by Otto Schafer
Most of today’s Maya lived in southern Mexico and Central America and most worked in agriculture. But her mother had wanted something else. Itzel got into archeology because she wanted to protect her heritage, yes, but she also longed for adventure. Gabi felt that same longing too.
Her mother and father had met at university, where they bonded over their love for ancient Maya culture. Her father Andrés was born in Villahermosa, and though he wasn’t Maya, he loved everything about history, culture, and archaeology. He always told Gabi the greatest mysteries of the universe were hidden just beneath her feet.
Gabi wanted to follow in her parents’ footsteps studying ancient cultures like the Olmec, the Aztec, and most of all the history of her own culture, the Maya. But she was only thirteen and, even though she was the luckiest kid on the planet, a very real fear lurked at the back of her mind. A fear that they could hit a dead end, or run out of funding, or be driven out of the area by warring factions of the cartel, or any other of a hundred reasons they could be shut down and forced off the site. But the truth was, even if this site shut down, they probably could find work and they would be okay even if times got tough. But the real reason she worried had little to do with losing the dig site and much more to do with losing the woman leading it – Sarah.
Most lead archaeologists wouldn’t allow Gabi, at only thirteen, onto the dig site. No kids, they said. She will get in the way, they said. She will get hurt, they said. She will hurt something, they said. Instead she had to stay at the base camp and complete her homeschool work and maybe, if she was lucky, she would be allowed to help catalog the less valuable items, such as broken pottery shards or items such as animal bones pulled from refuge pits. But Sarah was different. Even though Gabi had only been twelve when she arrived at the site, Sarah insisted she be part of the team. Not only part of the team, but right in the mix learning everything she could, either working with her parents or right at Sarah’s side. Sarah said she reminded her of Dr. Moore’s daughter, an American girl named Bre. It was Bre who had discovered the crevice. Sarah said Bre was going to be a great archaeologist someday, even better than Sarah herself. Best of all, Sarah said Gabi could be too, if she worked hard and applied herself.
Working hard was not a problem for a Maya, and she proved it every day, working until she was forced to stop. It didn’t seem like work at all for her. Working with Sarah every day was an adventure!
For over a year now they had studied every inch of the mountain while another team worked to clear the collapsed cave. In all those months, they had been unable to find the alternate entry even after a careful search of the entire mountain, grid by painstaking grid. She got to learn about ground-penetrating radar and how to read the GPR graphs. What they confirmed was fascinating. The site was not a simple cave that led to a cenote under a mountain. It was a very cleverly, purposely concealed pyramid. One that had not been swallowed by time but swallowed by intention. It wasn’t uncommon for new pyramids to be discovered that had long ago been devoured by jungle, but it was rare – no, not rare, unheard of – for a pyramid to be intentionally buried, especially one this big. If Sarah was right, this pyramid could be nearly double the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza! That would make it not only the oldest but perhaps also the largest in history.
To uncover the pyramid and find the opening might have taken decades, but thanks to Bre stumbling upon the eroded crevice at the bottom of the deep gorge, they didn’t need to wait. All they had needed to do was clear the collapse.
It had been hard work. But after more than a year of painstaking effort, they could finally explore the innermost bowels and see for themselves what this chamber of the Moores was all about. Only today the team had removed the last of the blockage in front of the spiraling staircase. Finally, they would get some answers.
“Gabi,” María said in a quiet voice from behind her as they crossed the first chamber. “What Sarah speculated was right. The trap the Moores sprung had been ingeniously designed to leave the lower chamber whole, but completely inaccessible. The entire lower chamber is unharmed.”
Gabi gasped. “That’s wonderful!”
Behind her the sound of grunts, sledgehammers striking stone, and stone striking hollowly against the basin of a wheelbarrow reverberated through the upper chamber. The laborers still worked to clear the chamber in the other direction. Perhaps soon they would be able to explore the pyramid above.
Here we go, Gabi thought, making her way past the single piece of pristine pottery. It was the only piece not crushed by the collapsing ceiling that nearly killed the Moores. Her mother, Itzel, stood next to the lintel archway leading to the lower chamber. “I can go down?” Gabi asked.
“Yes.” She nodded. “Sarah and Fredy just went down a moment ago. We don’t even have lighting set up yet. Your father is working on that now, but they said it is safe for you to join.” Itzel cupped Gabi’s face in her hands. “Just be careful, noconetzin,” she said, leaning in to kiss her daughter’s nose.
Gabi nodded, her focus fixed on the opening. She was so excited she wanted to run through the opening, but she knew better. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I will be along as soon as your father gets back with the lighting. He’s going to need María and I to help carry it all down,” she said with a smile.
For the first time ever, Gabi passed cautiously beneath the large lintel and found herself descending a wide, curving set of stone stairs. As she stepped down and then down again, her mother’s voice called after her, “And don’t touch anything, Gabriela!”
She knew her mother meant business when she called her by her real name.
She stepped down a few more stairs, her eyes darting from left to right, trying to take in everything she could cast her headlamp on. How long must it have taken to carve these spiraling stairs into the stone? As tempted as she was to run down them, she slowed, inspecting the work. Along the edge of the steps ran a seam. She looked at the other side and found a seam there too. What? She turned back to face up the stairs and confirmed a seam ran all the way across the back of the step. Directing her light at the wall, she searched but saw nothing, only perfectly smooth stone.
Stepping down again she leaned in closer, and there she found a seam running down the wall in a crisp, straight line tight enough she would not have been able to fit a sheet of paper between the two… two what? Maybe it was limestone, but she wasn’t sure. Limestone wasn’t typically this dark. Surely it wasn’t basalt? Either way, she only noticed the one vertical seam running from floor to ceiling. There was no horizontal seam. The ceiling stretched upward several meters.
She descended four more stairs until she reached the next wall seam. Couldn’t be! That would mean this one block, if it were a block, and it must be, or why else would there be a seam, must be two meters wide and four meters high. How much would that weigh? She couldn’t know that without knowing how thick it was, but it had to weigh dozens of tons. On top of this revelation was the fact the whole section she was looking at was curved. Creating a curved block this big with such precision would take some serious mathematical skill. This staircase wasn’t carved into the cave. This whole spiraling stairwell was somehow… what? Placed here? Just the thought of it was crazy, but if it were true that would be crazy cool! But how would they have done it? How could they have gotten such big stones in here? Unless, unless this came before everything above? She wondered if Sarah had noticed the seams.
She hurried down the remaining steps until she was suddenly standing on the bottom step, peering out into a pitch-dark chamber. Her eyes went wide as she caught her first glimpse of an impossibly tall statue. She could see someone’s light a few meters away, coming from behind the giant, then suddenly another light filled her vision. She shielded her eyes as the silhouette of Fredy came into view. Gabi sucked in a short breath and held it before finally releasing it. “¿Neta?”
“Sí,” the grey-whiskered man laughed. “It’s for real, Gabi!”
Gabi
thought of Fredy as the village elder, a wise man, always working close to Sarah as her trusted adviser. She wasn’t sure how old he was, just that he was really old – fifty something, maybe even sixty.
Fredy handed her a notepad. “Prepare yourself, Gabi, it’s remarkable!”
Gabi strained her neck to see past Fredy, her own headlamp pushing back the darkness of the chamber to illuminate giant stone legs. She followed the legs upward, tipping her head back to discover the giant wore an angry expression topped with a serpent headdress just like the one on the lintel at the top of the stairs. It must have been at least twelve meters tall, with the ceiling of the circular room stretching even further above.
“Breathe, Gabi.” Fredy chuckled.
Gabi pulled in another short breath. “It’s so big!” she exhaled.
“Come, Sarah is waiting for you.” He leaned in close to her ear. “She said, and I quote, ‘Get Gabi down here! I want her with us on this!’”
Gabi’s blush was invisible in the darkness of the chamber, but her bright eyes and wide smile spread infectiously to Fredy, who gave a joyful burst of laughter. To work so hard for so long, unsure of what condition they would find the lower chamber in, only to find it completely intact – well, it was cause for high spirits.
“Come on you two, get over here!” Sarah’s voice called in a mock order followed by her own giggles.
Despite the giant’s extended hands and less-than-inviting expression that seemed to be saying, “Stop! Go back!” Gabi stepped slowly off the bottom step and onto the floor. She froze, unsure of what she thought might happen, but everything was still. The giant just continued to glare down at her menacingly.
“Gabi! You have to see this!” Sarah exclaimed from across the room. Sarah was a short, petite woman with almond skin and long curly brown hair. Even though Sarah kept it tucked under her hardhat, her long curls seemed to find their way out, dropping down along her cheek to frame her face.
As Gabi panned her light toward Sarah, it reflected across stacks of something bone-white. Not stacks – racks. Along the walls were racks and racks of skulls!
“Tzompantli!” Gabi breathed. “Sarah, these are Aztec?” Internally she wanted the site to be Maya, but she had prepared for this eventuality as well. Dr. Moore had said he had seen racks and racks of skulls. However, he and Breanne had only been in the dark lower chamber for a few brief moments before triggering the trap. This quick glance led Sarah’s team to think he might have seen something else. Perhaps he had seen sacrifices with skulls haphazardly stacked along the wall. But there was no mistaking this. These were beyond a doubt ancient skull racks. The racks had vertical shafts with several rows of horizontal shafts spaced just far enough for the skulls to fit. The skulls were placed onto the rack by breaking out a hole on both sides of the cranium in the temporal and parietal areas then sliding them onto a wooden shaft one after another, forming rows. These racks stretched several feet up the wall taller than Gabi stood.
“I don’t know, Gabi. For these racks to be here doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense when Charles told me about them over a year ago and honestly, they still don’t. I think I convinced myself that whatever he had seen couldn’t have been this, but here they are. The Aztecs used skull racks to warn their enemies they meant business. They were always displayed out in the open, near the top of a pyramid, near a ball court, or even at the city center, but not hidden at the bottom of a cave… or whatever this place is. I don’t know which is the bigger question, Gabi – who or why? Come, let’s have a closer look.”
Gabi made her way over to Sarah, giving the giant stone statue a wide berth and choosing instead to stay close to the racks of skulls.
Meanwhile, Fredy made his way over to the circular hole in the floor between the giant’s legs. “Fredy, careful – that’s where Charles told me he stepped on the tile,” Sarah said.
“Sí, compañera,” Fredy replied, cautiously peering down the hole with his flashlight.
“Okay, Gabi,” Sarah said, pulling her down next to her as she too squatted on the balls of her feet. Sarah smiled, readying herself to inspect the first skull rack. “I didn’t want to start without you. Now, we just have to be careful not to touch them or bump them – I wouldn’t want them to collapse.”
“Sarah?” Gabi gave her arm a squeeze. “Thank you for bringing me down.”
Sarah smiled. “No thanks necessary. You earned this, Gabi. You have worked just as hard as anyone on this team. I’m so glad you’re here. In a couple weeks, Bre will be here too, and I think you two are going to be quite the team.”
Gabi smiled and nodded. She couldn’t wait to meet this girl she had heard so much about. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Having another girl here was going to be like having a big sister.
“It’s true, Gabi, what Charles said, all of it. I never thought I would see a whole tzompantli in my entire career. Now I am in a room full of them. But I still don’t know why – why are they here? And I’m not convinced yet this is Aztec. We mustn’t assume anything. We have to let the science guide us.”
Gabi looked closely at one of the skulls, shining the beam of light right into the broken-out hole in the side of its head. The shaft of wood, perhaps oak or maybe mahogany, punched through one side of the skull and out the other. Gabi frowned, cocking her head to the side as she studied it. Something was amiss with this skull. She had seen many skulls on other digs, and once she even got to help a student clean a human mandible. She leaned in to get a better look.
“Sarah? Please, come have a look at this,” Fredy said.
“Coming,” she said, standing back up and shining her light in Fredy’s direction. “Whatcha got?”
Gabi pulled her attention away from the strange skull and stood, following Sarah over toward the center of the room.
“This hole. It’s very strange. It’s too perfectly centered to be a natural phenomenon,” Fredy said, as he panned his light back and forth across the chamber. “I bet if I measured the room, we’d find that this hole is precisely centered. This leads me to speculate either the room or the hole is not a natural occurrence.” He removed a glow stick from a hip pouch and bent it in the middle, creating a bright greenish-yellow glow. With no flame, there was no risk of creating an explosion should methane gas be present inside the hole.
Fredy tossed the glow stick down the hole, and Gabi watched as it spiraled into the depths, lighting up the circular shaft walls as it fell, before finally settling to the bottom seconds later. The depth was hard to measure with the eye, but it was a good distance, dozens of feet, maybe even a hundred feet below.
“Did you see that?” Fredy asked.
“Yes, the shaft was perfectly circular all the way down!”
Fredy squatted and ran his hand around the edge of the hole. “Wait, what is this? Feel this!”
Sarah knelt and ran her hand around the edge.
“Gabi, feel this! Fredy, hold on to her just to be safe.”
Gabi knelt next to Sarah as Fredy got a firm grip on her arm. This was why Sarah was the coolest adult on earth. She treated her like a grown-up, which made sense because she was already thirteen. Gabi felt around the edge of the hole until her fingers slipped into a notch. She walked her fingers down the wall, following a strange groove as far down as she could reach. Next, she concentrated her headlamp on the groove and followed it down as far as she could see – the groove continued out of sight. “What is this, Sarah?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Look here,” Fredy said, pointing at the opposite side of the circular hole. “Another groove identical to the one across from it.”
Gabi cocked her head to one side and allowed her eyes to split the difference between the two grooves and sure enough, there was another groove, and across from that groove was another. Four grooves in total. Each rounded groove was no more than a few centimeters wide by a few deep.
Sarah saw them too. “Fredy, these grooves aren’t random – they ar
e spaced into four equal distances around the hole. But why?”
“I have no idea, compañera, but they must serve some purpose,” he said.
Sarah shook her head. “This hole, it would make sense that it was an opening to the underworld. I would have guessed it was a place to make offerings to the rain god Chaahk if we were dealing with Maya or, given the skull racks, it could be the Aztec god of rain, Tlaloc.” Sarah threw up her hands. “But now… I just don’t know.”
Gabi paused to rack her brain, trying to somehow put it together in her mind. She spoke slowly as she puzzled it out loud. “The giant statue could be a representation of the Olmec feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl. Its feathered winged features sometimes make it look more like a dragon. Couldn’t this explain the dragon headdress and images on the lintel and pottery?”
“Well, the Olmec are certainly mysterious. There is so much we still don’t know, but the skull racks point more toward Aztec, and I have never heard of the Olmec coming this far inland from the gulf.”
Gabi nodded, so maybe not Olmec but her gut told her something was off.
“What do you think this means?” Fredy asked.
The three of them peered back over the edge of the pit, where the glow-stick was still radiating like a distant beacon in the darkest of night, guiding them to something – but what?
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t know, Fredy, but I have a hunch. The only way to be sure is to rappel to the bottom of this pit. Please head back up and bring the team, lighting, harness, and ropes. I need to get down there.”
Fredy nodded.
With Fredy bringing the team and gear, Gabi and Sarah were left alone in the curious chamber. “Sarah, can we have another look at the skulls?”
“Good idea!” They stood and moved carefully back to the racks of skulls.
On one skull, a detached mandible dangled strangely askew, giving the skull a deformed look of open-mouthed surprise. The dangling jawbone caught Gabi’s light and with it her attention. She leaned in closer to the jaw and froze, her heart leaping into her throat. “Sarah, look at this!” she croaked, blinking in disbelief as if it might make what she was seeing somehow go away.