The Labyrinth Key

by Christopher Cartwright

  Tom swept the entire playing field with the beam of his flashlight. High above, on each side of the sloping walls, were what appeared to be row upon row of stone benches, forming what must have once been a tremendous seating arrangement for spectators. At either end of the field, large rows of masonry stairs ascended to the heavens above. “It’s an ancient sports field?”

  “Yes,” Sam confirmed, knowing full well what he was looking at. “The game is called Pok-ta-pok.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “No, I’m serious!” Sam replied. “The Mesoamericans have been playing the game for more than three thousand years. Of course, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a ballcourt constructed underground.”

  “Why do they play the game?”

  Sam shrugged. “Why not? There are a number of theories but the most prominent one isn’t too dissimilar to the ‘why’ of modern sports today.”

  “And that is?”

  “Because we can and because we, as the human race, have a need for competition and without sports we’d probably end up releasing some of that pent-up desire on a battlefield.”

  “What do you know about the Mayans and their game… what did you call it putt-putt?”

  “I believe that’s miniature golf.” Sam grinned at his own joke. “The Mayans played Pok-ta-pok, which is believed to mimic the sound their rubber ball made when it struck a player.”

  “All right,” Tom said, “So how was this Pok-ta-pok played?”

  Sam replied, “Ballcourts were public spaces used for a variety of elite cultural events and ritualistic activities like musical performances, festivals and, of course, the ballgame. Pictorial depictions often show musicians playing at ballgames, while votive deposits—a sacrifice, sacred in nature and made up of a variety of items and offered to gods—buried at the Main Ballcourt at Tenochtitlan contained miniature whistles, ocarinas and drums.”

  He walked farther across the main alleyway. “Although there is a tremendous variation in size, in general all ballcourts have the same shape – a long narrow playing alley flanked by walls with both horizontal and sloping surfaces. The walls were often plastered and brightly painted. The length-to-width ratio remained relatively consistent at 4:1 despite the tremendous variation in ballcourt size.”

  Tom asked, “How big are we talking here?”

  “Well, the playing field of the Great Ballcourt at Chichen Itza is by far the largest, measuring just under 300 hundred feet long by 90 feet wide, while the Ceremonial Court at Tikal was only 45 feet by 15.”

  Tom glanced around the underground ballcourt. “This is somewhere in the middle of that, nothing spectacular by any means in comparison to what we know has already been built.”

  “With the exception of this being underground.” Sam shined his flashlight straight up toward the domed ceiling. “Look at that. A masonry dome like this wasn’t achieved by the Romans until 126 AD when the Roman emperor Hadrian built the Pantheon.”

  Tom nodded. “And this is a heck of a lot larger than the Pantheon.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So, what did they do? Kick the ball like some complex game of soccer?”

  “Kind of…” Sam thought about it for a minute, recollecting the various tidbits of fact from his knowledge base on Mesoamerican history. “No one knows for certain how the game was played but most theories suggest its rules were similar to racquetball, where the aim was to keep the ball in play. The stone ballcourt goals, those rings up there along the alleyway, are a late addition to the game.”

  Sam took a breath and continued. “The players struck the ball with their hips, although some versions allowed the use of forearms, rackets, bats, or hand-stones. The ball was made of solid rubber and weighed as much as ten pounds.

  “Games were played between two teams of players. The number of players per team could vary, between two to four. Some games were played on makeshift courts for simple recreation while others were formal spectacles on huge stone ballcourts and leading to human sacrifice.”

  Sam grinned. “Even without human sacrifice, the game could be brutal and there were often serious injuries inflicted by the solid, heavy ball.

  “Points were lost by a player who let the ball bounce more than twice before returning it to the other team; those who let the ball go outside the boundaries of the court; or those who tried and failed to pass the ball through one of the stone rings placed on each wall along the center line. Points were gained if the ball hit the opposite end wall, while the decisive victory was reserved for the team that put the ball through a stone ring – a rare event given that the rings were barely larger than the ball and often as high as 15 feet off the ground!”

  Tom studied the grand stadium. “It’s quite something, especially for a game that kids might have played to stave off boredom.”

  “Pok-ta-pok was used for a lot more than entertaining kids,” Sam warned. “Some historians believe it related to astronomy, with the bouncing ball thought to have represented the sun and the stone scoring rings speculated as signifying sunrise and sunset, or equinoxes. Then, there was the concept of war.”

  “War?” Tom asked.

  “Pok-ta-pok was most likely a proxy for warfare. Two kings of opposing people may challenge their best players to the game, with the winner vanquishing their enemy. In many cases, that meant the losing king would be sacrificed at the end of the game.”

  Tom swallowed. “Brutal.”

  “You’d better believe it.” Sam shrugged, as though the Mayans were no worse than the Romans or any other early civilizations. “There are also some theories that the games were played to promote the fertility of a kingdom or to determine the outcome of cosmologic duality.”

  Tom made a wry and incredulous grin. “Cosmologic duality?”

  Sam smiled. “The game was a struggle between day and night, a battle between life and death, as seen in the underworld. Ballcourts were considered portals to the underworld and were built in key locations within central ceremonial precincts. Playing ball engaged one in the maintenance of the cosmic order of the universe and the ritualistic regeneration of life.”

  Tom sighed heavily, “So if this really is Xibalba, what do you think this ballcourt means? Were people playing to decide whether they were going—at least from their society’s notion of the afterlife—upward to Heaven or downward to Hell?”

  Sam bit his lower lip. “Well, if you’re to believe the Popul Vuh, basically the Mayan bible, this was the ballcourt where the twin heroes, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, challenged the gods of the underworld to a multi-match ball tournament.”

  “They challenged the gods of the underworld to a game of ball?” Tom suppressed a grin. “How did that go?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sam said, “Mayan cosmology, which shirks neither from darkness and violence nor beauty and heroism, features one of the most strange and transformative tales of the underworld. The story is found in the Popul Vuh, the most comprehensive, remaining work of Mayan mythical literature and which was recorded through the Quiché language by a Dominican friar in 1701 AD. The most important and cohesive part of the Popul Vuh recounts twin heroes, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, challenging the gods of the underworld to a multi-match ball tournament…”

  Tom said, “Go on.”

  “The story begins when Hun Hunahpu, the father to the twins, challenged the greedy and corrupt gods of Xibalba to a ball game. In important tournaments the losers were sacrificed and their severed heads became permanent additions to the court. When Hun Hunahpu lost the ball game to the gods of the dark house, they ripped him apart and left his head impaled on a tree.”

  “You’re really selling the ancient Mayan times to me here, Sam.”

  Sam nodded in agreement and continued with the story. “However, Xquic, a lovely blood goddess of the underworld fell in love with the head of the brave and handsome Hun Hunahpu and became impregnated by his spit. She raised her own twin sons, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, keeping them hidden awa
y from the eyes of the gods below but, when the two grew to manhood they inevitably found their father’s sporting equipment. Learning of his downfall, they set out to defeat the gods of Xibalba, whose malign influence was corrupting the world of life.

  “After deliberately losing several ball matches in order to obtain a strategic advantage, the brothers were forced to take shelter in a dark house in Xibalba which was filled with killer bats and the horrifying bat gods known as the Camazotz. To escape the bats, the brothers took refuge inside their blowguns but Hunahpu, mistakenly believing that dawn had arrived, stuck his head out to look around. A Camazotz promptly snipped Hunahpu’s head off with razor claws and carried the bleeding head to the ceremonial ball court for use during the next day’s ball game.

  “Grieving for his dead brother, Xbalanque summoned the animals of the jungle and asked them to bring their favorite food. Many animals brought leaves or grubs or worthless carrion, but the coati brought a calabash gourd, which Xbalanque then fashioned into a surrogate head for his brother. During the ballgame, he managed to exchange the fake head for the real one and the brothers ultimately went on to win the tournament!”

  “What did the Xibalban gods do when the twins won?”

  “Enraged by the loss, the Xibalbans constructed a great oven in which they immolated the meddlesome twins. The deities of hell then ground the twins’ burned bones to dust and threw them in a river. However, Xbalanque and Hunahpu were again, one step ahead. They magically regenerated as a pair of catfish which gradually changed into boys. Amazed by this miracle and not recognizing the now-transformed twins, the Xibalbans hired the orphans as magical entertainers. The twins performed increasingly spectacular magical miracles for the Xibalbans, for example transforming into animals and burning buildings—only to restore them, perfectly unharmed.”

  Sam took a deep breath. “Finally, the two magicians were called to appear before One Death and Seven Death, the ranking rulers of Xibalba. The twins performed a spectacular magic show and culminated with Xbalanque sacrificing Hunahpu, only to have the latter emerge more powerful and vigorous than before. One Death and Seven Death applauded and demanded the twins put them through the same transformation. Naturally the twins sacrificed the rulers of Xibalba, but they did not restore them to life. They then revealed their true identities and began to slaughter their former tormentors. The forces of Xibalba surrendered utterly, begging for mercy.

  “The story ends with the twins granting clemency to the surviving gods of Hell on the condition that the world of life no longer need worship them or present offerings to the underworld. The brothers then dug up their father’s remains and pieced them together, but their magical skills could not bring him fully back to life. Maimed and broken, he was left on the ball court where they found him. Some say he became maize and gave life to the world. Others say he became the fragile hope which lingers for all things lost and dead.

  “The brothers then left the underworld but, as they ascended to the world of the living, they found that it had now become somewhat diminished from their purview. Their mighty magical transformations had put the affairs of life behind them. The two kept climbing and transcended the world entirely. They are still visible as the sun and the moon. Their story is the Mayan story of creation and how life was redeemed – at least for a time – from the greedy deities of the underworld.”

  Tom said, “Great. So, what did the Master Builders have to do with any of this?”

  “I have no idea,” Sam said, fixing his flashlight on the upward staircase at the end of the ballcourt. “But I think it’s time we go visit the Heavens and find out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They followed the passageway at the end of the ballcourt into a small alcove that harbored more than a dozen weapons, shields and warrior masks. They were presumably the remnants of long-forgotten Mayan victories on the ballcourt.

  At the end of the alcove, they climbed the steps that symbolically led upward toward Heaven. The passage ascended at a forty-degree angle, almost identical to those found in the Egyptian pyramids. After climbing roughly a hundred and eighty feet, the diagonal passage opened into a large, empty chamber. Sam shined his flashlight along the walls. There was nothing. A completely vacant room, which probably took the better part of a decade to carve out. He wondered what purpose it had once served.

  They turned around and backtracked until they reached a second opening in the ceiling that ran in an opposite, diagonal direction. This passage maintained the same forty-degree angle as the original but, instead of heading north, slanted south. Sixty feet along, a second passage opened. This one ran horizontal.

  Sam caught his breath before continuing.

  At the end of the ascending passage the tunnel leveled out again and then opened into another large chamber. Presumably the king’s chamber, but there was no sarcophagus. Instead, an ornamental pedestal stood at the center. He ran his eyes across the chamber. It was made almost entirely out of pink quartz crystal, known as rose quartz. He looked up. The ceiling was a large, rounded dome, the surface of which was covered with both writings and numbers.

  Tom focused his flashlight on the ceiling. “The writings are a mixture of pictographs, hieroglyphs and symbols. The same sort of gibberish I’ve seen you refer to as being written by the ancient Master Builders.”

  Sam grinned. “Yes, this is their work. Now I’m certain of it.”

  Sam stared at the ceiling trying to make sense of what appeared mostly as ancient, undecipherable markings. Although the domed ceiling was full of writing, none of the words were grouped together. Instead, it appeared as though a child had scribbled all over it, at random. A likely alternative, the individual words could mean something all by themselves.

  Tom asked, “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said, already taking a digital recording of the images so that he could decipher it later. “It can take hours to decipher a single word in the ancient language.”

  He lowered his eyes and examined the rest of the room in silence. On top of the central pedestal sat a small piece of glass or transparent stone, glistening. It appeared ornamental and yet valuable, like an orb. It stuck out of the pedestal, with some sort of metallic bevel material, like brass only more golden, blocking the surrounding sides and directing the light, reminding him of a microscope lens.

  Sam shined his flashlight at it.

  The light scattered throughout the small chamber, as if through a prism.

  At the top of the brass-like sidings, where the clear orb stood proudly, were a series of markings dividing the circle into four equal portions.

  Sam had seen a very similar device inside a flooded pyramid beneath the Mediterranean Sea. That one made sense out of some of the quatrains that Nostradamus had purportedly foretold the future by showing a vision of places far away.

  Sam tried to rotate the pedestal. The device didn’t move. He tried harder, but it may as well have been bolted to the stone flooring. Studying the markings in the brass, he tried to move the brass itself with no success. He then moved along to the lower section of the pedestal where a series of pictographs surrounded a single, beveled dial of brass, shaped like a spear.

  Tom was the first to recognize the image. “That’s a looking glass!”

  “Another looking glass!” Sam was incredulous. “I thought we’d found them all by now.”

  “Apparently not.”

  The looking glasses were a network of communication devices built by the ancient Master Builders and spanned the globe. They projected light only, no sound, but allowed the users to see where the refractive tube opened, often viewing distant lands and at times, thousands of miles away.

  The question to be considered—what was a looking glass doing inside the Mayan underworld?

  Sam stepped closer to the pedestal and looked directly at the flawless orb. It was currently opaque, but he hoped to change that. Tom had found the first of the looking glasses in a pyramid nearly 500 feet below t
he Gulf of Mexico. The stone orb was made from a material harder than diamond and nearly two hundred times more translucent, meaning light and sound could travel through it much farther and faster than any other known material on earth.

  It was designed for viewing other parts of the world during the ancient times.

  A type of magic used long before the internet allowed such communication; videoconferencing, for example.

  Sam rotated the dial shaped like a warrior’s spear, waited, and then grinned like he’d just won a final hand of cards. He placed his eye up to the orb as though he was looking through the lens of a microscope. The opacity of the orb had dissipated, giving way to a very clear picture.

  The image depicted an identical chamber to the one they were already standing within, only the next one was made of jade. He rotated the dial again and the image changed to another darkened and empty chamber. The walls were made of blocks of limestone. He made one more rotation, finding another made out of marble.

  Tom said, “It looks like there are four temples linked together by this looking glass.”

  “That’s right. Maybe they’re all Mesoamerican? Maybe they span the globe? There’s no real way of knowing from here.”

  “Any idea what these four temples relate to?”

  “No. But I intend to find out.”

  It was nearly an hour before Sam and Tom finished digitally archiving the contents of the king’s chamber in addition to images of the other three kings’ chambers as they were viewed through the looking glass.

  There was a connection there, somehow, but right now Sam sure as hell couldn’t see it.

  When there was no more to be learned at this particular location, they headed back down, toward the ballcourt.

  They descended the ancient stairway, passed through the votive hall adorned with its ritual battleaxes, blades, shields and masks and out into the main Pok-ta-pok, the ballcourt of Xibalba.

  And stopped…