As they rode away from the city past miles of cultivated fields on their way into the interior, Remi stared into the distance at the blue triangle of Tacana. Christina Talamantes noticed. “There doesn’t seem to be any more smoke. Maybe it’ll settle down again for another hundred years or so.”
“And maybe it’s saving its strength to spit fire and ash on our heads and bury us in lava,” Jose said. “The word ‘Tacana’ is Mayan for ‘House of Fire.’”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t live up to its name, for now,” Sam said.
They rode for another hour before they reached the small town of Union Juarez. There were two small brick buildings along the main street that had partially collapsed and two others that had lost some roof tiles. In the central square, the driver and the Spanish-speaking volunteers got out to talk with the people loitering there. Sam and Remi stuck close to Christina, who obliged them by translating. After talking briefly with an Indian-looking couple, Christina told the Fargos, “The road ends in about seven kilometers.”
“Then what?” asked Sam.
“Then we walk,” she said. “The lady says it’s a foot trail, and there are lots of smaller trails branching off of it that lead to the mountain villages.”
Remi said, “Did she say anything about conditions up there?”
“She warned me that it will be cold. It’s over thirteen thousand feet at the top.”
“We’re ready for that,” Remi said. “In fact, I have some things I can share with you. I brought some shells and fleece linings on the yacht because sometimes the Pacific can be cold at night, especially when the wind blows.”
“Thank you,” said Christina. “I brought some warm clothes too, and so did Maria, because we thought we’d be sleeping outdoors. But we may take you up on your offer in a day or two.”
“Did the lady say anything else?”
“They’ve had some avalanches from the shaking, and some of the villages’ water supplies may be contaminated. There are a few injuries that Maria and I can treat, and possibly some that we can’t. Those people will have to be evacuated.”
Sam said, “We’ll look for places near each of the villages where a helicopter can land.”
“Thank you,” said Christina. “Right now, I’m going to the church to join Maria and see if we can interview people who have come down from the mountain to find shelter. Want to come?”
When they entered the church, Maria and Christina met with five families from mountain villages. As they talked with the parents, the children came to Remi and sat on her lap. They were fascinated by her long auburn hair and loved to hear her sing little songs in her exotic native language, English. She gave them protein bars with nuts and chocolate as treats.
After a while, the truck driver appeared in front of the church, and everyone climbed into the flatbed truck for the last leg of their ride. Where the road ended, there was a stone to mark the beginning of the foot trail. Each of the volunteers climbed down from the truck and shouldered a heavy pack full of supplies. They all helped one another adjust load straps, and then set off.
The walk up the steep mountain trail was hard and slow. The forests had been cut and cleared for most of their journey but had never been cleared on the mountain, so foliage overhung their path. They made camp on a level clearing surrounded by trees with fruit that looked like small avocados the Mendozas called criollo, and slept until dawn, when the sun woke them. As they reached higher altitudes, the lowland trees were replaced by pines called pinabete.
They followed the same pattern for three days, breaking camp each morning, walking until they reached the next village, and meeting with its inhabitants to find out what kind of help they needed. At each one, Christina and Maria examined patients and treated injuries and illnesses. Remi assisted them, keeping the inventory of medicines and supplies, bathing and bandaging and administering prescribed doses while the doctors moved on to the next patient. Sam worked with a crew of volunteers and local farmers to rebuild and strengthen houses, replace broken pipes and wiring, and fix generators to restore electrical power.
At the end of the fifth day on the mountain, as they lay in a tent at the edge of a village near the twenty- five-hundred-meter level, Sam said, “I have to admit I’m glad we decided to do this.”
“Me too,” Remi said. “It’s one of the most satisfying times of my life.”
“You have wonderful taste.”
“You have wonderful self-esteem,” she said. “And I’m going to sleep.”
The following morning, Sam and Remi led the way to the last village. They took the smaller side trail that the mayor had told them led to their final stop and soon they were getting too far ahead of the others. They waited until the others could see them and then went on. But, before long, they were much farther ahead again.
Sam and Remi reached a slope that had suffered an avalanche during the night and covered a stretch of the trail with dirt and rocks that looked like basalt. They made a detour above it, carefully navigating around the big boulders that had fallen. Then they both stopped.
One of the enormous chunks of basalt that lay in the path was not natural. It was a perfect rectangle with rounded corners at the top. Without speaking, they both stepped closer. They could see the carved profile of a man with the hooked nose and elongated skull of a Mayan aristocrat and an elaborate feathered headdress. There were columns of complex symbols that they could tell were Mayan writing. They both looked up the side of the mountain, their eyes following the gash in the green foliage upward, tracing the path of the avalanche to its beginning.
Irresistible attraction made them begin to climb at once. They went up the steep hillside to a surface that was perfectly flat like a shelf, about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. The space was bordered by trees, but there were none within the ring. They could see that a portion of the shelf had broken off and gone down in the avalanche.
Sam dug down a few inches with his knife, and they both heard the blade strike stone and scrape when he moved it.
Remi looked around her. “A patio?” she said. “Or an entryway?”
They looked at the sheer face of the mountain. There was one area that had a layer of new dirt on it, which had fallen from higher up on the mountain, and a bit of a recessed spot. “This looks like it might have slid down when the big block fell,” Sam said. He poked it with his knife, then set down his pack and took out his folding shovel. He used it overhand, scraping down more of the dirt from the rocky wall.
“Careful,” Remi said. “We don’t want to bring down the rest of the mountain.” But she took off her backpack, took out a hatchet they’d used for splitting firewood, and joined him. When the dirt was cleared, they faced a wall of black volcanic rock. Sam stabbed at it with his shovel a few times. It was brittle and porous like pumice and chipped off in chunks. He nodded at Remi’s hatchet. “May I?”
“Be my guest.” She handed him the hatchet.
Sam hacked at the layer of volcanic stone, knocking it away. “It looks as though at some point there was a lava flow, and it must have come down like a curtain.”
“Over the entrance?”
“I didn’t dare to put it that way,” he said. “We don’t know it’s an entrance to anything, but that’s sure what it looks like.” He hacked harder until a bigger chunk fell inward and a hole appeared.
“You just had to knock hard,” said Remi. “What do you think? Tomb?”
“Way up here? I’m guessing a sacred place, like a shrine to whatever god was in charge of volcanos.”
Sam enlarged the opening, took his flashlight from his pack, shone its beam into the hole, and then stepped through the opening. “Come in,” he said. “It’s an ancient building.”
Inside was a room made of cut stone, then plastered in white. All of the walls had been painted with colorful pictures of Mayan men, women, and gods in a procession of some sort. A few humans sacrificed to the gods by cutting themselves or pushing thorns through their tongues. But the figure that dominated the pictures on each wall was a skeleton with dangling eyeballs.
But Sam and Remi didn’t let their flashlights linger on any of these scenes. They both stepped deeper into the room, drawn by a singular sight. On the whitewashed stone floor lay the desiccated body of a man, dark and leathery. He wore a breechcloth, and a pair of sandals of woven plant fiber. In the stretched lobes of his ears were large green jade plugs. There were jade beads around his neck and a carved jade disk. They both ran the beams of their flashlights up and down the withered figure. Beside the man’s body was a widemouthed, lidded pot.
