“It’s sort of taboo land. And after all, investigation is, or has to be, a two-way proposition. To investigate a place, you have to go there and then come back again. I’ve never known anyone to come back from there and bring a report. So you can say that if any investigation ever was made, it was involuntary, and the findings were never publicized. They died with the investigator.”
“What about the so-called government down here? It’s national territory, isn’t it?”
“Sure. But they seem content to carry it on the books as a dead loss, so to speak.”
“What about planes?”
“It’s off the beaten air-lanes. All the commercial planes go down the spine of Central America. A few have gone over it, mostly off course, but the mountains keep them at a high altitude, and they’ve reported nothing to be seen but jungle carpet. If there was anything alive, of course, it wouldn’t be visible up at that height, anyway. They’ve made out a few ruins, but ruins are cheap down here. They’re not worth their weight in building material.”
“Where does the ghost stuff come in? You said it was called—”
“Tierra de los Muertos,” Mallory supplied. “The Land of the Dead. Local superstition gave it that name, I suppose. The phantom silhouettes of warriors that they thought they saw outlined against the crest from time to time. What could they be but ghosts? Drumbeats like the ones we’re hearing now. Maybe it’s just the pounding of some subterranean waterfall, which plays up now and then through some freak of mountain acoustics. Anyway, to them it’s the Land of the Dead, and you can’t tell ’em different. You’re as good as dead if you go in there. The Spaniards made their usual passes at it, and for once drew a complete blank.”
“How do you mean?”
Mallory hitched his hip up onto the veranda rail and crossed his arms.
“There was quite a high degree of civilization in all these parts of the world before the Spaniards got here and cracked down on it. I suppose you know that. It was highly advanced, but it was dark and cruel; Prescott’ll tell you all about that.’”
Jones wasn’t sure who Prescott was; some local trader or planter whom he hadn’t met yet, he supposed. He didn’t interrupt the recital to inquire.
“Anyway, this valley is one place that held out against them. The lowlands were a pushover, but the mountains made a natural barrier. The branch of the Mayas — I guess they were Mayas — that inhabited it retired into their shell, and that was that. ‘Come and get us.’ One of the earlier viceroys, as soon as he had things in hand down on the coast, sent an expedition in to clean up on them. Just a little token expedition. You know the kind of odds they were used to, from Mexico and Peru. About five hundred to one. They were spoiled. Well, he waited, and he waited, and no word. Finally he sent a second expedition in to find out what had become of the first. And he waited, and he waited, and no word from them either.”
“Then I suppose he sent in a third.”
“That would be the perfect punch line. But no, the fact is he didn’t. They changed viceroys or something, and the new man was too lazy. Or maybe he couldn’t spare the men, or figured this one dinky little valley wasn’t worth it. Then about two years afterward, one solitary survivor of the whole two expeditions came staggering out. He was one of the friars who had gone in there with them; they always had them along. He was down to skin and bone, but he made it. His tongue had been torn out, so he couldn’t say a word. Well, they handed him a parchment and a quill, to see if he could set down what had happened. He only had strength enough to scrawl a single line. ‘Es una tierra de los muertos.’ It is a land of the dead. Before they could get anything more than that out of him, he’d died. One opinion was that what he’d meant was only that the two expeditions had died to a man, killed off by the inhabitants. The other was that there was no one alive in there at all, expedition or inhabitants. This one finally won out. The Church was a deciding factor, and the king in Madrid. Funds for a third expedition would have had to come out of his purse, and since no stories of hidden gold had been featured as a come-on, he wasn’t interested. The Church excommunicated the valley, proclaimed it accursed. And that’s the story.”
Jones screwed up his face. “Grisly, isn’t it?”
“So,” Mallory went on, “if there was anything alive in there then, and if half of what there was male and the other half female, which is the usual arrangement, then chances are there should be something alive in there today, the laws of nature being what they are. And if there was anything alive in there then, back in the fifteen hundreds, since nothing worth speaking of has gone in since, and absolutely nothing whatever has been known to come out, then whatever there is in there should be a little cell of pure undiluted sixteenth century.”
“A little too fantastic, don’t you think?” Jones said.
“What’s fantastic and what isn’t?” Mallory challenged him. “Who knows any more? What do we really know about the world today? Less than we did a hundred years ago. Then they could still be sure of their world. Today we can’t any more. The plane was fantastic in 1902. But in 1903— The atom bomb was fantastic in 1944. But in 1945— Besides, the difference between an aboriginal Indian tribe of the fifteen hundreds and an aboriginal Indian tribe of today is so small that it doesn’t really matter much in the end. It would be hardly noticeable to the naked eye. The earlier ones would kill you a little more quickly, maybe; at sight instead of waiting for provocation. Bangles instead of white cotton pants, feathers instead of straw sombreros, sun worship instead of a one-two whitewash of very diluted Catholicism. It’s only relative, after all. Don’t confuse it with the difference, for instance, between Tudor England and today’s England. That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s still too fantastic for me, thanks,” Jones said, with all the irritability of one who feels he is getting the worst of an argument. “I finished reading Henry and Rider Haggard when I was twelve.”
Mallory held up his finger to indicate the throbbing in the air. “And that is—?”
“You name it,” Jones snarled almost belligerently. “You live around here. I don’t.”
“It’s getting you, isn’t it?” Mallory suggested understandingly.
“No, I like it! It’s like dentists working on you with a drill on twenty-four-hour shifts. It’s like a subway being excavated right between your two legs. It’s like a concussion you’ve got already, being tapped with hammers.”
He bowed his head abruptly, clasped his hands, and pressed them down hard across the back of his neck, as though to relieve the strain.
“I was at Anzio,” he said, “but that wasn’t like this. Every bang had a reason behind it. And they didn’t come even, on the downbeat, each time. Oh, God, how I wish I were back in the middle of good old Anzio again! There were other fellows all around me, and I wasn’t afraid. You could see the flash that came with every crash.”
Mallory didn’t say a word, just sat there watching him closely.
Jones’s head suddenly came up again. “I’m a liar,” he blurted out unasked. “There is something to this, and I know there is. What am I bickering with you about it for? What am I denying it for? I saw a smoke sign coming up from the opposite side, the far side, only this morning when I was out riding with my wife. I shut up about it. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone else, I guess because I didn’t want to admit it to myself first of all. There’s already been too much strangeness in my life. I didn’t want any more. It keeps piling on, and piling on, until I can’t stand it any more! If it’s me, if I’m going crazy, if I’m riding for a nervous breakdown, why doesn’t it happen and get it over with? What do I have to have this long build-up for, what’re they trying to prove to me? I’ll take their word for it. Only they should hurry up and finish the job. And if it isn’t me, then it might as well be, because what’s the good of not being crazy, when your whole little private world around you suddenly is?”