Gabriel hurries to the first pyramid, which is so thickly encrusted with barnacles, shells, and crustaceans that it’s barely recognizable as stone and masonry. It looks instead like a giant sea palace, fashioned by crafty dolphins and deft ocean turtles. Rounded and softened by the constant ocean currents, the pyramids have none of the sharp angles associated with the Maya culture. They look like lumpy sandcastles ready to dissolve back into the surf.
The guide chips at the coating on the walls until he reaches bare rock. They catch a glimpse of Maya glyphs. They are unmistakable, although completely unreadable to the Anglos. Gabriel taps at the rock until he finds the complete phrase.
“Jaguar prize,” he says.
Clicking and whirring fill the reporter’s ears as Garret records the moment. In a second, what has been covered for centuries is now written in light in Garret’s mechanical box.
They spend the afternoon exploring the pyramids, four in all. Three of them are small, fifty feet or so in height, and appear to be ceremonial structures, for the restored artwork depicts activities sacred to the Maya: bloodletting, vision-questing, hunting. Garret asks about the human sacrifices. Gabriel throws down a small hammer and walks away.
“The Spanish used sacrifice as an excuse to wipe out the Maya culture,” Amaryllis whispers to Garret as Gabriel disappears behind some rock. “The Aztecs gave everyone a bad rap. The Maya rarely resorted to human sacrifice.”
“The pyramids were supposed to be altars…”
“Forget it, Garret. The pyramids were astronomical structures.”
“I was taught…”
“They taught us all wrong…”
By the time they work their way to the final pyramid, Garret fills his camera bag with used film and digital chips. Nearly out of ammunition, he loads his final chip. He needs to take his shots wisely now, for the last pyramid, a huge structure, looks to be much more than a ceremonial center. Amaryllis’ skin begins to sizzle. She realizes the pyramid has a narrow opening.
Gabriel is inside when they squeeze through, climbing slowly up the dripping staircase. Inside the pyramid, the air is torrid and the walls seep a lichen-laden fluid. In the dark, aided only by the occasional flicker of Gabriel’s flashlight, they climb what could be one hundred feet. At the apex is a tiny chamber containing a jaguar-shaped throne, encrusted with jade. Steal it. Sell it now on the black market and we’ll be richer than a computer baron. No one would ever know.
“Look at the floor,” Gabriel hisses.
Beneath Amaryllis’ feet are square limestone blocks. Gabriel points at a crack that has split a stone in half. In the gap, something shines for his flashlight. She creeps on her hands and knees to the gap and views a glistening, iridescent material.
“Mica,” Gabriel says, still whispering. This glassy mineral means more to him than twenty jade jaguars. The journalists trade confused glances, but the Mexican man offers no explanation. Now, Amaryllis wants to know everything. What is this world? Who could have built it? And more than anything else, how can she get this story? It is sure to win her the prizes and acclaim she’s been working for all her adult life.
#
Their dinner is well deserved after the day’s spectacular find. They sup on tamales and green salsa, a posole soup and some Twinkies that Garret fishes out of his voluminous camera bag. All the while, Gabriel’s voice rises and falls with the cadence of a master hypnotist.
At Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, remains of a fantastic Toltec City were discovered, Gabriel says. The area was so old that it completely returned to forest by the time the Spanish invaded. Over centuries, humans ripped back the jungle carpet to find a meticulously designed city with pyramids, canals, and observatories. Some claim the structures comprised a precise map of our own solar system, with a mound even representing Pluto—which hadn’t been “discovered” until the 1920s by Percival Lowell.
“The mica?” Garret asks, licking Twinkie frosting from his stubby fingers.
“There are two main pyramids: the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun,” Gabriel says, handing his opened dessert to Garret. “When the Pyramid of the Sun was excavated by a so-called archaeologist—just a pathetic hack, really—they discovered that a layer of the pyramid was constructed of mica sheets.”
The mica proved too valuable to leave in a pile of rotting stones, and the adventurers removed it for a quick sale. But questions remained. Mica is not native to central Mexico. What sort of transportation available to the Toltecs would allow them to cart sheets of highly fragile, nearly transparent mineral from South America, the closest source for this rare substance? What purpose could the mica provide? They stare at Gabriel, awaiting an answer.
“Mica is an extremely efficient semi-conductor,” Gabriel says.
Semi-conductor. Amaryllis has no idea what a semi-conductor does, but she knows it has to do with electricity. And the Maya, they say, had not even invented the wheel. Yet, toys were found in Central America. Little toy carts with working wheels, attributed to the Olmecs, the mysterious predecessors of the Maya and the Toltecs. No one has any idea what these ancient people really were capable of doing. Maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe societies don’t always march toward progress. Maybe there are periods of regression. Maybe the Maya of the conquistadors’ time merely forgot what their ancestors had achieved. Look what happened to Europe in the Middle Ages.
#
This morning the sea has changed. Yesterday, it was cobalt blue with small, creamy white eddies swirling in the distance. Today, the little milk-colored tempests have stopped. Once stirred up by recent storms, sand has returned to the ocean floor, leaving the sea sparkling and limpid. Amaryllis doesn’t know why, but she has a sudden urge to be out there where the sea and land have an uncertain boundary. She wants to see where the edges lie.
She slips into a bathing suit. She’s not uninhibited enough to jump in au naturale, not with Garret along. And certainly not with Gabriel able to pop up, unseen at any time. She frets over her Victorian mindset, until she dips her toe into the Caribbean. It swirls warm as bathwater, even now, in January, two weeks after the solstice.
As she pulls herself away from the shore, she allows her muscles to loosen and she floats on the waves. She begins to imagine a series of networked cities, all ancient, joined by Maya ceremonial roads. She envisions the pyramids as new and fresh, covered with red paint and golden ornamentation. Inside a priest sits on a jade jaguar throne, holding an orb, clear and immaculate, searing with radiant power. The priest hums and chants syllables of majesty that cause the air to vibrate. He holds the sphere to the sky. Power surges from the orb, through the pyramid to its base, charging the atmosphere of the city with a purple glow. The priest raises his eyes, and she recognizes Gabriel’s stare.
Pain jags through her big toe and she stops, gasping and splashing in the water, realizing that in her daydream she’s gone too far. The water has dropped off to a great depth, yet Amaryllis’ foot touched rock. Where is she? On a sandbank? She peers through the spring-like clear water to find a wall. Well, not really a wall, but something long, solid and manmade.
She dives underneath the waves. Next to her is the tip of a giant stone structure. It widens as it plunges down to the ocean floor, filling her line of sight. She surfaces and swims toward the top of the rock. Amaryllis fights for breath as the waves roll up toward her chin and away. She dives again. The structure is a pyramid, without a doubt. It can’t be a natural formation. Its lines are too regular. The stones used to fit the pyramid together are huge—twenty-ton boulders at least—yet they are meshed with knife-edge precision. She can’t get her fingernail between them. Another thing occurs to her: this pyramid is not built in steps, but is smooth-sided like the monuments of Egypt.
She bobs up and down, diving and surfacing for a quarter of an hour, finding more impossible things. These walls, unlike those of the Maya structures they found on land, are still smooth. They are weathered and pitted, but not covered over with ba
rnacles and seaweed. She sees the remnants of writing carved into the rock near the top, but can’t tell what language it is. It has neither the pictorial intricacy of Maya glyphs nor the simplicity of Roman characters. It has a modern aspect, clean and stylized, proportionally balanced, as if it were a font designed by an advertising agency. Yet, some of the figures recall the ancient themes of the American Indians: swirling vortices, men with large heads, hunting dogs. The most prominent of all symbols is a cross inscribed with concentric circles.
Amaryllis’ strength is nearly gone, but she dives once more if only to give the fullest of reports to her cohorts sleeping back onshore. She slips below the surface and feels along the eastern wall, pulling herself down. She is looking for a dark square she glimpsed before, gaping and black. It yawns at once before her, its edges wavy in the ocean swells. A sea turtle darts in front of her, and she constricts her lungs. She streaks to the surface, gulps a huge lungful of air and immediately she’s at the opening again. Seconds disappear as she measures the portal. It’s just big enough to slip through, but will she be able to get back out? A shining gem illuminated by a sun ray catches her eye. She swishes inside.
With lungs screaming, she scans a tiny chamber, carved from top to bottom with ancient writing. Gold glints from porticos on the sides. A painting is still visible on the ceiling. A carved hand, claw-like and strong, rests on a pedestal in the center of the space. The red hand holds a stone so beautiful, she can’t bear to leave it. In the filtered sunlight that passes through the doorway, the gem dazzles like Venus in the night sky. The morning star—the guide that Amaryllis can rely on. She grabs the jewel.
Through the door, up to the surface, sucking in the air—she’s free. She thrusts the crystal, about the size of a paperweight, in her bathing suit top and swims for shore with a strength she doesn’t know she has.
#
Tall. Maybe seven or eight feet tall, they walk the earth, their feet barely bruising the dirt as they pass. They are russet red with golden eyes. “There were giants in those days.” A temple sits in the middle of moat-like, round canals of water. Endless energy blazing from the apex of the temple. Speech is unnecessary. Writing is an ornament. The real news is here, in your mind. No need to translate; it’s all here.
We will not survive. The earth is changing. The climate shifting from tropical splendor to sodden bog. Ice melts in the north and floods challenge the land. Boats set forth, some to the west, some east. One ship to the land of the Olmec. The children of the pyramids seek new land. As they leave, the hand becomes so old it nearly shrivels to ashes. The crystal continues to shine, stronger now, pulsing a message to the entire world. Save yourselves.
#
“Amaryllis, please talk to me.”
Gabriel is staring into her eyes, his alarm clear and unmistakable. She sits up slowly, trying to determine what earth she is on. She sees the large gemstone, clear and dazzling, lying on the beach near her side. She reaches for it, but Gabriel takes her hand.
“I know,” he says and closes his eyes with force.
She reaches a finger to his forehead and is filled with sorrow for things she never knew about this man. He has held the crystal, too. What she knows, he knows. He opens his eyes, and Amaryllis looks inside. He is a lost wolf, filled with an urge to seize something, wandering, ravenous, yet unable to locate the prey. She strokes the hairs just beginning to gray near his ears.
“It’s a recording,” she says. She doesn’t know how she realizes that. She only knows the crystal holds the knowledge of an entire civilization that has been totally obscured from modern humanity. The touch of a human mind opens the enchanted sphere. “Like a CD-ROM. A hard drive.”
Gabriel nods with a sharp jab of his chin. In his apparent anxiety, he seems to breathe with labor, but he speaks anyway, punching out his words.
“They are the ancestors, Amaryllis. They are the ones I’ve been trying to find. Just out there beneath the waves. As the water recedes, we see a new history.”
“The genesis race. The one before the flood.”
She thought this moment would fill her with pride. It would be the time when she’d see herself in headlines, on talk shows, in rewritten history books. But now she senses nothing but confusion. She wanted the truth, and now the picture is more complicated than ever. She shakes her head in an attempt to get her bearings.
She begins to reach for the crystal again, but Gabriel snatches her in a furious grip. He holds her so tightly she can hear his breath rasping in and out of his pinched, hawk-like nose. She sees the moisture on his eyelids, she watches his brown eyes darken to a hollow black. For one second, she thinks he is about to kiss her, press his hard shoulders down on her, force her to admit the way blood pounds in her temples when she breathes his scent.
But she has it all wrong. The passion is for the rock. He plucks the crystal from the sand and leaps to his feet.
“It’s got to go back,” he says. “It belongs to them. It’s their truth, not ours.” He runs to the shore and jumps into the surf, heading out to the sunken pyramid.
“Gabriel! Stop! You’ll lose it.”
Amaryllis screams for Garret, bellowing his name in the torrid mid-morning air, knowing she is too exhausted to stop Gabriel. Garret staggers over the rocks from the tent they pitched high in the hills. She points to the surf, where Gabriel is making little progress against a huge, sudden swell of waves.
She sloshes back into the water. Garret dives in next to her, a sleek otter in the aquamarine. She loses sight of him within seconds. Without warning, the water rises up like a sheet of glass, fifty feet behind them. A trembling sound precedes a roar, and the water is everywhere, rushing at them from every angle. Amaryllis swims for the beach, already drained from her morning’s strenuous dives. She grabs at the sandy rock and pulls herself onto a small hillock, then runs for higher ground. She turns back to peer into the torrent, but can’t catch sight of her companions.
#
“The water diversion project was bombed, did you know that?” A cop is speaking. A wiry Mexican detective in a dirty gray trench coat. A guy who speaks perfect English. In fact, he sounds as if he hails from Chicago.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“That’s why the water began to rise so fast.”
“It was too early for the tide.”
The man is sitting on a steel chair—the kind you can stack to the ceiling—next to her little cot. He keeps reaching into his coat pocket, fingering something. Probably trying to quit smoking.
Amaryllis coughs, aware that she is supposed to be offering information, but she can think of nothing to say.
“Miss…uh, Quigley. Miss Amaryllis Quigley,” The Mexican accent peeks out when he pronounces her first name. “Unusual name. It is a flower that blooms in mid-winter.” She nods. “You are on assignment for the Los Angeles Star, accompanied by free-lance photographer Garret Lucas.” She nods again. “What have you found?”
“Ruins.”
He leans back in the chair, with a tight smile. The expression reminds her of Gabriel’s intractable visage. A sudden, unseen wind sweeps across the tiny hairs on her arm, and she realizes the ruins are gone. She looks into the policeman’s eyes, asking an unvoiced question. He nods.
“They destroyed the levee and all the breakwaters, the water rushed back. The water is higher than it ever was now.”
“Who bombed it? Where am I?”
“Revolutionaries.” He nods, moving on to her second question. “The hospital. You see, the water project was controversial. An ecological disaster, the separatists said. Your ruins were innocent bystanders.”
He leans forward and tilts his head. She sees a hearing aid in one ear.
“Miss Quigley. Mr. Santangelo was trying to swim out to sea…before Mr. Lucas dragged him ashore and the patrol boat picked you up. May I ask why?”
She thinks of lying. She thinks of bolting out the door, ripping the tubes out of her arm and racing down the corridors in
her little, incomplete nightgown. She considers feinting a sudden loss of consciousness.
“He wanted an artifact. We thought he was crazy.”
“He was, to do that. He nearly drowned. But he will recover. Right now, he’s in no shape to talk to us.”
The cop stands. He keeps fidgeting with an object in his pocket. Amaryllis lies back on the cot, waiting for him to accuse her of confiscating rare Mexican treasures. Maybe she’s liable for not stopping Gabriel’s mad rush for the sea. Maybe she’s only under suspicion for being a snoopy American. She considers how long it takes to get bailed out of a Mexican prison. The man smirks.
“Mr. Lucas gave me this and said it was yours.” He pulls the crystal, radiating like a solar flare, from his pocket, handling it as if it were a kid’s marble. She is afraid to breathe. Does he know where it came from? He flips it to her, where it lands, nestled next to her waist.
The cop stands. “Of course, when he regains consciousness, Mr. Santangelo might have a different story. If I were you, I’d get out of Mexico as soon as possible.”
#
Garret and Amaryllis can’t afford first class, but they splurge. The bag of film can’t be checked, can’t fit under the seat, can’t be entrusted to the mail. In first class, the flight attendants treat the travelers like royalty, stowing their precious carry-on satchel in a large locker. They watch the bag until the door clicks closed.
“Will they print the story? With no verification?” Garret pulls his collar away from his neck. He has turned bright red after two days in the Mexican sun and now is beginning to peel and itch.
“Your pictures are verification,” she explains. “National Geographic did a special on the Bimini Road, supposedly built by Atlanteans. They sent scuba divers down to examine the finds.”
Dateline: Atlantis Page 2