Authors: Matilde Asensi
In the middle of that nave, we were like shipwrecked people eternally rowing without direction, but at last after a few minutes we could make out some distant stones, the back wall, and that encouraged us to hasten our steps, because with the help of the potent little Mini-Maglite flashlights, it had seemed like we saw at the base of that wall something like a shipping crate with many boxes on top.
The image got clearer as we neared it, but that’s not how we guessed what it was; it didn’t look like anything we could identify with a simple glance. Not even when we were a stone’s throw away could we decipher what we were seeing. We had to get there, go up the stone staircase, and lean over the packages in order to realize that what we had taken for an altar was an enormous gold sarcophagus about thirteen feet long and three feet high, almost identical to those of the Egyptian pharaohs, except for the small difference that its head was pointed. The four boxes that had at first seemed to be sitting on top of the supposed altar were a few other huge sarcophagi placed on stone shelves sticking out of the wall at varying heights. There were two sheets the same size as the large dais embedded in the wall on both sides of the main sarcophagus; the one on the left contained a text in
tocapus
; the one on the right, a drawing of what looked like a cubist landscape.
And at that very moment, a deafening roar made us turn as quick as wind toward the path by which we had come.
“What the hell is going on?” Jabba yelled.
For a moment I was afraid the whole place was coming down, but the sound was very localized, rhythmic, familiar….
“The door is closing!” I shouted.
“Run!” Jabba exclaimed, beginning an absurd dash through the passage, grabbing Proxi’s hand and pulling her along with him.
Neither Dr. Torrent nor I followed them. It was useless. The door was too far. Then the noise stopped.
“Come back here,” I told them, cupping my hands around my mouth like a loudspeaker. “We’re already shut in.”
They came back, disheartened and furious.
“Why didn’t it occur to us that something like that could happen?” Marc muttered, working hard to contain his irritation.
“Because we’re not as clever as the Yatiri,” Dr. Torrent told him.
The moment of confusion past, we turned our gazes back to the gold sarcophagi, but now we were serious and preoccupied, without our previous good mood. We looked at those golden coffins, each of us wondering in silence how in the hell we were going to get out of there.
To do something, we went up the stone staircase and were struck dumb, not knowing what to say or do before the sight of the silhouettes carved on the covers of the sarcophagi (at least, of the main one and the lowest two on the shelves). Some very realistic images showed some weird guys, who, if what we were seeing was true, appeared to be about eleven feet tall, to have beautiful beards, and to have undergone occipital frontal deformation.
“The giants?” Lola murmured, frightened.
But none of us answered her question, because we simply couldn’t make a sound. If they were the giants, the chronicle of the Yatiri had told the truth. About everything.
“It can’t be…,” I groaned at last, bad tempered. “It can’t, it can’t be true! Help me, Jabba!” I shouted, standing at one side of the main sarcophagus and sticking my fingers between the box and the lid to push the lid upward. Both felt soft but icy.
Marc followed me like a shadow, also annoyed, and with a strength coming from anger, we managed to lift that heavy gold cover, which first slid gently and then fell heavily and noisily to the floor on the far side. A quick and surprising whiff of gasoline filled my nose. The professor’s voice made us react.
“Do you know what you just did?” she said, very calm. When we looked at her, we saw
that Lola had gone to stand next to her and also looked angry. “You could have ruined for good a serious and delicate investigation of this tomb. Has no one ever told you that you should never touch anything when you make an archaeological discovery?”
“You’ve just committed the biggest act of stupidity in the world,” Proxi declared, putting her hands on her hips and looking daggers at Jabba. “There was no need to open that sarcophagus.”
But I wasn’t in the mood to feel guilty.
“Yes, there was,” I contradicted in a quavering voice. “When we get out of here, I don’t care if an army of archaeologists comes in and seals this place for the next hundred years, but right now it’s ours and we’ve worked very hard to find a cure that will give Daniel back his sanity. And you know what, Proxi? I don’t think we’ll find it…. Not here,” and I stretched out my right hand in a gesture that included the whole nave behind us. “Or will you be able to find the gold sheets that explain how to do it? If there’s a giant inside this sarcophagus, at least I want to leave with the certainty that the Yatiri were telling the truth and that there’s hope. If there isn’t, I will be able to go back home with a clear conscience and sit down to hope medication and time will have an effect.”
Immediately after speaking, I lowered my gaze to look at what we had exposed. I almost died of fright: a wide golden face looked at me with empty feline eyes from an enormous head that extended upward in a conical skull covered by a
chullo
made entirely of jewels, and adorned on both sides with two giant circular
orejeras
, also made of gold, with turquoise mosaics. My gaze traveled down that endless body, taking in a very deteriorated breastplate made of white, red, and black beads that formed a pattern of solar rays around the figure of Piri Reis’ Humpty-Dumpty, and over this breastplate rested an incredible necklace made of small gold and silver human heads. The mummy’s arms were raised, and a very fine skin like parchment was visible beneath which the almost powdered bone could be made out. The wrists, however, were covered by wide bracelets made of tiny seashells that time had left alone, unlike those giant hands that looked like eagle claws toasted by fire, resting on a golden thorax sticking out from under the breastplate. The size of each of those bones, which seemed drawn with sand, was really frightening. I was aware of Lola and Marta Torrent coming to stand next to me, and sensed their shock because of the unconscious backward movement of their bodies. The legs of the Traveler—that was, without a doubt, the famous
Sariri
so protected by the Yatiri—were covered by a fringed cloth, very damaged, on which could still be seen the original design of
tocapus
, and the feet, the enormous feet, were encased in golden sandals.
We were facing the remains of the Traveler, an eleven-foot tall giant who confirmed, on one hand, the myth of Viracocha, the Inca god, the so-called “old man of the sky,” who had created, near Tiwanaku, a first humanity that he didn’t like, a race of giants which he destroyed with columns of fire and a terrible flood, leaving the world dark afterwards; and on the other hand, he also corroborated the claims of the chronicle of the Yatiri, which told that a goddess named Oryana had come from the sky, and from her union with an earthly animal had given birth to a humanity of giants with centuries-long lifespans, who, after building and living in Taipikala, had disappeared due to a terrible cataclysm that put out the sun and caused a flood, leaving them sick and debilitated to the point of turning them into the small and short-lived humanity we were now.
Marc expressed out loud what I was thinking:
“What bothers me is that the Bible’s going to be right after all about the flood thing, now that no one believes it.”
“What makes you say that?” exclaimed Dr. Torrent, without pausing in her contemplation of the Traveler. “I believe it. In fact, I’m completely convinced that it really happened. But not because the Judeo-Christian Bible tells that Yahweh, discontent with humanity, decided to destroy it with a flood that lasted forty days and forty nights, but because the myth of Viracocha tells exactly the same thing, and Mesopotamian mythology does as well, in the Poem of Gilgamesh, which tells of the god Enlil, who sent a flood to destroy humanity, and of a man named Ut-Napishtim, who built an ark onto which he loaded all the seeds and animal species of the world in order to save them. It’s also mentioned in Greek mythology, and in China, where a man named Yu built, over a period of thirteen years, some enormous canals that saved part of the population from being destroyed by the flood. Do you want more?” she asked, looking back at the sarcophagus. “In the holy books of India, the Bhagavata Purana and the Mahabharata, the flood is described in complete detail and the story of the hero and his rescue boat is repeated. The Aborigines of Australia have the myth of the Great Flood that destroyed the world to create a new social order, and the North American Indians also tell a similar story, and the Eskimos, and almost all the tribes of Africa. Doesn’t it seem odd to you? Because it does to me. Very much so.”
Okay, so many similar occurrences couldn’t be a coincidence. Maybe it was true that there had been a universal flood, maybe the holy books and myths needed a scientific evaluation, a secular and impartial reading to uncover the authentic history that had been transformed into religion. Why deny them all validity on principle? They probably contained important truths that we were refusing to accept just because they smelled of superstition and incense.
“And when is this supposed to have happened?” Jabba asked, skeptical.
“That’s another interesting fact,” the professor remarked as she leaned over to examine the Traveler’s fringed skirt. “It could be said that almost all versions are remarkably similar: between eight and twelve thousand years ago.”
“The end of the Ice Age…,” I murmured, suddenly remembering the map made by the Turkish pirate, the Nostratic language, the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of species all over the planet (like the Cuvieronius and the toxodon), etc. But the professor wasn’t listening to me.
“‘This is Dose Capaca, who set forth on his journey in his six hundred and twenty-third year,’” she read out loud.
“That’s what it says on the textile covering his legs?” Proxi hurriedly asked, leaning over the giant’s delicate remains.
“Yes,” Marta Torrent replied, “but perhaps this textile and some of the objects are from several centuries later than the body. We can’t know.”
The professor then moved, distracted, toward the golden,
tocapu
-engraved sheet that was embedded in the wall to the left of the sarcophagi. She stood in front of it, raised her head to illuminate the engravings, and began to translate:
“‘You have learned how the language of the gods is written and you are reading these words. You deserve to know their sounds as well. Come find us. Neither the death of the sun, nor torrential waters, nor the passage of time have done away with us. Come and we will help you to live. Say: We will find you because we want to learn. Don’t bring war because you will not find us. We want you to bring only the desire for knowledge.’”
Her fantastic radio announcer’s reading voice had lent a solemn tone to the message’s words, so Marc, Lola, and I stood with foolish expressions on our faces.
“It must be a joke, right?” I suggested after making an effort to react.
“It doesn’t seem to be, Mr. Queralt.”
“But…It’s impossible that they still exist. They wrote that before leaving, and it doesn’t seem likely that they’re still somewhere awaiting the arrival of some visitors who have come by here and read their message.”
“There’s nothing left of these guys!” Marc boomed. “Someone would have seen them at some point and they would have been on the news. Besides, the message doesn’t make sense. It starts with a ridiculous question that invalidates everything else. This is some scammers’ joke.”
“Why is the question at the beginning of the message ridiculous?” the professor inquired, turning toward him.
“Because, where do they get the idea that the people who have come here have learned to read these gold sheets? We don’t even know how to get out of this pyramid! If you weren’t with us or if we didn’t have your husband’s ‘JoviLoom,’ none of us would have survived long enough to decipher this damned
tocapu
writing.” Jabba seemed really angry; despite the cool temperature, his shirt showed large sweat stains around his neck and on his back. “I’ll remind you that we’re locked in and that it’s been a long time now since we had our last meal. If we don’t find a way to return to the surface, we’re going to kick the bucket in a few days, which doesn’t give us enough time, or proper physical conditions, for learning a language without help.”
“Don’t be so sure, Marc,” she replied, with a furrowed brow. “Look at the wall. Pay attention to these drawings.” And she pointed at some reliefs engraved on the stone blocks that formed a band running the length of the wall.
Like robots, we began to walk slowly, examining the series of images composed of large
tocapus
, each one followed by a scene of Tiwanakan art representing its meaning, like a school primer for learning how to read.
“Notice that the first
tocapu
on the wall is also the first that appears in the message,” Marta Torrent was explaining to us, “and that the second and third, which form, as can be seen by the drawings, the verb ‘understand,’ with the suffixes for third person and realized action, or past perfect, are also the second and third from the text, etc. It really caught my attention when I read what the sheet said, that the message was written exclusively with figurative and symbolic
tocapus
. There isn’t a single one that represents the sound of a letter or a phonetic syllable. The message is very well thought out so that it can be represented visually on the wall. Look at this little man who’s working on a sheet with a little hammer and fine chisel. The previous
tocapu
is the root of the verb ‘to write.’”
“In other words,” I said, still walking, “the Yatiri leave a message that can be translated, or at least partially understood, in a short time. They take it for granted that they should formulate their invitation for people who don’t know their language or their writing. They have it very well thought out. But what if the conquistadors had gotten here? Imagine for a moment that Pizarro enters this chamber on his horse. Do you really think no one would have noticed these drawings were a lithographic primer?”