Balancing on the steep side of the pyramid with the scanner was fiddly, especially with the headset display restricting his vision so he couldn’t see where he was putting his feet. He fought his way through the denser vegetation around the base to a slightly clearer patch half way up. The display showed stone blocks just inches below the soil. Their outer layer was tumbled, each brick having long ago been dislodged by roots before becoming entombed in ever-deepening layers of decomposing organic materials. He adjusted the settings to see more deeply into the stonework. The patterns were regular now, showing much less disruption from invading creepers and trees. Deeper still, the clean-cut stones faded into rubble, a loose in-fill material not intended ever to be seen.
It was only when he adjusted the settings to the maximum penetration range of which his scanner was capable that he saw something shocking in the heart of the pyramid.
* * *
Under the pale starlight and a handful of garden illuminations from the hotel, the lake was a sheet of graphite, almost invisible. Ruby found its stillness neither inviting nor threatening, just beautiful. As she eased her body into its coolness, she felt the serenity of a midnight dip, the electricity of complete immersion in the natural world. But this was no ordinary swim. She had made the decision to escape from Orlando’s control, preferring the known risk of the crocodiles to the uncertain fate that awaited her if she did nothing. If she could gain her freedom she might also be able to save her professional reputation from the foul stench of association with a dictatorship.
From her balcony she had studied the reptiles’ behaviour for hours. They were creatures of habit, with two particular patches of muddy lakeside beach on which they liked to spend their time. Crepuscular rather than nocturnal, they were most active at dawn and dusk. Now, six hours after sunset, seemed to be an appropriate time to enter their world, and it had been simple enough for her to clamber down the balcony support post to the grassy bank.
Only her head protruded above the water, but from here she could count nine shapes on one of the banks, and three on another. It correlated with her daylight observations. They were all asleep. Nevertheless, she gripped the little plastic bag of meats she had saved from her lunch, hoping the need to use it as a decoy would not arise.
She had a clear plan for her escape: she would find a road, hitch a ride to the capital and bang on the gates of the British Embassy, hoping to avoid a repeat of Matt’s experience at the American one. From what she had observed at the hotel, the country was becoming heavily militarised and citizens might have difficulty moving around without paperwork, but she would deal with one thing at a time. Besides, it all depended on her making it away from the hotel to the other side of the lake; getting safely past the lake’s toothy inhabitants was now her sole focus. Freedom was a hundred feet away. She pulled herself smoothly along, minimising the ripples with a slow breast stroke, pausing regularly to count the black shapes on the shore. Nine and three. She was still alone. She pushed on further for a few strokes and repeated the count. Nine and three. And again.
Nine and two.
She scanned the waters around her, gripping the bag of meat even tighter. Would she be able to see if the errant crocodile honed in on her? Would its nose and ripples be visible from her low vantage point? Or would the first she knew about it be the pincer grip around her thighs, dragging her down to a pitiless fate? She was strangely calm and analytical. She was ready. She took the meat from the bag and held it out of the water, ready to throw it at the first sign of approaching danger.
There it was. Hard to see, just a small blob moving in her direction, the tip of the creature’s nose the only clue. She threw the meat and started swimming desperately towards the far shore. Seconds later she glanced back for another quick body count.
Zero and zero.
She was out of decoy meats and twelve crocodiles were heading her way.
She swam harder, looking back repeatedly at the rapidly advancing row of noses. Still about twenty feet to go. Even if she could outswim them it wouldn’t be over. The bank might be slippery. She might stumble or become entangled in weeds. Crocodiles could sprint short distances over land, and she would be tired after the swim.
She wasn’t going to make it. She screamed, more in frustration than in fear.
A gunshot pierced the air. Had she been spotted? She looked back at the hotel. A volley of shots now rained down behind her. Orlando’s goons were trying to kill her. The water convulsed. Tails whipped and spun. In the mass of white water, she couldn’t make out the crocodiles and just kept swimming until with deep relief her fingers touched the mud and she was able to scramble ashore on her knees.
The shooting stopped. The crocodiles were no longer moving. There was a brief silence before the most astonishing and unexpected sound hit her ears: a round of applause and cheering. She stood up and looked back at the hotel. Dozens of soldiers were watching her, clapping. She felt a tap on her shoulder. Orlando stood there, accompanied by a guard.
‘Thank you, Ruby,’ said the President.
‘Huh?’ she replied, reduced to the kind of incoherence she normally associated with her American former boyfriend.
‘Thank you for demonstrating to my men the meaning of courage. They have all enjoyed your escape, and they were protecting you every step of the way. No one expected you to make it as far as you did. I am sure that when the big day arrives, they will be inspired by you to fight with all the bravery I require of them.’
Orlando’s guard placed handcuffs on her wrists.
‘Huh?’ she gasped again, silently reprimanding herself for her monosyllabic gibberish.
‘I have given you too much freedom. I have trusted you, Ruby. I have treated you well. I have given you the chance to remain by my side where I will shortly need you, but you have abused that freedom. You have insulted my faith in you.’ He leaned closer and whispered in her ear. ‘Ruby, too much is at stake. I cannot afford to lose you.’
Tuesday 4th December 2012
A line of student archaeologists woke Ratty with their whistling and clanking of tools. He half expected Snow White to be following up the rear. He peeked at them from his foetal position in the back seat of his car and remembered he was still in Belize. His temporary parking spot adjacent to the unexcavated pyramid had turned into a long stay on account of the jetlag that had overwhelmed him after nightfall. Even his excitement at making a significant discovery inside the pyramid could not cancel out his exhausted body’s demands for rest.
When the students were out of sight, he climbed out of the car and stretched his stiff frame. The rear of the pyramid served as his bathroom and the lower slopes at the front became his kitchen as he prepared himself for the challenging day ahead, all the while thinking about the profound implication of what he had seen with the ground-penetrating radar.
He pinched himself. Such a thing was impossible. It had to be the result of his brain subconsciously adding something to the digital image in front of his eyes. He had been weary, after all. The mind could play tricks under those conditions. He opened up his maps and tried to concentrate on the problem of entering Guatemala. A rough track within Caracol would take him all the way to the border. There it stopped, but on the archaeological map it showed a Mayan path continuing westwards. He rather hoped to find a wire fence marking the border because it would be fun to drive through it with irresponsible velocity.
The ground-penetrating radar unit had the capability of recording the images it displayed. Ratty re-scanned the same part of the pyramid he had examined the previous night, this time with the equipment set to record its discoveries. Then, with everything safely stowed away again, he immediately set off for the border. He now knew what he had seen, and it had not been a misinterpretation or a delusion. It was, nevertheless, impossible.
He reached the fence. It was eight feet high and consisted of rusty interlaced wire with a strip of barbed wire at the top. The base of the fence had been curled up to permit reasonabl
y comfortable pedestrian passage beneath it. He guessed the archaeologists regularly passed through here. The footpath marked on the Guatemalan side of the Mayan map looked to be a traversable continuation of the track on which he currently sat. He backed the car up a few yards. He checked his mirrors. All was clear. He began to accelerate towards the fence. Upon impact, as the wires stretched, snapped and whipped around him, he had no thoughts of possible Guatemalan military presence. The only thing on his mind was the centre of the pyramid.
For what he had seen was not rubble. Not soil. Not anything that deserved to be encased for all time beneath a thousand tons of brick. What he had seen was beauty. Poetry. A symphony in stone. It was a face. A pure and lovely woman’s face staring at him through time and technology.
It was a face that he recognised.
* * *
The Jurassic Park-style entrance to Tikal was now a heavily guarded military checkpoint. Orlando’s cavalcade of armoured cars was waved through and continued along the deep jungle track until it reached the visitors’ car park. There were no tourist vehicles any more, just tanks, APCs, green trucks and portable buildings that had been hastily set up in the last few days. In front of the former visitors’ centre was a welcoming party – a line of soldiers and officials saluting the arrival of their President.
‘Wait here,’ Orlando told Ruby, next to him in the car. She was still handcuffed, desperate for some moisturiser to soothe her chapped wrists. ‘This won’t take a minute.’
He stepped out and slowly walked along the line of men, occasionally shaking hands and uttering banal comments.
He loves every minute of this pointless charade of loyalty, thought Ruby. Those people were probably just as obsequious to every other president – until they strung them up on the lamp-posts.
When Orlando reached the end of the line, a man in a white suit accompanied him back to the car and both men got in.
‘Ruby, what a pleasant surprise!’ said Paulo, making himself comfortable beside her. ‘No teeth marks, I see. I heard all about your little adventure. Thought you could be like Tarzan, did you?’
Ruby found that, for the first time, she was actually pleased to see him, not even wriggling when he kissed her on the cheek. There was no shame in her failed escape attempt. Her moonlit swim across the lagoon had earned her the respect of everyone who had heard the story.
‘You’re looking well, Paulo. It’s nice to see they don’t enforce the wearing of wrist jewellery on everyone. It wouldn’t suit you.’
‘Indeed. So, Mister President, I would now like to take you on a tour of our installation. Thanks to the enormous resources you have provided, we have been able to achieve a miraculous rate of development here. If our driver would like to turn left after this building, I will explain what we have accomplished.’
They turned a corner and drove down a road that was gleaming in the sun with its new covering of tarmac. Here, what had been a simple unexcavated temple mound surrounded by trees a few weeks before was now a building site, devoid of both trees and life.
‘We will see many examples like this,’ said Paulo. ‘As you know, Mister President, but Ruby probably doesn’t, it was recently discovered that the centres of the temples at Tikal contain more than stone. They have each been built around something that the Mayans of a thousand years ago discovered and treasured. Previous archaeological works at this site were purely superficial. They cleared the soil from the stones, cleaned them up and investigated any doorways that were found, but no one actually dismantled a major pyramid.’
‘I’m not surprised!’ snapped Ruby. ‘That would be sacrilege. We haven’t even had time to record them with the three-dimensional scanners. We owe it to future generations to look after them.’
‘Anyway, no one had looked inside until our scientists pointed Geiger counters at them. They went around the whole of Tikal pointing their Geiger counters at every temple mound. A few of them gave weak readings. One of them nearly went off the scale.’
Orlando was enjoying watching Ruby’s reactions.
‘And no one knew about this?’ she asked. ‘How come no one ever got radiation sickness?’
‘Simple,’ said Paulo. ‘It was an unexcavated mound. No one ever spent more than an hour or two there. It wasn’t one of the pyramids that people come here to see. This is just the peripheral stuff, not as tall or impressive as the ones in the Great Plaza. Most tourists would look and move on. The mound was fenced off and a team was sent in to check it out. They dismantled the pyramid, brick by brick, until they got to its centre. The source of the radiation had simply been sealed in Mayan stone a thousand years ago.’
‘Just a thousand? So it has no connection with the aircraft we excavated?’
‘On the contrary. The Mayans of a thousand years ago uncovered something strange in their jungle, something that was to them alien and god-like. They built a temple over it and kept it preserved. What we found when we looked inside was the melted, distorted remains of some kind of reactor ...’
Paulo paused for effect, but Ruby seemed too awestruck to chip in and the President knew all of this anyway. ‘It looked as if it had exploded, or as if there had been an explosion nearby that had damaged it. We found a kind of concrete, some metal fragments, plutonium fuel cells. Our scientists tried to work out its function, and it seemed very different to the design of modern reactors. It’s too early to tell whether this ancient design would have been any more efficient, or safer, but we have a team working on a reconstruction.’
‘And is that where we are now?’ asked Ruby.
‘No. The other temples weren’t completely destroyed, as you can see with this one. Once we were sure of the kind of thing we were looking for, it was only necessary to remove half of one side of each pyramid. Concrete was used to stabilise the structure while the core was dug out. As you can see in this instance, a concrete roof and extended walls have also been added.’
Ruby was jolted into speech. ‘It’s horrible. Like you’ve built a small warehouse on the side of an ancient monument.’
‘That is exactly what we have done. The new building on the side of it protects the items we find in the centre of the temple, and allows us the space to examine the find in situ. Some of the things we find are too fragile to be moved easily. Sure it looks bad, but isn’t it better to know more about our history than to leave intact a few mounds of earth that people occasionally come and stare at for five minutes?’
‘No. A more sympathetic approach would be a careful removal of the bricks, extraction of the find and re-building of the temple to its original state.’
‘But there isn’t time,’ objected Paulo. ‘The clock is ticking. You can’t expect us to sit idly and wait for –’
Orlando held up his hand. Paulo realised he was entering a subject area to which Ruby had not yet been fully initiated.
‘Ruby,’ said Orlando, ‘you do not see the truth. Not yet. But you will know when the time is right. Paulo, please explain what was found at this temple.’
‘Actually this one was particularly unusual. Inside was a pile of human bones, about fifty sets in total. They were carbon dated to roughly twelve thousand years old, and were in a poor state of preservation, but this temple was one of the ones registering a weak reading on the Geiger counter. All of the bodies were mildly radioactive.’
‘Were they linked to the reactor?’ asked Ruby.
‘That’s what we thought at first, but the type of radioactivity was wrong. The radioisotopes used in the reactor leave a different kind of radiation imprint in humans to the sort we found in the bones. These people weren’t killed by exposure to the reactor, or even by an explosion.’
They drove on along the road. The forest was untouched until they arrived at the site of the next temple mound, where again the trees had been cleared, the side of the pyramid cut open, and hideous concrete walls and a roof had been quickly and shoddily put up. At this site, there were also portable office buildings and cars. Large doors i
nto the new concrete extension of the pyramid were open, revealing unrecognisable objects on benches and people poring over them.
Ruby cast an eye over the artefacts, but soon gave up trying to make sense of them, exclaiming in her frustration, ‘I can’t make out anything! I thought I would recognise stuff having dismantled that aircraft, but it all looks like junk. How do they know what they’ve got?’
‘Everything we have found is badly damaged,’ sighed Paulo. ‘Not just through corrosion and the effects of the enormous period of time, but it has all suffered from explosive forces. Some of the remains are therefore difficult to identify, particularly as we are talking about objects that we might not recognise even if they were in perfect condition.’
‘Do you know if all of these things originated from the same site, or were they brought to Tikal by the Mayans?’ asked Ruby.
‘An intelligent question for a pretty little lady,’ replied Paulo, instantly cooling the warmth Ruby had briefly felt for her old acquaintance. ‘We have people examining the tiny soil fragments embedded in some of the artefacts. From the samples already analysed, the soils do not always match those found in Tikal, and they do not, on the whole, match each other. However, they all originated within a relatively small distance from here. Nothing was carried more than a few kilometres. So Tikal must have been a significant place more than twelve thousand years ago. Possibly a city or a military base.’
‘The Mayans must have kept on finding this stuff all over the place,’ said Ruby. ‘Whenever they found something, they brought it here and stuck a temple on top of it. They must have thought these things were relics of the gods or something. Hey, but what about other temple sites? What about the ones in Mexico and Honduras?’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 23