I pointed my beam into the passage. It was extremely skinny, barely wide enough to fit a single person at a time.
Exhaling softly, I squeezed into the passage and took a few steps. It sloped downward. The others fell in behind me and slowly we worked our way through it.
"I see something," I said after a short walk.
"What is it?" Beverly asked.
"A dead end."
"Anyway around it?"
"I don't see one."
"Then Tum was right." She sighed. "This is a trick passage."
"Wait a moment." I walked to a large slab. "This is definitely manmade. It doesn't extend all the way to the ceiling. And it doesn't touch the rock on either side of it either."
I shifted my beam. It illuminated two giant half moons carved onto the slab's surface. Hundreds of small stars surrounded them.
I studied the ground. A giant orb had been carved into it. Thick points shot out on all sides of it. It looked a little like a sun beaming in the sky.
I studied the area where the floor touched the slab. Then I stepped forward. Taking a deep breath, I leaned against the slab. It moved a fraction of an inch. At the same time, the ground under my feet shifted upward.
"The slab is connected to the floor in an 'L' shape," I said. "If we all lean forward, it should tip over and spill us out into the other end of the passage."
"That's it?" Graham said.
"Let's hope so." I cleared my throat. "Okay, everyone squeeze together and lean toward me."
The others crowded in until I could barely breathe. Ever so slowly, the wall tipped forward while the ground shifted upward.
"Push harder," I hissed.
Sweaty bodies slammed into me. The slab tipped over. With a loud bang, it crashed to the ground. The impact sent me rolling into the other side of the passage.
The passage had previously sloped gently into the ground. But now, it featured a far steeper descent and I found myself rolling over smooth rock at a high rate of speed.
Five seconds later, I skidded to a stop. Some bodies crashed into me. Others rolled right over me before coming to a halt.
"Well, that was fun." Graham sat up, rubbing his head. "Hey, does anyone else hear that?"
"It sounds like rocks scraping against each other," Emily said slowly.
I retrieved my flashlight and pointed it behind me. The giant sun carving, previously at our feet, had flipped upward and now faced us.
My jaw dropped as the L-shaped rock started to move. When we'd pushed it over, a set of ancient stone wheels had landed on the ground. Now, gravity was directing the whole thing in our direction.
I leapt to my feet. "Run."
The others jumped up and we raced forward. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder. The vertical part of the L-shaped rock was on the far side of the base. If the rock was about to run me over, I figured I could jump onto the base and ride it the rest of the way down the tunnel.
I looked forward. My heart skipped a beat. The tunnel didn't open up into another cave. Instead, it dead-ended at a wall. A closer look revealed a slot at the bottom of the wall. It was large enough to fit the wheels and base of the L-shaped rock. Effectively, anyone standing on the base when the slab hit the wall would be crushed to death.
Graham and Beverly darted ahead. They leapt to the left and vanished from sight. Emily was right behind them, followed by Tum and Dr. Wu.
Rock smacked against rock. The noise sounded close.
I doubled my speed. The L-shaped rock was so close I could almost feel its base pressing into my legs.
I spotted a gap on my left. I dove toward it. The rock hurtled past me, barely missing my body. Its base slid into the slot and its upper half smashed into the wall.
Beverly glided to my side. "Are you okay?"
My chest was bruised. Long, bloody scrapes covered my hands. "Never better," I replied.
"We made it." She helped me to my feet and looked around. "This must be Metnal, the ninth level of Xibalba."
"Cy," Graham said. "You've got to see this."
I turned toward him. My tongue expanded, filling my mouth. My eyes bugged out as I stared at the magnificent sight. "Is that …?"
"Yeah." He shot me a toothy grin. "We did it. We found the lost Library of the Mayas."
P
ART
V
The River
Chapter 105
Shiny gold, distant yet unbelievably close, glittered under my beam. It was brighter than anything I'd ever seen in my life. Speechless and half-blinded, I wandered forward.
"Be careful," Beverly said. "There could be another trap around here."
But I knew she was wrong. This time, there would be no traps. No bats. No shifting platforms. No rolling L-shaped walls.
I shifted my beam. Gigantic stalactites reached down from the ceiling. Humongous stalagmites reached up to greet them. The cavern was gigantic, easily the largest one yet. I couldn't even begin to estimate its massive size or its incredible height.
A vast river flowed through the middle of it. Its dark waters gurgled loudly and I realized it was the same waterway Hunahpu had used to create his artificial marsh. But I barely looked at the water. Instead, my gaze was fixated solely on
it
.
The Library of the Mayas.
Two massive domes—constructed entirely from gold plates—towered before me. They stood in the middle of the river and rose almost to the ceiling. The sheer amount of gold astounded me. But the knowledge it contained, well, that was enough to make me speechless all over again.
I walked to the edge of the river. Water splashed against my boots. Mist assailed my eyes. But I didn't step back. Hell, I couldn't step back.
My boots and socks were still wet from Rattling House. So, I didn't take them off. Instead, I just lowered myself into the river. It was chest-deep. The swift current crashed against me.
I couldn't feel the water or sense its temperature. I didn't hear it either. And I couldn't smell the dust or taste the staleness of the air. It was as if all my senses, sans vision, had malfunctioned at the exact same moment.
The gold domes grew larger as I waded across the river. They completely dominated my view until I could see nothing else.
I stopped in front of the larger dome and ran my hand over the plates. They were malformed so as to fit together. Tiny etch marks had been engraved onto each plate. I couldn't decipher them, but they were definitely Maya hieroglyphics.
The current gained a little speed. I thrust out my hands and steadied myself against the gold plates.
"Amazing." Dr. Wu's head burst out of the river a few feet away from me. "I've never seen so much gold. It goes all the way to the bottom."
"And each plate is a separate book," I replied. "This is going to rewrite Maya history. It's going to change the world."
Emily waded out to join us. She produced a small camera and aimed it at the larger dome. But the current intensified and she had trouble maintaining her balance.
"Want me to do that?" I asked.
She nodded and handed me the camera. Quickly, I started to take pictures of the individual plates as well as of the domes themselves. But after a few minutes, reality seeped into my consciousness. "We can't stay here."
A frown creased Emily's visage.
"We don't have any equipment. And even if we did, it could take days, maybe weeks, to dismantle these domes. We won't last that long, not with Votan looking for us."
"We can stop him."
"With what? We've got a handful of guns between us. He's got a helicopter full of armed goons." I shook my head. "We have to find an exit."
She eyed me closely. "But what about the library?"
"I don't know about you." A change, sudden and permanent, came over me. And at that exact moment, I knew I couldn't retire from treasure hunting. Maybe I was risking an untimely death. But that was better than living a life I wasn't meant to live. "But I don't need it anymore. I got what I came here for."
With a frown, she turned away from me. Her fingers gently brushed against one of the plates. "That's interesting. There are hardly any gaps."
I examined the larger dome. Then I waded over to join Dr. Wu at the smaller one. "This one has a few gaps," I said slowly. "I see rock under here."
"Step aside."
I whirled around at the sound of Beverly's voice. She stood several feet away, up to her shoulders in river water. She clutched the handheld mass spectrometer in her hands. "You're going to analyze it?" I frowned. "But that'll take hours."
"More like minutes."
"Will it be accurate?"
"Accurate enough."
I glanced backward. The passage we'd used to access the library was quiet and still. But I knew it wouldn't last that way forever. Eventually, Votan would get past Hunahpu's traps. It was only a matter of time.
Beverly harvested a couple of samples from the two domes. A few minutes passed while she used the spectrometer to analyze them. "Okay, the gold appears to be layered over a blend of rock and metal. I'm getting initial readings for iron-60, lead-205, samarium-146, and curium-247. In other words, the same materials I found in the red rain, the pyramid blocks, and the wall. Only the concentrations here are much stronger."
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Not exactly. I'm picking up a faint, but rather large concentration of uranium. I think we've found our radiation source." She cast a wary eye at the two domes. "Or rather, sources."
I took a few steps back as I realized the truth. "They're meteorites," I said softly. "The impact scattered the lower limestone layer, sending chunks of it toward the surface. Over time the river carved out this cave system."
"Hang on a second." Beverly's gaze tightened. "The stuff under those domes isn't ordinary uranium."
"What do you mean?"
"It contains an unusually large amount of uranium-235." She exhaled loudly. "In other words, it's the same stuff used to make nuclear weapons."
Chapter 106
Graham's eyes bugged out of his head. "They're fissile?"
Beverly hoisted herself out of the water. "I'm afraid so."
I waded to the ledge. While I waited for Dr. Wu to climb out of the river, I noticed deep marks etched into the limestone, maybe a foot beneath the surface. I realized the river had carved them over a long period of time. That meant the water level had risen recently. Was it because of the rain? Or was it something else?
"I know it's a big deal." Emily squeezed her shirt, wringing water out of the fabric. "But doesn't uranium exist all over the world?"
"Not this type of uranium and not in these quantities," Beverly replied. "Believe me, I know. I had to study this subject pretty intensively during my military days. All natural uranium contains the same isotopic ratio. A little over ninety-nine percent is uranium-238. Uranium-235 is a little less than one-percent. And a very small fraction, less than a hundredth of a percent, consists of uranium-234."
"Come on," Tum said. "It can't all be the same."
"Actually, it is, at least in nature. Most cosmochemists think it's because our solar system's natural uranium ore was formed at the same time. It's been decaying at a uniform rate since then." She paused. "Uranium-235 is fissile. Millions of years ago, natural ore contained enough of it to sustain a fission chain reaction. But that's no longer the case."
"Why not?"
"Because uranium-235 decays much faster than uranium-238. So, it's gradually become a smaller part of natural ore. That's why nuclear weapons programs require uranium enrichment." She studied her spectrometer. "The uranium deposits appear to be heavily concentrated, representing about thirty-five percent of the material I sampled from under the two domes. My initial readings suggest a little more than twenty-four percent of the two deposits consists of uranium-235."
"Damn." Graham shook his head. "How'd it get that way?"
"If my extrasolar meteor theory is correct, then the uranium originated from outside the solar system. So, it could've been formed much later than Earth's natural ore. Also, the large presence of curium-247 could be a factor. Over time, curium-247 decays to uranium-235."
I climbed out of the river and turned around to study the two domes. "They must be putting out tons of radiation. We're hundreds of feet underground. Plus, gold acts as a radiation shield. And yet there was still enough radiation to affect Rigoberta and Pacho in just two weeks."
The others edged away from the domes.
"It might not have killed them though." Graham glanced at Dr. Wu. "Didn't you say Rigoberta overexerted herself?"
The doc nodded. "I'm nearly certain she was sick prior to coming here."
"There you go." Graham turned to face the rest of us. "Plus, it didn't kill the Xibalbans. They lived here long enough to build a small city."
"Yeah, but it could've introduced mutations into their population," I replied. "That would explain their unusual bones. That's probably how that strange cat—the nagual—came into existence too. Its ancestors started out as normal jaguars and evolved into something else."
"Can we go somewhere?" Dr. Wu licked his lips. "Preferably a long way from here?"
Graham ignored him. "Hunahpu must've sent a few people to investigate these caves. They probably came out looking like atomic bomb victims. So, he imprisoned these meteorites—thinking they were death gods—behind gold plates."
"And since gold blocks radiation, it even worked in a way." My face twisted in thought. "But how could he have known to use gold?"
"He could've used lots of things." Beverly fiddled with the mass spectrometer. "Any number of materials from the crater could've provided protection from gamma rays. Most likely, he just chose something that was readily available."
"I bet the Xibalbans built a shield before the Mayas came here," Emily said. "It probably wasn't as fancy or as effective. But it explains why Hope's plate was inscribed on both sides. The Xibalbans carved one side. The Mayas carved the other one."