The Mayan Secrets fa-5 Page 7

  They came up to the short corridor, through the bookcase door, and back into the office. Selma said, “That’s funny, that wasn’t here before.”

  Sam and Remi looked where she was pointing. It was a large cardboard box. “It’s our souvenirs from Mexico,” said Remi.

  Wendy Corden was working at one of the computers in the area across the room. “That came a few minutes ago. I signed for it.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam. He lifted the box up onto a worktable, giving it a gentle shake. “I didn’t hear anything broken.”

  “Don’t even say that,” said Selma. “I can’t believe you shipped it that way — just mailed it home like a… a piece of crockery.”

  “You had to be there to appreciate our choices. People kept trying to steal it.”

  Selma produced a box cutter from a desk drawer and handed it to Sam. “Can we see it?”

  Sam opened the box. He removed some of the packing peanuts, then some of the wall hangings and mats.

  Selma unrolled one of them, then two others. “These are truly dreadful,” she said. “That king looks a bit like Elvis — who was, come to think of it, The King.” She unwrapped a small pot. “And look at these — sparkly paint in case this warrior gentleman isn’t fancy enough.”

  Remi laughed. “I think those were the inspiration for Sam’s improvements to the real pot.”

  Sam reached in and gently lifted the genuine Mayan pot. He set it upright on the table. Selma moaned. “That is horrifying. Gold and silver paint? That’s vandalism.”

  “It comes off,” he said. “I read one time that a lot of great Egyptian art got to Europe disguised as cheap replicas. The trick still works.”

  Sam used his cell phone to dial Dr. David Caine’s office at the university. “Dr. Caine?” he said. “The delivery I was waiting for has arrived. Would you like to take a look?”

  “I’d love the chance,” Caine said. “When can I come?”

  “Anytime from now on. We’ll be here until evening.” Sam recited the address.

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Sam terminated the call and then turned to the others. “He’ll be here in an hour. I’d better wipe this sparkly paint off right away or he’ll be as horrified as Selma.”

  An hour later, their guest arrived. Dr. David Caine was in his mid-forties, very fit and tanned, wearing jeans and a summer-weight sport coat over a black polo shirt. As he stepped through the doorway into the vast office space, he saw the pot on the table across the room and could barely draw his eyes away from it. He stopped and shook Sam’s hand. “You must be Sam. I’m Dave Caine.”

  Remi stepped up. “I’m Remi. Come this way. I can tell you’re dying to see the pot.”

  He followed her across the open hardwood floor, but when he was still six feet from the pot, he stopped and stared at it for a moment, then walked around it, looking at it from every angle. “I read the article and looked at the pictures you sent me, but seeing one of these in person is always a moment,” he said. “I always feel a bit of excitement. The pottery, the paintings, always contain a little bit of the personality of the artist. When I see a water pitcher shaped like a fat little dog, it’s like going back in time to meet the potter.”

  “I know what you mean,” Remi said. “I love that too, when the actual human being is staring back at you from a thousand years ago.”

  Caine came in toward the table and looked closely at the pot. “But this one is different. It’s obviously a prime piece, classic period. A day in the life of the king of Copán.” He straightened and looked at the Fargos. “You know that discoveries like this have to be reported to the government of Mexico, right?”

  “Of course,” said Sam. “We were in the middle of a natural disaster and there wasn’t any reasonable, safe way to do that or any authorities who had time to deal with it. We’ll return the pot when we’ve had a chance to learn what we can about it.”

  “It’s a relief that you know the rules,” he said.

  Remi said, “Are you sure it’s from Copán? We found this at Tacaná, north of Tapachula, Mexico. That’s at least four hundred miles from Copán.”

  Caine shrugged. “Native people in the Americas sometimes covered a lot of ground on foot. There’s also trade.”

  “How old is it?”

  Caine cocked his head and looked. “Wait. Here we go. The king is Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the sixteenth ruler of Copán. It says so here.” He pointed at a group of vertical columns with rounded designs like seals.

  Sam said, “You can read those?”

  “Yes. These columns each consist of one to five glyphs and each glyph is a word or phrase or an indication of a position in a sentence. You read from top left to right, but only for the first two columns, then go down a line and read the left one and the right one and so on. There are eight hundred sixty-one glyphs that we know.”

  “There are over twenty Mayan languages,” said Remi. “Does this form of writing work for all of them?”

  “No,” he said. “The only ones we have were written in Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatec.”

  Sam stared at the pot. “So this comes from Copán. I wonder how it got from Honduras all the way across Guatemala to the border of Mexico.”

  “And when,” said Remi.

  “Exactly what I was wondering,” said Caine. “We could do a carbon date on any organic material associated with the find and on the man himself. That would do it.”

  “I’ll call Dr. Talamantes and Dr. Garza and see if they can arrange to have the man tested,” said Remi. “He’s in a hospital morgue in Tapachula. They signed him in, mostly on the strength of the goodwill they built up with the medical community in the area after the earthquake.”

  “Are they also archaeologists?” asked Caine.

  “No, just medical doctors,” said Sam.

  “Then would you mind if I stepped in and got a couple of Mexican colleagues to go to work on this? They’re first-rate scientists and very well respected.”

  “We’d be delighted,” said Remi.

  “Then I’ll call them this afternoon and get them going on it. You’ve done a good job of keeping his location quiet since the first blast of publicity, so there hasn’t been a crush of people trying to get in and see him. But you can be sure that lots of people are waiting and listening — some scholars and scientists, and some crackpots and some charlatans as always.”

  Sam said, “The publicity came from another volunteer who was up there with us. He didn’t believe in keeping the find quiet, based on his own principles: The discovery belongs to the people so the people should be told about it. We thought we’d talked him into waiting, but he went public without us. After that, we took steps to give the scientific community a chance to see things before the tourists and souvenir hunters destroyed them.”

  “It’s a good thing you did. Do we have anything here we can carbon-date?”

  Remi said. “Quite a bit. Our guy made himself a pair of dishes out of hollowed-out pieces of wood. There was some plant residue in one of them.”

  “Perfect,” said Caine. “Anything living begins to lose carbon 14 the minute it dies.”

  “I’ll get them.” She went off to the other end of the room, disappeared through a door, and came back with the two plastic bags containing the wooden vessels, seeds, and husks.

  Caine returned his attention to the pot. “This pot has a lid. The seal looks translucent, a bit like beeswax. Have you opened it?”

  “No,” said Sam. “We realized that the minute we cleared the lava out of the doorway to the shrine, or whatever that building is, we exposed the man and his belongings to air and started the clock ticking. We didn’t want to do anything that might harm the pot. We’ve carried it around quite a bit, so we know the contents aren’t liquid and aren’t stone or metal, but it’s not empty. Something shifts around a little when you move it.”

  “Shall we try to open it now?” asked Caine.

  “We have a good place to do it,”
Remi said. “In our remodeling, we’ve had the builders put in a climate-controlled room — low temperature, low humidity, no sunlight — just like a rare-book room in a library.”

  “Wonderful,” said Caine.

  “Follow me.” She led them to the door she had just emerged from, opened it, and turned on the light. The room had a long worktable and a few chairs and a wall of glass cabinets, all of them empty at the moment. In the corner of the room was a tall red tool chest on wheels that looked like the ones in auto mechanics’ shops.

  Professor Caine carried the pot into the room and set it on the table. Sam wheeled the chest over and opened the top drawer, which held a collection of tools for working on small, delicate objects — brushes, tweezers, X-Acto knives, dental picks, awls, magnifiers, and high-intensity flashlights. There was also a box of sterile surgical gloves.

  Caine put on gloves, chose a pick and tweezers to examine the seal and pull some of it off. He looked at it under a magnifier on a stand. “It seems to be a glue made from some kind of plant resin.” He switched to an X-Acto knife and methodically cut away the translucent substance from around the lid.

  “What’s in there can’t be food. It’s glued shut,” said Remi.

  “I don’t dare guess,” said Caine. “Archaeology is full of high hopes and pots that turn out to be full of mud.” He gripped the lid and twisted. “Interesting. I can turn the lid a little but not raise it. What it looks like is that he heated the pot a little, sealed it, and let it cool. That would produce a partial vacuum in it to keep the seal tight.”

  “Just like canning,” said Remi. “Maybe it is food.”

  “Now, I wonder how to get it open without breaking it.”

  Sam said, “We could heat it a bit again to get the air inside to expand. Or we could take it up to a high altitude, where the air pressure is lower.”

  “How could we warm it a bit without harming it?”

  “If we do it evenly, the pot shouldn’t break,” said Sam.

  “I agree,” Caine said.

  “Another modification to the house: We put in a sauna,” said Remi.

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Sam entered the sauna, placed the pot on the wooden bench, then turned on the heat, slowly raising the temperature. At the end of ten minutes, he entered the sauna, wrapped the pot in a towel, and brought it out. He held the pot while Caine tried the lid. It came up and the pressure was equalized. Sam put the lid back on, and they all went back downstairs to the climate-controlled room.

  “The big moment is coming,” said Remi.

  “Don’t be disappointed if it’s just a mess of organic matter that used to be food,” said Caine. “Sometimes the best bits of information don’t look like much at first.”

  Sam set the pot on the table. Caine, still wearing surgical gloves, took a deep breath and reached in. He pulled out a mass of what looked like dried weeds. “Packing material?”

  He picked up a small flashlight and looked inside the pot. “Oh…” He stood up and peered down into the vessel. “Is it possible?”

  “What is it?”

  “It looks like a book,” he said. “A Mayan book.”

  “Can you get it out?”

  Caine put both hands into the vessel and lifted out a thick brownish rectangle and gently set it on the table. He reached out slowly with only his gloved index finger, lifted the outer layer an inch. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Intact. I can’t believe it.” For a moment, he stood still, lost in thought. He withdrew his finger and only then seemed to notice the Fargos again.

  His whole face brightened. “It’s a Mayan book, a codex. It seems to be undamaged. We have to take our time examining it because we don’t know how fragile it is, and there’s no way to know how many times a page can be turned or even touched.”

  “I know they’re very rare,” Remi said.

  “The rarest of all Western Hemisphere artifacts and by far the most valuable,” said Caine. “The Maya were the only people in the Americas who developed a complex system of writing and it’s good. They could write anything they could say. If they’d had the urge, they could have written novels, epic poems, histories. Maybe they did. There were once hundreds of thousands of these codices. Today there are only four that survived and made it into European museums — the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris. And there’s also the Grolier Codex, but it’s so inferior to the others that many experts think it’s a forgery. But the first three are full of Mayan knowledge — mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, calendars. This could be the fifth.”

  “You said there were once thousands,” said Remi.

  “Hundreds of thousands, is a better estimate,” he said. “But there were two problems. The codices were painted on a fabric made from the bark of a wild fig tree called Ficus glabrata. The fabric was folded into pages and the pages painted with a white mixture like stucco. That gave the Maya white pages they could write on. They were better than papyrus, almost as good as paper.”

  “What were the problems?”

  “One was the climate. Most of Mayan country was humid jungle. When books get wet, they rot. Some codices were buried in tombs — some at Copán, some at Altun Ha in Belize, some at Uaxactún Guytan. The fig-bark fabric rotted, leaving little piles of painted stucco fragments too small and delicate to ever be pieced together. But the biggest problem arrived in ships.”

  “The Spanish conquest,” said Sam.

  “Mainly the priests. They made a point of destroying anything having to do with native religions. Mayan gods looked like devils to them. They burned every book they found and then searched every hiding place so no book could survive. This went on from the beginning of the Mayan conquest in the 1500s until the 1690s, when they took the last cities. That’s why only four are left.”

  “And now five,” said Remi.

  “It’s a spectacular find,” said Caine. “Do you have a place to put it where it will be safe?”

  “We do,” said Sam. “We’ll lock it up tight.”

  “Good. I’d like to get started on the dating process and then come back tomorrow to start examining the codex. Is that possible?”

  “I’d say it’s mandatory,” said Sam. “We’re as curious as you are and we can’t satisfy our curiosity without you.”

  Chapter 7

  LA JOLLA

  The next afternoon, Sam and Remi were waiting when David Caine arrived. After Sam and Remi took him into the climate-controlled room, Remi put on surgical gloves, opened one of the glass cabinets, and set the codex on the table. Caine sat for a moment, staring at the cover. “Before we begin,” he said, “the carbon dating is complete on the seeds and husks that were in the wooden bowls and on the wood itself. The samples all had 94.29 percent of their carbon 14. The wood and the plants died at about the same time, which is four hundred seventy-six years ago, in 1537.”

  “Isn’t that sort of late for a classic Mayan?” asked Remi.

  “It’s well into the end-time of the civilization. Most major classic cities had been abandoned by around 1000 A.D. Others stood until the Spanish got to them, beginning around 1524, when Pedro de Alvarado attacked the Maya with a huge army of native allies from Tlaxcala and Cholula. But there were many Mayan kingdoms that took a long time to be conquered. The last few fell in 1697, more than a hundred fifty years later.”

  Remi said, “So what we found was a high-ranking man who picked up a pot from somewhere near Copán in Honduras. He put a book inside it and set off on foot. He went four hundred miles or so, then climbed all the way up the side of the Tacaná volcano in Mexico and put it in a shrine.”

  “I would say it’s almost certain that something of that sort happened. Why he did it, we can only guess at this point.”

  “Do you have a guess?” asked Sam.

  “I think that he was taking an extremely precious book to a secret and remote place to hide it from the Spaniards. Judging from your photographs of the site, you’re probably right that it was a smal
l stone shrine. Inside are pictures of Cizin, god of earthquakes and death, who was the bringer of earthquakes. He’s the dancing skeleton with the dangling eyeballs.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I’m just guessing, remember. At some point, the shrine was covered by a lava flow from the volcano. It’s even possible that he intentionally placed the book in the shrine, knowing the likelihood that it would be covered by lava, believing that a god was giving him a perfect way to seal the book in a safe place.”

  “Do you think he would do that?”

  Caine shrugged. “The Mayans had a strong belief in an afterlife in which they would be rewarded or punished. They also believed that the universe was kept in balance by what they did. Much of the knowledge they accumulated in books about astronomy and mathematics was intended to tell them what they should do to keep the universe from spinning out of control and destroying itself like an unbalanced machine. By 1537, this man’s universe had been showing signs of coming apart for hundreds of years. There had been terrible droughts from 750 to 900 A.D., a series of wars between cities, disease. And then the Spaniards came. Their arrival in 1524 was like the landing of aliens in a horror movie. They carried weapons nobody could fight or make for themselves. They were bent on destroying what remained of Mayan civilization and killing or enslaving every Mayan person. It was the final curse after a long series of curses. A Mayan — and this was a person of the royal class — would have taken the long view. These are people whose calendar was divided into cycles 5,125 years long. He might have believed that the book he was saving contained information essential to keeping the world intact or rebuilding it in the future.”

  “I suppose, then, he wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice himself to save the book.”

  Caine said, “Imagine that powerful, humanlike creatures arrived here in spaceships, killed or enslaved everyone they could find, and then began the process of finding every computer, every book, and burning it. Oops! There goes the history of art, and, after it, every painting. There goes calculus, algebra, even arithmetic. They’re burning the books of every religion — all Bibles, the Koran, the Talmud, everything. Did they forget philosophy? Nope, it’s all going into the fire. Every poem, every story, ever written? Up in smoke. Physics, chemistry, biology, medicine; the history of the Romans and Greeks, the Chinese, the Egyptians. All gone.”