“It looks like an asterisk with a high wall circling the center,” Sam said.
“You could fly over this area a hundred times and not really see it,” Remi said. “The trees make everything seem natural. The shapes are rounded off, but I’ll bet this hill we’re standing on is a pyramid.”
“It’s something big anyway,” Sam said. “Well, I guess we know where we have to go.”
“Of course,” she said. “The place where the roads meet.”
When Sam and Remi reached the bottom of the steep hill, Remi said, “This is creepy.”
“What’s creepy?”
“You know they’re not hills, they’re huge buildings covered with dirt and plants. And these trees around us would be the only things that aren’t creepy except that they’re growing in the middle of this road. I feel like the people who lived here are watching us.”
“Trust me, they’re not.” He looked over his shoulder. “Nope. Not one ghost. But, just in case, let’s leave the Jeep here.”
As they walked, Remi said, “Look at those trees. The cover was all pretty much the same until we got here. Now look. The trees are all in a straight line.”
Sam stood beside her and sighted along the flat strip, where trees of all sizes and many species all ran along the center in a line. He stopped, shrugged off his pack, and began to dig a hole in line with the trees. The dirt was a rich, composted loam that came up easily. Shortly, he had a hole three feet wide and about three feet deep. “Take a look,” he said, and stepped out of the hole.
Remi jumped in, looked down, and used her machete to probe the surface. “It’s V-shaped and has a stone lining. It looks like an irrigation ditch.”
Sam looked around him, turning his body slowly. “I think it might be something else.”
“What?”
“Think back. Dave said that whatever else was going on in the Mayan world during the late classic period, it was made worse by droughts — two hundred years of them at least.”
“What do you think this was?”
“I think this flat space wasn’t a road. The Mayans had no wheeled carts, or tame animals to pull them, so why make it fifty paces wide? And it doesn’t go anywhere. It looks like a plaza, except there are six of them in all directions. I think this place was designed to collect rainwater.”
“Of course,” she said. “Both sides have a subtle slope down to the groove in the center and the groove would direct the water where they wanted it.”
“And that would explain why there are six strips leading inward from all sides. The place where they meet is the catch basin,” Sam said. “The six strips aren’t roads. They’re for catching rain and keeping it from washing away and sinking into the ground.”
“Let’s go see if we’re right,” said Remi. They hurried along the strip toward the spot where all six converged. At times, the brush and saplings came together to make their progress difficult. Here and there, the surface of the strip was bare even of leaves, cleared by some inundation during the rainy season.
At last, they came to the end. The strip ran to the foot of an ancient stone wall about fifteen feet high. The V-shaped ditch led to an opening in the bottom of the wall, where there was a hole about ten inches wide. They walked around the circular wall and saw that each of the other five strips met the wall in the same way, bringing the water in through small openings at its foot. They found that the wall was not a circle with a gap in it for a door or gate. It was a spiral, so that the circular wall stretched for a full three hundred sixty degrees, and then continued ten degrees past the beginning spot so it overlapped for about ten feet to form a narrow, curved corridor ending in an entrance. Sam and Remi sidestepped along the corridor and found themselves inside the circular wall. In the center was a pool of water.
They stepped to the edge and looked down. The pool was quite clear, about thirty feet deep. The bottom received no direct sunlight, at least not after the sun was low. The high stone enclosure around the pool included a walkway near the top that could be reached by a flight of steps.
“Why do you suppose they built a wall?” asked Remi.
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “Maybe during the last days of the city they needed to protect their water. Maybe it was the last line of defense if the city was taken. You could do worse than control the water supply in a siege. And, look, this place is only about thirty feet wide. It would be easy to defend. The walls are about six feet thick at the bottom.” He walked along the wall and picked up a loose rock, then looked across the enclosure. “This rock seems to be a plug. The other holes have fitted stones blocking them too. That would protect the water from poison.”
“I think its time to let Selma and Dave know that we found it,” said Remi.
“You’re right,” said Sam. “Let’s take a few pictures and send them first thing so Dave can tell us what we’ve found.”
Remi took pictures of the well, the pool, the curved entryway, and then stood on the battlement and took pictures in every direction. She added them to the pictures she had taken from the pyramid and on the strip and sent them. Then she waited a minute and called Selma.
“Selma here. Fire away.”
“We’ve found it. We’re on the site, and I’ve just sent you some pictures. Tell Dave Caine that the map is right. There’s a pool of water here with a stone margin around it and a high wall above it. It’s clear, and it seems to be quite deep — thirty feet or more.”
“What are those flat areas I’m seeing? Roads?”
“We think they’re surfaces built to catch the rain and direct it here to the pool. They are all slightly tilted toward the center and they go only a couple hundred yards.”
Sam stood close to Remi and said, “We also think the hills along the sides of the strips are buildings — one of them is quite large.”
“So the site could be a city?”
“Let’s just say they invested a lot of labor on architecture,” said Sam.
“You’ve accomplished your mission,” Selma said. “Congratulations. Well done. Are you coming home?”
“Not just yet,” Remi said. “I think we’ll dive the pool tomorrow morning and see what’s down there. After carrying a scuba rig through a dry jungle, I want to make use of it.”
“I can’t blame you,” said Selma. “I’ll forward the pictures to David Caine right away, along with your description.”
“Good,” said Sam. “We’ll talk to you soon.”
As they hung up, Sam said, “We need to get the rest of the gear here. Do you want to drive the Jeep down or are you still worried about the ghosts?”
“Let’s leave the Jeep where it is and bring the gear. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of trips with the other pack and the dive equipment.”
They pitched their small tent in the enclosure around the pool, collected firewood in the nearby forest, and built a fire to boil a pot of water for their dehydrated food. After they’d eaten, they used the last hour of light to photograph the site from the nearest hills.
As they were about to go to sleep, Sam’s phone buzzed. “Hello?”
“Sam! It’s Dave Caine.”
“Hi, Dave,” Sam said. Then he put the phone on speaker.
“The pictures are fantastic. You’ve proven the codex is an accurate rendering, not a myth or vague historical rumors. From the looks of the place, it could have been a ceremonial center. The stone around it seems to be limestone, and the crumbling by the pool makes that seem even more likely. A sinkhole gets bigger as the limestone dissolves in the water.”
“We’ll get a closer look tomorrow when we dive.”
“Be prepared for a sight,” Caine said. “The Mayans believed that everything depended on their relationships with a complicated pantheon of gods. They will almost certainly have tossed valuables into the pool as sacrifices to Chac, the rain god.”
“Whatever else went wrong here, it wasn’t because of a lack of water.”
“We’ll be waiting to hear.”
“Good night.”
