Harvey slid back into his cane chair and frowned terrifically. “Um, about
'Do you think she was a pretty girl?'
Harvey wriggled uncomfortably. It wasn't his kind of question. No right answer. “It's hard to say. From the Maya's point of view, I guess she was.'
It wasn't a bad answer. By today's standards she would have been far from pretty, but surely the Maya would have thought her beautiful with her delicate, broad skull and those extraordinary, convex nasal bones. To make her prettier still her forehead had been artificially flattened when she was an infant, so that the top of her head was squeezed into the pointy hump they found so attractive. And the hole bored in her tooth had certainly been for a faceted jade pellet that was probably still at the bottom of the cenote. No doubt her ears had been pierced for pendants, her nasal septum for a plug, her left nostril for a gem. Very likely, her eyes had been permanently crossed in childhood by long months of focusing on a little ball of pitch dangling from a string tied to her hair. All to make her desirable.
He let out a long sigh. Amazing, the number of ways you could mutilate and deform human flesh and bone, given a little ingenuity. All that work and pain to make her desirable, and then they had killed her before she was twenty. And all Harvey saw was tubercles and protuberances.
'Okay,” Gideon said gently, “let's see if we can't look at her as a human being now, not just a mass of skeletal criteria. For example—'
'Gideon! Dr. Oliver! Hey, where are you?'
He recognized Leo Rose's bellow of a voice and sighed again. Tlaloc was one of those Horizon Foundation excavations that was supervised by professionals but staffed by pay-for-the-privilege amateurs who worked for two weeks or a month and usually turned out to be both the chief pleasure and the chief pain of the dig. Pleasure because of the artless, enthusiastic interest they showed in almost anything at all; pain because this same interest meant the professional staff rarely got ten minutes in a row to work on something without having to answer a well-meant but often inane question.
'Over here, Leo. We're behind the shed.'
Bearlike and rumpled, the California real-estate developer lumbered into sight around the corner of the thickly overgrown Priest's House. Or what they called the Priest's House. Anthropologists didn't really know what these buildings had been, any more than they knew what any ancient Mayan building had been, or what the Maya had called their great cities and ceremonial centers (if they were actually ceremonial centers), or even what the Maya had called themselves. There was a hell of a lot, when you thought about it, that anthropologists didn't know and probably never would.
Leo was bouncing with excitement. “We found a fake wall, can you believe it? With a kind of little hidden room behind it, and this fantastic stone chest in it. Come on, we figured you'd want to see this. Oh, hiya, Harvey.'
Gideon didn't have to be asked twice. He was up at once, carefully placing the girl's skull on the bean-bag ring that served as a cushion. Was there anyone on a dig, amateur or professional, who didn't harbor secret hopes of sealed rooms behind false walls? Not since Howard Carter knocked down that wall in 1922 and walked into the untouched tomb of Tutankhamen, there wasn't.
'Where? In the temple?'
'Underneath. In the stairwell.'
Clearing the rubble-filled stairwell was the major ongoing task of the Tlaloc excavation. Since the dig had opened more than two years before, the director, Howard Bennett, had worked steadily at it with changing crews, boring down into the flattopped pyramid on which the little Temple of the Owls sat. Gideon, on leave from his teaching post, had come to Yucatan only two weeks before—when they had begun to bring up bones from the cenote—but he had long since learned that Howard's enthusiasm was centered on the buried passageway. Howard had staked his reputation, such as it was, on the unearthing of some great find when they finally got to the bottom. Why else, he wanted to know, would the Maya go to all the trouble of packing a perfectly good stairwell with tons of debris, if not to hide something of tremendous importance?
Gideon had been doubtful. Sometimes there were treasures at the bottom of such rubble-packed passages; much more Often there was nothing. The Maya had made a practice of enlarging their pyramids by using an old one as the core of a new one erected on top of it. The Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal had five such masonry “envelopes,” one inside the other, like the layers of an onion. And when the Maya built this way, they usually blocked up any hollow spaces in the original pyramid; for structural soundness, not to hide anything. But a false wall and a sealed room that was something else again.
'Did you reach the bottom, then?” Harvey asked as they trotted across the grassy plaza toward the pyramid.
No, Leo explained, huffing for breath, they hadn't found the base of the stairwell yet, although they had now dug down twenty-four steps. No, the hollow wall had been discovered on the landing that was just twelve steps down from the temple floor, at a level that had been exposed and unremarked for a year. Someone had noticed that the mortar on one of the walls was different, more crumbly, and when Howard had probed between the blocks of masonry with the point of a trowel, they had come loose.
At the foot of the pyramid Gideon nodded to the two straw-hatted Mayan laborers enjoying their break—cigars and lukewarm tea—on the bottom steps. In return he received two decorous, unsmiling nods. He jogged up the steaming, worn steps, Harvey bumping along beside him and Leo gasping behind, then entered the small building on the pyramid's flat top: the Temple of the Owls, so-called on account of the frieze that ran along its lintel. (They didn't look like owls to Gideon, but no one had much liked his “Temple of the Turkeys” suggestion.)
Inside, the structure was bare, with the look of a burned-out tenement. Ceilings, walls, and floor were coated with a limestone stucco made dismal and blotchy by centuries of intrusive plant growth, since removed, and a millennium of damp heat, still very much present. Only near the roofline were there a few faded streaks of green, blue, and red to suggest what it might have looked like in A.D. 900. The one unusual note was the square opening cut in the floor, and that, of course, led into the stairwell.
On the landing twelve steps below, most of the west wall had already been taken down, with the removed blocks neatly stacked and numbered with felt-tipped markers. The crew and another Mayan laborer were gazing mutely at the opening. Two portable lamps on the landing threw their garish yellow light into the small, astonishing room before them.
It is one of the great thrills of anthropology to look at something that was sealed up a thousand years ago, by the people of a great and vanished culture, and has lain unseen ever since. But this was something more,
