Authors: Donald Hamilton
She grimaced. “Oh, God, the commie menace rears its ugly head!”
I said grimly, “If you dig up an ancient Melmec cosmic-death-ray machine, commies aren’t the only ones who’ll be snooping around. Hell, anything that kills lots of people interests lots of people. And the trouble is that those interested people, like the unpleasant trio I have in mind, often use some fairly crude methods to find things out. So keep your eyes open.” After a moment I went on: “You seem to’ve been in touch with Lupe Montano, or his people, all through this trip. How did they make contact with you?”
“There does seem to be quite a bit of support for his revolution,” Frances said. “He’s got people working for him just about everywhere, particularly in the hotels… Oh, oh, here comes Ramiro to tell us we’re late and everybody’s waiting for us.”
She started picking up her things, while I closed my camera case. The stocky guide had eschewed his formal white guide-suit for today’s expedition; he was wearing white sailcloth slacks and a blue knit sports shirt.
“Do not hurry yourself, señora,” he said. “I merely wished to confirm our plans so I can tell the driver: You do wish to start at the Temple of the Jaguar today?”
“Yes, let them get the impact of the Great Court first. We’ll spend this morning on that, and plan to pay it another visit the last day before we leave, to kind of pull it all together for them. Tomorrow we’ll pick up the minor temples around here and the big
cenote
and the Ball Court; by that time they should be ready to appreciate the Sacred Cave, those who aren’t afflicted with claustrophobia. Then we’ll spend a day looking over Labal, and maybe a couple of other outlying centers if there’s time, whenever you can round up enough Jeeps, to show them how big this ancient urban complex really was.” She gave him an odd sideways glance. “Did you sleep well, Ramiro?”
He met her look with a meaningful one of his own. “After midnight I slept very well indeed, señora. It is always a relief to see the goods properly delivered, as you say in America.” He went on in a dry voice, deliberately mimicking the political jargon he’d been using on us: “As a loyal agent of my fine progressive government I must, of course, consider it regrettable that the patriotic forces of right and justice were not available to apprehend the anti-administration criminals before they could join forces to conspire further against the free people of Costa Verde.” He smiled thinly, looking at me. “I am glad you chose not to interfere, Señor Felton.”
Watching him move away, I said, “So Ramiro Sanchez is one of Lupe’s people, too. The guy I wasn’t supposed to talk too loudly in front of yesterday because you were afraid, oh, so afraid, that he’d report my subversive utterances to the government!” I looked at Frances grimly. “One of these days you’re going to start trusting me, Dillman, and I’ll die of shock.”
She smiled nicely. “If that’s the only thing that can kill you, Sam, you’ll live a long time.”
It was a long, hot, hardworking morning. I used the 24 mm wide-angle lens for the overall shots and the 70-140 mm zoom for the details; each lens on a separate camera body, of course. That gave me enough optical equipment hanging around my neck to look nice and professional and fool the people.
Actually, I’m still a little uncomfortable with those zooms. They’re convenient, of course, letting you frame each shot—near or far—with a twist of the wrist; but the early ones had all the crisp definition of an operable cataract. This was a new one, and I’d checked it out and it had seemed sharp enough, but I still didn’t have the total faith in it that I had in my old-fashioned one-focal-length lenses. But you can’t play pro nowadays without at least one long, fat zoom lens on display.
Whoever had laid out the tour—and I suspected Frances was largely responsible—had planned the approach for a maximum of drama. We hiked half a mile along a trail through the tangled jungle, single file, between odd overgrown rocky mounds that were pointed out to us as ruins that had not yet been excavated and perhaps never would be. Unless a certain site promised new information, Frances said, it was left untouched because the old friezes and bas-reliefs tended to deteriorate quite rapidly once they were exposed to air and rain and sunlight, unless they were carefully stabilized, an expensive and not always totally successful process.
Then we scrambled up a steep slope and found the Great Court lying open before us, very impressive, table-flat and several football fields long. It was flanked by two massive temple-crowned pyramids. At the end of the long court the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid loomed ominously, black against the sun. A ray of light shone directly through the temple at the top, the Temple of Death, apparently open from east to west.
“As you can see,” Frances said after giving us time to catch our breaths and admire the view, “as you can see, this whole ceremonial area is a tremendous level platform raised about twenty feet above the jungle floor; the pyramids rise from that. When you climb them, please be careful. You’ll note that the steps themselves are quite narrow and the risers are quite high. The best method is to go up and down in a crabwise fashion. Anybody who’s subject to vertigo had better not try it. It’s a good deal steeper than it looks.”
One of the lady schoolteachers, Pat Tolson, looked up at the shadowed temple silhouette surmounting the forbidding mass of the Great Pyramid. She asked, “Up there, isn’t that where they sacrificed the virgins by opening their chests with an obsidian knife and tearing their hearts out?”
Frances said, “That sacrificial technique was more popular with the later Aztecs over in Mexico. However, the Melmecs did have their human sacrifices; you’ll see various methods illustrated in the temple decorations. But that particular death, as far as we can determine, was usually reserved for prisoners taken in war. Bones indicating female sacrifices have been found; but unfortunately after a few thousand years it’s a little hard to determine just how pure the lady was at the time of her death.”
After that, as far as I was concerned, it was Pyramid Day; and as I started up the first one I realized that I’d never make an archaeologist. The damned thing had looked reasonably negotiable at a distance, but close up it loomed above me like the United Nations Building with a few inadequate notches in it. Each step, as Frances had indicated, while almost two feet high, wasn’t even wide enough to plant your shoe on properly… The simple fact is that I get dizzy, dammit. Vertigo, like the lady said. And not only do I not like places high in the air, I do not like them deep in the ground—and I still had a cave to look forward to. Scratch archaeology as a possible career alternative.
Fortunately, the big camera bag gave me a good excuse to be clumsy and cautious about it, hauling myself up ignominiously on all fours, more or less, while Gloria Jean Putnam, for one, in her wide skirts, and heavy boots, bounced up and down the giant stairs like a frisky chamois; and Frances herself strolled casually about those murderous steps while explaining that the Melniec priests probably didn’t want their pyramids to be too easy for ordinary mortals to climb; there was also the theory that the pitch had been scientifically calculated so that a dead sacrificed body dumped from the top would roll all the way down without hanging up halfway in embarrassing fashion, which would be a very bad omen. I was glad to know that, if I started to roll, I wouldn’t become a bad omen.
But the temple carvings were spectacular, once you got to the top and recovered enough to appreciate them, carefully blocking from your mind the fact that you still had to get back down. We learned about the corbeled arch, which isn’t really an arch. We were shown scenes of bloody battle and bloodier sacrifice in a world tormented by strange demonic beasts ruled by the jaguar, Death. We came to understand a little about a tough, lusty, cruel fighting people who’d had intelligence enough to discover systems of mathematics and astronomy that were not to be surpassed for thousands of years, but who had left odd little gaps in their civilized knowledge.
They had built some fine paved roads, but they’d never invented wheels to run on them—not even the later Mayas had made use of the wheel. They’d had shields and obsidian knives and stone-studded clubs and stone-tipped spears, but the
atlatl
, or throwing stick, was still to come, and that dreadful implement of long-range homicide, the bow, was not yet—as far as this part of the world was concerned—even a gleam in its inventor’s eyes. And intelligent as they were, they had never discovered a way, perhaps they’d never even discovered the desire, to escape from the total, absolute domination of their priests…
It was well past noon when we all got together up where the great menacing two-headed stone jaguar at the top of the Great Pyramid looked both ways out of his open temple, scowling fiercely toward the Land of Morning and the Land of Night as if he didn’t like either very well. When she’d finished explaining the elaborate carvings on the temple façade and turned everybody loose to look around, Frances beckoned me to follow her.
“Over here,” she said. “Let me show you something, Sam. Have you got a flashlight?”
It was a dark alcove—in a Christian church it might have been called a small chapel. I dug a little flashlight out of my camera bag and turned it on. The mural leaped out at me from the stone wall opposite, faded of course, chipped here and there where the lime plaster had flaked away with the centuries, but magnificent and terrifying. It was Picasso’s
Guernica
set back in time and style a few millennia and done without the dying horse; but everything else in the picture was dying, priests and priestesses, armed and plumed warriors, richly dressed citizens, even a few children, all gasping their last in the Great Court below us, and on the ceremonial platforms before the three elevated temples, including the one in which we now stood, the Temple of Death.
“But what’s killing them?” Frances whispered. “What’s
killing
them, Sam?”
There was no indication of what was killing them. There were no spear wounds or knife slashes or club fractures; there was no blood except around the altar where, obviously, elaborate sacrifices had been made just before
it
happened, whatever
it
was. They were simply dying, all of them.
“I’d rather you wouldn’t photograph that,” Frances said. “We’ve made careful record shots of it, of course; but we’d rather it wasn’t publicized until we’ve found some kind of explanation to go with it.”
“Sure.”
Outside, the sunshine seemed very bright. Although I’d only been in there a few minutes, I felt as disoriented as if I were coming out of a long and scary movie. Frances left me; she wanted to find Sanchez and ask him when he’d scheduled the bus to take us back to the hotel. I worked my way around to the west side of the temple where the early-afternoon light now threw the carvings into sharp relief. As I turned the corner of the building, I almost bumped into the old man named Cortez. He gave me his formal little bow, and I answered it.
“
Iglesia hermosa
,” he said.
“Yes, it is a beautiful church,” I said.
“But for you,” he said, “better
Templo Guerrero.
” He pointed. “For me, priest, better
Templo Sacerdote.
” He pointed again. Then he looked at me hard. “When I call, you come. Soon now.”
He had those strange brown in-turned Maya-Melmec eyes; and I reminded myself that as a good transplanted Scandinavian, I allow myself to be slightly prejudiced against the brown-eyed variety of human animals, simply because as a rule I find them less comprehensible than the blue-eyed variety to which I belong; but somehow the prejudice did not apply here. I realized that, despite some minor differences in pigmentation, we knew each other very well in a strange and disturbing way, this old man and I. Uncomfortably well.
I heard myself say, “I will come.”
“Be careful.
Vaya con dios
, señor.”
“What was that all about?” It was Frances’s voice behind me.
I watched the old man move down the steep pyramid with a strange floating gait; well, climbing pyramids was in his blood. Maybe if my ancestors had been climbing pyramids all those centuries, I’d be good at it, too.
When I call, you come.
Who the hell did he think he was, anyway? Who did he think I was?
But that was a foolish question. He knew who I was; he’d known ever since he’d looked at me in the hotel lobby. One day he’d tell me, and then I’d know, too.
“What was he saying to you?” Frances asked.
“He was saying that this is a beautiful church,” I said, “but that as a warrior, I’d do better over in the Temple of the Warriors; and as a priest, he’d do better in the Temple of the Priests. I think he was making a joke, in his own obscure fashion. What’s the bus story?”
The bus story was that the bus was already waiting to transport us back—well, forward—a few thousand years to modern civilization as represented by the Hotel Copalque. When I came into the lounge for a much-needed drink, Miranda Matson, in her usual baggy seersucker pantsuit, was perched at the bar with a tall one in front of her, obviously not her first.
“Hey, Flash, how are you making it?” she asked.
“They got the wrong guy,” I said, sitting down beside her wearily. “Sir Edmund Hillary would have loved it; although Everest was never like this. Anything I can do for you, Miranda?”
“Introduce me to the professor lady in charge, will you? She’s supposed to be digging up all kinds of strange and wonderful things around here, revolutionizing Mesoamerican history. What’s a Melmec, anyway?”
“Ask her; she’ll tell you,” I said, and beckoned to Frances, who’d just come in. “Dr. Dillman, Miss Matson, and vice versa. Watch out for this one, Frances. Unlike some polite journalistic types you’ve been dealing with, she’s no gentleman.”
I went over and had a drink with Paul Olcott, whom I’d seen negotiating the giant pyramid steps in a very relaxed fashion. Well, I suppose after chasing mountain sheep and goats—his hunting specialty—up thousand-foot cliffs, it had seemed easy. We were joined by his handsome blond wife Elspeth; but after a little they said that after all that climbing they wanted to shower before lunch, and left me to nurse my glass alone. Presently Miranda joined me.