thought of decompression.'
'You'd better start thinking now,' I said grimly. 'One slip-up and you'll get the bends. Have you ever seen that happen to anyone?'
'No, I haven't.'
'Fizzy blood doesn't do you any good. Apart from being terrifyingly painful, once a nitrogen embolism gets to the heart you're knocking at the Pearly Gates.'
'But it's so long,' she complained. 'What do you do sitting at ten feet for nearly an hour?'
'I haven't done this too often myself,' I confessed. 'But I've used it as an opportunity to compose dirty limericks.' I looked across at the recompression chamber. 'I'd like to have that thing a bit nearer the scene of the accident -- maybe on the raft. I'll see what Rudetsky can do.'
IV
The work went on, week after week, and I nearly forgot about Gatt. We were in radio contact with Camp One which relayed messages from Pat Harris and everything seemed to be calm. Gatt had gone back to Mexico City and was living among the fleshpots, apparently without a care in the world, although his band of thugs was still quartered in Merida. I didn't know what to make of it, but I really didn't have .time to think about it because the diving programme filled all my time. I kept half an eye on Halstead and found him to be working even harder than I was, which pleased Fallon mightily.
Every day discoveries were made -- astonishing discoveries. This was indeed Uaxuanoc. Fallon's teams uncovered building after building -- palaces, temples, games arenas and a few unidentifiable structures, one of which he thought was an astronomical observatory. Around the cenote was a ring of stelae -- twenty-four of them -- and there was another line of them right through the centre of the city. With clicking camera and busy pen Fallon filled book after book with data.
Although no one was trades-union inclined, one day in every week was a rest day on which the boffins usually caught up with their paper work while Rudetsky's men skylarked about in the cenote. Because safe diving was impossible under those conditions I used the free day to rest and to drink a little more beer than was safe during the working week.
On one of those days Fallon took me over the site to show me what had been uncovered. He pointed to a low hill which had been denuded of its vegetation. 'That's where Vivero nearly met his end,' he said. 'That's the Temple of Kukulkan -- you can see where we're uncovering the steps at the front.'
It was a bit hard to believe. 'All that hill?'
'All of it. It's one big building. In fact, we're standing on a part of it right now.'
I looked down and scuffled the ground with my foot. It didn't look any different from any other ground -- there was just thin layer of humus. Fallon said, 'The Mayas had a habit of building on platforms. Their huts were built on platforms to raise them from the ground, and when they built larger structures they carried on the same idea. We're standing on a platform now, but it's so big you don't realize it.'
I looked at the ground stretching levelly to the hill which was the Temple of Kukulkan. 'How big?'
Fallon grinned cheerfully. 'Rudetsky went around it with a theodolite and transit. He reckons it's fifteen acres and averages a hundred and thirty feet high. It's an artificial acropolis -- 90 million cubic feet in volume and containing about six and a half million tons of material.' He produced his pipe. There's one something like it at Copan, but not quite as big.'
'Hell's teeth!' I said. 'I didn't realize it would be anything like this.'
gallon struck a match. 'The Mayas .. .' puff -- puff '.. . were an . . .' puff '. . . industrious crowd.' He looked into the bowl of his pipe critically. 'Come and have a closer look at the temple.'
We walked over to the hill and looked up at the partly excavated stairway. The stairs were about fifty feet wide. Fallon pointed upwards with the stem of his pipe. 'I thought I'd find something up there at the top, so I did a bit of digging, and I found it all right. You might be interested.'
Climbing the hill was a heavy pull because it was very steep Imagine an Egyptian pyramid covered with a thin layer of earth and one gets the idea. Fallon didn't seem unduly put out by the exertion, despite his age, and at the top he pointed 'The edge of the stairway will come there -- and that's where I dug.'
I strolled over to the pit which was marked by the heap of detritus about it. and saw that Fallon had uncovered a fear-some head, open-mouthed and sharp-toothed, with the lips drawn back in a snarl of anger. 'The Feathered Serpent,' he said softly. The symbol of Kukulkan.' He swept his arm towards a wall of earth behind. 'And that's the temple itself -- where the sacrifices were made.'
I looked at it and thought of Vivero brought before the priests on this spot, and shivering in his shoes for fear he'd have the heart plucked out of him. It was a grim thought.
Fallon said objectively, 'I hope the roof hasn't collapsed; it would be nice to find it intact.'
I sat down on a convenient tree stump and looked over the site of the city. About a fifth of it had been cleared, according to Fallon, but that was just the vegetation. There were great mounds, like the one we were on then, waiting to be excavated. I said, 'How long do you think it will take? When will we see what it was really like?'
'Come back in twenty years,' he said. 'Then you'll get a fair idea.'
'So long?'
'You can't hurry a thing like this. Besides, we won't excavate it all. We must leave something for the next generation -- they might have better methods and find things that we would miss. I don't intend uncovering more than half the city.'
I looked at Fallon thoughtfully. This was a man of sixty who was quite willing to start something he knew he would never finish. Perhaps it was because he habitually thought in terms of centuries, of thousands of years, that he attained a cosmic viewpoint. He was very different from Halstead.
He said a little sadly, 'The human lifespan is so short, and man's monuments outlast him generation after generation, more enduring than man himself. Shelley knew about that, and about man's vanity. 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'' He waved his hand at the city. 'But do we
