Authors: Matilde Asensi
“In any case, the worshiping figures on the Gate of the Sun appear mixed with the text, forming triangular figures with vertices that point to the condor’s head. If we consider both tables as one, and number them in rows and columns from one to ten, as if it were a chess board…,” she pinched her lower lip with her thumb and forefinger, pensive, “the figure would change radically, because then we would have two diagonal lines crossed in the center, one made up of two birds and three humans, and the other by two humans and three birds.”
“Five,” blurted out Proxi, who was following the explanation with great interest. “The two diagonal lines each have five figures. I mention it because I’m convinced all of this had to do with the last test, where you had to multiply by five and divide by two.”
“It is without a doubt a progression of knowledge and skills,” Dr. Torrent replied. “They teach us something and ask us to apply it practically. Are we worthy of accessing a superior power, or, on the contrary, does our mental incapacity close the doors to us?”
I was dazed listening to the two of them, especially the professor. She had an absolutely scientific way of reasoning and a definitely pedagogical way of explaining herself, and Proxi, our Proxi, picked up the signal like a radar receptor, reacting in harmony.
“Hey, Professor…,” Jabba interrupted. “Do you know how to talk like a normal person? Do you always have to be so abstruse?”
Marta Torrent looked at him with narrowed eyes, as if she were concentrating on sending gamma rays at him to turn him into a puddle of plasma, and I thought they were going to start arguing if I didn’t intervene to stop it. That was when I learned, however, that the narrowed eyes of the professor were the sign preceding her wild laughter. Instead of getting offended and reacting like a furious Nemesis, her laughter rung in the broken-floored tunnel and bounced off
the walls, multiplying. It sounded as if we were surrounded by a choir of bacchantes.
“Oh, I’m… sorry, Mr….!” she attempted an apology, as she tried to stifle her laughter. “I… I don’t remember your name, sorry.”
“Marc. My name is Marc,” he responded grumpily. I thought: “Bond. James Bond.” But I kept quiet.
“Marc, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to irritate you. It’s just, you know, my children and my students are always making fun of me for the way I speak. That’s why it seemed so funny to me. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
Jabba shook his head, denying it, and turned his back on the professor to make his indifference abundantly clear, but I, who knew him well, knew that he had liked the response. The situation was becoming very uncomfortable.
“Alright, let’s see,” Proxi murmured, positioning herself next to the professor. “If we number the rows and columns like you said, from one to ten, the diagonal with three condors and two humans has its five figures situated in boxes 2-2, 4-4, 6-6, 8-8, and 10-10, while the diagonal with three humans and two condors has them in 1-10, 3-8, 5-6, 7-4, and 9-2. So the more regular of the two is the one with three condors.”
By then I had done several quick mental calculations with the numbers, and I was arriving at the conclusion that the irregular series didn’t make mathematical sense, while the regular one corresponded cleanly with the five first whole numbers whose result, whether you divided them by two or multiplied them by five, had the same root.
“We have to push the five figures in the diagonal with three condors,” the chubby worm said at that moment.
“Why’s that?” I asked, annoyed. Again, he had beaten me to it.
“Don’t you see it, Root?” Proxi reprimanded. “Two, four, six, eight, and ten are divisible by two and multipliable by five with the same root, while the other series is illogical.”
“Yes, I had noticed that,” I observed, joining them, “but why do we have to push the five figures?”
“Because they’re five, Mr. Queralt, five spread over two tables. Five and two, the numbers from the first test, and besides, following the idea contained in the phrases, the condors imply movement while the humans suggest immobility. In the diagonal of the five digits divisible by two and multipliable by five, there are three condors, while in the other, there are three humans.”
“Maybe the number three has something to do with the next test,” Jabba remarked.
Proxi wrinkled her forehead.
“Let’s try to be more positive!” she reminded him.
“What did I say?” he protested.
“Fine, but… What if we punch in that combination and it makes the rest of the floor sink beneath our feet?” I remarked with apprehension.
“The floor is not going to sink,” Proxi grumbled. “The reasoning is perfectly logical and coherent. As clean as an infinite loop.”
“What’s this about an infinite loop?” the professor asked.
“A group of instructions in code that endlessly lead to each other,” Proxi explained. “Something like ‘if Marc is a redhead then jump to Arnau, and if Arnau has long hair, then go back to Marc.’ It never ends because it’s an unconditional statement.”
“Unless I cut my hair and Marc dyed his blond. Then it would stop being unconditional.”
It was a good joke, but Proxi and the professor didn’t seem to think it at all funny, so the two of us who had broken into laughter shut up.
“Still,” I proposed, repressing the last unfortunate smile and speaking as judiciously as I could, to recover my lost dignity, “three of us should go back to the part of the passage where the floor is still whole, and one, secured with the rope, should stay here to enter the combination. In case the floor ends up sinking, the other three can hold him.”
“What’s this about ‘hold him?’ Are you already trying to get out of it?” Jabba discreetly insinuated.
“Neither you nor I can be that person because we weigh too much. Understand? It has to be one of the two women. It’s not a question of bravery, but of excess weight.”
“It’s very clear, Mr. Queralt,” the professor agreed, without showing a flicker of emotion. “I’ll push the
tocapus
.” And faced with Proxi’s gesture of protest, she raised a hand, stopping her. “I don’t mean to offend you, Lola, but I am thinner, so I weigh less. End of discussion. Give me that rope and move back.”
“Are you sure, Marta?” Proxi asked, not very convinced. “I’m an experienced climber and I can manage better.”
“That remains to be seen. I’ve been working in excavations my whole life and I know how to ascend and descend a rope, so get back. Come on. Let’s not waste any more time.”
In the blink of an eye, we made a harness for the professor with the rope, and we moved farther back in the tunnel, jumping from stone to stone until we got to safe ground; then we harnessed ourselves as well, so we could exert the maximum amount of tension in case of an accident. From so far away, our lights barely illuminated the wall at the end, so we couldn’t see what the professor was doing, and I was still waiting for everything to jump into the air, with my muscles tensed, when a sound like distant thunder erupted over our heads. When we looked up, our headlights lit a narrow band of the ceiling, the very center, which began to descend right on top of us like a piece of tape coming unstuck.
“Dr. Torrent!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Are you alright?”
“Perfectly.”
“Then come here so we can unfasten the rope and get away from what’s over our heads!”
“What’s going on?” she asked; her voice sounded closer.
“Look, Professor!” Jabba bellowed. “Now is not the time for explanations! Run!”
The rope went slack in our hands and we pulled it back in bit by bit until we saw Dr. Torrent make the last jump to us. By then, the stony band of low sky was about to squash us, so we dispersed toward the side walls and pressed against them like glue, and even so, that thing was about to scrape the belly of the fattest of us. Only then did we notice that its descent had been on a diagonal, meaning that it was really an incredibly long staircase that came out just above the small condor head and ended at our feet, inviting us to go up it. But seeing the situation clearly did not make us peel ourselves off the walls. There we stayed, with our eyes glassy with panic and our nostrils crazily beating the dust that had fallen from the ceiling.
The first of the four to react was Proxi.
“Ladies and gentlemen…,” she whispered apprehensively, “the neck of the condor.”
“Of the first one or the second one?” Jabba inquired in a voice that didn’t want to leave his throat. He remained stuck to the wall, sucking in his belly.
“Of the first,” I stated without moving. “Remember the drawing of the map of Thunupa.”
The professor examined the three of us with a dark look on her face.
“Are you guys as clever as you seem,” she asked, “or did you get all of this from the documents supposedly belonging to your brother, Mr. Queralt?”
But before I could answer her, Proxi beat me to it:
“We’re supposing that Daniel discovered it because his documents gave us the necessary clues to figure it out. But it wasn’t all in the papers.”
“I never write everything I know,” she murmured, passing her hands over her hair to remove the dirt that had fallen on her.
“Probably because you don’t know everything,” I concluded, moving toward the first step, to which were attached two thick chains that ascended into the heights, “or because you know nothing.”
“It must be that,” she replied with cold sarcasm.
I started to carefully ascend those banister-less saw teeth that had fallen from the sky.
“Is this gold?” I heard Proxi ask, wary. I turned and saw her examining one of the chains.
“It’s gold?” I repeated, astonished.
The professor passed a hand over the links to remove the patina of dirt, and the light of her headlight, much larger and older than ours, illuminated a gleam of gold. Proxi, true to her character, began to shoot photographs. If we got out of there, we were going to have a fantastic album of our odyssey.
“Yes, it is,” Marta Torrent affirmed decisively. “But it shouldn’t surprise us: gold abounded in this land until the Spanish arrived, and besides, the Tiwanakans considered it to be sacred because of its awesome properties. Did you know that gold is the most extraordinary of all precious metals? It’s unalterable and doesn’t oxidize, so ductile and easily molded that it can be transformed into threads as fine as capillaries or into thick and resilient chains like these. Time doesn’t effect it, nor does any substance present in nature. It’s the best electrical conductor and it doesn’t provoke allergies, nor is it reactive, not to mention it has one of the highest indices of light reflection in the world, since it reflects even infrared rays. It’s so strong that the motors of spaceships are covered in gold, because it’s the only metal capable of withstanding the super-high temperatures generated in their interiors without melting like chocolate in your hand.”
The account of the Yatiri my brother had compiled from scattered texts mentioned that they had left their legacy written on gold because it was the sacred metal that lasted eternally. But why had an anthropologist who specialized in ethnolinguistics completed such research on the metal? She looked at the three of us and must have read the question on our faces.
“It really spiked my interested when I discovered that the Yatiri, as you know, wrote their texts on golden sheets. I couldn’t understand why. I thought that if they wanted to leave messages on a truly resistant material, they could have used stone, for example. However, they showed an exaggerated interest in writing on gold, and that intrigued me. But it’s certainly infinitely preferable to stone. Much safer, unalterable, and resistant.”
“That’s why they wrote on gold sheets,” Proxi remarked, “and they hid them in the chamber of the Traveler before leaving Taipikala.”
Dr. Torrent laughed again.
“Taipikala, indeed. And the Traveler…. Damned if you don’t know everything!”
“Are we going to stay here forever?” I snapped, starting my slow and cautious ascent up the staircase again.
No one answered me, but everyone started walking, following me. Why had the professor supplied us with that abundant information on gold? She couldn’t ask what we knew directly; that would have been a mistake, of course, so she had set a trap. She had obviously reacted when we had mentioned Thunupa, recognizing the least known epithet for the Staff God, letting us know that her knowledge was at the level of our own (when I spoke with her in her office, she hadn’t mentioned it). Then she had done the same with the secret name of Tiwanaku, Taipikala,
and with the Traveler. Somehow, she was trying to communicate to us that she knew the story perfectly. But I couldn’t forget the phrase: “It really spiked my interested when I discovered that the Yatiri, as you know, wrote their texts on golden sheets.” That “as you know” hadn’t been a question, it had been an affirmation. Everything that she’d told us about the precious metal were data accessible to anyone, trivial information. Except that phrase. It was clear she had been expecting a reaction from us. Did she want to confirm that we knew about the gold sheets? The funniest thing was, somehow, she had gotten what she had been looking for: Proxi had responded with two important bits of information, Taipikala and the Traveler. Now she sensed perfectly how far our knowledge went, and in case we were interested, she had also told us, in her way, what she knew, in a way that made it perfectly clear that it was much more than what we knew, because she had researched details as insignificant as that of the gold in depth. She was exhibiting her limits and sounding out ours. She was as clever as the devil.
And those mysterious Yatiri? Why had she so protected her most important knowledge? In the chronicle it clearly said that if another cataclysm and flood like those of the age of the giants happened, the surviving humans would be able to find their legacy, a legacy that would provide them with a code of impressive power. Maybe it wouldn’t help them survive, or eat, or not get sick, but at least by being communicated, it wouldn’t be lost forever; someone would be able to preserve it. So that was the goal those guys had with the whole set-up of the Pyramid of the Traveler: They weren’t interested in helping a humanity in trouble, as we had believed, following a line of reasoning laid out by my brother, but in keeping what they knew from being lost forever. To some extent, it also didn’t matter to them what use could be made of said power. The important thing was that it endure.