despair when we see this? I know that I don't. I regard it as the glory of short-lived men.' He held out his hands before him, gnarled and blue-veined and trembling a little. 'It's a great pity that this flesh should rot so soon.'
His conversation was becoming too macabre for my taste, so I changed the subject. 'Have you identified the King's Palace yet?'
He smiled. 'Still hoping for plated walls of gold?' He shook his head. 'Vivero was mixed up, as usual. The Mayas didn't have kings, in the sense that we know them, but there was an hereditary chief among them called Halach uinic whom I suppose Vivero called king. Then there was the nacom, the war chief, who was elected for three years. The priesthood was hereditary, too. I doubt if the Halach uinic would have a palace, but we have found what we think is one of the main administrative buildings.' He pointed to another mound. 'That's it.'
It was certainly big, but disappointing. To me it was just another hill and it took a great deal of imagination to create a building in the mind's eye. Fallon said tolerantly, 'It isn't easy, I know. It takes a deal of experience to see it for what it is. But it's likely that Vivero was taken there for the judgement of the Halach uinic. He was also the chief priest but that was over Vivero's head -- he hadn't read Frazer's Golden Bough:
Neither had I, so I was as wise as Vivero. Fallon said, The next step is to get rid of these tree boles.' He kicked gently at the one on which I was sitting.
'What do you do? Blast them out?'
He looked shocked. 'My God, no! We burn them, roots and all. Fortunately the rain forest trees are shallow- rooted -- you can see that much of the root system on this platform is above ground. When we've done that there is a system of tubes, in the. structure where the roots were, and we fill those with cement to bind the building together. We don't want it falling down at this late stage.'
'Have you come across the thing Vivero was so excited about? The golden sign -- whatever it was?'
He wagged his head doubtfully. 'No -- and we may never do so. I think that Vivero -- after twelve years as a captive -- may have been a little bit nuts. Religious mania, you know. He could have had a hallucination.'
I said, 'Judging by today's standards any sixteenth-century Spaniard might be said to have had religious mania. To liquidate whole civilizations just because of a difference of opinion about God isn't a mark of sanity.'
Fallon cocked an eye at me. 'So you think sanity is comparative? Perhaps you're right; perhaps our present wars will be looked on, in the future, as an indication of warped minds. Certainly the prospect of an atomic war isn't a particularly sane concept.'
I thought of Vivero, unhappy and with his conscience tearing him to bits because he was too afraid to convert the heathen to Christianity. And yet he was quite prepared to counsel his sons in the best ways of killing the heathen, even though he admitted that the methods he advised weren't Christian. His attitude reminded me of Mr. Puckle, the inventor of the first machine-gun, which was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Turks.
I said, 'Where did Vivero get the gold to make the mirrors? You said there was very little gold here.'
'I didn't say that,' contradicted Fallon. I said it had been accumulated over the centuries. There was probably quite a bit of gold here in one way and another, and a goldsmith can steal quite a lot over a period of twelve years. Besides, the mirrors aren't pure gold, they're tumbago -- that's a mixture of gold, silver and copper, and quite a lot of copper, too. The Spaniards were always talking about the red gold of the Indies, and it was copper that gave it the colour.'
He knocked his pipe out. 'I suppose I'd better get back to Rudetsky's map and plot out next week's work schedule.' He paused. 'By the way, Rudetsky tells me that he's seen a few chicleros in the forest. I've given instructions that everyone must stay in camp and not go wandering about. That includes you.'
That brought me back to the twentieth century with a bang. I went back to camp and sent a message to Pat Harris via the radio at Camp One to inform him of this latest development. It was all I could do.
V
Fallon was a bit disappointed by my diving programme. 'Only two hours a day,' he said in disgust.
So I had to put him through a crash course of biophysics as it relates to diving. The main problem, of course, is the nitrogen. We were diving at a depth of about a hundred feet, and the absolute pressure at the depth is four atmospheres -- about sixty pounds a square inch. This doesn't make any difference to breathing because the demand valve admits air to the lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water, and so there is no danger of being crushed by the difference of pressure.
The trouble comes with the fact that with every breath you're taking four times as much of everything. The body can cope quite handily with the increase of oxygen, but the extra nitrogen is handled by being dissolved in the blood and stored in the tissues. If the pressure is brought back to normal suddenly the nitrogen is released quickly in the form of bubbles in the bloodstream -- one's blood literally boils -- a quick way to the grave.
And so one reduces the pressure slowly by coming to the surface very carefully and with many stops, all carefully calculated by Admiralty doctors, so that the stored nitrogen is released slowly and at a controlled safe rats.
'All right,' said Fallon impatiently. 'I understand that. But if you spend two hours on the bottom, and about the same time coming up, that's only half a day's work. You should be able to do a dive in the morning and another in the afternoon.'
'Not a chance,' I said. 'When you step out of the water, the body is still saturated with nitrogen at normal atmospheric pressure, and it takes at least six hours to be eliminated from the system. I'm sorry, but we can do only one dive a day.'
And he had to be satisfied with that.
The raft Rudetsky made proved a godsend. Instead of my original idea of hanging small air bottles at each decompression level, we dropped a pipe which plugged directly into the demand valve on the harness and was fed from big air bottles on the raft itself. And I explored the cave in the cenote wall at the seventy-foot level. It was quite large and shaped like an inverted sack and it occurred to me to fill it full of air and drive the water from it. A hose dropped from the air pump on the raft soon did the job, and it seemed odd to be able to take off the mask and breathe normally so deep below the surface. Of course, the air in the cave was at the same pressure as the water at that depth and so it would not help in decompression, but if either Katherine or myself got into trouble the cave could be a temporary shelter with an adequate air supply. I hung a light outside the entrance and put another inside.
