‘Do you really think Uaxuanoc is dripping in gold—or that it ever was?’ Fallon asked. He too was smiling as though an infection had spread to him from Halstead.
I began to get angry. ‘Vivero said so, didn’t he?’ I picked up the prints and thrust them under Fallon’s nose. ‘You believe in these, don’t you? Vivero placed cities where you
know
there are cities, so you believe him that far. What’s so bloody funny about the rest of his story?’
‘Vivero was the biggest liar in the western hemisphere,’ said Fallon. He looked at me in wonder. ‘I thought you knew. I told you he was a liar. You’ve heard us discussing it.’
I told myself to relax, and said slowly, ‘Would you mind spelling it out again in words of one syllable?’ I glanced at Harris who, by his expression, was as puzzled as I was. ‘I’m sure that Mr Harris would like to be let in on the joke, too.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Fallon. ‘You really took the Vivero letter at its face value.’ Halstead again broke into laughter; I was getting pretty tired of that.
Fallon said, ‘Let’s take one or two points in the letter. He said the de Viveros were of ancient lineage and had been hammered by the Moors so that the family fortunes were lost. He was a goddamn liar. His father was a goldsmith—that’s true enough—but his grandfather was a peasant who came from a long line of peasants—of nobodies. His father’s name was Vivero, and it was Manuel himself who added on the aristocratic prefix and changed it to de Vivero. He did that in Mexico—he would never have got away with it in Spain. By the time Murville visited the Mexican branch of the family the myth had really taken hold. ‘That’s why he couldn’t believe that a de Vivero had actually made the tray.’
‘So he was a liar on that point. Lots of people lie about themselves and their families. But how do you know he was
lying about the gold? And why should he spin a yarn like that?’
‘All the gold the Mayas ever had was imported,’ said Fallon. ‘It came from Mexico, from Panama and from the Caribbean islands. These people were neolithic, they weren’t metal workers. Look at Vivero’s description of their weapons—wooden swords with stone edges. He was right there, but the stone would be obsidian.’
‘But the Mayas
had
gold,’ I objected. ‘Look what they found when the cenote at Chichen Itza was dredged.’ I’d read about that.
‘So what did they find? A hell of a lot of gold objects—all imported,’ said Fallon. ‘Chichen Itza was an important religious centre and the cenote was sacred. You find sacred wells all over the world in which offerings are made, and cenotes are particularly important in Yucatan because water is so precious. There were pilgrimages made to Chichen Itza over a period of hundreds of years.’
Harris said, ‘You can’t put up a public fountain in New York without people throwing money into it.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fallon in a pleased voice. ‘There seems to be a primitive attraction to water in that sense. Three Coins in the Fountain—and all that kind of thing. But the Mayas had no gold of their own.’
I was confused. ‘Then why the hell should Vivero say they had?’
‘Ah, that puzzled me at first, but Halstead and I discussed it and we’ve come up with a theory.’
‘I’d be pleased to hear it,’ I said sourly.
‘Vivero found
something
—there’s no doubt about that. But what it was, we don’t know. He was cryptic about it because no doubt, he didn’t want to give the secret away to anyone who might read that letter. The one thing he was quite clear about was that he wanted to reserve the honour of discovery for his sons—for the de Vivero family. So if he
couldn’t actually tell his sons this mysterious secret then he had to find some other way of attracting them—and that was what they would confidently expect to find. Gold!’
I slumped in my chair dejectedly. ‘And why would the Spaniards be expecting to find gold where there wasn’t any? You’ve got me going round in circles.’
‘It’s simple enough. The Spaniards came to Mexico looking for plunder—and they found it. They raided the Aztecs and found gold in plenty in the temple treasuries and in Montezuma’s palace. What they failed to realize was that it wasn’t a
continuing
supply. They weren’t deep-thinking men and it never occurred to them that this hoard of gold which they had looted from the Aztecs had been built up over centuries, a little year by year. They thought there must be a major source, a huge mine, perhaps. They gave it a name, They called it Eldorado—and they never stopped looking for it. It didn’t exist.
‘Consider these Spanish soldiers. After they had looted the Aztecs, Cortes divided the spoils. When he had received and swindled his captains, and the captains had put their sticky fingers into what was left, there was little enough for the common soldiers. A gold chain, perhaps—or a wine cup. These men were soldiers, not settlers, and always on the other side of the hill was Eldorado. So they attacked the Mayas, thinking this was Eldorado and, after the Mayas, Pizarro attacked the Incas of Peru. They brought down whole civilizations because they weren’t prepared to sweat and dig the gold from the ground themselves. It was there, right enough, but it certainly wasn’t in Yucatan. The Mayas, like the Aztecs, certainly had plenty of gold, but not in such quantities that they could cover buildings or make rainwater gutters from the stuff. The nobles wore small pieces of gold jewellery and the temple priests used certain gold implements.’
Harris said, ‘So all this talk about gold by Vivero was just a come-on to get his boys moving?’
‘It seems so,’ said Fallon. ‘Oh, I daresay he did surprise the Mayas by melting gold and casting it. That was something they hadn’t seen before. I’ll show you a piece of genuine Mayan goldwork and you’ll see what I mean.’ He went to a safe, unlocked it, and returned with a small gold disk. ‘This is a plate, probably used by a noble. You can see it’s very nicely chased.’
It was very thin and flimsy looking. The design was of a warrior holding a spear and a shield with other figures bearing odd shaped objects. Fallon said. ‘That probably started out as a nugget found in a mountain stream a long way from Yucatan. The Mayas beat it flat into its present shape and incised that design with stone tools.’
I said, ‘What about the mountain of gold? Was that another of Vivero’s lies? Couldn’t there have been a mine?’
‘Not a chance,’ said Fallon decisively. ‘The geology is dead against it. The Yucatan Peninsula is a limestone cap—not auriferous at all. No other metals, for that matter—that’s why the Mayas never got out of the Stone Age, smart though they were.’
I sighed. ‘All right, I accept it. No gold.’
‘Which brings us back to Gatt,’ said Fallon. ‘What the hell is he after?’
‘Gold,’ I said.
‘But I’ve just told you there is no gold,’ said Fallon exasperatedly.
‘So you did,’ I said. ‘And you convinced me. You convinced Harris, too.’ I swung round to face Harris. ‘Before you heard this explanation did you believe there was gold in Yucatan?’
‘I thought that was what this was all about,’ he said. ‘Buried treasure in ruined cities.’
‘There you are,’ I said. ‘What makes you think Gatt believes any different? He may be an educated man, but he’s no archeological expert. I’m not an illiterate myself,
and I believed in buried treasure. I didn’t have the technical knowledge to know Vivero was lying, so why should Gatt? Of course he’s after the gold. He has the same mentality as the Conquistadores—just another gangster unwilling to sweat for his money.’
Fallon looked surprised. ‘Of course. I hadn’t allowed for the lay mind. He must be told the truth.’
Harris wore a crooked smile. ‘Do you think he’d believe you?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not after reading the Vivero letter, he wouldn’t. Hell, I can still see that king’s palace all shiny in the sun, even though I know it’s not true. You’d have a whale of a job convincing Gatt.’
‘Then he must be a stupid man,’ said Fallon.
‘No, Gatt’s not stupid,’ said Harris. ‘He just believes that men who spend as much time as you have on this thing, men who are willing to spend time in the jungle looking for something, are looking for something very valuable. Gatt doesn’t believe that scientific knowledge is particularly valuable, so it must be dough. He just measures you by his own standards, that’s all.’
‘Heaven forbid!’ said Fallon fervently.
‘You’re going to have trouble with Jack,’ said Harris. ‘He doesn’t give up easily.’ He nodded to the prints on the table. ‘Where did you have those made?’
‘I have an interest in an engineering company in Tampico. I had the use of a metallurgical X-ray outfit.’
‘I’d better check up on that,’ said Harris. ‘Gatt might get on to it.’
‘But I’ve got the negatives here.’
Harris looked at him pityingly. ‘What makes you think those are the only negatives? I doubt if they’d get it right first time—they’d give you the best of a series. I want to see what has happened to the others and have them destroyed before Gatt starts spreading palm-oil among your ill-paid technicians.’
Harris was a professional and never gave up. He had a total disbelief in the goodness of human nature.
Fallon’s way of organizing an archeological expedition was to treat it like a military operation—something on the same scale as the landing on Omaha Beach. This was no penurious egghead scratching along on a foundation grant and stretching every dollar to cover the work of two. Fallon was a multimillionaire with a bee in his bonnet and he could, and did, spend money as though he had a personal pipeline to Fort Knox. The money he spent to find Uaxuanoc would have been enough to build the damn place.
His first idea was to go in by sea, but the coast of Quintana Roo is cluttered up with islands and uncharted shoals and he saw the difficulties looming ahead so he abandoned the idea. He wasn’t troubled about it; he merely chartered a small fleet of air freighters and flew his supplies in. To do this he had to send in a construction crew to build an airstrip at the head of Ascension Bay. This eventually became his base camp.
As soon as the airstrip was usable he sent in a photographic reconnaissance aircraft which operated from the base and which did an aerial survey, not only of the area in which Uaxuanoc was suspected to be, but of the entire provinces of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. This seemed a bit extravagant so I asked him why he did it. His answer was simple: he was cooperating with the Mexican Government in return for certain favours—it seemed that the cartographic department of the State Survey was very short on information about those areas and Fallon had agreed to supply a photo-mosaic.
‘The only person who ever took aerial photographs of Quintana Roo was Lindbergh,’ he said. ‘And that was a long time ago. It will all come in very useful professionally.’
From Ascension Bay helicopters set up Camp Two in the interior. Fallon and Halstead spent quite a lot of time debating where to set up Camp Two. They measured the X-ray prints to the last millimetre and transferred reading to Fallon’s big map and eventually came to a decision. Theoretically, Camp Two should have been set up smack on the top of the temple of Yum Chac in Uaxuanoc. It wasn’t, of course; but that surprised nobody.
Halstead favoured me with one of his rare smiles, but there didn’t seem to be much real humour in it. ‘A field trip is like being in the army,’ he said. ‘You can use all the mechanization you like, but the job gets done by guys using their own feet. You’re still going to regret coming on this jaunt, Wheale.’
I had the distinct impression that he was waiting for me to fall flat on my face when we got out in the field. He was the kind of man who would laugh himself silly at someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his leg. A primitive sense of humour! Also, he didn’t like me very much.
While all this was going on we stayed at Fallon’s place outside Mexico City. The Halsteads had given up their own place and had moved in, so we were all together. Pat Harris was around from time to time. He departed upon mysterious trips without warning and came back just as unexpectedly. I suppose he reported to Fallon but he said nothing to the rest of us for the quite simple reason that everyone was too busy to ask him.
Fallon came to me one day, and said, ‘About your skindiving experience. Were you serious?’
‘Quite serious. I’ve done a lot of it.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘When we find Uaxuanoc we’ll want to investigate the cenote.’
‘I’ll need more equipment,’ I said. ‘The stuff I have is good enough for an amateur within reach of civilization but not for the middle of Quintana Roo.’
‘What kind of equipment?’
‘Oh, an air compressor for recharging bottles is one of the biggest items.’ I paused. ‘If the dives are more than a hundred and fifty feet I’d like a stand-by recompression chamber in case anyone gets into trouble.’
He nodded. ‘Okay; get your equipment.’
He turned away and I said gently, ‘What do I use in place of money?’
He stopped. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll ask my secretary to arrange all that. See him tomorrow.’
‘Who is going down with me?’
‘You need someone else?’ he asked in surprise.
‘That’s a cardinal rule—you don’t dive alone. Especially into the murky depths of a hole in the ground. Too many things can go wrong underwater.’
‘Well, hire somebody,’ he said a little irritably. This was a minor part of the main problem and he was only too eager to get rid of it.
So I went shopping and bought some lovely expensive equipment. Most of it was available locally, but the recompression chamber was more difficult. I saw Fallon’s secretary about that and a few telephone calls to the States produced a minor flap in the far-flung Fallon empire; it also produced a recompression chamber on the first available air freighter. Maybe that piece of equipment was an extravagance, but it’s one thing getting the bends in England where the port hospitals are equipped to handle it and where the Navy will give a hand in an emergency, and it’s quite another thing to have nitrogen bubbling in your blood like champagne in the middle of a blasted wilderness. I preferred to play safe. Besides, Fallon could afford it.
I ended up with enough gear to outfit an average aqualung club, and normally I should have been full of gloating at the opportunity to handle and use all those efficient and well-designed tools of the diver’s trade—but I wasn’t. It had come too easy. This wasn’t something I’d
sweated for, something I’d saved up to buy, and I began to see why rich people became bored so easily and began to indulge in way-out entertainments. Not that Fallon was like that, to give him his due; he was all archeologist and very professional.