The Sphinx Scrolls

by Stewart Ferris

  The nose and mouth had partially shattered, but it was evidently a human face. It gazed skywards with the melancholy eyes of disappointment, of waiting in vain. They were fixed upon a point in the heavens, on a place that was no longer there. Leo. The constellation was half way through its precessional cycle, now about as far from this point as it would ever be. But twelve thousand years ago, those eyes would have locked precisely on to that star system. The leonine body would have made sense, been the marker of its age, for this was a time machine, built to convey a message from a forgotten past to the present day. It was beautiful. It was as elegant as the twin stelae that had guided them there.

  Ruby blinked several times in disbelief. There was something familiar about those eyes and the shape of the broken face, but the shroud of dust and debris denied her the opportunity to make a connection. The outline of the object in its entirety, though, was plain. She was looking at a Sphinx.

  Thursday 20th December 2012

  The first winter snows rolled in low across the marches. The old house was no match for the icy air that mercilessly squeezed through keyholes, cracked glass and ill-fitting doors. The invading frost quickly overwhelmed the Edwardian oil-fired radiator system. Ice began to form on the insides of the leaded window panes. Tapestries on the walls became brittle. Suits of armour creaked disconcertingly as the metal cooled and shrank. In the mahogany-lined library, however, a fire was glowing cherry red, its coals projecting a small arc of comfort that was not quite sufficient to remove the chill when Ruby’s bare neck made contact with the leather wingback armchair. She wore a dressing gown that was somewhat on the large side and covered most of her legs, and Ratty had found her a pair of thick woollen socks to warm her feet. She opted not to complain about the moth hole through which one of her toes was peeping.

  Ratty walked across the room, wrapped tightly in an old picnic blanket, and peered out through the window at the white oblivion.

  ‘It’s a tad early,’ he chirped.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The end of the world. Should have been tomorrow.’

  ‘Not funny, Ratty. I’m scared. What if the Mayans were right to count the days? What if the scrolls are true?’

  Ratty shrugged, overwhelmed by the size of the global threat. The Mayans had been obsessive in their measurements, mathematically accurate across vast millennia, compulsive in their desire to protect their descendants and to keep the warnings alive. They had ingrained their counting system into a religion, into a social structure that was as solid and dependable as the temples they had constructed to house it. They had done everything they could to perpetuate their message.

  Then, five centuries ago, came the first expeditions of an unknown nation from across the sea, a different religion, a population dedicated to the blunt, violent exportation of their God, indifferent to the Mayan people and positively antagonistic to their culture and beliefs. The genocide began, the counting ceased, the abandoned temples were subsumed by the rainforest. The ancient warning from the ancestors to the descendants was forgotten.

  Also very nearly forgotten was a backup plan: the message spelled out in the written word, sealed, entombed, secure; the wisdom of the ancients sent slowly forward through time to aid a generation they would never know; a repository of knowledge, a chamber of secrets, a hall of records. The concept had become legendary, its existence theorised, disputed and dismissed.

  * * *

  SPHINX SCROLL # 01

  * * *

  I have a memory of hair on my head, but when I touch my skull I feel nothing. I remember breathing clean air, but now my lungs rattle inside my chest. Scar tissue that once sealed old wounds is losing its grip. Movement is excruciating, and even the process of writing is more than I can bear.

  Though I cannot use my hands to write, I can still produce recognisable sounds from the flaking bark within my throat. I have a brave and talented female in my presence who is prepared to scribe my every word. These words will survive far longer than my fading presence for, like a fallen ceiba tree in the rainforest, forces of decay are working interminably upon me. These scrolls are my immortality, and I hope they will serve a worthy purpose.

  As the heavens drag our planet into the great Age of Leo, we enter a future far darker than I could have ever imagined. There may be other groups like us in the world, but I have no way of knowing where they are or – more importantly – if any future generations will flow from them. The accounts I intend to write may therefore never be read. I have come to terms with the idea that I could be living at the sunset of humanity. We have had our day on this sphere, and perhaps it is time to hand it to another species. But should one strain of our flawed DNA succeed in swimming upstream to an uncertain future, and if there is to be no other record of the achievements and blunders of our kind, I hope the warnings I intend to recount will provide the tools to save our descendants from the miserable existence we have endured.

  I suppose I should begin with our place in time. Two thousand years have passed since the arrival of Quetzalcoatl. His legacy of enlightenment was a powerful force that we all believed would forever moderate and control mankind’s natural tendency towards extremism. How naïve that mindset now seems when I look back at the violent death of his last descendant, Hocol, and the astonishing speed with which that incident triggered an end to all progress in peaceful science and society.

  A million open-mouthed spectators watched the demise of Hocol with a mixture of morbid fascination, distress and shame. There were a few moving moments of silence. They were all thankful that they were not personally affected by an event that was to alter cataclysmically the path of human history.

  Never before had so many people been so wrong.

  * * *

  ‘Any sign of them?’ Ruby asked, putting down the translation that she couldn’t stop herself reading repeatedly, desperate for an answer.

  ‘Not a sausage.’

  She wondered if they’d become stuck in a snowdrift. Ratty’s old Land Rover could cope with the British winter, but whether Matt could really handle a manual gearbox while sitting on the wrong side of the car and driving on the wrong side of the road was more open to question.

  A clock chimed. Ratty turned a Bakelite switch on the front of something that looked like a small antique cupboard. Nothing happened. Then the faint voice of BBC Radio 4 crackled to life, gaining in strength by the minute as the valves reached their operating temperature. The news bulletin was half way through before he could hear it clearly. Media hype about the supposed end of time, or end of the world, or end of the universe – depending on an individual’s degree of pessimism – was getting crazy. The New Agers were counting down the hours until doomsday. They were hiding in caves, or dancing on hills, or even making love on the streets with no fear of repercussions. Scientists argued that the planet would continue its eternal balletic dance around the sun, a reliable rock with no intention of ending it all, oblivious to the fears and dreams of its passengers. The world would keep turning with or without them.

  Ratty waited for the everyday political stories. There was news of an announcement from Guatemala that it would begin a reconstruction programme aimed at repairing the damage caused to a number of Mayan sites in Central America, with the goal of re-opening them to tourists within two years. The funding for the project would come from the dividends it was receiving from the licensing of the ancient technologies found there. The United States had also pledged to aid the reconstruction of Tikal, the most severely damaged of all the Mayan sites. President Orlando Barillas, not yet fully recovered from his recent liver transplant, but already back in power, welcomed the news. Then came a minor story about the unmanned Chinese mission to the Cydonia region of Mars that had succeeded in returning a sample of the red planet to Earth. The exact quantity and nature of the sample were currently state secrets; only its location at a receiving centre in Hainan was public knowledge.

  Ratty tutted disparagingly at the news. His part in the d
iscovery of the ancient scrolls in Tikal had already faded from the tweets and blogs of the chatterati. His fifteen minutes of fame and glory had already slotted into history and the world had moved on. The ephemeral nature of his hero status was of no concern to him, however. He had set out to achieve his personal goals, and to a limited degree he had succeeded. Should any descendants one day spring from his loins, they would have a true-life adventure to read. He had earned his place in the family’s wall of greats. It had come at a cost, though. The house had been repossessed in his absence and sold at auction to an anonymous purchaser who allowed Ratty to lease it back again, but mysteriously did not require any rent to be paid. The enigmatic landlord had even paid his outstanding debts, which Ratty considered to be awfully civilised of him. And by the skin of his wonky teeth, and some timely support from the old school tie network, Ratty had avoided jail, much to the disgust of the three debt collectors who had only been rescued from his turret – and its deplorable lack of mobile phone signal – when Constable Stuart had finally located the hastily abandoned key two days after Ratty’s departure for Guatemala.

  A car horn tooted. Ratty began the long walk to the front door, returning minutes later with his other house guests. Matt handed a small shopping bag to Ruby. She looked inside.

  ‘What do you call this?’

  ‘This,’ he replied, ‘is what’s left when everyone thinks the world is about to end. As if panic buying a few tins is gonna make a difference. All they had was these eggs. Not even organic or free range options. Six tiny eggs from factory hens.’

  ‘A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg,’ said the Patient, already nosing through yet another of the classic texts in Ratty’s library.

  ‘Well that’s helpful,’ said Ruby, ‘but it doesn’t change the fact that we’ll still be hungry after we’ve shared this omelette.’

  She took the eggs and her copy of the translated scrolls to the kitchen and the others followed, settling at the long rustic table. The cold flagstone floor sapped the heat from their feet, and Ruby tried to keep her exposed toe from making contact with it.

  They were a sorry bunch – tired, isolated, emotionally spent. Their discovery of the Tikal Sphinx seemed an age away. Which was almost what it was – soon to be confined to the preceding baktun, the last recorded Mayan calendrical period. The planet was entering uncharted territory, a baktun that the Mayans had not thought it necessary to record.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ asked Matt.

  ‘So what’s what?’ Ratty enquired.

  ‘It’s over. We did our bit. We found the scrolls. You guys translated them. We told the world. Gave it fair warning. If nothing happens tomorrow, we’ll look a right load of asses.’

  ‘Would you prefer it if the doomsayers are correct?’ asked Ruby, breaking the first egg into a dish.

  There was no answer. Ratty looked at the radar scanner leaning in the corner of the room, a piece of technology entirely at odds with a kitchen that had changed little since Georgian times and didn’t even possess an electric kettle. The scanner’s paint still bore the scars and dust picked up at Tikal, but it had provided valiant, reliable service not only in saving their lives in Paulo’s hands, but also in identifying the presence of a cavity within the Sphinx. The pale grey tubes of clay that they’d found inside the cramped chamber were a huge disappointment to Ratty. He knew then that there would be no gold hoard waiting for him, but New Ratty was not someone who would accept permanent defeat. His day would come again. He made a mental note to complain to his anonymous landlord about the lack of a kettle.

  The Patient had recognised instantly the value of the clay tubes. As acting Guatemalan President, and with the assistance of Ruby, Matt and Ratty, he had facilitated their extraction from the Sphinx. The scrolls contained within the tubes needed to be opened in a controlled environment and examined with the appropriate equipment. Ruby had assured him that in her country she had access to the finest facilities in the world, and so the tubes and the four of them had travelled on an urgent diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom. The writer of the scrolls appeared to have anticipated the death of his language, and had assisted future translators by providing a pictorial key as well as versions of some passages written in other contemporary languages.

  At no point did the Patient show any signs of stress, regret or concern about the events of the night Tikal was destroyed. He gave his father no further thought. The choice he’d had to make had not been difficult. Three men. Two livers. One of them had to lose. Putting into practice medical procedures that he had only studied in books was a task of Herculean proportions, and some of his cuts and stitches lacked the level of finesse that he would have preferred, but his brother had survived and that was what mattered to him. It wasn’t as if he had actually ended the life of his father in any case. He saw it as more like a temporary break in Otto’s personal timeline. The Patient had followed Otto’s written instructions for the mummification procedure to the letter. Not the primitive, barbaric version practised by the ancient Egyptians and other cultures of their epoch – Egyptian mummies were watered-down, pale imitations of the real thing. Their population had carried a vague memory in their collective consciousness of the way it used to be done, but they had no understanding of the science. Without that essential knowledge, all of their rituals and beliefs were a waste of time, mere empty symbolism. Otto would join his adoptive father, entombed, mummified, gliding blindly through centuries that didn’t want them, waiting for a new culture to rise and restore them, perhaps even to appreciate them.

  In spite of his indifference to Otto’s demise, the Patient carried within him something of the desire to fulfil the Mengele destiny, to give the world the intellectual tools for survival. Otto had come close to that fulfilment, but the Patient had been able to take things further. And for what? The early history of mankind recorded in the scrolls was fascinating, and the warning was chilling, but it wouldn’t stop the end of the world if there was nothing to stop.

  With a cooking pan in one hand and the translation of the scrolls in the other, Ruby instinctively continued reading as she prepared breakfast.

  * * *

  SPHINX SCROLL # 02

  * * *

  The death of Hocol has triggered so much that I cannot forget a single detail. I saw the golden craft on which Hocol had travelled as it flew over the city. It banked to the left, creeping around the edge of the hills, reflecting a swathe of light from the setting sun that blinded me for a split second.

  Hocol would have lain motionless next to his interpreter, Parem, in the luxury of their padded compartment. I saw a thin wisp of smoke rising rapidly as the small missile rose inexorably towards its target. No sound reached me until after the impact, a muffled grinding of metal upon metal followed by a drop so sudden and so violent that Hocol’s face must have impacted with the roof of the cabin.

  The machine was not destroyed, but it was fatally damaged. From the ground it appeared to dive, arcing low enough to touch the treetops. The power unit sparked and coughed, then briefly fired again with an exhalation of black clouds as the craft regained some height. A thin smoke trail smiled weakly across the sky.

  For some seconds the craft maintained a fragile altitude. As the wings twisted in an effort to maintain lateral stability, a gap quickly opened up between the craft and the stained part of the sky it had left behind. It was riding on nothing more than silent momentum. The laws of physics that had propelled the elegant machine from the Earth no longer applied.

  The automatic pilot chose a gap between the trees in which to crash land, unaware of the boggy consistency of the ground. The area is marshy at this time of year and could swallow an aircraft whole without leaving any visible trace. It is possible that Hocol survived the crash itself, only to drown or suffocate in the aircraft under the mud.

  As a direct descendant of the great Quetzalcoatl, the legendary leader who brought knowledge, culture and technology to the primitives of South Amer
ica, Hocol had a hard lineage to live up to. His life had become a continual dance of stamping out little sparking fires in the bracken to prevent the forest from burning. That he would not live to see the final inferno was a well-disguised blessing.

  He had viewed Tikal as the latest hotspot, a busy and troubled metropolis, over-populated and politically overheated. For some years, the city had resorted to the practice of casting out its poorer classes, forcing them into a primitive existence in the forest. It was a policy I hated to have to instigate, but, harsh though it was, it ensured that the most efficient workers and the brightest and the best were able to flourish at the expense only of the expendable. There were one or two little safety nets through which one had to fall before qualifying as an outcast, but in recent times the number of people slipping through these nets had reached frightening proportions. And yet there was no way in which the underclass could be supported by the state. It would have meant complete economic collapse.

  Watching from the wings with jealous and resentful eyes, the ever-growing numbers of disenfranchised citizens posed a threat to the stability of a state that could no longer afford to carry passengers. The sounds of civilisation could not penetrate the forest, nor could the songs and cries of the forest reach into the city. We were each aware of the existence of the others, but I ignored it as an unpleasant thought in the far reaches of my mind.