Chapter 6

Thursday

After plugging my gear into their spare generator so everything would be fully charged when we started our dive, Tim and I ate a quick breakfast. I still set up my solar chargers after breakfast while we waited for everything to finish charging. By 9:15, we were ready to go. Assisted by Brian and Raul, the two guys assigned to help us, Tim and I lugged our gear into the cave.

The lake was about twelve meters inside the mouth, and I do mean mouth. Like my drawing had showed, the cave mouth had been bordered by carved stones to make the cave entrance look like an open mouth, complete with upper and lower teeth. Someone had recently built a sturdy wooden ramp up to the opening, allowing us to wheel our equipment inside without having to struggle up the stone steps. Unlike more famous pyramid-style Mayan temples, this one was nothing more than the decorated opening to the cave, and the cave itself.

The inside of the cave was well-lit, with three banks of lights powered by a generator set up well outside the cave entrance. When I reached the edge of the opening, I looked down into the pit. A fourth and fifth bank of lights were aimed down into the fifteen-meter deep abyss. The other three banks lit the interior of the cave. A portable fence had been set up across the cave about three meters from the drop-off to prevent anyone from accidentally falling over the edge.

Three chain ladders (like household fire escape ladders) with sturdy aluminum steps ran over the edge and all the way down to the “beach” around the cenote. The beach was a one-meter-wide strip of sand. After double-checking to make sure all three ladders were anchored securely, I started putting on my wetsuit, including the hard-soled neoprene boots. While Tim and I prepared to dive, Brian and Raul made sure the manual hoist was working. They would use it to lower our tanks and to retrieve any artifacts we found.

“Ready?” Tim asked me once he had everything on.

“Ready,” I agreed, and we began the long climb down to the beach. I used the left-hand ladder, and he used the right, leaving the ladder between us empty.

“Shit, I’m tired now,” I laughed when we finally reached the beach.

“The climb back up to the top is a real bitch,” Tim warned.

“Now you tell me,” I mock complained, making him laugh.

We helped each other put our twin tanks on, checked regulators, and set our dive computers. Once I had my fins, mask, and dive helmet on, I grabbed my underwater video camera. Tim did the same. After securing the upper end, we dropped a weighted rope into the water on each side to mark the halfway point around the lake. I’d video the north side and Tim would video the south side. We’d make a half-circuit of the lake, drop lower, and go back to where we started.

If we found any side branches, we’d inflate a marker buoy and attach it to one end of a line secured at the top or side of the branch. We’d continue doing this until we finished filming our half of the lake’s edge, top to bottom--or had to surface.

I finished filming about five minutes before Tim did. It was easy to find him by following the light from his camera. Since the filming only took half an hour, we began preparing the floor of the lake for us to use the GPR. The floor had a thick layer of fine white calcium particles that were easily disturbed and made a milky cloud when stirred up.

We started by pushing stakes into the sediment where the two ropes marked the halfway point, and then running orange nylon twine between the stakes. From there, we measured half a meter north at each end and ran another orange line. I was glad that I’d done this at the first dig, so I had a better idea of what I was doing. Despite stirring up quite a cloud of sediment, we managed to run east/west lines marking half-meter wide lanes for the northern half of the lake bottom before we had to surface.

Even though we were only ten meters deep, and a decompression stop wasn’t called for, we still stopped for five minutes when we reached the three-meter level. It would take at least an hour to reach the closest decompression chamber at the hospital in Merida. The extra five minutes were worth it to avoid any problems.

Navy dive tables are meant to be a guideline. They assume an occasional outlier on the Bell curve and accept the possibility of an injury or fatality. We weren’t willing to accept that risk, hence the “unnecessary” decompression stop. Tim and I were happy to learn that we both adhered to the same philosophy: better safe than sorry.

Once out of the water, we divested ourselves of our diving gear. Raul and Brian hauled Tim’s tanks up and then mine. Then they sent us a large (one-meter square) nylon bag to hold everything else. We both continued to wear our dive helmets since the top of the cliff was fifteen meters above us. A fist-sized rock could cause serious injury from that height, although I noted no fallen rocks at the cliff base.

I’d just stepped on the first rung of the ladder when something caught my eye. Turning on one of my dive helmet’s light, I gasped.

“Tim,” I hollered, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. He was already on the third ladder rung when he stopped and looked at me. I waved for him to join me.

Once he was next to me, I motioned for him to be quiet and then turned on my helmet light again.

Small vertical fissures covered the face of the cliff. Every fissure had at least one small gold or jade statue stuffed into it. In some places, it looked like a small spot had been dug into the cliff face to hold a statue or a natural fissure had been widened. The statues were all nearly identical. If laid flat instead of standing, they looked like a body lying in repose, ready to bury, complete with the arms crossed on the chest. The one odd thing was that the hands formed a small circle barely big enough to slide a soda straw into it.

“Holy shit, funerary statues,” he hissed quietly. “We need to tell Doctors Gonzalez and Cooper about these.”

“We should leave these here until we can document them. I can sketch one for them. Hell, I’ll just run my helmet video camera for the entire ascent,” I suggested.

“Both good ideas. We’ve found some gold and jade artifacts in the main temple, but there have to be hundreds or even thousands of these, depending on whether they are in all the cliffs around us or just in this side,” he agreed. I walked to my right and he walked to his left. We met at the opposite side of the lake. There were statues stuffed into the cliff face all the way around the lake.

“We’re going to be working on the cliffs a lot longer than we’ll be working in the water,” Tim chuckled.

“No way will we be able to set up a search grid for the cliff walls like we plan for the bottom,” I mused aloud. “We’ll probably have to use the ladders and make each space between the rungs a grid square. We can count the center ladder as column zero. Use odd numbers for columns going one direction and even numbers going the other direction. If we number each rung of the ladder, we have row numbers in each column for any artifacts in that square.”

“Good idea. Let’s go see if the Doctors like it,” Tim replied. I used the video camera attached to my dive helmet, leaving the helmet light on, and videoed my ascent. I noted that, as I climbed higher, the gold and jade statues gave way to silver and polished stone statues. The silver and stone statues gave way to clay statues, as well as clumps of what was probably rotted wood from carved wooden statues. I did see one surviving statue that looked like it was wood and wondered if the Maya had access to ironwood.

Tim made it to the top in half the time it took me. When Brian and Raul teased me about taking so long, I explained that I was merely documenting the face of the cliff as I climbed, specifically not mentioning the reason. We stripped off our remaining gear and our wetsuits. After pulling my walking shorts on over my speedo, I slipped on my shoes. With help from Raul and Brian, Tim and I loaded our diving gear onto our wheeled carts. Each of the four of us wheeled one cart back to Tim’s and my tents and stashed the gear inside once it was clean and dry. I started my gear recharging from my solar panels.

I copied the video showing the statues during my ascent onto my computer, and then to one of the numerous flash drives I brought with me. Flash drives and memory cards for my cameras are two things I brought LOTS of.

While I was copying it to a flash drive, I fast-forwarded the video and counted steps of the ladder. The steps were twelve inches high and wide. The gold and jade statues were in the bottom eight rungs. Silver and polished stone statues appeared for the next twelve. Clay statues and what looked like rotted wood filled crevices to within thirty cm of the top. If that held true all the way around the lake, the Maya had somehow managed to partition the cliff face.

Drs. Gonzalez and Cooper were both excited and worried about our discovery. So far, they had managed to keep secret the discovery of the eleven gold and three jade artifacts they’d found in the temple they were exploring. The odds of keeping the discovery of potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of jade, gold, and silver artifacts secret was about the same as winning the lottery.

“Did you find anything on the lake bottom?” Dr. Cooper asked.

“Lots of calcium sediment, but nothing else. If anything is there, it’s buried beneath the calcium sediment,” Tim replied.

Dr. Cooper nodded his acknowledgement, but we could see that his mind was on something else. “I think we should search the lake first,” he said. “We’ll need more armed guards here when we start clearing the cliffs. If there are lots of valuable artifacts on the lake bottom, we’ll bring the extra guards in sooner.”

Tim and I had nothing else to do for the day, so I decided to see if I could do dream sketches of the cave’s interior after we ate lunch. Marita, one of the cooks, approached me nervously while we ate.

“I heard that you hunted at your last site,” she said questioningly.

“I did. Our cook used some of the meat, making stew for our dinners. The rest she sent home with her son. They sold the extra to earn money for their family,” I explained.

“I have seen peccary in the meadow by the stream during the day, and deer in the early morning and evening,” she said.

“Mind if I hunt this afternoon?” I asked Tim.

“Go ahead, I’m kind of tired of canned meals,” he replied.

It was midafternoon by the time I finished making a travois. With my trusty atlatl, my full complement of throwing darts, and a travois, I followed Marita to where she had seen the peccaries.

When I researched peccaries online at the first dig, it said they formed groups of from six to thirty. That group in Ecuador must have been several groups together, as was this one. While remaining hidden behind the bushes from the herd, I noted more peccaries than I could count as they milled around grazing. When I was ready, I loaded one dart and held a second in my left hand.

The sudden movement when I stepped out from behind the bushes and threw the first dart startled the group. Half of them--the young and what I assumed were their mothers--began moving away from me. The other half watched me warily, giving me time to throw a second dart.

That had all the rest moving quickly away from me. Marita was bouncing excitedly as I loaded the peccaries onto the travois, which sagged under the weight as I dragged it back to camp.

When Marita and I made it back, I was surprised to see three additional cooks. I recognized one as Paloma, the second cook for our dig. Marita introduced me to Delores and Olivia, the cooks for the local workers who stayed in camp. About a third of the locals lived in a nearby village and went home every evening. Two of our interns each drove a pickup truck full of workers home each evening. Two different interns picked them up each morning. At least someone had been smart enough to line the bed of the pickups with an old mattress and the sides with what looked like old couch cushions.

Marita explained that the men who stayed here had to buy their own food, although the NGS paid the cooks. The extra meat would allow the men to save more of their money. Most of the workers were married and sent their money home. Some of the single men sent money home to help their families while others were trying to earn enough that they could afford to marry.

Olivia looked at me oddly and started speaking rapid-fire Spanish to the other three. I understand and can speak Western Hemisphere Spanish, but have to think about and mentally translate each word. Hence, I only caught about a third of what she said.

“Olivia says that you glow,” Marita told me questioningly.

I reached for the original necklace before remembering that, while it was there, it wasn’t. I couldn’t see it in a mirror, couldn’t touch it, and couldn’t even see the glow. So far, few others had seen the first necklace. The necklace made from the teeth and claws of the jaguars was visible and could be touched.

“I have been given a gift that lets me communicate with the spirits of ancient civilizations. If the spirits want their villages explored, they allow me to visit those places in my dreams so that I may sketch them accurately. Dr. Cooper asked me to sketch Montabala to test my ability. One of my sketches led them to the cave,” I explained.

“Do you know Holy Shaman Parker?” Marita asked.

“Yes, I am one of the two artists he hired,” I replied. That pronouncement started the four women chattering excitedly, and rapidly, in Spanish.

I already knew that Dr. Parker was revered by the Maya. He’d explained about the “dream battle”, something relatively few people--aside from the Maya--knew the details of.

By then, two of the cooks had to leave to finish preparing dinner for the hired workers, taking one of the peccaries. Marita promised that we would have the other one for dinner tomorrow.

After dinner, I went off to do dream sketches of the inside of the cave. Instead, I ended up watching four dream scenes play out inside the cave. The first was a priest dressed in ornate clothing and a feathered robe, standing near the cliff’s edge. He held one of the small jade statues as he prayed for the just-deceased head priest named Chicahua.

His prayer was lengthy as he extolled Chicahua’s virtues, beseeching Yum Cimi (the Mayan death god) to allow the departed priest immediate entry to the spirit world. Right before the priest tossed the statue over the edge, I managed a good look at the jade statue and saw what appeared to be a tuft of hair clutched between the statue’s hands. I heard the splash when it hit the water below.

“We’ll find at least one statue down there,” I mused.

The second scenario was similar, but for a high-ranking government official. This time, the priest gave the gold statue to a teenage boy. The boy scrambled down one of the numerous wooden ladders lining the cliffs on all four sides of the cenote and stuffed the statue into a crevasse in the lowest section. There were two tiers of wooden scaffolding running around the face of the cliff, which explained the separation of gold/jade, silver/stone, and clay/wooden statues.

The third scene was similar except the man who said the prayer wasn’t dressed in such ornate clothing. He was a merchant and was praying for the spirit of his just deceased wife. The statue he held was silver, and he made the climb down the ladder to the middle section himself.

The final scene was of an obviously pregnant woman. She stepped up to a table where two priests awaited. From the small pouch she carried, she carefully poured a handful of maize kernels onto the table in front of the priests and pointed to a carved wooden statue.

In a magnanimous gesture, the priest scooped up all but one kernel of maize and poured them back into her pouch. He took the lock of hair that she was clinging to, deftly twisted it into a tight bunch, and worked it into the opening between the statue’s hands. She thanked him profusely for his generosity, renewing the tears that had only recently stopped staining her cheeks.

Moving towards the cliff, she stopped and prayed for the spirit of her departed husband. “He was a good father and husband and made sure we always had plenty of food. Please be kind when you test him,” she begged.

Given her condition, the priest called over one of the teenage boys that the one priest had paid to climb down the ladder, sparing the pregnant woman having to make the climb. He deftly scrambled down the ladder and wedged the statue into a crack about two meters from the top of the cliff.

I had tears on my face when I woke up right after that. Still, I quickly began sketching what I’d seen, beginning with the last scene. I was still engrossed in my work when Tim found me.

“What’s that?” he asked, motioning to the drawing I was just finishing.

“It’s what happened inside the cave,” I replied, and then explained what I’d seen. It was only then that I realized I’d understood what the people were saying. In Mayan. I’d already learned the names of the main Mayan gods, along with several other key words I’d picked up from the Parkers but was definitely NOT fluent in Mayan before this.

Occasionally, I’d catch Ray and his wives speaking Mayan or some other ancient language. When I asked about it, he laughed, explaining, “We’re telling dirty jokes or making suggestive comments to each other. This way, nobody else can be offended.”

I wondered if I’d be able to read Mayan now. I felt that I’d be able to speak it now. The thoughts I was having were quickly and effortlessly translated into Mayan. It was harder for me to translate my thoughts into Spanish.

Tonight, Tina noticed my excitement and asked about it, so I explained what happened and that I could now understand Mayan. I wondered briefly if I’d be joining the group working with Dr. Parker and others as they brought ancient languages to light again. Just as quickly, I realized that I wouldn’t. Dr. Parker “introduced” a handful of new translators to the Tribunal each semester. So far, he’d only “introduced” two artists besides his wives Itzel and Nuk. I was still excited when I finally awoke in the morning.

Friday

At breakfast, I showed my newest sketches to Drs. Gonzalez and Cooper, explaining what they represented. “I think I can even speak ancient Mayan, now,” I told them.

“How sure are you?” Paloma asked, having overheard me.

I started to answer, and suddenly realized that she had spoken to me in Mayan. “Reasonably sure, especially now,” I replied. In Mayan. She grinned. The two cooks looked at the sketches.

Marita pointed at the pregnant woman. “That looks like Zahra,” she said in Spanish. I gawked because I had understood every word without the necessity of a delayed mental translation.

“Zahra is a woman in our village,” Paloma explained, so I told them about what I’d seen in my dream.

After breakfast, Tim, Raul, Brian, and I grabbed Tim’s and my diving gear and headed for the cave. As we entered the cave, I could envision the table from my dream where the priests sold the statues just inside the mouth of the cave.

Once Tim and I entered the water, we began by exploring the three branch caves off the lake. We secured a tether rope to the side of the first branch and then slowly worked our way inside. There was no calcium sediment in the first branch.

The first branch cave was about five meters wide, three meters high, and sixty meters long. By the time we finished exploring it, we only had a few minutes left on our dive computers. We took a quick look at the other two branches before surfacing. They looked to be ten to fifteen meters deep, and not as wide as the one we explored today.

Tim and I traded ladders for today’s ascent, and I filmed the wall of the cliff where he had first ascended. After our gear was clean, dry, and put away or recharging, we compared the two videos. Sure enough, the line of demarcation between types of statues was the same. Of course, the two ladders were only a foot apart. The gold and jade statues were limited to the lowest eight rungs. Silver and polished stone statues filled the next twelve, and clay statues filled the rest.

With our work done for the day, I retrieved my atlatl from my tent and went hunting again. Marita and Paloma both kissed me on the cheek when I returned with two more peccaries. I was exhausted after dragging the travois back to camp.

Before dinner, Drs. Gonzalez and Cooper took Tim and me aside. “We want to start documenting the cliff face and removing the funerary statues, starting with the gold and jade ones,” they told us quietly. “We’ll have Carlos, Erica, and Raelene help you guys. I have empty crates ready that you can move into the cave to pack the statues in. One of the three can photograph each item and label it while the others keep a written record.

“I like your idea of using the spaces between ladder rungs as grid squares. Go ahead and number the columns left of center with odd numbers and those right of center with even numbers. Find some way to mark the cliff face that shows where the ladder was hanging for each column and have the girls use numbered stakes to mark the top of the cliff. That will help keep our search grids from overlapping.