Ahead, Leo similarly tested the invisible wall, then he and Colton ducked out of sight.
Merritt followed and crossed into muted darkness, which became complete when the vines fell back into place behind him. The sensation of claustrophobia closed around him like a fist. His heart began to pound and his breathing became labored. He couldn't bear the prospect of being underground for any length of time, and fought the surge of memories from the Afghan desert.
The thin beam of a penlight bloomed to his right. It provided too little illumination to truly gauge the size of the space beneath the rock overhang, and barely silhouetted the others.
A triangle of sunlight streamed in from behind as Galen joined them.
"I need more light," Sam snapped. Her voice positively trembled with excitement.
"This is all I have," Colton said. He flashed his beam from side to side to emphasize his point.
"Then we need to get rid of some of those vines. Who has the machete?"
"I do," Webber said as he passed into the inner sanctum.
The blade whistled through the air and struck the layers of vines with a thuck. The serpentine green vines fell away and slithered over the edge of the cliff. Light slanted through in their absence.
"More," Sam said.
Webber continued to whack through the screen as Sam slowly approached the rear wall of the broad cave, which was far larger than Merritt had initially suspected. It was perhaps a hundred feet long and twenty feet deep with a domed ceiling that arched a good ten feet over his head. He couldn't tell if it had been chiseled by human hands or eroded into the hillside by nature as the seas and rivers receded millions of years ago. Either way, someone had put the space to good use. As Webber welcomed more and more light into the alcove, the structures at the rear drew form. Six tall sculptures stood against the center of the back wall, nearly reaching the roof. They were all identical: four-foot-wide, appendage-less bodies painted with various designs in yellow and red ochre, supporting large, parabolic heads that must have looked like crescent moons in profile. A single thin line formed the mouths beneath sharp, triangular noses. The brows were straight and ridged, and created the impression that the statues wore headdresses low over their foreheads. Staked on short wooden posts to their heads were human skulls, their articulated jaws opened in soundless screams.
To either side of the unsettling statues, small adobe buildings had been constructed side by side against the cavern wall. They were multi-tiered, though each level was only tall enough to accommodate a man if he crouched. Their reddish walls had been painted with thick, horizontal white stripes, into which myriad shapes had been etched. Square windows lined each level, through which only darkness stared out at them. Their roofs were slanted in such a way that they reminded Merritt of Japanese pagodas. A single rectangular doorway set into the adobe to either side of the vaguely human statues serviced all of the dwellings. While they may have looked separate from the outside, apparently they were all interconnected.
Dust hung thickly in the air, stirred by the soft breeze that circulated the musty smells of age and decomposition.
They were all awed to silence.
Sam approached the strange statuary. All of the plaster figures were joined together three feet from the floor. Between the center two, what looked like a hearth had been carved into their union.
"Let me borrow your flashlight," Sam said, holding out her open palm without diverting her attention from the dark opening for a second.
Colton set the penlight in her hand and leaned over her shoulder as Sam shined it into the recess. A dull tawny glow reflected back.
Merritt eased closer and craned his neck to see around her head.
A golden skull rested on a deep shelf, situated so that it leered out at them from the shadows. It was roughly the height of a human skull, but that was where the similarities ended. It had an elongated snout filled with sharp teeth that laced together like those of a caiman, and twin ovular nostrils at the tip. The eye sockets were oblong and far too large proportionately. Fitted into each was a dusty, multi-faceted bluish-green stone that seemed to absorb the light into its core, where it radiated with what could have passed for sentience.
"What's all that stuff underneath it?" Merritt asked.
"I can't tell," Sam said. She leaned closer and blew away the coating of dust.
She coughed and recoiled as the gray cloud billowed around the skull.
"Feathers," Merritt said. He reached over Sam, withdrew one from the shelf, and held it up so he could better see. The sunlight caused it to shimmer with an emerald hue.
He turned and looked at Galen, who still held a nearly identical feather in his hand.
IV
11:18 a.m.
Dahlia leaned over Jay's shoulder and studied the odd tableau from the perspective of the camera. She had been struggling to keep up with the group. Her legs ached and her lungs burned, but her exhaustion was now forgotten as she directed her cameraman.
The spotlight affixed to the digital recorder highlighted Sam and cast her elongated shadow onto the unusual sculptures. Motes of dust swirled in the diffused beam.
"Get every inch of this place as she's talking," Dahlia whispered. "We can create a transcript of everything she says and do a voiceover in post-production."
"These statues are actually anthropomorphic wooden coffins called purunmachus," Sam said. "They're nearly identical to the ones at Karajia, north of the fortress at Kuelap. The Chachapoya would first mummify and bundle their dead in several layers of cloth, and set them on a short stone wall. Then they built the framework around the remains using long wooden poles. From there, they used a mixture of clay and straw to sculpt the body and the head."
"So you're saying there are corpses inside each of those?" Merritt asked.
"Yes, but not just any corpses. These were important men, likely their most decorated warriors. The purunmachus were constructed to look like them so that they would be honored and remembered."
"What's with the skulls staked to their foreheads?" Jay asked.
"No one is really sure. The prevailing theory is that they're the skulls of an especially reviled enemy and were displayed as trophies, or perhaps to ward off future aggression. It's a tactic they're believed to have borrowed from the Jivaro, who were notorious headhunters."
"And the golden sculpture?" Colton asked.
"Zoom in on it," Dahlia whispered to Jay, who did as she asked.
"The purunmachus at Karajia didn't have anything like it, so I can only speculate." Sam paused. She nibbled on her lower lip as she formulated her thoughts. "The foundation was obviously built to incorporate it, so it wasn't a later addition or an afterthought. It's the focal point of the whole display and must have been extremely important, even sacred, but its design doesn't reflect the typical Chachapoyan style. You can see from the faces on the purunmachus themselves that their motifs were generally more abstract, while the skull sculpture is completely realistic. And they were renowned for their textile skills, not their metallurgy, which would indicate that the idol was crafted during the years following their conquest by the Inca. Even then, it appears far beyond even their considerable skills."
"How much do you think it's worth?" Jay asked. Dahlia pinched his arm. Hard. "Ow. Jesus, Dahlia."
"It's priceless," Sam said, with a note of disdain.
"What about the other buildings?" Merritt asked. "The levels are barely high enough to crawl through. Were they built for midgets or something?"
"They're chullpas, burial buildings, similar to those at Revash, near the town of Santo Tomas de Quillay. They mortared stones together with mud to form the framework, then plastered over them like the purunmachus. They used logs lashed together with vines to create the unusual sloped roofs, and sealed them in adobe as well."
"So they're full of dead bodies, too," Merritt said.
"I'm sure. You have to understand that the Chachapoya revered their dead. Being interred in such a manner was
a great honor. Not everyone who died received this kind of treatment. This is truly a sacred site, and an archeological discovery of incalculable significance. We could spend the next decade poring through these tombs and still not learn everything there is to know."
"Earlier you said that if the people in the village below us were descended from the Chachapoya, we would find their chullpa nearby," Leo said. "Judging by the amount of dust covering everything, it doesn't look like this one's been used anytime recently."
"True," Sam said. Her eyes glinted when she spoke. "Then I'd imagine this one belongs to an older tribe, presumably the one responsible for the headdress that Hunter discovered. Their village can't be far from here."
"Let's see what's inside those buildings," Dahlia whispered. There would be plenty of time for research when they returned to the States. What they really needed right now was something to add a little spice to their film, and she couldn't think of anything more exciting than being the first to explore a five hundred year-old tomb.
Jay rose and followed her to the rear of the chamber. She ducked through the entryway to her left and found herself in a small room framed by plastered stones. The beam on the camera cast her shadow deep into the structure, to where the darkness was marred by the almost palpable columns of wan light that slanted through the small windows. Pillars of fitted rocks supported the wooden floor above her. Egg-shaped bundles of rotting fabric lined the walls to either side of the central aisle. She could sense the presence of the corpses inside the bundles. The stench of decomposition was a physical entity crawling on her skin.
She had to stoop to keep from splitting her scalp on the low ceiling as she stepped aside and waited for Jay to pass her with the camera. The beam showcased footprints in the thick dust on the ground beyond where she had walked. They obviously weren't the first to have been in here. It was comforting to know they hadn't strayed from Hunter Gearhardt's trail.
Jay led her down the central walkway, which connected all of the structures well beyond the furthest reaches of sight. Between the smell and the confines, she was starting to feel as though she were crawling through a dry sewer.
The outer blanket of one of the bundles to her left had rotted away to reveal a second blanket underneath. From her preliminary research, she knew that these funerary bundles were created by wrapping the deceased in fetal position within several layers of fabric. Each layer contained a stuffing of objects that were both of personal importance and meant to help the dead in the afterlife. She had read about bundles filled with corn, pottery, hollowed gourds that held various grains, and different ornate textiles. The stuffing from the outer layer littered the floor at their feet.
Jay filmed the bundle a moment longer before directing the camera at the ground. The light caused a shimmer of green to pass across the mound of dusty feathers.
They pressed deeper into the dwellings, passing from one to the next through constrictive stone thresholds. There were bundles everywhere. They filled every inch of free space, shoulder-to-shoulder. It reminded her of the scene in Aliens when Sigourney Weaver found the chamber with all of the alien egg pods. She was just about to share her observation with Jay, whom she knew would get a major kick out of it, when she noticed that one of the corpse-filled bags had toppled into the aisle ahead. It looked like some sort of rodent had gnawed through the blankets to liberate a scattering of grains, kernels, and feathers. Through the tattered fabric, she could see a desiccated face in profile.
"Zoom in on that."
"Way ahead of you," Jay said. He brought the beam to bear on the gaunt head. The skin had taken on the consistency of parchment, the bones beneath sharply obtrusive. There was only a hollow, dark pit where the eye should have been. The lips had shrunken back from the bared, yellowed teeth, and the nose was upturned like a pig's following the dissolution of the cartilage. Thick scars bisected the cheek. She wished she could see more, but the rest of the body was still shrouded.
"There's another one over there," Dahlia said, pointing back behind them. When Jay turned with the camera, she grabbed the edge of the fabric near the face and ripped downward with a tearing sound.
"Christ, Dahlia," Jay snapped as he whirled back around. "They'll have our heads if they find out you did that."
"That's why I couldn't have it on film." She smirked. "Besides, we aren't going to fully unwrap it or anything. I just want a better look at what's inside."
"You're pushing your luck, you know."
She rested her hand on his shoulder and felt him stiffen. His affection for her was readily apparent, which made him far too easy to coerce. He was a dear friend and she hated to take advantage of his feelings, but sometimes she just couldn't help herself.
"I have luck to spare," she said. "You ought to know that by now. And what would any of them do anyway? It's not like they'd send us packing. They need us, Jay. So are you going to film this or what?"
The light again zeroed in on the corpse.
Dahlia gasped.
She didn't know what she had expected, but this was the furthest thing from it. The dead man's legs had been bent, pinned to his chest, and bound in place with a frayed rope. The left arm was jaggedly fractured mid-shaft, and the skin had curled back from the bone into a liquefied black sludge, presumably the source of the foul, gangrenous stench. The entire left half of the ribcage had been destroyed, leaving a gaping hole framed by pointed fragments of bone. The flesh that surrounded it was ruggedly torn and peeled back in leathery straps.
"That must have been one big, nasty rat," Jay said.
There was a shift in the shadows inside the broken ribcage, and, as if on cue, a gray rodent poked its whiskery face out, its eyes glowing red.
Dahlia screamed. She whirled and sprinted as fast as she could toward the entrance. Her head struck the low log ceiling repeatedly, but she hardly even felt it. All she could focus on was the distant rectangle of light.
She burst through the opening and nearly slammed into Galen, who shuffled aside just in time.
Jay emerged a few seconds later, laughing so hard that tears streaked through the dust on his cheeks.
"It's not funny," Dahlia snapped. She punched him in the arm.
"Oh, but it is, princess. It is." He raised the camera to capture the expression of terror on her dirty face.
So the rodent had surprised her. Big deal. Ha, ha.
"That was the biggest rat I've ever seen in my life. It was the size of a dog."
"You keep telling yourself that. Just wait until you see the playback," Jay said. He could barely catch his breath through the laughter. "Then you can tell me again how big it was."
Dahlia huffed and turned away. The heat of embarrassment flushed her cheeks.
Galen crouched directly in front of her before the golden skull as though praying to the obscene idol. His hand trembled as he reached out and removed a dusty feather from beneath it. He held it up and blew on it---once, then again. His gaze fell upon the shiny skull, and the color blanched from his face.
"What is it?" she asked.
He looked up at her and blinked repeatedly as though abruptly awakened from a dream.
"Not yet," he mumbled. He rose and shook his head. "Not until I'm sure."
He cast one last glance back at the skull before wrapping his arms around his chest and shuffling out of the cave and into the sunlight.
V
12:03 p.m.
Sam reluctantly allowed herself to be guided away from the ancient burial site. There would be limitless time to study and excavate the chullpas and purunmachus in the years to come. For now, the lure of the lost fortress ahead kept her moving. She could feel it out there, calling to her, drawing her with its promise of mystery. What wonders would they find inside its fortifications? Was the golden headdress really an anomaly, or were there indeed more treasures that would unlock the secrets of a culture long thought extinct? She imagined the National Geographic features to come, the articles she would be able to place in every i
ndustry journal, the documentary that would chronicle their expedition and bring the elusive Chachapoya to the forefront of the world of anthropology.
She hadn't been this excited since the days when she had explored the uncharted wilderness with her father as a child. His enthusiasm had been contagious, and for a long time it had more than compensated for living out of tents, isolated from the life that normal children led. She could thank him for her love of history and its misunderstood societies, for granting her glimpses of the professional adventures to come, but at the same time she felt she owed the world a debt on his behalf. He had been a good man and an even better father. It was the decisions that he had made along the way that couldn't be taken back...or forgiven. He had discovered ruins that made front page news around the globe. However, plundering the sites of their artifacts left them incomplete when the scholars arrived in his wake, like playing Scrabble without the vowels. And he had never seen anything wrong with it. To him, that was part of the job. He and Leo invested their money into finding and securing the treasures, which were the payoff for their hard work. Now, instead of those artifacts of inestimable cultural value filling displays in museums, they rested on the shelves of wealthy businessmen, or they'd been melted down and sold, or they simply sat in crates in the dusty warehouses of antiquity dealers. It fell to her to make amends, and she would start right here and now. Nothing would leave these sites without being properly logged and catalogued. This she swore.
Leo had promised her that the ruins would not be pillaged. While she had always known him to be a man of his word, she was prepared to go to war with him if he so much as thought about reneging.
Protecting the sites was an imperative, the more immediate of her concerns, but what about the descendents that had managed to remain hidden in the jungle for so long? How would they react to having the spotlight of the scientific world shined into their faces? Would that even be in their best interests? Was there a way to announce their discovery without flooding the rainforest with researchers who would insist upon poking and prodding them, and sharing the wonders of modern technology, and diseases for which they had no antibodies, and religions hell-bent on the annihilation of mankind?
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