“5:00,” said Alred, checking her watch to see exactly how many
hours
ago that had been. She leveled him with a dry gaze.
Porter’s glow dulled. As if just remembering his small bag beside his book, he jumped, “Want some pistachios?”
“Food’s not allowed in the library. I thought Mormons were supposed to be perfect.”
“Ah. ‘A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid…Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’”
“Shakespearean all of a sudden?”
“Matthew 5:14 and 16.” Pulling a legal pad from beneath two others, he flipped through the sheets and handed it to Alred.
“What am I looking at,” she said, examining a chart without lines.
“On the right side we have the English,” Porter said, interlocking his fingers as he relaxed.
“
This
is English?!?” Alred squinted at the scribbled words.
Porter cocked his head to the left and wiggled a finger in his ear. “My second grade teacher said I was doomed if I didn’t practice better penmanship. Thank goodness for the personal computer! Anyway, I feel a little rushed.”
“This supposed to be Mayan?” she said, looking at logograms drawn in the middle column of the sheet.
Porter leaned forward, snatched the pad from her, and pointed at one Mayan glyph on the page. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know. You said this was supposed to be Mayan? Looks like a hand.”
“Right. How do you pronounce that?”
“If this is your best attempt at Mayan, I’d say this character is
manik
…pronounced
keh
.”
“Look at this letter,” Porter said, sliding his finger left to a more simple squiggle.
“Is that supposed to be a hand?” Alred said. “Let me guess. You pulled it off the codex.”
Porter shook his head. “It’s the Hebrew letter
k
. It is
kaph
, a hand. Tell me if I’m mistaken, but doesn’t the Yucatec Mayan
kab
have the same meaning?”
Alred looked up, scanning her memory. “It does, if I recall.”
“The West-Semitic word for hand or palm, represented by the image of a hand in ancient times, was also pronounced…
kap
. As far as our current study goes, these connections shouldn’t surprise us. There is a link between the Middle East and Mesoamerica. Both Dr. Albright and Dr. Peterson have publicly noted it.”
“I recently found a paper from a professor of the University of Calgary who supposes a connection between three letters of the Mayan calendar to the Hebrew alphabet,” said Alred.
Porter lifted a finger. “I have some of those here! The Hebrew
lamed
and the Mayan
lamat
. A similarity so obvious, one might suppose it to be complete fraud created by those desiring to prove relationships between the Old and New Worlds. Yet here it is, solid fact. Tell me it’s a coincidence.”
“But these correlations are not proven.” Alred pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat on it, looking around at the quiet library. Was anyone else here? Most of the lights had been turned off. She smelled moist carpets and shifted the points of her heels on the wood floor running from the window behind Porter to the stairway some thirty feet behind her. “Are they trying to conserve energy here?”
“These logographic systems sound too much alike to go unnoticed. Did you know the Chinese character for
boat
is made up of three pictures with distinct definition? The first meaning a
vehicle
, the second is the number
eight
, and the third, a clear depiction of a mouth. A vehicle with eight mouths?”
“Does this have an application to Mesoamerican languages?” said Alred, wrinkling her brow.
“Both have connections to Biblical tongues,” said Porter, lifting an open hand. “Noah’s ark had eight mouths: Three sons and their wives, and also Noah and his wife.”
“Doesn’t folklore school us that Noah brought two of every kind of
mouth
on the planet?”
Porter smiled, but his excited eyes didn’t waver. “More, actually. But…there were only eight humans on the ark. All ideograms, like Egyptian, Mayan, and Chinese—in fact all letters!—originate from preconceived mental images. Why did the ancient Chinese, when desiring to write the word
boat
, describe such a detailed picture that has no reference to floating or even water? Why was a vehicle with eight people on it so clearly representative of this particular word?”
“You’re shooting in the dark,” Alred sighed.
“Isn’t that what all scholars do, followed by an analysis of facts explaining their assumptions?” said Porter.
“What’s the rest of this?” Alred said, looking at the pad full of foreign figures and badly scrawled English.
“Ever heard of the
Popol Vuh
, a Mesoamerican codex written not long after the Spanish conquered the area?”
“Did you forget my area of expertise?” Alred smiled. “
The Book of the Council.
I’ve quoted it. It was created by American Indians of the Quiche tribe, the most powerful nation in the area and also a branch of the Maya.”
“Right, in 1524, a general under Cortez forced the Quiche to surrender, burning their capital city, Utatlan.”
“You know some American history,” Alred said, her eyes relaxing. “The
Popol Vuh
was one of the few books that survived the period. Most of the native libraries were decimated by the Spanish inquisition, ruining our chance to obtain a detailed history of the Maya.”
“Some Mayan codices survived the Conquest,” Porter said quickly.
“Most are fakes.” Alred crossed her legs. “The
Popol Buj
, or
Popol Vuh
as you call it, was only one of four authentic works we know of. What about it?”
“Well, you know it is a collection of oral tales recorded by the Quiche nobles,” said Porter.
“I am well aware of the book’s background, Porter. Do you also know that we don’t have the original?”
“Is that supposed to preclude what I’m about to say?”
Alred paused. “I’m the Mesoamerican scholar here.”
“I…realize that. That’s why I think you’ll appreciate this. Especially in light of our new study. I have the book right here.” He picked up an English copy from under a thick lexicon of Hebrew words. “Listen to this: ‘…
they
planned the creation.’”
“Is that why we’re talking about the
Popol Vuh
?”
Porter looked at her, shock on his face.
Was she supposed to understand something in all this rhetoric?
“It says the same thing in the Book of Genesis.”
“I thought the Bible defines
one
god as the creator,” Alred said as Porter reached into his briefcase and pulled out his scriptures.
He put them on the table and Alred’s eyes widened. The black book with worn gilding was at least three inches thick, and as he opened it, she could see the onion skin pages. “Here. Genesis 1:26. ‘And God said, Let
us
make….’” He shot his face up at Alred’s.
“What happened to Judeo-Christian Monotheism?” said Alred.
“
Vayomer elohim vaaseh adam btsalmenu kdmutenu.
The Hebrew word for God in this verse is
Elohim
. As in Cherub
im
and Seraph
im
, the -
im
implies plurality, just as
-es
in the English language. And the gods in this scene are obviously
planning
to come down and create. Here: chapter 2 verse 4 and 5: ‘…in the day that
the Lord God made
the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field
before it was in the earth
, and every herb of the field
before it grew
…’
“‘Thus it was created in the darkness and in the night by the heart of heaven,’ says the
Popol Vuh
.” Porter looked up from his books.
Alred nodded. “Is that the Mormon in you speaking, or the scholar.” She didn’t know why she listened. She was sure she could find a Jew capable of explaining why their monotheistic religion had a deity with a name implying plurality.
“The scholar, actually!”
“You’ll bring up
The Books of Chilam Balam
next,” said Alred.
“You know I can find Semitic relations with the name
Balam
, but I wanted to point out the
Popol Vuh
. See these names?” he indicated the pad again. “I’ll read them for you.”
“Please.” Alred closed her eyes.
“This one,
Vucub Cakish
, a main character in the book,” he said. “Did I pronounce that right?”
She nodded.
“And this…
Xbalanque
.”
“Small Jaguar,” Alred said, opening her eyes and folding her arms.
“What?”
“That’s what the name means.”
“Well,” said Porter, “both correspond to…names in the Book of Mormon. But neither
Vucub Cakish
nor
Xbalanque
were available to scholars let alone anyone else until Carl Scherzer translated the text in Vienna from the original language into Spanish in 1857…many years after the publication of the Book of Mormon.”
“Really,” she said, skepticism in her voice. “What Book of Mormon names exactly.”
“Well in a section called the Book of Ether, there is a person by the name
Akish
. That’s not a stone’s throw from
Cakish
.”
“But ambiguous enough for debate,” said Alred.
“True. The second might take a deeper dive, but look. Break up the name
Xbalanque
. Of course the
x
in older Spanish and Portuguese languages is pronounced
sh
. And you know vowel shifts are common enough that rarely can we trust vowels at all in etymology.”
“Okay, you’ve effectively turned
Xbalanque
into the word SH-B-L-N-Q,” said Alred. “Where’s your correlation.”
Was she humoring him? Or just hoping he’d get it over with.
“Do you believe the
q
with an
n
preceding it could fall off the end of a word?”
“Why not.”
Porter tightened his lips together, then softened. “And an
m
is interchangeable with an
n
?”
“Are you patronizing me?” she said lifting her brow. “We all know
p
and
b
,
t
and
d
,
k
and
g
,
l
and
r
, and other such combinations can be found in the evolution of languages.
Balam
and
Balan
are essentially the same name. What’s your point.”
“There is both a Shiblon…and a Shiblom in the Book of Mormon. Incidentally, the Hopi Amerindian tribe professes even today that they come from the ‘great red city of the south.’”
“Oh, really,” she said, relaxing with the realization that the further Porter babbled into American anthropology and philology, the more he left behind his area of scholarly specialty.
“Yes. There is a similar mention in the Book of Mormon about groups of people departing a city they called Zarahemla. By a strange coincidence, in Arabic,
dar
or
zar
is one word for settlement, and
ahmar
means red.
Zarahamra
and Zarahemla,” Porter tilted his head. “Could be nothing, but seems enough evidence to at least warrant serious consideration of transoceanic contact with the Old World even without Ulman’s codex.”
“Did our conversation just leave the
Popol Vuh
?” said Alred.
“The Mayan Indians possess plenty of proofs of Near East connections if you ask me,” said Porter.
“All long shots?” said Alred. “Give me one.”
Porter raised a hand and let it flop as if he’d already spoken his thought. He grabbed his copy of the
Popol Vuh
, flipped the torn up pages, and read a line. “‘In this way they carried Avilix to the ravine called Euabal-Zivan,’ pardon my pronunciation, ‘so named by them, to the large ravine of the forest, now called Pavilix….’ Pavilix, in Mayan—”
“Means
in
Avilix,” said Alred. “Tell me your amazing fact.”
Porter didn’t speak, his face shining as if it was obvious. “The Mayan prefix
p
can be defined
in
?”
“That’s right.”
“The letter
b
is simply a voiced
p
.”
“Are we back to sound shifts?”
“The Hebrew mirrors the Mayan in this case.
B
is the prefix used at the very beginning of the Torah or the Old Testament:
B-reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamaim vet ha-aretz
.
B-reshit
,
in
the beginning….See it?”
“And what does this have to do with our precious KM-2?”
Alred realized she was sitting in a tight ball, limbs wrapped together like tape, strapping her to the chair. Her eyes had found their usual hard stare. Her skin had paled in the dim library light. Her auburn hair had turned to dark gray.
Licking his lips, Porter visibly debated his response. “I…found something even better while translating. Something I know…you won’t believe.”
“I’ll believe anything less subjective than the ride you just took me on,” she said. “What.”
Porter scratched his forehead and gazed at the shelves around him, holding volumes of their own secrets. “I probably shouldn’t…say…yet.”
“Because we’re at war?” she said, leaning forward and propping her hands on her knees as if about to spring at him. She tried to loosen at least her shoulders. “Or because you’re not sure about your facts?”
Porter sagged in his seat. The fire in his pupils dimmed. “Alred…I’m not trying to fight you. I really wish we could work together on this. That’s what Kinnard wanted us to do.”
So little he knew, she thought, squinting with her eyes and her lips.
“Do you have the codex here?” she said.
“I do,” he said.
“You go everywhere with it?”
“No,” he said, before holding his breath. “I hide it in the vent in my office. The heat’s not too bad for it.”
“We should trade off,” said Alred, thinking him foolish with the manuscript, “a day at a time.”
Porter made his mouth into a tight line and nodded.