The Mayan Secrets

“It’s a relief that you know the rules,” he said.

Remi said, “Are you sure it’s from Copán? We found this at Tacaná, north of Tapachula, Mexico. That’s at least four hundred miles from Copán.”

Caine shrugged. “Native people in the Americas sometimes covered a lot of ground on foot. There’s also trade.”

“How old is it?”

Caine cocked his head and looked. “Wait. Here we go. The king is Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the sixteenth ruler of Copán. It says so here.” He pointed at a group of vertical columns with rounded designs like seals.

Sam said, “You can read those?”

“Yes. These columns each consist of one to five glyphs and each glyph is a word or phrase or an indication of a position in a sentence. You read from top left to right, but only for the first two columns, then go down a line and read the left one and the right one and so on. There are eight hundred sixty-one glyphs that we know.”

“There are over twenty Mayan languages,” said Remi. “Does this form of writing work for all of them?”

“No,” he said. “The only ones we have were written in Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatec.”

Sam stared at the pot. “So this comes from Copán. I wonder how it got from Honduras all the way across Guatemala to the border of Mexico.”

“And when,” said Remi.

“Exactly what I was wondering,” said Caine. “We could do a carbon date on any organic material associated with the find and on the man himself. That would do it.”

“I’ll call Dr. Talamantes and Dr. Garza and see if they can arrange to have the man tested,” said Remi. “He’s in a hospital morgue in Tapachula. They signed him in, mostly on the strength of the goodwill they built up with the medical community in the area after the earthquake.”

“Are they also archaeologists?” asked Caine.

“No, just medical doctors,” said Sam.

“Then would you mind if I stepped in and got a couple of Mexican colleagues to go to work on this? They’re first-rate scientists and very well respected.”

“We’d be delighted,” said Remi.

“Then I’ll call them this afternoon and get them going on it. You’ve done a good job of keeping his location quiet since the first blast of publicity, so there hasn’t been a crush of people trying to get in and see him. But you can be sure that lots of people are waiting and listening — some scholars and scientists, and some crackpots and some charlatans as always.”

Sam said, “The publicity came from another volunteer who was up there with us. He didn’t believe in keeping the find quiet, based on his own principles: The discovery belongs to the people so the people should be told about it. We thought we’d talked him into waiting, but he went public without us. After that, we took steps to give the scientific community a chance to see things before the tourists and souvenir hunters destroyed them.”

“It’s a good thing you did. Do we have anything here we can carbon-date?”

Remi said. “Quite a bit. Our guy made himself a pair of dishes out of hollowed-out pieces of wood. There was some plant residue in one of them.”

“Perfect,” said Caine. “Anything living begins to lose carbon 14 the minute it dies.”

“I’ll get them.” She went off to the other end of the room, disappeared through a door, and came back with the two plastic bags containing the wooden vessels, seeds, and husks.

Caine returned his attention to the pot. “This pot has a lid. The seal looks translucent, a bit like beeswax. Have you opened it?”

“No,” said Sam. “We realized that the minute we cleared the lava out of the doorway to the shrine, or whatever that building is, we exposed the man and his belongings to air and started the clock ticking. We didn’t want to do anything that might harm the pot. We’ve carried it around quite a bit, so we know the contents aren’t liquid and aren’t stone or metal, but it’s not empty. Something shifts around a little when you move it.”

“Shall we try to open it now?” asked Caine.

“We have a good place to do it,” Remi said. “In our remodeling, we’ve had the builders put in a climate-controlled room — low temperature, low humidity, no sunlight — just like a rare-book room in a library.”

“Wonderful,” said Caine.

“Follow me.” She led them to the door she had just emerged from, opened it, and turned on the light. The room had a long worktable and a few chairs and a wall of glass cabinets, all of them empty at the moment. In the corner of the room was a tall red tool chest on wheels that looked like the ones in auto mechanics’ shops.

Professor Caine carried the pot into the room and set it on the table. Sam wheeled the chest over and opened the top drawer, which held a collection of tools for working on small, delicate objects — brushes, tweezers, X-Acto knives, dental picks, awls, magnifiers, and high-intensity flashlights. There was also a box of sterile surgical gloves.

Caine put on gloves, chose a pick and tweezers to examine the seal and pull some of it off. He looked at it under a magnifier on a stand. “It seems to be a glue made from some kind of plant resin.” He switched to an X-Acto knife and methodically cut away the translucent substance from around the lid.

“What’s in there can’t be food. It’s glued shut,” said Remi.

“I don’t dare guess,” said Caine. “Archaeology is full of high hopes and pots that turn out to be full of mud.” He gripped the lid and twisted. “Interesting. I can turn the lid a little but not raise it. What it looks like is that he heated the pot a little, sealed it, and let it cool. That would produce a partial vacuum in it to keep the seal tight.”

“Just like ca

“Now, I wonder how to get it open without breaking it.”

Sam said, “We could heat it a bit again to get the air inside to expand. Or we could take it up to a high altitude, where the air pressure is lower.”

“How could we warm it a bit without harming it?”

“If we do it evenly, the pot shouldn’t break,” said Sam.

“I agree,” Caine said.

“Another modification to the house: We put in a sauna,” said Remi.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Sam entered the sauna, placed the pot on the wooden bench, then turned on the heat, slowly raising the temperature. At the end of ten minutes, he entered the sauna, wrapped the pot in a towel, and brought it out. He held the pot while Caine tried the lid. It came up and the pressure was equalized. Sam put the lid back on, and they all went back downstairs to the climate-controlled room.

“The big moment is coming,” said Remi.

“Don’t be disappointed if it’s just a mess of organic matter that used to be food,” said Caine. “Sometimes the best bits of information don’t look like much at first.”

Sam set the pot on the table. Caine, still wearing surgical gloves, took a deep breath and reached in. He pulled out a mass of what looked like dried weeds. “Packing material?”

He picked up a small flashlight and looked inside the pot. “Oh…” He stood up and peered down into the vessel. “Is it possible?”

“What is it?”

“It looks like a book,” he said. “A Mayan book.”

“Can you get it out?”

Caine put both hands into the vessel and lifted out a thick brownish rectangle and gently set it on the table. He reached out slowly with only his gloved index finger, lifted the outer layer an inch. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Intact. I can’t believe it.” For a moment, he stood still, lost in thought. He withdrew his finger and only then seemed to notice the Fargos again.

His whole face brightened. “It’s a Mayan book, a codex. It seems to be undamaged. We have to take our time examining it because we don’t know how fragile it is, and there’s no way to know how many times a page can be turned or even touched.”

“I know they’re very rare,” Remi said.

“The rarest of all Western Hemisphere artifacts and by far the most valuable,” said Caine. “The Maya were the only people in the Americas who developed a complex system of writing and it’s good. They could write anything they could say. If they’d had the urge, they could have written novels, epic poems, histories. Maybe they did. There were once hundreds of thousands of these codices. Today there are only four that survived and made it into European museums — the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris. And there’s also the Grolier Codex, but it’s so inferior to the others that many experts think it’s a forgery. But the first three are full of Mayan knowledge — mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, calendars. This could be the fifth.”