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Pitt went to work clearing what he thought was a heavy layer of compost. It proved to be only 10 centimeters (4 inches) thick. He had only to brush away the decomposing leaves with his hands to reveal several beautifully carved stone heads and full figures of various sizes. He guessed they were religious animal gods. A sigh of relief escaped his lips at discovering that the wreck of the galleon was untouched.
Scraping away a length of rotting vine that had fallen from the trees far above, he discovered twelve more carvings, three that were life-size. In the ghostly light their green coating of mold made them look like corpses arising from the grave. A clutter of clay pots and effigies had not fared as well after the damp of four centuries. Those that were relatively intact crumbled when touched. Of the textiles that had been part of the original treasure trove, all had rotted into a few swatches of black mold.
Pitt eagerly dug deeper, ignoring torn fingernails and the slime that smeared his hands. He found a cache of jade, elegantly ornate and painstakingly carved. There were so many pieces he soon lost count. They were mingled with mosaics made of mother-of-pearl and turquoise. Pitt paused and wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm. This bonanza was bound to open a can of worms, he reflected. He could already envision the legal battles and diplomatic machinations that would occur between Ecuadorian archaeologists and government officials, who would claim the artifacts belonged to them by right of possession, and their counterparts in Peru, who would claim the trove as their original property. Whatever the legal entanglements, the one certainty was that none of the masterworks of Inca art would end up on a shelf in Pitt's home.
He glanced at his watch. Over an hour had passed since he dropped through the trees. He left the mass of jumbled antiquities and continued moving toward what had once been the captain's cabin on the stern of the galleon. He was swinging the blade of the machete back and forth to sweep the dead vegetation away from a debris mound when the blade suddenly clanged on a solid metal object. Kicking the leaves to the side he found that he had stumbled on one of the ship's two ca
Pitt could no longer tell where his perspiration left of and the humid moisture from the forest began. It was like working in a steam bath, with the added a
He knew he was in the right area when he uncovered the big pintles and gudgeons, now badly rusted, that once held and pivoted the rudder. His foot accidentally kicked something buried in the ground, an unidentifiable circular band of ornate iron. When he bent down for a closer inspection he saw shards of glass. He checked Perlmutter's illustrations and recognized the object as the stern ru
In forty minutes of searching on his hands and knees, he found an inkwell, two goblets, and the remains of several oil lamps. Without stopping to rest, he carefully brushed away a small heap of leaves and found himself looking into a green eye that stared back through the dank humus. He wiped his wet hands on his pants, took a banda
Keeping his enthusiasm in check, he painstakingly dug four small trenches around the unblinking face, deep enough to see that it was the lid to a box about the size of a twelve-volt car battery. When the box was totally uncovered, he lifted it from the moist soil where it had rested since 1578 and set it between his legs.
Pitt sat in wondrous awe for the better part of ten minutes, afraid to pry off the lid and find nothing but damp rot inside. With great trepidation he took a small Swiss army knife from one pocket, swung out the thi
The interior of the box was lined with cedar and contained what looked to him to be a folded mass of multicolored knotted string. Several of the strands had faded but they were intact and their colors could still be distinguished. Pitt couldn't believe the remarkable state of preservation, until he closely studied the antiquity and realized it was made, not from cotton or wool, but twisted coils of tinted metal.
"That's it!" he shouted, startling a tree full of macaws, who winged into the depths of the rain forest amid a chorus of shrieking chatter. "The Drake quipu."
Clutching the box with the tenacity of an Ebenezer Scrooge refusing to donate to a Christmas charity, Pitt found a reasonably dry fallen tree to sit on. He stared into the jade face and wondered if the quipu's secret could somehow be unriddled. According to Dr. Ortiz, the last person who might have read the knotted strands had died four hundred years ago. He fervently hoped that Yaeger's state-of-the-art computer could cut through time and solve the mystery.
He was still sitting there amid the ghosts of the English and Spanish seamen, oblivious to a swarm of biting insects, the stabbing pain from his gashed arm, and the clammy dampness, when the returning helicopter came within earshot from somewhere in the shrouded sky.
A small van, marked with the name of a well known express package company, drove up a ramp and stopped at the shipping and receiving door of a sizable one-story concrete building. The structure covered one city block of a huge warehouse complex near Galveston, Texas. There was no company sign on the roof or walls. The only evidence that it was occupied came from a small brass plaque beside the door that read Logan Storage Company. It was just after six o'clock in the evening. Too late for employees to be working on the job but still early enough not to arouse the suspicion of the patrolling security guards.
Without exiting the van, the driver punched in a code on a remote control box that deactivated the security alarm and raised the big door. As it rose to the ceiling, it revealed the interior of a vast storehouse filled to the roof support girders with seemingly endless racks packed with furniture and ordinary household goods. There was no hint of life anywhere on the spacious concrete floor. Now assured that all employees had left for home, the driver moved the van inside and waited for the door to close. Then he drove onto a platform scale large enough to hold an eighteen-wheel truck and trailer.