Danielle knew better. Somewhere out there an enemy sought them, and despite the time they’d bought by racing up the river, eventually that enemy would find them. She wanted the civilians long gone when it happened. To make sure that happened, she had to keep pushing.
She looked to Professor McCarter, crouched on the rooftop, running his finger down a seam in the stonework and explaining to the group what he’d found.
“Tell me again what this means,” she said.
“You see how precise the fit is?” he said, pointing. He waved the others closer and then used his knife to scrape at the moss. The stonework was so tight that the moss hadn’t grown into it, just covered it over like a tarp. “You couldn’t get cigarette paper between these stones. All the great sites that have stood the test of time show this type of craftsmanship. In the Yucatan, in Egypt, in Mongolia.
“This structure must be remarkably stable to look like this, perhaps built onto some bedrock like the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. I have seen some damage on the north side,” he admitted. “But the foundation itself can’t have subsided too much or these seams would be loose and jumbled. I’m quite excited about that.”
“You said you might have found a way inside,” she reminded him. “Can we skip ahead to that part? That’s what I’m excited about.”
“You’re not one for slow cooking,” McCarter replied, only slightly bothered.
“Microwave,” she replied. “Or faster.”
He smiled and moved to another section of the roof, waving the group over. “This stone tells us another story. The connection here is less precise, the workmanship less exacting.” He dug at the moss, pulling it loose where it had burrowed into the cracks, clearing the seam all the way to its corner. The exposed edge was gouged and chipped, dozens of hairline fractures revealing damage yet to come. He looked up. “Of all the stones on this roof, only this one appears in such condition. That can mean only one thing — this stone has been moved … repeatedly.”
At last. “You think this is the way in,” she guessed.
“If there is one,” he said. “Most Mayan temples have nothing inside except an earlier temple.”
Puzzled looks came his way.
“The kings and Ahau of Maya wanted monuments to themselves like all the other leaders of the ancient world. But in a surprisingly pragmatic twist, they would often commission a new structure to be built over the existing ones, a sort of pre-Colombian municipal rehabilitation project, one that enabled them to leave behind a greater temple than their predecessor. The result is something like those Russian nesting dolls, where each larger doll covers the smaller one. At places in the Yucatan some temples have half a dozen underlying layers.”
He returned to his original thought. “But other Mayan temples are stand-alone structures, some of which contain inner chambers, rooms for the kings and the priests to meditate and communicate with their long-passed ancestors. A process usually accompanied by the letting of blood, as they passed barbed ropes and stingray spines through their lips and their earlobes and, um … through other parts considered more sensitive.”
Hawker winced. “Kind of puts a damper on that whole being a king thing.”
Danielle laughed and looked back at McCarter. “So you think this is one of the latter types?”
“It looks that way,” he said. “And that could help us determine if this place is Tulan Zuyua or not.”
“How?” she asked.
“Remember how Tulan Zuyua had other names,” he said. “The stone Blackjack Martin found contained one of those names. Seven Caves. Other Mayan writings refer to it as the Place of Bitter Water.”
“Seven Caves,” she said, running the scenario through her mind. “So you think there might be a cave under here or a group of them?”
“Possibly,” McCarter said. “But I’m thinking on a less dramatic level. Other Mayan sites linked to the word ‘cave’ have been found to contain inner chambers. And why not? After all, what is a cave? A dark place with walls of stone. It’s only semantics that differentiate a stone-walled chamber from an actual stone cave. Spelunkers even call the open chambers of a cave a room. The Mayan description probably follows a similar line of thought. And if this temple was to have a set of inner chambers, seven of them, then that would support our theory that it is Tulan Zuyua.”
“Our theory?” Danielle said.
“I’m co-opting it,” McCarter said, smiling. “Besides, there’s another reason to go inside as well, a more important one perhaps. Anything that’s inside will have been protected from the sun and rain for all these years. The walls out here have been worn smooth by the environment, but in there, we might find writings, murals or pottery. Even ritual objects with information on them. The best and quickest way to gather information is to get inside, and that means we start here.”
It would take the better part of four hours, a rash of strained muscles and one broken pulley, but eventually the slab was dislodged and forced upward by the leverage of the pry bars. A nylon rope was passed beneath it, and with a jerry-rigged tripod they managed to raise the stone and move it backward an inch at a time. It had traveled almost two feet before the contraption collapsed and the stone ground to a halt.
As McCarter got down on his stomach to peer through the slot, he began coughing and then turned away. Danielle could smell acrid fumes in the air escaping from the temple’s innards. A sulfurous and wretched stench.
McCarter looked up, his eyes watering. “That’ll clear your head.”
As he moved back toward the entrance, Danielle took a deep breath and got down beside him, the beams of their flashlights playing across a flight of wide steps that dropped into the darkness beyond.
“Let’s get in there,” she said.
McCarter caught her eye and seemed to realize there would be no point in arguing. He took a fluorescent lantern from her hand.
“Anyone else?” he asked.
As a few of the others backed away to unvolunteer, Hawker stepped up. “What the hell, another hole in the ground. At least this one has stairs.”
McCarter nodded then looked at his student. “Susan?”
Susan had backed away from the entrance, coughing and wheezing from the sulfur smell. “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t be able to breathe.”
McCarter nodded. “I’ll give you a full report.” He turned to Danielle. “Okay, boss, let’s go.” With that McCarter squeezed through the gap, disappearing from view. Danielle followed, with Hawker right behind her.
Once inside, they were soon able to stand, descending a flight of stairs while pungent sulfur fumes assaulted them, stinging their eyes and burning their throats. The thick stone walls deadened the place to outside noise and distorted their voices with strange reverberating echoes. When the others spoke too loudly or too quickly, Danielle noticed that their words became unintelligible.
She stopped next to McCarter at the bottom of the stairs, pointing her flashlight in various directions. Despite their lights it was hard to see any details. The sulfur in the air had condensed into a yellowish fog and was scattering the light from their torches.
Hawker spoke. “Twenty steps. Mean anything to you, Doc?”
“Not particularly,” McCarter replied. “But there are twenty named days in the Mayan Short Calendar. Then again, that might have been how many stairs they needed to reach the top.”
Danielle shined her light along the floor. It was made of the same gray stone as the exterior, cut and laid in precise blocks. “Amazing,” she said. As she stepped past McCarter and into the darkness beyond, her foot hit something and sent it rolling across the floor. The object came to a stop near the far wall and one of the flashlight beams soon found it: a skull, weathered and discolored with time, now laying beside a large pile of similar skulls. There were dozens of them, perhaps fifty or more, some intact, others smashed and broken.