The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  I had weeks before used the last of my film and so I was left to make sketches, which is what I did for the remainder of the day, until Eleut told me it was late and time for us to return to the village. I did, however, dig into some of the piles of rubble with the camp shovel I had with me. Unfortunately, there was little to be found besides a curious fragment of dark stone with some strange scratchings on its surface, which I have sketched in the addendum to this letter. This stone I brought back to the village. Shortly afterwards I returned to Bacalar for provisions. But I was still weak and suffered something of a relapse, so that I was forced to spend several more weeks resting. I decided at that time to return to England to recuperate and to raise money for a formal expedition. But before many days the war intervened and when I returned to England we were in the midst of hostilities with Germany. It seemed incumbent on me to do my patriotic duty as soon as my strength was restored and so you see me now. I shall shortly be doing my own small bit against the Hun and I have no idea when, if ever, I shall have an opportunity to return to Central America. Nevertheless, you can now see the basis for the opinion I expressed to you that the sixteenth-century Spanish were not the first white men to arrive in Central America and that even that notable Italian navigator, Columbus, was a Johnny-come-lately.

  There were a few words of well wishes and then the signature, in bold, clear cursive:

  John Dance Williams

  I set the letter down on the aluminum camp table.

  “So now you know my secret,” Hayes said. “I’ve always been a diffusionist at heart. There are so many data in favor of it—the Jomon pottery from Ecuador that points to a Japanese arrival two thousand years before Christ, the Olmec heads with their negroid features, the Paraibo stone from Brazil, the various Welsh and Ogham inscriptions from different parts of the New World, the resemblances between the Southeast Asian and Mayan calendars …”

  He waited for my reaction, but I didn’t give him any.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” he went on, “it’s willful insanity to deny the evidence when it stares you in the face. But for a hundred and fifty years, American archaeologists have insisted that, aside from the Vikings, whose colonization they dismiss as a short-term phenomenon, nobody from the Old World could possibly have set foot in the New World before 1492. And anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is branded a heretic and a crank.”

  I took a deep breath, choosing my words carefully. “I’m not sure anybody says nobody from the Old World could have come before Columbus, just that there wasn’t any sustained influence.”

  Hayes guffawed. “Of course. They stonewall until you show them irrefutable evidence and then they say, ‘Well, it’s possible one or two people were swept up on the beach,’ but they don’t mean it. It’s just too much against the accepted dogma: The peoples of the New World had to have developed on their own, without any help from outside. It’s not science, it’s a damned political position, and if you say anything else, you’re called a racist.”

  “There’s truth to that, of course,” I said. “But you have to admit, Paul: The evidence for diffusionism is pretty murky. I mean, the Paraibo inscription comes from a piece of stone that was lost, so we don’t even have an original, and the Jomon stuff can just as easily be an indigenous development, and as for the Olmec heads—”

  “Oh, I know, Alan, you’ve been indoctrinated, I didn’t expect anything else.”

  “Paul, what I’m saying is it’s a question of evidence and mechanics. You not only have to show evidence that can’t be refuted, but you have to provide a mechanism for it to have gotten where it was, and I don’t mean Vikings hiking all over Oklahoma and Arkansas and randomly leaving writings on cave walls that some epigrapher says reads something like, ‘Ten men heading north.’ ”

  “Haven’t I just showed you evidence?”

  “That letter from John Dance Williams? Come on, Paul. The man was already half dead from malaria. He sees a sculptured head and a temple mural and says this looks like a European? How do we know what Williams saw? Hell, we don’t even have his original letter here.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “He says he didn’t have a camera, so he sketched the things he saw, but do we have his sketches?”

  Hayes shook his head. “The sketches have disappeared.”

  “And the drawing he says he made of the stone with markings on it?”

  “We don’t have that, either.”

  “Then what’s left?”

  The older man licked his lips and reached into the box again. He removed a small object, wrapped in a soft cloth.

  “The only thing we have,” he said, opening the cloth with a flourish, “is the stone itself.”

  THIRTEEN

  I stared down at the little slab of green stone. Perhaps eight inches long and three across, it had a dull luster, and on its surface had been scratched what appeared to me to be a random series of lines at different angles.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, turning the object over in my hands.

  “Same place as the letter. My contact knows the Williams family. John’s sister had the original letter and some of her brother’s other things and after I’d read the copy of the letter, I called and asked if there was anything else, like maps or drawings and, voilà!”

  I stared down at the object. “Looks like random scratchings to me.”

  Hayes took it back and reverently laid it on the cloth. “That, my friend, is because you aren’t a linguist. Very few archaeologists are. Oh, they make the required course or two in historical and comparative linguistics in graduate school, but that’s the end of it, and most of them have a very vague notion of the development of ancient writing systems. But, Alan, you have to understand: Ancient writing is my field. That’s how I can know what this is.”

  “And what is it?”

  “It’s a Canaanite script, relatively late. It was used by trading peoples in much of the Mediterranean area. This particular variant I’d suggest is Punic, originating in North Africa or southern Spain.”

  “That would make this …”

  “Mid-second century A.D. is when I’d date it, based on the writing itself. And the fact that old Eleut’s chronicle referred to the Katun 10 Ahau. That katun, or twenty-year period, would have fallen from A.D. 140 to 160.”

  “That would have been during the period of the Roman Empire. Why wouldn’t the writing be Latin or Greek?”

  Hayes shrugged. “Lots of people—especially traders— would have known all three languages. But if they were stuck in a strange place, wouldn’t they more likely use the language that was most natural to them?”

  I picked up the stone again. “Sorry, Paul, but these scratches look pretty random to me. Some Mayan could have sat down and played around with a flint tool—”

  Hayes uttered a snort of disgust. “Alan, you’re being bull-headed! Do you think somebody would go to this much trouble just to do the Mayan equivalent of whittling?”

  “Well, what does it say, then?”

  The little man frowned. “I can recognize certain letters—a D, a W, and an H, the first part of ‘Jews’ or ‘Judea.’ If so, then it’s possible that this is essentially similar to the Bat Creek inscription, and Cyrus Gordon, the paleographer, reads it to mean, possibly, ‘the end for the Jews,’ as in the Hebrew concept of the End of Time. It was a popular apocalyptic concept in those days, as you may recall, with the temple having been destroyed in A.D. 70, during the first revolt against the Romans. And there were two other revolts after that. You had lots of turmoil, with Judaism being persecuted and Christianity finally being recognized by Constantine in the fourth century. But in the meantime, people went about their business: They lived, died, and carried on commerce, some of it long-distance, via ships.”

  I scratched my cheek. “The Bat Creek inscription, if I remember right, was interpreted as Cherokee writing by the man who discovered it.”

  “Because it was found in Tennessee, where there were
Cherokees. But remember, Alan, that little piece of stone was discovered directly under a human skull in a burial mound, during a scientific excavation by the Smithsonian Institution in the 1890s. It’s still in the Smithsonian. A number of paleographers have examined it and there is nearly unanimous agreement that it represents a Semitic script of the second century after Christ.”

  “Unanimous among diffusionists,” I said dryly. “Paul, look, I can’t argue with you about Canaanite script because I’m not an expert on that. But how many possible letters do we have here? Four? Five? Why shouldn’t they duplicate some of the letters on the Bat Creek stone? The law of probability—”

  Hayes’s head jerked up and down. “I know, the argument is that with such a short corpus of writing you could have gotten the marks randomly.” He leaned forward then and put a hand on my knee. “That’s why it’s so important, Alan, to find the supporting evidence.”

  “And where is this supporting evidence?” I asked.

  “At the site of Lubaanah,” Hayes whispered. “The real site of Lubaanah, not the rather pedestrian ruin Eric is investigating.” He sighed. “Eric decided to call the site by that name for publicity purposes, but you’ve seen for yourself there’s nothing there that remotely resembles what John Dance Williams described. It didn’t matter to Eric, though, so long as he could field an expedition.”

  “Has he seen this letter?”

  Hayes smiled. “Eric and I have agreed to disagree on this. I showed him the letter, but he blew it off. His mind was set. I was hoping, though, that you might be a little more open-minded.”

  I thought for a moment. “So what’s the next step?” I asked.

  Hayes carefully replaced the little object in its box and lifted his glass.

  “We have to find the real site of Lubaanah.”

  “And that’s what you’ve secretly been looking for.”

  “Bingo.” He got up, staggering against the table and then steadying himself. “I’ve been traveling to all the little villages, trying to find out if anybody remembers Williams’s visit. Of course, I know that was sixty years ago, but there’s always a chance there’s somebody. I’ve been concentrating on the h-menob, the shamans, because one of them could have been the student, or the student of the student, of this Eleut. And I’ve also been asking about a site nearby that resembles the one Williams described.”

  “And so far?”

  “Nothing yet. I started in the area near our excavation, because that seemed to agree best with what Williams implied about the general area, but when that didn’t pan out, I expanded north, all the way to Carrillo Puerto. But I think it’s unlikely it’s any farther north than that.” He gnawed his lip. “The worst possibility is it’s across the border in Belize or so far into Guatemala I won’t be able to get there without going through a new set of government red tape.”

  “Well, I think there’s a worse scenario than that,” I said. “The site could have been destroyed.”

  “I try not to think about that.”

  “Paul, you said this inscription dates from around A.D. 150 or so. That’s late pre-Classic. But the kind of site Williams described sounds like full-blown Classic, even early post-Classic. The sculpture, the murals, the buildings ….”

  Hayes turned his back on me. “But the site may well have a pre-Classic component. The descendants of the site’s builders, who also lived there, may have remembered a famous king who lived long before and chosen to commemorate him in their sculpture just as they did in their chronicles. By then he may have become mythic.”

  “Yeah, but remember, Paul, the Maya had a cyclical concept of time: Sometimes they tended to confuse when events occurred, just so long as they could fit them into one of the katun periods. So we don’t know, when they say Katun 10 Ahau, whether they mean the 20 years that ended in A.D. 160, or the 20-year period that ended 256 years later, in 416, or even 256 years after that, in 672.”

  “You’re forgetting the inscription.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “And you’re also forgetting what Eleut told Williams was written in his sacred book.”

  “Oh?”

  “About this white man coming from a place where there was a great king! Doesn’t that bring anything to mind?”

  “There are always great kings,” I said.

  Hayes threw up his hands in exaggeration. “Alan, think: There were, no matter how you look at it, two great kings in A.D. 150. There was the emperor in Rome, the temporal ruler, and the messiah of the Christians, the spiritual king.”

  “And?”

  “This could refer to either of them. But I’m inclined to think this was a Christianized group.”

  He went to the closed front door, as if to reassure himself that no one was outside listening.

  I shook my head. “You’re saying this stranger was a Christian missionary?”

  “Spare the sarcasm. Look, I’ll spell it out: I’m talking about a Christianized Carthaginian or at least someone from that general area. Someone who probably set out on a trading mission, maybe from Spain—there were Phoenician settlements there and the Phoenicians were just Canaanite traders. But this man and his crew ended up going beyond the pillars of Hercules—the Straits of Gibraltar—maybe down the west coast of Africa, and somewhere along the way he wandered out into the vast ocean.”

  “And was swept over to Central America?”

  “Perhaps. But more likely he set out in this direction on purpose, as part of a planned expedition to trade and convert.”

  “Across the Atlantic?”

  “Alan, have you ever heard of the Piri Reis map?”

  “The name’s familiar.”

  “Piri was a Turkish naval officer: Reis means admiral. He lived in the first part of the sixteenth century and he commissioned a series of maps to be made from ancient sources, many of which the Moslems took from the great library of Alexandria, Egypt, which had been destroyed by fire in the seventh century.” Hayes suppressed a belch. “The main map was copied in Istanbul in 1513 and it was rediscovered in the old Imperial Palace there in 1929.”

  “I remember reading something about it.”

  “It’s a very important document. It shows what has to be the east coastline of South America, and the distances from the Old World are too close to be coincidental.”

  “But you said the map was copied in 1513. That was over twenty years after Columbus came back from the New World on his first voyage. As soon as he announced his return, the knowledge spread.”

  “Alan, be reasonable. Cortes hadn’t even conquered the Aztecs in 1513.”

  “So you think …”

  “I’m saying that the map is compelling evidence, for anyone who isn’t blinded by current archaeological dogma, that the New World was known to the ancients and that there were trips back and forth.”

  He stared, goggle-eyed, as if awaiting my reaction, but I only shrugged. All at once the energy seemed to leave him and he grabbed the central rafter to hold himself up, setting the hanging light bulb into a crazy motion that sent the shadows spinning around the little room.

  “And if you don’t find this site?” I asked gently.

  “I will. Look, Alan, I’m an old man. I lost my wife a few years ago. And I’ve had a couple of minor strokes. But unlike what you may think, I’m not a doddering old fool.” He exhaled heavily. “Still, if my time’s coming, I want to leave on a high note.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” He stepped close to me then and I could smell the rum fumes on his breath. “All my life I’ve been convinced that there were cultural contacts from the Old World. Call me crazy, call it a delusion. I’ve kept quiet because when you start talking about it, people’s eyes glaze over— like yours did just now.”

  “I’m just tired,” I said, patting his shoulder.

  “You’re being kind. But I know better.” The focus returned to his eyes then. “But when I find the site and when I publish, nobody will be able to d
eny the evidence.”

  “I hope you succeed,” I said.

  “Look, would you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Would you hold the stone tablet for me?”

  “Paul …”

  “It isn’t safe here. Somebody broke in earlier …”

  “But you said nobody else knows you even have it.”

  “Oh, it was probably a maid looking for loose change. But there are characters who wander up and down this beach—I was telling Geraldo he ought to hire a watchman. Any beach bum could break in. They don’t have to be looking for the tablet, but they might think it was made out of jade or something.”

  “And you think it would be safer with me? The same people can break into our hut as yours. Remember the dead man on the beach?”

  “You’re smart, Alan, and you’ve been down here before. You know how locals think. Hide it somewhere. I trust you.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because you’re honest about not believing my theory but you don’t call me a racist for being politically incorrect.”