unwilling to be put on ice.
Concluding that the woman would not be charmed, he resorted to one last trick. Turning quickly, the professor attempted to flee from the bureaucratic barracuda. But his escape route was blocked by a bank of sifting barrels, and Ms. Arenas pounced.
“You’re holding up the development of this land for tourism at great cost to the Mexican government,” she barked. “The Ministry of the Interior gave you a permit to dig for eighteen months. Your time is up, Professor.”
“Now wait a minute—”
But it was Olga Arenas who stalked away this time. “Results by the end of the week or we pull the plug!” she called over her shoulder.
Sebastian De Rosa squinted in the burning sun as the woman climbed back into her limousine and sped off. Cursing, he kicked a rock into the bush, then sagged against a tree. He and his team had been working like tireless mules for eighteen months and had found nothing. How was he going to make a significant discovery in only five days, let alone prove his theory about the origin of Mesoamerican culture and civilization? Impossible.
He cursed himself for not working harder on the politics. Only recently, Sebastian had learned that a rival archaeologist had been working behind his back to gain the ear of Mexico’s minister of cultural affairs, the influential and no doubt corrupt Juan Ramirez. The unknown rival had undermined Sebastian, speaking out against his project, his theories, and against him.
Such predatory behavior was nothing new in the academic world, and nothing new to Sebastian. After all, he’d grown up admiring his father’s ability to best men who would smile in his face while thrusting a self-serving dagger in his gut. But what Sebastian hadn’t expected was the campaign of personal and professional destruction that had been waged against him ever since he’d broken with the herd to question a few of the cherished “facts” of modern archaeology—a scientific discipline he had naively assumed was in pursuit of the truth.
The controversy had begun when Sebastian had published his doctoral dissertation challenging the notion that the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops had built the Great Pyramid. When irate Egyptologists had demanded that he prove his “absurd” theory, Sebastian had published a second paper—his own translation of the inscriptions found on the mysterious “Inventory Stela” discovered in the ruins of the Temple of Isis in the 1850s. A record of the pharaoh Cheops’s reign carved in limestone, the inscriptions clearly indicate that both the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were already on the Giza plateau long before Cheops was even born.
This second paper was the academic equivalent of setting a hornet’s nest on fire. The implications of Sebastian’s theory, if proven, were staggering and would change recorded human history. And Sebastian had gone even further. He’d declared that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were both far older than the Egyptian civilization that had sprung up in their shadows, and both were likely the remnants of an older and
Dr. Sebastian’s reputation had suffered after the mainstream press had misrepresented this theory. Upon obtaining a copy of his dissertation, a Boston tabloid reporter had twisted his ideas. Hence the unfortunate headline: “Archaeologist Claims People from Atlantis Built the Pyramid.”
Other tabloids had picked up on this misrepresentation, and the resulting wave of speculation among the Roswell, UFO,
Of course, Dr. De Rosa had never uttered the word “Atlantis,” and he publicly objected to the simplistic characterization of his research. But the damage had already been done, and all his protestations only threw more fuel on the fire.
Since the publication of those first erroneous reports, Dr. Sebastian De Rosa’s work had been both praised and condemned in the archaeological community—but mostly the latter. Sebastian generally ignored his critics and doggedly pressed on with his quest to find the connection between the pyramid-building civilizations of the Nile Valley and those in Central and South America. Two years ago, that quest had landed him in Mexico, where he’d been granted a rare opportunity to examine a unique and inexplicable artifact.
In the 1960s, a peasant farmer was digging around at the base of the Temple of the Sun when he unearthed a burial chamber filled with priceless Mesoamerican artifacts. The farmer later claimed to have discovered vessels, implements of gold, and other finds his untrained mind could not recognize. Most of the stuff was sold on the black market and vanished, but one object fell into the hands of a Mexican archaeologist curious enough about its origins to pursue the matter back to the farmer himself.
It was a metal object roughly the size and shape of a U.S. mint silver dollar. The artifact was inscribed with characters that resembled the earliest form of hieroglyphics used by the Egyptians. Potassium-argon dating techniques that accurately measure when a metallic ore was last heated to a temperature above 227 degrees Fahrenheit subsequently revealed that the artifact was made around 3000 B.C.—about the time the Egyptians first developed their pictographic writing system.
But how, Dr. De Rosa asked himself, could such an object appear in Mesoamerica, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the cradle of Egyptian civilization in the Nile Valley—long before any known human culture existed in the rain forests of Central America? The tenets of traditional archaeology could not answer that question, so the object was declared a forgery by the prevailing experts and locked away in a vault at the Universidad de Mexico until Dr. De Rosa received permission to study it three decades later.
After a careful examination, Sebastian concluded that the artifact was genuine and that it represented the first physical link between Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations ever unearthed. But he also knew that the only way he could convince other archaeologists that the object was real was to somehow “repeat the experiment.” In other words, unearth a
For a year and a half Sebastian De Rosa and his team had been hunting and had come up empty-handed. Now their time had run out.
“Professor! Professor!”
Sebastian looked up, glad for the distraction. Marco, a worker hired locally, was waving a long sheet of computer paper over his head. Marco’s job was to scan the ground with a metal detector mounted on a long pole. The data collected by that device was fed to a laptop computer manned by Thomas, an archaeologist Sebastian had trained himself and a digital imaging specialist whose job it was to interpret the vague, shifting forms that appeared on his monitor.
“Over here!” Sebastian called to Marco.
Breathless, Marco crossed the excavation site, and, with a Cheshire cat grin, he thrust the computer printout into the archaeologist’s hand.
“We found it!” Marco declared as Sebastian examined the image on the printout.
“Where?”
Around the Temple of the Sun a series of deep, long trenches had been excavated by Sebastian’s team. The main trench was close to six feet deep. Marco pointed in the direction of that main trench, and Sebastian took off in a run, legs and arms pumping.
By the time Sebastian arrived, the diggers had already abandoned the pit and stood on the edge watching, curious to see what all the excitement was about. Only Thomas remained at the bottom of the deep trench, waiting for Dr. De Rosa to arrive. Sebastian leaped into the middle of the pit and paused to study the digital image on the computer sheet once again. The printout indicated that a solid object—round and possibly metal—was buried just beneath the earth under his feet.
Dropping to his knees, Sebastian fingered the rich, black soil. Marco leaped into the trench to kneel next to the archaeologist. Around them, work ceased as rumors of a major find raced through the site.
“It’s right here,” Marco said, patting the ground with the flat of his hand. “Thomas says it could be metal of some kind.”
Sebastian looked up at Thomas. The computer expert leaned against the wall of the trench, arms folded, his open laptop perched on a wooden crate.
“What do you think?”
Thomas pondered the question. “It’s too small to be the chamber.”
