“I’ll get them.” She went off to the other end of the room, disappeared through a door, and came back with the two plastic bags containing the wooden vessels, seeds, and husks.
Caine returned his attention to the pot. “This pot has a lid. The seal looks translucent, a bit like beeswax. Have you opened it?”
“No,” said Sam. “We realized that the minute we cleared the lava out of the doorway to the shrine, or whatever that building is, we exposed the man and his belongings to air and started the clock ticking. We didn’t want to do anything that might harm the pot. We’ve carried it around quite a bit, so we know the contents aren’t liquid and aren’t stone or metal, but it’s not empty. Something shifts around a little when you move it.”
“Shall we try to open it now?” asked Caine.
“We have a good place to do it,” Remi said. “In our remodeling, we’ve had the builders put in a climate- controlled room — low temperature, low humidity, no sunlight — just like a rare-book room in a library.”
“Wonderful,” said Caine.
“Follow me.” She led them to the door she had just emerged from, opened it, and turned on the light. The room had a long worktable and a few chairs and a wall of glass cabinets, all of them empty at the moment. In the corner of the room was a tall red tool chest on wheels that looked like the ones in auto mechanics’ shops.
Professor Caine carried the pot into the room and set it on the table. Sam wheeled the chest over and opened the top drawer, which held a collection of tools for working on small, delicate objects — brushes, tweezers, X-Acto knives, dental picks, awls, magnifiers, and high-intensity flashlights. There was also a box of sterile surgical gloves.
Caine put on gloves, chose a pick and tweezers to examine the seal and pull some of it off. He looked at it under a magnifier on a stand. “It seems to be a glue made from some kind of plant resin.” He switched to an X- Acto knife and methodically cut away the translucent substance from around the lid.
“What’s in there can’t be food. It’s glued shut,” said Remi.
“I don’t dare guess,” said Caine. “Archaeology is full of high hopes and pots that turn out to be full of mud.” He gripped the lid and twisted. “Interesting. I can turn the lid a little but not raise it. What it looks like is that he heated the pot a little, sealed it, and let it cool. That would produce a partial vacuum in it to keep the seal tight.”
“Just like canning,” said Remi. “Maybe it is food.”
“Now, I wonder how to get it open without breaking it.”
Sam said, “We could heat it a bit again to get the air inside to expand. Or we could take it up to a high altitude, where the air pressure is lower.”
“How could we warm it a bit without harming it?”
“If we do it evenly, the pot shouldn’t break,” said Sam.
“I agree,” Caine said.
“Another modification to the house: We put in a sauna,” said Remi.
They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Sam entered the sauna, placed the pot on the wooden bench, then turned on the heat, slowly raising the temperature. At the end of ten minutes, he entered the sauna, wrapped the pot in a towel, and brought it out. He held the pot while Caine tried the lid. It came up and the pressure was equalized. Sam put the lid back on, and they all went back downstairs to the climate-controlled room.
“The big moment is coming,” said Remi.
“Don’t be disappointed if it’s just a mess of organic matter that used to be food,” said Caine. “Sometimes the best bits of information don’t look like much at first.”
Sam set the pot on the table. Caine, still wearing surgical gloves, took a deep breath and reached in. He pulled out a mass of what looked like dried weeds. “Packing material?”
He picked up a small flashlight and looked inside the pot. “Oh…” He stood up and peered down into the vessel. “Is it possible?”
“What is it?”
“It looks like a book,” he said. “A Mayan book.”
“Can you get it out?”
Caine put both hands into the vessel and lifted out a thick brownish rectangle and gently set it on the table. He reached out slowly with only his gloved index finger, lifted the outer layer an inch. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Intact. I can’t believe it.” For a moment, he stood still, lost in thought. He withdrew his finger and only then seemed to notice the Fargos again.
His whole face brightened. “It’s a Mayan book, a codex. It seems to be undamaged. We have to take our time examining it because we don’t know how fragile it is, and there’s no way to know how many times a page can be turned or even touched.”
“I know they’re very rare,” Remi said.
“The rarest of all Western Hemisphere artifacts and by far the most valuable,” said Caine. “The Maya were the only people in the Americas who developed a complex system of writing and it’s good. They could write anything they could say. If they’d had the urge, they could have written novels, epic poems, histories. Maybe they did. There were once hundreds of thousands of these codices. Today there are only four that survived and made it into European museums — the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris. And there’s also the Grolier Codex, but it’s so inferior to the others that many experts think it’s a forgery. But the first three are full of Mayan knowledge — mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, calendars. This could be the fifth.”
“You said there were once thousands,” said Remi.
“Hundreds of thousands, is a better estimate,” he said. “But there were two problems. The codices were painted on a fabric made from the bark of a wild fig tree called
“What were the problems?”
“One was the climate. Most of Mayan country was humid jungle. When books get wet, they rot. Some codices were buried in tombs — some at Copan, some at Altun Ha in Belize, some at Uaxactun Guytan. The fig- bark fabric rotted, leaving little piles of painted stucco fragments too small and delicate to ever be pieced together. But the biggest problem arrived in ships.”
“The Spanish conquest,” said Sam.
“Mainly the priests. They made a point of destroying anything having to do with native religions. Mayan gods looked like devils to them. They burned every book they found and then searched every hiding place so no book could survive. This went on from the beginning of the Mayan conquest in the 1500s until the 1690s, when they took the last cities. That’s why only four are left.”
“And now five,” said Remi.
“It’s a spectacular find,” said Caine. “Do you have a place to put it where it will be safe?”
“We do,” said Sam. “We’ll lock it up tight.”
“Good. I’d like to get started on the dating process and then come back tomorrow to start examining the codex. Is that possible?”
“I’d say it’s mandatory,” said Sam. “We’re as curious as you are and we can’t satisfy our curiosity without you.”
Chapter 7
The next afternoon, Sam and Remi were waiting when David Caine arrived. After Sam and Remi took him into the climate-controlled room, Remi put on surgical gloves, opened one of the glass cabinets, and set the codex on the table. Caine sat for a moment, staring at the cover. “Before we begin,” he said, “the carbon dating is complete on the seeds and husks that were in the wooden bowls and on the wood itself. The samples all had 94.29 percent of their carbon 14. The wood and the plants died at about the same time, which is four hundred seventy-six years ago, in 1537.”
