Cameron shook his head. “Do you know how irrational this is? If something were to happen to me, at least you would survive to—”
Susan Garnett put a hand to his lips. “Don’t go there, please. I’ve been there.”
“But this is not very logical, Susan. We can’t afford for both of us to—”
“I’ve always been a little on the reckless side of life,” she interrupted, drawing a heavy sigh from Cameron, who cupped her face, kissed her, and turned around, facing the ancient array of mosaics.
The archaeologist placed the palm of his right hand on the ancient relief of the upper left-most mosaic, two bars beneath three dots identifying it as decimal number thirteen.
“The stone’s cold,” he said, before planting his left foot back and leaning into the rock. The mosaic gave, caving in almost six inches, its grinding sound, echoing lightly inside the terrace, reminding Susan of large clay pots being dragged over concrete.
She held her breath, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. The mosaic remained depressed. Cameron stepped to the right side of the array, placing his palm on the next number in the sequence, sixty-six. Again, he pressed, and again, the stone gave.
“Two more to go,” he said, positioning his palm over the correct mosaic in the lower right quadrant and pressing hard, pushing it back.
“Now for the last one,” he said, locating the lower left-most mosaic with the number zero in it and placing his hand on the shell-like carving of the Mayan numeral.
He turned to Susan. “Last chance to get away.”
She stepped up to him, holding his left hand. “I lost someone I loved dearly. This time I’m going with him, anywhere.”
Cameron regarded her for a brief moment, his dark eyes deep, absorbing.
Then he pressed the stone.
3
Cameron and Susan stepped back as the massive slab began to recede into the wall, like the mosaics, but rumbling much farther back while pivoting on its left side, revealing not just the cavernous hall that Susan remembered from the other night, but also the incredible thickness of the exterior wall, almost six feet of solid limestone.
“And you wanted to blast through this?” he muttered to himself, cool air streaming out of the ample room, swirling his hair as he peered at the dark interior, Susan by his side, still holding his hand. “We’re going to need lanterns.”
A couple of minutes later, armed with three lanterns, the group went in, slowly, Cameron leading and Joao trailing, their sounds amplified inside the stone chamber, echoing off the ancient walls to the rhythm of the pulsating light. A heavy feeling of dread formed in Susan’s stomach as she peered at the interior. She found it difficult to breathe, feeling as if the thick walls closed in on her as she stepped away from the entrance. She forced her mind to focus, to shove her fears aside. She watched the archaeologist at work, lifting the gas lamp toward the nearest wall, shining its light onto the intricate reliefs, exposing a phenomenal mural that ran the entire length of the rear wall. The combined light from the three lamps revealed a rectangular-shaped room, roughly fifty feet wide and thirty deep.
“Hold it there,” Cameron said, the dampness chilling Susan as she stood next to him, as much surprised by the elaborate reliefs as by the serene expression on his face, on his eyes as they swept the mural, the ancient carvings. Once again, she found reassurance by being close to him.
“Dear God,” he mumbled, backing away a few steps, looking toward the left, then to the right, returning his focus to the figure in the center.
“What?” Susan asked. “What do you see?”
Cameron pointed at the far left, where a young mother was shown holding a baby surrounded by fire, flying quetzals, and feathery serpents. Common people, dressed in simple loincloths or short skirts, knelt by her feet as she held the baby toward the sun.
“That’s Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, and the famous chief himself at birth, in A.D. 603.”
Cameron angled the hissing lantern toward the next life-size relief, showing a boy of around twelve years of age in a ceremonial gown and ornate headdress sitting on a throne, a woman with deformed features on his right. Once more commoners knelt by his feet.
“Young Pacal ruling,” Cameron said. “With mother nearby for counseling and for ratification of his power, just as described in the glyphs all around the terrace and the steps, which matches the reliefs from Palenque.”
“Why does she look like that?” asked Ishiguro, a finger pointing at the enlarged jaw and prominent brow ridge.
“Pacal’s mother suffered from the clinical syndrome known as acromegaly. Her bones and soft tissue were progressively enlarged as a result of a malfunctioning pituitary gland.
“Next is an older Pacal, venerated by his people for his wisdom, fairness, and vision. Over there he is shown building the Temple of the Inscriptions. Now, this is very strange. Come,” he said, walking toward the right side of the mural.
“Pacal did die in Palenque, in A.D. 683, as shown by this date beneath his body lying on an altar and encircled by flying quetzals. But he is never carried inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, in the tomb built especially for him and unique to all of Mesoamerica. No other Mayan edifice has ever been used as a tomb, like in Egypt, except for the Temple of the Inscriptions.”
Susan squinted, struggling to keep up with Cameron, watching the pictorials of Pacal being taken away from Palenque, away from the temple where he was supposed to be buried. “But, if Pacal was not buried there who did Ruz find in 1952? Who was in Palenque?”
Cameron nodded. “That sure explains it,” he mumbled.
“Explains what?” asked Susan.
“Remember what I told you about Mayan royalty? About how they deformed their skulls and filed their teeth?”
“Yes.”
“The mummified remains found by Alberto Ruz at the Temple of the Inscriptions had neither of those. Why was Pacal Votan, the greatest Mayan chief that ever lived, lacking the elongated skull and the filed teeth that were the norm of the day? Archaeologists have debated the question for generations. Now I finally understand why. He wasn’t buried at Palenque.”
“Where was he buried then?” asked Ishiguro, standing next to Cameron now, extending the lamp toward the right-most section of the mural.
Cameron pointed at the last two pictorials, one showing a procession of men carrying a coffinlike object across the jungle, and another depicting the same group reaching a clearing in the middle of the jungle, shielded by the branches of towering trees—all surrounding a cenote.
“You mean that—”
“He’s buried here,” Cameron said. “According to this last relief, and the accompanying glyphs.”
“But where?” asked Joao, stepping forward for the first time. The Mayan chief had remained in the background, but obviously listening careful. “I do not see a tomb.”
“Neither do I,” said Ishiguro, looking about, holding the lantern high in the air, washing the interior with yellow light. His wife stood beside him, also checking for a sign of a burial.
Cameron shook his head. “You got to give Pacal’s subjects a little more credit than that. They wouldn’t have buried him up here. If they went through so much trouble at Palenque, burying an impostor in a chamber that was four floors belowground, they certainly would have done something similar here, where apparently the real Pacal was buried—again, according to the glyphs.”
“But where?” asked Susan.
Cameron also looked about, grinning as he pointed at yet another matrix of numbers, on the far right side of the room, adjacent to the 3-D pictorial of the Maya carrying Pacal’s body to this site. “There’s our next safe, and its combination is probably also booby-trapped.”
Approaching it, Susan saw to her relief that the numbering sequence appeared to be the same as the one outside. “Same key for both locks?”
Cameron didn’t reply, rubbing the stubble on his chin while regarding the array, also thirteen down by tw
enty across.
Susan jotted them down on her engineering notebook anyway, taking a few minutes to complete the array.
“Slightly different,” she said, noting that the unique number in each quadrant was shifted one quadrant in the clockwise direction. “Nifty little trick, to see if you’re paying attention.”
“That’s the Maya, always taxing the human mind. And if I know anything about their way of thinking, my guess is that the wrong combination will immediately shut the main door, trapping us inside. We would be dead from asphyxiation within a couple of hours. So just in case I do get it wrong, why don’t you all wait outside? That way, if I get trapped inside, not only will I last longer, but you can dial the combination again to reopen the door.”
Ishiguro and Jackie nodded, stepping outside. Joao followed them out, leaving his lantern on the floor. Susan remained put, grabbing Joao’s lantern.
“No way I can talk you out of it, huh?”
She smiled and shrugged. “We’re a team, remember?”
He didn’t reply, pressing his palm against the first number. It caved. He followed with the second, third, and fourth.
The massive slab to the side of the entryway moved back with alacrity, almost as if it were spring-loaded, giving Cameron and Susan no time to react and try to sneak out of the room. At once, vaultlike, the accurately cut stone slammed shut, a tire-deflating sound marking its airtightness, sealing the entrance, leaving the scientists staring at one another in the glowing yellow light.
The walloping sound had an air of permanency that made Susan’s skin goose-bump. She rubbed her hands over her forearms. “What are we going to do?” Her voice was now amplified by the acoustic resonance of the large anteroom.
“Conserve oxygen.” Cameron immediately dimmed his lantern and switched off Susan’s.
The sudden murkiness did not feel reassuring, further inciting a panic that she struggled to control, something about being locked inside hundreds of tons of ancient stone with no apparent way out. “Do you have matches to light it back up again if we need it?”
“Ex-smokers always carry a lighter,” he said, adding while grimacing, “I guess I guessed wrong.”
Susan opened her mouth to reply but was instead momentarily jolted by the now-familiar rumbling noise, like rock against concrete. “I—I don’t think you did,” she said, a trembling finger pointing at the floor to their right, a five-foot square of shiny limestone began to sink, exposing a passageway.
Cameron approached her, putting a hand to her face. “Relax, would you? I’ll be the first to tell you when to start praying, all right?”
She nodded.
When all motion ceased, Cameron and Susan slowly, cautiously, approached the gap on the floor, the glowing lantern leading the way.
“Steps,” she said, noticing a stairway heading down into the darkness. A dry and cool draft of air rose out of the hole. “The Maya were quite clever.”
“Now you’re getting the picture.”
“If I really had the picture we wouldn’t be trapped.”
He glanced at her with that scholarly-like look that always conveyed a sense of control. In her current predicament, Susan appreciated it, for it brought comfort in this cold and dead place. “Who says we’re trapped?”
Susan regarded him quizzically, not certain what to think sometimes. “Sweetheart,” she said, “the main door is shut. Get it? Closed. Locked. I call that being trapped.”
“We’re not trapped until we can’t move forward anymore. That way,” he said, extending a thumb over his shoulder, toward the temple’s blocked entrance, “is going back, not forward.”
“Have I told you how strangely you think sometimes, Cameron Slater?”
“Have I told you how tempting you look in the dim light of a Mesoamerican temple?”
She couldn’t help a laugh, which brought a sense of relief in spite of her growing fear of being trapped in this place, like the ancient wives of pharaohs, buried alive to be with their husbands in the afterlife. The thought struck her as ludicrous, until she also thought of her life following Tom’s death. For all practical purposes she might as well have been in the coffin with him.
Susan took a deep breath of the dead air rising out of the hole, pointing at the darkness projecting beyond the first few steps. “I’m right behind you, honey.”
“Count them as you go. I’ll do the same,” he said, holding the lantern in front of him as he took the first step.
4
“They’re trapped!” Jackie said, standing on the terrace, running her hands against the hairline crack between the massive limestone slab and the walls. “How are we going to get them out?”
Ishiguro turned to Joao, who shook his head. “My job was to protect the priests. I was trained for that since birth. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of this structure. I’ll have one of my men go back to the village and check on the high priest. Maybe he has awakened.”
While Joao shouted something at one of the Mayan warriors guarding the site, the Japanese astrophysicist looked about him, not knowing what do to. Cameron Slater and Susan Garnett were the real experts here, and they were currently trapped inside the temple, running out of air.
He turned to the mosaics, but found the four numbers of the combination still depressed. The stone shifting back had not reset the combination lock. Checking his Casio, he clicked the digital chronograph. Cameron had estimated no more than an hour for all of them, meaning that he and Susan had probably three hours at the outside.
“Come,” he told Jackie. “Let’s go set up our equipment. Perhaps we can be of help by picking up clues from tonight’s event.”
“I don’t like this,” Jackie said. “I feel like we’re just abandoning them. Poor Susan must be panic-stricken in there.”
Ishiguro took his wife’s hand. “She’s in the best possible hands. If I were to be trapped inside one of these, what better friend to have on your side than a seasoned archaeologist? Now come, I got the feeling that Cameron and Susan are hard at work in there. We also have work to do. We’ll come back in a half hour or so, to see if something has changed.”
With a reluctant backward glance at the colossal limestone slab blocking the entryway, Jackie Nakamura followed her husband out of the terrace.
Chapter Twenty
01-01-00
1
December 18, 1999
The walls flanking the ancient staircase came alive under the glowing light from Cameron’s lantern, his archaeological eyes taking in the beauty of the intricate chiseled work that had turned vertical slabs of rock into stunning murals depicting various facets of the life of the Maya’s chief ruler, atop a ceremonial altar, sitting on his throne, presiding over a game of pokatok.
Cameron thought of Alberto Ruz Lhullier, the man who discovered Pacal Votan’s first crypt in Palenque back in 1952. He thought of the excitement, of the fear, of the breathless anticipation that must have gone through Ruz’s mind as he first descended down steps similar to these, toward the heart of an edifice from another time, from another culture, during a very different period in history.
He moved cautiously down the limestone steps, one at a time, slowly, with respect, absorbing the details of the reliefs, a continuation of the story in the anteroom. Actually not a continuation, but additional information, more insight, depicting the ruler Pacal actually being buried in the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque upon his death by his son, Chan-Bahlum. But a dark future loomed beyond the horizon for the once-bustling city, a future of invasions, of desecration, of looting, of destruction. And so Chan-Bahlum had ordered the exhumation of his father in A.D. 688, just five years after Pacal’s death, and the search for a distant place, protected by the Petén’s lush jungles, beyond the reach of the nearing wave of invaders. He had ordered that no records be kept of his decision to preserve the memory of his father, of his works, of his mortal remains. Scouts departed to all corners of the Yucatán, searching for the ideal site, settling on
this one. By the end of A.D. 689 the crypt had been finished, and Pacal’s body transferred to its final resting place, as depicted by the last pictograph in the anteroom.
Cameron continued to interpret the carvings, struggling to contain his excitement, the euphoria that must have also swept through Ruz in 1952, the realization of making the discovery of a lifetime, the climax of his career. He spoke out loud, clearly, explaining to Susan everything he saw, everything he felt, how the site was finished by A.D. 693 and ordered to remain guarded through the centuries, across the millennia, by generations of high priests under the protection of skilled warriors.
“For how long? Forever?” Susan asked.
Cameron shrugged. “I can’t tell.”
After twenty steps they reached a landing with a U-turn, followed by another flight of thirteen steps, where Cameron saw more iconographic reliefs, detailing the early post-Classic Period, according to the dates, ranging from A.D. 792 to around A.D. 1201.
“That explains the feathery serpent and other post-Classic artwork. The descendants of Pacal and Chan-Bahlum continued to record their history for some time,” he commented, reaching the second landing, staring down a wide corridor beneath a triangular, corbel-shaped ceiling, amazed that the essence of the Maya Classic Period had survived the test of time, uninfluenced by the advent of technology, by the waves of invaders that razed Mesoamerica, eradicating its native culture. But the temple had not been fully isolated. Through the centuries other civilizations had somehow influenced Joao’s ancestors, however subtly, maybe as a result of the Mayan military leaders’ tradition of traveling beyond their land to learn about the outside world. That explained the Uxmal influence, as well as the influence of other ancient civilizations, including the works with gold from the Incas in Peru and the Aztecs in central and northern Mexico.”
“I can understand being influenced by the Aztecs, who weren’t that far away. But the Incas, down in Peru?” Susan asked with amazement. “That’s quite a ways down there.”
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