, the temperature cooled to the level of a bottle of chilled cerveza and the faint odor of sweat from the myriad tourists stuck to the walls, unable to escape through the thousands of tons of stone above. It took nearly ten minutes to reach the death crypt. Stepping inside, they found themselves staring at a heavy sarcophagus lid.
“Now,” Suzy recalled from the information she’d read on the plane, “the carvings on this lid depict Pacal descending the length of the world tree to the underworld, and the sun moving between life and death. At his side was buried a figure of the Sun god, suggesting that the king would rise again into the eastern sky after his underworld rituals.”
“Even more Egyptian-sounding!” Tom responded.
“Quite. And once a year, on the winter solstice, the setting sun would shine through a dip in the ridge behind the pyramid onto the carved scenes of the opposite pyramid, called the Temple of the Cross. Then, as the sun set, its light would travel down the stairs to King Pacal’s tomb, signaling the rebirth of the dying Sun god.”
“The winter solstice is December 21st,” Tom observed, “four days before Christmas Day.”
“Exactly.”
“Just like the Great Pyramid, which was aligned with its star shafts pointing to Orion and Sirius, this pyramid or temple was linked to astronomy as well. What objects were discovered in the tomb?”
“Nothing like the volume of artifacts in Tut’s tomb, but there was a jade necklace on the king’s neck, two stone heads, the famous jade death mask, and he was wearing four rings on each hand.” The other tourists in their group were now jostling to squeeze into the small room.
“It’s hard to see anything properly with all these people,” Tom whispered.
“Why don’t we come back tonight on our own?” Suzy whispered back. “Then we could take a better look.” Tom hesitated.
“OK.” Clearly, exploring the ruins by night did not appeal to Tom, but Suzy argued to herself that, if she felt safe coming back here at night, he could hardly chicken out.
Within an hour they were back at the motel that the tour guide had suggested. It was more like a tribal village of primitive wooden huts locked away in the jungle than a motel. Inside the wooden hut that Tom and Suzy were staying in, the walls were covered with a thick coat of traditional cinnamon red paint and a healthy smell of industrial disinfectant percolated off the slippery wooden floorboards, as if they had been mopped clean just moments before. Two small windows poked out into the jungle. The room was very basic and there was only a single old-fashioned oil lamp for light, an odd brown linen sheet on a ceiling curtain rail divided the room into two to provide a modest degree of privacy, in what the motel aptly called a “twin-single” room, there were no other rooms available so Suzy had to settle for sharing with Tom. In the corner was an open, red, tin bucket, and coiled tightly inside, asleep was a small green lizard. Suzy glanced at it but it looked harmless enough. Suzy poked her head around the corner to inspect the shower room, which consisted of an orange plastic hose and another bucket with a sponge and an old loofah. White porcelain tiles and an antique conch shell soap holder provided a tinge of old world colonial charm, and the toilet cubicle next door boasted a chipboard box with a functional hole in the top and a hanging piece of frayed rope to activate the flush. It reminded Suzy of the rickety motels in Manaus where she’d taken nature trips with her parents into the Amazonian rainforest, those were good times in the jungle, she thought, as she fingered the silver locket around her neck affectionately.
Tom was surprised and delighted to discover there was Internet access. Suzy did a quick Google search and found a good site on the Temple of Inscriptions Pyramid and King Pacal. She worked out the Baktun time periods of the Mayan long count system and their 260-day Tzolkin calendar. Tom listened as Suzy described what she was doing.
“There is a lot of numeric symbolism,” Tom admitted, “but it appears simpler than in Tutankhamun’s case.” By now Suzy had started to flick through the pages of her guidebook for inspiration and they fell int
o a companionable silence as both researched, lying side by side on the simple wooden bed. Tom had torn some paper out of his notebook, creating a small pile in front of them, and from time to time each of them scribbled down rough notes.
“I’ve been trying to find out why the door to the tomb was triangular, and I can’t seem to find anything,” Suzy said, after a while.
“Ah, I think know the answer to that one. I’ve just read about it.” Tom replied, looking up from his screen. “Apparently there was a stone box discovered at the foot of the secret stairway. It contained three painted shells, three clay plates, eleven jade beads and a pearl in a seashell filled with cinnabar-red powdered mercury. And … hang on,” he looked at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. “Yes, that’s it! Do you know, I think I’ve cracked it!”
“Cracked what?”
“There are a couple of missing numbers.” Suzy raised an eyebrow, wondering where he was heading next. “No, stick with me here. Have you heard of a magic square?” She nodded. “Well, this is more like a magic pyramid. Look, the clues are hidden in the pyramid and the objects found inside it and Pacal’s tomb. The key is to realize the pyramid represents not one pyramid but a synthesis of five pyramids.” Grabbing a fresh piece of paper from the pile, Tom sketched a block pyramid with nine steps.
“Here’s the Pyramid of Pacal, otherwise known as the Temple of Inscriptions.” Suzy rolled closer, her chin brushing his upper arm as she looked down at the paper.
“Why do you think it has five doorways on the top?” Tom posed. Suzy shrugged. “Because,” he said, “each one represents a hidden doorway to the Mayan’s five epochs of time. It is meant to represent five separate pyramids, but in this case they are not made of stone blocks but of numbers—numbers from the objects left behind by the builders.” At Suzy’s questioning look, Tom sketched a grid of boxes and scribbled some numbers in each one.
“If we start at the top of each pyramid, the top level in the grid, we see that the archaeologists found single objects inside the pyramid—just one pearl in a seashell, one female skeleton in the antechamber, one death mask of Pacal, one long bead on the death necklace by itself and so on, that complete the top of each of the five pyramids. Look at the fifth level: five pyramid doorways, five mezzanine levels, five male skeletons, five ceiling beams, five coffin lids. There are hidden clues in objects at every level of the pyramid, and, if you count them systematically, this is what you get.” Tom continued working his way down, writing in the objects for each square in the grid, until he got to the last level.
“Nine. Nine bottom steps to the pyramid, nine top steps, nine Lords painted on the tomb walls, nine codes on the side of the sarcophagus lid, and finally,” he jabbed the fifth square on the bottom row with his pencil, “it took me a while to spot it, but of course, nine pyramid levels. Finito! And we now have it.”
Suzy studied the grid.
“And now, look,” he said, pointing at the sixth row down, “Three of the boxes have a missing 6.” She could almost feel the heat of his excitement.
“That’s 666,” she said, “the number from Revelations in the Bible.”
“Exactly!” he beamed.
“It’s also the number encoded into the Passion of Christ.” Tom looked at her blankly.
“The Passion of Christ?”
“Yes, 666 is contained in the Passion of Christ. Professor Gurion explained it to me in Jerusalem.”
“Well, yeah, but let’s not get too sidetracked.”
“OK but why the five-by-nine grid?” she asked.
“There are four Mayan long count periods and then an additional 260-day ‘normal’ Mayan calendar,” Tom explained, “making five time periods in all, a baktun of 144,000 days, a Katun of 7200 days a Kun of 360 days, the 260-day Tzolkin calendar and finally the Uinal of 20 days. There were also five ages of the sun, according to the Mayans. So, take the number of days in each unit and multiply by nine, but do it five times.”
Suzy now began to see exactly where he was going. He scribbled the numbers out on his notepad and held it up to her.
(9 x 144,000) + (9 x 7200) + (9 x 360) + (9 x 260) + (9 x 20)
“It totals 1,366,560 days, the length of the Mayan long count from 3113 BC to 2012 AD. That must have been what my father had struggled to figure out. The Pyramid of King Pacal encoded the secret of the Mayan long count into his pyramid, so it could be rediscovered later. The fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 is encoded into the pyramid. It was there to preserve the ancient knowledge for posterity.”
“I think you’ll find that the number of days in the Mayan long count is well known already,” Suzy pointed out. “The long count is all over the tombs of the Mayans and in the book of Chilam Balam, and it’s all over the Internet and Wikipedia as well, Tom.”
Tom’s eyes tunneled into the pages of his notebook. He tore off the page in frustration and scrunched it into his fist, then hurled it into the bucket. Out bounced the startled lizard, hurtling through a crack in the floorboards as fast as its legs could carry it.
“Damn! It seems like I’ve solved a puzzle that’s already been answered. I need to go back to my father’s jottings. He wrote down the number 360 on the picture of the scarab, so it must mean something. I’m convinced we’re just missing the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but at least I’m making progress.”
“Of course you are.” Suzy encouraged. She got to her feet and stretched her aching muscles. “I’m tired. I’m going to take a shower.” She jumped up and tipped the contents of her bag onto the bed in search of shampoo. The small bagua mirror caught Tom’s eye.
“What’s that?”
“I think it’s one of those funky feng shui gifts that tourists buy in Chinatown.”
“Where did you get it?” he asked, picking it up and examining it.
“The Japanese assassin gave it to me.”
“The assassin who didn’t assassinate you?” He scrutinized it, as a thought occurred to him. “What if it’s a tracking device?” Suzy gave him a horrified look. Tom lifted it above his head and smashed it to the floor and watched as it shattered into pieces.
They both peered downed at the wreckage. There were no wires or silicon chips.
“Not a tracking device, then,” Suzy said bending down onto her knees to sift through the wreckage. “Just a broken mirror. Seven years bad luck, maybe?”
“Sorry.” Tom laughed. “Hold on a minute.” Tom picked up what looked like five smaller round mirrors from among the shards that had fallen out from behind the wooden casing but were still intact. Tom turned them over in his hand.
“These are kind of unusual. They’re silvered from the inside and they seem to be made from something stronger than ordinary glass, like sapphire. I’ll see if I can find anything about this bagua mirror on the Internet. And you,” he said, giving her a playful push, “you go and have that shower. I hope the water’s hot!”
When Suzy rejoined Tom, they went back to their work, losing track of time until they had to light the old oil lamp to see their way around the room. The light attracted a large moth that got inside the bulb, its frantic flapping making the light dance on the walls and ceiling. Suzy watched it for a while, and then jumped up without warning, startling Tom.
“The alabaster vase!” she cried. “That’s where it is.”
“Where what is?”
“In Tutankhamun’s tomb, there was a plain alabaster vase which had all the experts baffled. Then someone discovered that there were images painted on the inside. By lighting oil inside it they were able to project images of the gods from inside the vase onto the walls.”
Suzy shone her flashlight through the broken top of the alabaster vase Getsu had left her. Peering inside, she was sure she could see something drawn on the inside of the vase walls. Tom, as excited now as Suzy, transferred some of the lamp oil from the hotel lamp into the vase and lit it. As the light gathered strength, a series of images appeared on the hotel room walls and ceiling. Suzy stared at the
m like a child watching her first 3D movie at the cinema.
“It looks like the Sun god, Re, beside the images of Tut in his tomb,” she said. “Osiris and Isis perhaps in the West and East, and finally the scarab in the South.”
“What does it mean?”
“No idea,” Suzy admitted. “But it is beautiful. Professor Gurion would probably have some ideas.”
“Can you reach him?”
Suzy took out her phone and dialed. “Professor Gurion, it’s Suzy da Silva—”
“Suzy,” the Professor sounded excited. “I’m so glad you rang. I’ve been looking at Tutankhamun’s mask again. It’s very clever. It’s perfectly symmetrical back and front, but because of the clever split in the mask into top and bottom, the number relevance is not just the number twenty-eight to signify the moon.”
“Yes, I know,” Suzy said. “The number thirteen is encoded into the upper part of the death mask as well. And the mask is split by an Akhet, the two thin engraved lines around Tut’s neck split to form a shape which is the same profile as the Akhet hieroglyph.”
“So you discovered that already,” Gurion said, “but it’s not the number thirteen; it’s twenty-six on the upper part of the mask. That is the trick. People nowadays would think the number encoded was the famous number of superstition, number thirteen, but it’s the twin number, twenty-six, that sits above the horizon, above the Akhet.”
“And you think the twenty-six is somehow symbolic of the sun?” said Suzy.
“I confess I hadn’t actually thought of that, but it could be, I do know that the number twenty-six is important in Christianity.”
“Why? What does it signify?”
“Yahweh”
“Seriously?”
“The number twenty-six has held a mystical significance since ancient times. The word, God, IHVH in Hebrew, is called Yahweh or Jehovah, the Jewish word for God. It is the numerical value of the four letters that make up the name in the Hebrew alphabet: yud equals ten, hay equals five, vav equals six and hay again equals five, totaling twenty-six.”
