Serpent (32 page)

She floated over to a shelflike waterlevel protuberance and raised the lighter. There was another ledge a short distance above the first. Her heart raced with excitement. Steps! There might be a way out of this pit after all. Losing no time she pulled herself out of the water and climbed the steps that spiraled around the inside of the stone cylinder.

Soon she was over the rim of the well. Using the lighter again, she explored her surroundings. She was in a small cave. Her eye fell on the narrow furrow in the stone floor, and she followed it to a low ceiling passageway. She held the lighter dose to the opening and watched the flame flutter. Air was blowing through. Stale and warm. But still air.

Within seconds she was back in the well. She hyperventilated a few times then swam back the way she had come. Surfacing, she blurted, "I think I found a way out."

The professor's voice answered in the hollow darkness. "Dr. Gamay. I was afraid you were gone for good. So much time had passed."

"'Sorry to keep you waiting. Wait'll I show you what I found. Can you swim?"

"I used to do laps every day in the Harvard pool." He paused. "How long will I have to hold my breath?"

"Just the other side of the wall. You can do it."

They found each other's hand, and Chi splashed into the basin. With their heads close together, Gamay instructed him in breathing exercises. Between breaths he said, "I wish now my ancestors were Incan rather than Mayan."

"Pardon?"

"Large lung capacity from the thin mountain air. I'm basically a flatlander."

"You'll do fine, even for a flatlander. Ready?"

"I'd prefer to wait until I grow gills, but since that's not possible, vamanos!" He squeezed her hand in signal. Gamay sank beneath the surface, quickly found the continuation of the tunnel, and practically yanked the professor through the passageway. The journey took less than half the time of her earlier trip, but the professor was huffing and puffing when they surfaced, and she was glad the distance wasn't any greater.

She flicked the lighter. The professor's head bobbed a few feet away. He was sucking in big gulps of air. Somehow he had managed to keep the baseball cap on his head.

"Steps are over here," Gamay said, towing him behind her. She helped him to the top of the well.

Looking around, Chi said, "My guess is that the inhabitants of the city used this well as an emergency supply when the cenote and the river dried up after the rainy season." Chi got down on his knees and peered into the well. "When the water was high they could simply dip into it with their vessels. When the level dropped completely out of their reach they carved the steps. Like that coffee commercial. Good to the last drop."

He stood and traced the track in the floor. "The marks of many feet," he said in wonder.

Gamay was as interested in ancient civilizations as Chi, but the lighter flame was growing smaller and dimmer. When she pointed this out to the professor he picked up several pieces of charred bark from the floor and wove them into a serviceable torch that cast off smoky flames.

"Castor oil plant," he explained. Back on his dry land element, he took the lead. "Well, Dorothy, shall we follow the yellow brick road?" he said with an airy wave of the torch.

Glancing back to make sure Gamay was behind him, Chi ducked through the opening in the wall and into a rough tunnel. Chi's head comfortably cleared the low soot-encrusted ceiling, but Gamay had to bend over as she ascended the crooked and steeply pitched passageway. After only a few minutes the tunnel ended abruptly at the bottom of a narrow shaft. Gamay could stand again.

A crude ladder led up the shaft. Chi tested the rungs, pronounced the ladder rickety but safe, and climbed to the top of the shaft, where he knelt at the rim and held the torch as a beacon for Gamay.

The ladder miraculously held, and Gamay joined him at the opening of another passageway. This one led to a cavern about twice the size of the cave with the well in it. And like that chamber, there was only one way out. The tunnel was about a yard wide and slightly more than that tall. They navigated the twists and turns of the gradually ascending passageway on their hands and knees. The enclosed space would have been hot and stifling even without the smoke and heat from the torch, and at times Gamay found it hard to breathe. It was difficult to tell length and direction, but she guessed that the tunnel ran for about sixty feet, doubling back on itself at one point.

She had been crawling with her head down, glancing upward from time to time to make sure she didn't get too close to Chi although that was unlikely. He scuttled through the tunnels like a mole rat. The torchlight vanished unexpectedly, and she bumped into the professor's legs. She stood to see what the holdup was.

"Wait," Chi said, and put his arm back for emphasis.

He seemed frozen in place. In the torch's light Gamay quickly saw why The tunnel had ended at a ledge overlooking a yawning chasm. Three logs had been laid across the abyss. The early engineers who built the span had reinforced it with cross supports and thoughtfully attached a pole for a railing on one side.

"I'll go first," Chi said. Gingerly he put his weight on a log, and when it held he pressed forward. A quick few steps, and he was across.

"It's . not exactly the Golden Gate," he said apologetically, "but it seems to be fine."

The word seems hung in the air and overshadowed the rest of the reassuring sentence. Gamay balefully eyed the crude span. She really didn't have any choice. Reassuring herself that she only weighed thirty-five pounds more than the professor, she tripped across the bridge like a highwire walker. It was steadier than she anticipated, and the rough logs didn't roll. Still she was glad when she reached Chi's outstretched hand and put her foot back on solid rock.

"Well done," he said, guiding her to another shaft leading upward. Gamay almost panicked when she didn't see a ladder, but Chi pointed out the steps worn into the wet and slippery rock. They were barely big enough for her toes and-fingers, and she had to use every bit of rock-climbing muscle and skill. The infrastructure around here was made for slightly built Mayans, not tall Anglos, she grumbled to herself.

At the top of the shaft was another low tunnel. Gamay's throat felt like the Sahara desert on a hot day. Her climbing, swimming, and crawling exertions were catching up with her. Her eyes stung from cinders, and her knees were raw from crawling. At one point she and the professor had to squeeze through broken rock. Gamay might have stopped for good had it not been for an exultant shout from the professor.

"Dr. Gamay, we're out!"

Seconds later they stood in a chamber so large the light from the torch wasn't bright enough to illuminate the high ceiling. She rubbed the soot from her eyes. Were those columns? She borrowed the torch only to laugh softly when the light fell not on columns but on huge stalactites. The cavern was irregularly circular. Passages branched off from the chamber. One opening was semicircular in shape and twice as tall as a man. In contrast to the rough opening they had just come through, the portals were smooth and even, the surface of the floor unexpectedly flat.

"You could drive a car through this!" Gamay exclaimed.

"There are legends of underground highways that ran between villages. I always thought they were simply exaggerations, that some of the locals had seen natural tunnels and mistaken them for artificial ones. But this . . ."

They were brought to a halt where a section of fallen roof blocked the way, and turned back to the main chamber, stopping first to explore a side passage. They entered a miniature plaza whose rectangular tiled floor was surrounded by real columns, not stalactites. The vaulted ceiling was smoothed and plastered, as was the wall, which was adorned with murals of red figures in profile.

"Incredible," Gamay said. "Is this some sort of underground temple?"

Chi walked along the walls squinting at the figures whose paint seemed as fresh as if it had been applied the day before.

"The figures are Mayan, but, then again, they are not," the professor whispered.

Pictured was a procession of profiled figures carrying goods on shoulders and heads. Vases, baskets of bread, gold containers, odd shapes that could have been ingots.

"The boats again." Gamay pointed out merchant ships and war vessels similar to those carved into the walls of the structure Chi showed her earlier.

A whole story unfolded as they walked along the walls. Ships coming in. Unloading. The goods being taken off in procession. Even a painting of a man holding a list, obviously a teller. Soldiers standing guard. It was an ancient documentary of some great event or events.

Their attention turned to the center of the room and a large round stone pedestal supported by four heavy columnar legs. On the table was a cut box of purplish crystal-specked stone, similar in appearance to the temple structures on the summits of Mayan pyramids.

Gamay bent low and looked through the square opening in the side of the box.

"There's something inside," she said. She reached in with trembling fingers, lifted out the object, and set it on the mirrored surface of the table. Chi had found more castor branches to replenish the torch, and it burned brighter than ever.

The device, for that is surely what it was, consisted of a boxy wood housing inset with a metal wheel which in turn was strengthened with cross braces. Within the wheel was a large gear that apparently rotated around a central axle, and meshed with its teeth were several smaller gears.

"What is it?" Gamay said.

A machine of sorts."

"It looks like . . . no, it can't be."

"Don't keep me in the dark, Dr. Gamay"

"Well, it resembles something I've seen before, an artifact taken off an ancient shipwreck, made of bronze as this appears to be but terribly corroded. It was thought to be an astrolabe, a navigational device to determine the attitude of the sun and stars. Someone did a gamma radiograph. They found gear ratios that related to astronomical and calendar data. It was far more complex than a simple astrolabe. There were thirty gears, all enmeshed, even a differential gear. It was basically a computer."

"A computer. Where did you see it?"

She paused. At the National Museum in Athens."

Chi stared at the machine. "Impossible."

"Professor, could you give me a little more light here, where these scratchings are?"

Chi brought the torch so dose the flames almost singed Gamay's hair, but she didn't care.

"I don't know much about Mayan writing, but this isn't it."

It was Chi's turn to examine the inscription. "Impossible," he repeated, but with less conviction.

Gamay looked around the chamber. "This whole thing, this cloistered basilica, your underground freeway. They're all impossible, too."

"We must get this analyzed as soon as we can."

"I'm with you on that one. There's a slight problem."

"Oh yes," Chi said, remembering where they were. "But I think we're almost out of the caves."

Gamay nodded. "I felt the fresh air, too."

Chi tied the front of his shirt into a makeshift sack to carry the artifact, and they headed back to explore the main chamber: An enormous wooden ladder almost perpendicular in its steepness soared into the darkness above. The ladder was made of bark-covered saplings, logs really, about as thick as a Mayan's thigh and approximately twelve feet wide. The saplings were lashed to tree trunks that were braced horizontally at right angles against the face of the rods Running up the center of the ladder was a partition that acted as a hand railing.

The ladder was an impressive engineering feat, but time had taken its toll. Some of the round steps had slipped and hung at angles. In places supports had snapped, and the ladder sagged. The wood seemed sturdy enough to Gamay The fact that the steps and bras were lashed together with vines bothered her. In her sorry experience vines dried, cracked, and broke. Her confidence was not inspired when the bottom step detached itself from the ladder as she put her weight on it.