Incarnate: Mars Origin "I" Series Book III (16 page)

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?

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
“waterway.” 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.

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.”

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 inflicted 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.

“It gives the
reason. Right here,” Jairo said.

“Let
these be guidestones to an Age of Reason.” Logan read the inscription. “Oh.
Okay. The Age of Reason, huh?”

“This
is interesting,” I said looking at the stone Logan read from. “What you said,
Jairo about this being astronomically aligned. They wrote here how.” I skimmed
over it, “Okay, they put that the channel through the stone indicates the
celestial pole. The horizontal slot indicates annual travel of sun, and the
sunbeam through the capstone marks noontime throughout the year. Wow. So that’s
cool, huh, Logan. Just like the Maya observatories.”

“How many of
these languages can you read, Ma?”

I looked up at
the granite monument, the same message was written in eight different
languages, one on each side of the four slabs. And there was a shorter message
inscribed on the capstone in four ancient languages.

“Let’s see. Of
the four at the top - Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit and Egyptian
hieroglyphs - I can read all but the Babylonian.” I walked around and inspected
each slab. “English, of course. Spanish. No. Swahili. No. Hindi. No. Hebrew,
Arabic. Yes.  And the last two, Chinese and Russian. No.”

“Only the
ancient languages, huh, old lady.” Logan came and stood next to me and hooked
her arm in mine.

“Guess so,” I
said.

Jairo stood in
front of the slab inscribed in English and started reading the message out
loud.

“One. Maintain
humanity under five hundred million in perpetual balance with nature.”

“There’s your
population control.” I said. “We’re already well above that, though. Way above
that.”

Jairo read the
next one.

“Two. Guide
reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.”

“Another ban on
running up the number of people,” Logan said.

 I read
next. “Three. Unite humanity with a living new language. Four.
Rule
passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered
reason. Five. Protect people and nations with just laws and fair courts. Six.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.”
I looked at Jairo, the realization that these words could have easily been
taken from the manuscripts I’d found in Qumran I’m sure was all over my face.
He patted my shoulder. He seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Seven,”
he said. “Avoid petty and useless officials.”

“That
one I can relate to,” Logan said. She turned to leave. “I’m going to wait in
the car.”

Jairo
and I read the next two together. “Eight. Balance personal rights with social
duties. Nine. Prize truth - beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.”

Jairo
let a thoughtful smile escape his lips. He looked at me and nodded,

“Ten,”
I said. “Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for
nature.”