The Vivero Letter

I

Gatt was a man of about fifty-five and a little overweight. He was as smooth as silk and had the politician’s knack of talking a lot and saying nothing. According to him, he had long admired Professor Fallon and had regretted not being able to meet him before. He was in Mexico for the Olympic Games and had taken the opportunity of an excursion to Yucatán to visit the great Mayan cities — he had been to Uxmal, Chichén Itzá and Coba — and, hearing that the great Professor Fallon was working in the area, he had naturally dropped in to pay his respects and to sit at the feet of genius. He name-dropped like mad — apparently he knew everyone of consequence in the United States — and it soon turned out that he and Fallon had mutual acquaintances.

It was all very plausible and, as he poured out his smokescreen of words, I became fidgety for fear Fallon would be too direct with him. But Fallon was no fool and played the single-minded archeologist to perfection. He invited Gatt to stay for lunch, which invitation Gatt promptly accepted, and we were all set for a cosy chat.

As I listened to the conversation of this evidently cultured man I reflected that, but for the knowledge gained through Pat Harris, I could have been taken in completely. It was almost impossible to equate the dark world of drugs, prostitution and extortion with the pleasantry spoken Mr. John Gatt, who talked enthusiastically of the theatre and the ballet and even nicked Fallon for a thousand dollars as a contribution to a fund for underprivileged children. Fallon made out a cheque without cracking a smile — a tribute to his own acting ability but even more a compliment to the fraudulent image of Gatt.

I think it was this aura of ambivalence about Gatt that prevented me from lashing out at him there and then. After all, this was the man who had caused the death of my brother and I ought to have tackled him, but in my mind there lurked the growing feeling that a mistake had been made, that this could not be the thug who controlled a big slice of the American underworld. I ought to have known better. I ought to have remembered that Himmler loved children dearly and that a man may smile and be a villain. So I did nothing — which was a pity.

Another thing which puzzled me about Gatt and which was a major factor contributing to my indecision was that I couldn’t figure out what he was after. I would have thought that his reason for ‘dropping in’ would be to find out if we had discovered Uaxuanoc, but he never even referred to it. The closest he got to it was when he asked Fallon, ‘And what’s the subject of your latest research, Professor?’

‘Just cleaning up some loose ends,’ said Fallon noncommittally. ‘There are some discrepancies in the literature about the dating of certain structures in this area.’

‘Ah, the patient spadework of science,’ said Gatt unctuously. ‘A never-ending task.’ He dropped the subject immediately and went on to say how impressed he had been by the massive architecture of Chichén Itzá. ‘I have an interest in city planning and urban renewal,’ he said. ‘The Mayas certainly knew all about pedestrian concourses. I’ve never seen a finer layout.’

I discovered later that his interest in city planning and urban renewal was confined to his activities as a slum landlord and the holding up of city governments to ransom over development plans. It was one of his most profitable sidelines.

He didn’t concentrate primarily on Fallon; he discussed with Halstead, in fairly knowledgeable terms, some aspects of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and talked with me about England. ‘I was in England recently,’ he said. ‘It’s a great country. Which part are you from?’

‘Devon,’ I said shortly.

‘A very beautiful place,’ he said approvingly. ‘I remember when I visited Plymouth I stood on the very spot from which the Pilgrim Fathers set sail so many years ago to found our country. It moved me very much.’

I thought that was a bit thick coming from a man who had started life as Giacomo Gattini. ‘Yes, I rather like Plymouth myself,’ I said casually, and then sank a barb into him. ‘Have you ever been to Totnes?’

His eyes flickered, but he said smoothly enough, ‘I’ve never had the pleasure.’ I stared at him and he turned away and engaged Fallon in conversation again.

He left soon after lunch, and when his plane had taken off and headed north, I looked at Fallon blankly and said, ‘What the devil do you make of that?’

‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ said Fallon. ‘I expected him to ask more questions than he did.’

‘So did I. If we didn’t know he was up to something I’d take that visit as being quite above board. Yet we know it wasn’t — he must have been after something. But what was it? And did he get it?’

‘I wish I knew,’ said Fallon thoughtfully.

II

Pat Harris turned up in the jet during the afternoon and didn’t seem surprised that we had had a visit from Gatt. He merely shrugged and went off to have a private talk with Fallon, but when he came back he was ruffled and exasperated. ‘What’s wrong with the Old Man?’ he asked.

‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said. ‘He’s just the same as always.’

‘Not from where I stand,’ said Pat moodily. ‘I can’t get him to listen to me. All he’s concerned with is pushing Rudetsky. Anything I say just bounces off.’

I smiled. ‘He’s just made the biggest discovery of his life. He’s excited, that’s all; he wants to get moving fast before the rains break. What’s worrying you, Pat?’

‘What do you think?’ he said, staring at me. ‘Gatt worries me — that’s who. He’s been holed up in Mérida, and he’s collected the biggest crowd of cut-throats assembled in Mexico since the days of Pancho Villa. He’s brought in some of his own boys from Detroit, and borrowed some from connections in Mexico City and Tampico. And he’s been talking to the chicleros. In my book that means he’s going into the forest — he must have the chicleros to help him there. Now you tell me — if he goes into the forest, where would he be going?’

‘Camp Three,’ I said. ‘Uaxuanoc. But there’ll be nothing there for him — just a lot of ruins.’

‘Maybe,’ said Pat. ‘But Jack evidently thinks differently. The thing that gripes me is that I can’t get Fallon to do anything about it — and it’s not like him.’

‘Can’t you do anything yourself? What about the authorities — the police? What about pointing out that there’s a big build-up of known criminals in Mérida?’

Pat looked at me pityingly. ‘The fix is in,’ he said patiently, as though explaining something to a small child. ‘The local law has been soothed.’

‘Bribed!’

‘For Christ’s sake, grow up!’ he yelled. ‘These local cops aren’t as upright as your London bobbies, you know. I did what I could — and you know what happened? I got tossed in the can on a phoney charge, that’s what! I only got out yesterday by greasing the palm of a junior cop who hadn’t been lubricated by the top brass. You can write off the law in this part of the world.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Accepting all this — what the hell would you expect Fallon to do about it?’

‘He has high-level connections in the government; he’s well respected in certain circles and can set things going so that the local law is short-circuited. But they’re personal connections and he has to do it himself. I don’t swing enough weight myself — I can’t reach up that high.’

‘Would it do any good if I talked to him?’ I asked.

Pat shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He shook his head dejectedly. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. His judgement is usually better than this.’

So I talked to Fallon and got a fast brush-off. He was talking to Rudetsky at the time, planning the move to Camp Three, and all his attention was on that. ‘If you find anything in the preliminary clean-up, don’t touch it,’ he warned Rudetsky. ‘Just leave it and clear round it.’

‘I won’t mess around with any stones,’ said Rudetsky reassuringly.

Fallon looked tired and thinner than ever, as though the flesh was being burned from his bones by the fire glowing within him. Every thought he had at that time was directed solely to one end — the excavation of the city of Uaxuanoc — nothing else was of the slightest importance. He listened to me impatiently and then cut me off halfway through a sentence. ‘All this is Harris’s job,’ he said curtly. ‘Leave it to him.’

‘But Harris says he can’t do anything about it.’

‘Then he’s not worth the money I’m paying him,’ growled Fallon, and walked away, ignoring me, and plunged again into the welter of preparations for the move to Camp Three.

I said nothing of this to the Halsteads; there was no point in scaring anyone else to death. But I did have another conversation with Pat Harris before he left to find out what Gatt was doing. I told him of my failure to move Fallon and he smiled grimly at Fallon’s comment on his worth, but let it go.

‘There’s one thing that puzzles me,’ he said. ‘How in hell did Gatt know when to pitch up here? It’s funny that he arrived just as soon as you’d discovered the city.’

‘Coincidence,’ I suggested.

But Pat was not convinced of that. He made me tell him of everything that had been said and was as puzzled as I had been about Gatt’s apparent disinterest in the very thing we knew he was after. ‘Did Gatt have the chance to talk to anyone alone?’ he asked.

I thought about it and shook my head. ‘He was with all of us all the time. We didn’t let him wander around by himself, if that’s what you mean.’

‘He wasn’t alone with anyone — not even for a minute?’ Pat persisted.

I hesitated. ‘Well, before he went to his plane he shook hands all round.’ I frowned. ‘Halstead had lagged behind and Gatt went back to shake hands. But it wasn’t for long — not even fifteen seconds.’

‘Halstead, by God!’ exclaimed Pat. ‘Let me tell you something. You can pass along a hell of a lot of information in a simple handshake. Bear that in mind. Jemmy.’

With that cryptic remark he left, and I began to go over all the things I knew about Halstead. But it was ridiculous to suppose he had anything to do with Gatt. Ridiculous!

III

Harry Rider was a very busy man during the next few days. He flew Rudetsky and a couple of his men to Camp Three at Uaxuanoc, dropped them and came back for equipment. Rudetsky and his team hewed a bigger landing area out of the forest, and then the big cargo-carrying helicopter could go in and things really got moving. It was like a well planned military operation exploiting a beach-head.

It would have been a big disappointment all round if this wasn’t the site of Uaxuanoc, but Fallon showed no worry. He urged Rudetsky on to greater efforts and complacently watched the helicopters fly to and fro. The cost of keeping a big helicopter in the air is something fantastic and, although I knew Fallon could afford it, I couldn’t help but point it out.

Fallon drew his pipe from his mouth and laughed. ‘Damn it, you’re an accountant,’ he said. ‘Use your brains. It would cost a lot more if I didn’t use those choppers. I have to pay a lot of highly skilled men a lot of money to clear that site for preliminary investigation, and I’m damned if I’m going to pay them for hacking their way through the forest to get to the site. It’s cheaper this way.’

And so it was from a cost-effectiveness point of view, as I found out when I did a brief analysis. Fallon wasn’t wasting his money on that score, although some people might think that the excavation of a long-dead city was a waste of money in the first place.

Four more archeologists arrived — young men chock-full of enthusiasm. For three of them this was their first experience of a big dig and they fairly worshipped at the feet of Fallon, although I noticed they all tended to walk stiff-legged around Halstead. If his notoriety had spread down to the lower ranks of the profession then he was indeed in a bad way. I’m surprised Katherine didn’t see it, although she probably put it down to the general effect of his prickly character on other people. But what a hell of a thing to have to live with!

Ten days after Fallon had made the big decision we went up to Camp Three and, circling over the cenote, I looked down upon a transformed scene quite different from what I had seen when dangling on the end of that cable. There was a little village down there — the huts were laid out in neat lines and there was a landing area to one side with hangars for the aircraft. All this had been chopped out of dense forest, in just over a week; Rudetsky was evidently something of a slave driver.

We landed and, as the rotor flapped into silence, I heard the howl of power saws from near by as the assault on the forest went on. And it was hot — hotter even than Camp Two; the sun, unshielded by the cover of trees, hammered the clearing with a brazen glare. Perspiration sprang out all over my body and by the time we had reached the shelter of a hut I was dripping.

Fallon wasted no time. ‘This is not a very comfortable place,’ he said. ‘So we might as well get on with the job as quickly as we can. Our immediate aim is to find out what we have here in broad detail. The finer points will have to wait for the years to come. I don’t intend to excavate any particular buildings at this time. Our work now is to delimit the area, to identify structures and to clear the ground for our successors.’

Halstead stirred and I could see he wasn’t happy about that, but he said nothing.

‘Joe Rudetsky has been here for nearly two weeks,’ said Fallon. ‘What have you found, Joe?’

‘I found eight more of those pillars with carvings,’ said Rudetsky. ‘I did like you said — I just cleared around them and didn’t go monkeying about.’ He stood up and went to the map on the wall. Most of it was blank but an area around the cenote had been inked in. ‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘I marked them all.’

‘I’ll have a look at them,’ said Fallon. ‘Gentlemen, Mr. Rudetsky is not an archeologist, but he is a skilled surveyor and he will be our cartographer.’ He waved his hand. ‘As the work goes on I hope this map will become filled in and cease to be terra incognita. Now, let’s get on with it.’

He set up five teams, each headed by an archeologist who would direct the Work, and to each team he gave an area. He had had the Vivero map from the mirror redrawn and used it as a rough guide. Then he turned to me. ‘You will be an exception, Jemmy,’ he said. ‘I know we aren’t going for detailed exploration at this time, but I think the cenote might provide some interesting finds. The cenote is yours.’ He grinned. ‘I think you’re very lucky to be able to splash about in cool water all day while the rest of us sweat in the heat.’

I thought it was a good idea, too, and winked at Katherine. Halstead caught that and favoured me with a stony glare. Then he turned to Fallon, and said, ‘Dr.edging would be quicker — as Thompson did at Chichén Itzá.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ said Fallon mildly. ‘Dr.edging tends to destroy pottery. It would be a pity not to use the advanced diving techniques that have been developed since Thompson’s day.’

This was so true archeologically that Halstead could not object further without looking a damned fool, and he said no more; but he spoke in a low tone to Katherine and shook his head violently several times. I had a good idea what he was telling her but I didn’t interrupt — I’d find out soon enough.

The discussion continued for another half hour and then the meeting broke up. I went along with Rudetsky who was going to show me where the diving gear was and he led me to a hut that had been erected right on the edge of the cenote. ‘I thought you’d like to be on the spot,’ he said.

Half of the hut was to be my living quarters and contained a bed with mosquito netting, a table and chair and a small desk. The other half of the hut was filled with gear. I looked at it and scratched my head. ‘I’d like to get that air compressor out of here,’ I said. ‘And all the big bottles. Can you build a shack by the side of the hut?’

‘Sure: that’s no trouble at all. I’ll have it fixed by tomorrow.’

We went outside and I looked at the cenote. It was roughly circular and over a hundred feet in diameter. Behind it, the ridge rose sharply in almost a cliff, but easing off in steepness towards the top where Vivero had placed the Chac temple. I wondered how deep it was. ‘I’d like a raft,’ I said. ‘From that we can drop a shot line and anchor it to the bottom — if we can get down that far. But that can wait until I’ve done a preliminary dive.’

‘You just tell me what you want and I’ll fix it,’ said Rudetsky. ‘That’s what I’m here for — I’m Mr. Fixit in person.’

He went away and I tossed a pebble into the dark pool. It plopped in the middle of the still water and sent out a widening circle of ripples which lapped briefly at the edge, thirty feet below. If what I had been told was correct, many people had been sacrificed in this cenote and I wondered what I’d find at the bottom.

I went back to the hut and found Katherine waiting for me. She was looking dubiously at the pile of equipment and seemed appalled at the size of it. ‘It’s not as bad as that,’ I said. ‘We’ll soon get it sorted out. Are you ready to go to work?’

She nodded. ‘I’m ready.’

‘All the air bottles are full,’ I said. ‘I saw to that at Camp One. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do a dive right now and leave the sorting until later. I wouldn’t mind a dip — it’s too bloody hot here.’

She unbuttoned the front of her shirt ‘All right. How deep do you think it is?’

‘I wouldn’t know — that’s what we’re going to find out. What’s the deepest you’ve ever gone?’

‘About sixty-five feet.’

‘This might be deeper,’ I said. ‘When we find out how deep I’ll make out a decompression table. You stick to it and you’ll be all right.’ I jerked my thumb at the recompression chamber. ‘I don’t want to use that unless I have to.’

I tested it. Rudetsky’s electricians had wired it up to the camp supply and it worked all right. I pumped it up to the test pressure of ten atmospheres and the needle held steady. It was highly unlikely that we’d ever have to use it at more than five atmospheres though.

When one is making a dive into an unknown hole in the ground you find you need an awful amount of ancillary equipment. There was the scuba gear itself — the harness, mask and flippers; a waterproof watch and compass on the left wrist — I had an idea it would be dark down there and the compass would serve for orientation: and a depth meter and a decompression meter on the right wrist. A knife went in the belt and a light mounted on the head — by the time we were through kitting ourselves out we looked like a couple of astronauts.

I checked Katherine’s gear and she checked mine, then we clumped heavily down the steps Rudetsky had cut in the sheer side of the cenote and down to the water’s edge. As I dipped my mask into the water, I said, ‘Just follow me, and keep your light on all the time. If you get into trouble and you can’t attract my attention make for the surface, but try to stay a few minutes at the ten-foot level if you can. But don’t worry — I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

‘I’m not worried,’ she said. ‘I’ve done this before.’

‘Not in these conditions,’ I said. ‘This isn’t like swimming in the Bahamas. Just play it safe, will you?’

‘I’ll stick close,’ she said.

I gave the mask a final swish in the water. ‘Paul didn’t seem too happy about this. Why did he want to dredge?’

She sighed in exasperation. ‘He still has the same stupid idea about you and me. It’s ridiculous, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I said flatly.

She laughed unexpectedly and indicated the bulky gear we were wearing. ‘Not much chance, is there?’

I grinned at the idea of underwater adultery as I put on the mask. ‘Let’s call on Chac,’ I said, and bit on the mouthpiece. We slipped into the water and swam slowly to the middle of the cenote. The water was clear but its depth made it dark. I dipped my head under and stared below and could see nothing, so I surfaced again and asked Katherine, by sign, if she was all right. She signalled that she was, so I signed that she was to go down. She dipped below the surface and vanished and I followed her, and just before I went down I saw Halstead standing on the edge of the cenote staring at me. I could have been wrong, though, because my mask was smeared with water — but I don’t think I was.

It wasn’t so bad at first. The water was clear and light filtered from the surface, but as we went deeper so the light failed rapidly. I had dived often off the coast of England and it is quite light at fifty feet, but diving into a comparatively small hole is different; the sheer sides of the cenote cut off the light which would otherwise have come in at an angle and the general illumination dropped off sharply.

I stopped at fifty feet and swam in a circle, checking to see if the compass was in order. Katherine followed, her flippers kicking lazily and the stream of bubbles from her mask sparkling in the light of the lamps like the fountaining eruption of a firework. She seemed all right, so I kicked off again and went down slowly, looking behind from time to time to see if she followed.

We hit bottom at sixty-five feet, but that was at the top of a slope which dropped into darkness at an angle of about twenty degrees. The bottom consisted of a slimy ooze which stirred as I casually handled it and rose into a smokescreen of sorts. I saw Katharine’s light shining through the haze dimly, and thought that this was going to make excavation difficult.

It was cold down there, too. The hot sun merely warmed the surface of the water and, since the warm water was less dense, it stayed at the top of the pool. The water at the bottom came from the pores in the limestone all about, and was never exposed to the sun. I was beginning to get chilled as it sucked the heat from my body.

I signalled to Katherine again, and cautiously we swam down the slope to find that it ended in a solid wall. That was the absolute bottom of the cenote and I checked it at ninety-five feet. We swam about for a while, exploring the slope. It was smooth and level and nothing broke its surface. The ooze of which it was composed was the accumulated detritus of hundreds of years of leaf droppings from the surface and anything that was to be found would have to be discovered by digging.

At last I signalled that we were going up, and we rose from the bottom of the slope up past the vertical wall of limestone. About thirty feet up from the bottom I discovered a sort of cave, an opening in the sheer wall. That deserved to be explored, but I didn’t feel like doing it then. I was cold and wanted to soak some hot sun into my bones.

We bad been underwater for half an hour and had been down nearly a hundred feet, and so we had to decompress on the way up. That meant a five-minute wait at twenty feet, and another five-minute wait at ten feet. When we began diving in earnest we’d have the shot line to hold on to at these decompression stops, but as it was we just circled in the water while I kept an eye on the decompression meter at my wrist.

We surfaced in the welcome sun and swam to the side. I heaved myself out and gave Katherine a hand, then spat out the mouthpiece and took off the mask. As I closed down the valve on the tank, I said, ‘What did you think of that?’

Katherine shivered. ‘You’re right; it’s not like the Bahamas. I didn’t think I could feel so cold in Quintana Roo.’

I took off the harness and felt the hot sun striking my back. ‘It seems bloody silly, but we’re going to have to wear thermal suits, otherwise we’ll freeze to death. What else struck you about it?’

She pondered. ‘The ooze down there is going to be bad. It’s dark enough without having to work in the muck we’re going to stir up.’

I nodded. ‘A suction pump is going to come in useful. The pump itself can be at the surface and we’ll pump the mud ashore — with a filter in the line to catch any small objects. That’ll cut down on the fog down there.’ Now that I’d seen the situation, ideas were beginning to come thick and fast. ‘We can drop our shot line from the raft, and anchor it to the bottom with a big boulder. We’re going to have to have two lines to the bottom, because one will have to be hauled up every day.’

She frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Come up to the hut and I’ll show you.’

We arrived at the hut to find Rudetsky and a couple of his men building a lean-to shelter against one end of it ‘Hi!’ he said. ‘Have a nice dip?’

‘Not bad. I’d like that raft now if you can do it.’

‘How big?’

‘Say, ten feet square.’

‘Nothing to it’ he said promptly. ‘Four empty oil drums and some of that lumber we’re cutting will make a dandy raft. Will you be using it in the evenings?’

‘It’s not very likely,’ I said.

‘Then you won’t mind if the boys use it as a diving raft. It’s nice to have a swim and cool off nights.’

I grinned. ‘It’s a deal.’

He pointed to the air compressor. ‘Will that be all right just there?’

‘That’s fine. Look, can you lead that exhaust pipe away — as far away from the intake of the air pump as possible. Carbon monoxide and diving don’t go together.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll get another length of hose and lead it round the other side of the hut.’

I joined Katherine in the hut and dug out my tattered copy of the Admiralty diving tables. ‘Now I’ll tell you why we have to have two lines to the bottom,’ I said. I sat down at the table and she joined me, rubbing her hair with a towel. ‘We’re going down about a hundred feet and we want to spend as much time as possible on the bottom. Right?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Say we spend two hours on the bottom — that means several decompression stops on the way up. Five minutes at fifty feet, ten at forty feet, thirty at thirty feet, forty at twenty feet and fifty at ten feet — a total of... er... one hundred and thirty-five minutes — two and a quarter hours. It’s going to be a bit of a bind just sitting around at these various levels, but it’s got to be done. Besides the weighted shot rope from the raft, we’ll have to have another with slings fitted at the various levels to sit in, and with air bottles attached, because your harness bottles will never hold enough. And the whole lot will have to be pulled up every day to replenish the bottles.’

‘I’ve never done this kind of thing before,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been so deep nor stayed so long. I hadn’t thought of decompression.’

‘You’d better start thinking now,’ I said grimly. ‘One slip-up and you’ll get the bends. Have you ever seen that happen to anyone?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Fizzy blood doesn’t do you any good. Apart from being terrifyingly painful, once a nitrogen embolism gets to the heart you’re knocking at the Pearly Gates.’

‘But it’s so long,’ she complained. ‘What do you do sitting at ten feet for nearly an hour?’

‘I haven’t done this too often myself,’ I confessed. ‘But I’ve used it as an opportunity to compose dirty limericks.’ I looked across at the recompression chamber. ‘I’d like to have that thing a bit nearer the scene of the accident — maybe on the raft. I’ll see what Rudetsky can do.’

IV

The work went on, week after week, and I nearly forgot about Gatt. We were in radio contact with Camp One which relayed messages from Pat Harris and everything seemed to be calm. Gatt had gone back to Mexico City and was living among the fleshpots, apparently without a care in the world, although his band of thugs was still quartered in Mérida. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I really didn’t have time to think about it because the diving programme filled all my time. I kept half an eye on Halstead and found him to be working even harder than I was, which pleased Fallon mightily.

Every day discoveries were made — astonishing discoveries. This was indeed Uaxuanoc. Fallon’s teams uncovered building after building — palaces, temples, games arenas and a few unidentifiable structures, one of which he thought was an astronomical observatory. Around the cenote was a ring of stelae — twenty-four of them — and there was another line of them right through the centre of the city. With clicking camera and busy pen Fallon filled book after book with data.

Although no one was trades-union inclined, one day in every week was a rest day on which the boffins usually caught up with their paper work while Rudetsky’s men skylarked about in the cenote. Because safe diving was impossible under those conditions I used the free day to rest and to drink a little more beer than was safe during the working week.

On one of those days Fallon took me over the site to show me what had been uncovered. He pointed to a low hill which had been denuded of its vegetation. ‘That’s where Vivero nearly met his end,’ he said. ‘That’s the Temple of Kukulkán — you can see where we’re uncovering the steps at the front.’

It was a bit hard to believe. ‘All that hill?’

‘All of it. It’s one big building. In fact, we’re standing on a part of it right now.’

I looked down and scuffled the ground with my foot. It didn’t look any different from any other ground — there was just thin layer of humus. Fallon said, ‘The Mayas had a habit of building on platforms. Their huts were built on platforms to raise them from the ground, and when they built larger structures they carried on the same idea. We’re standing on a platform now, but it’s so big you don’t realize it.’

I looked at the ground stretching levelly to the hill which was the Temple of Kukulkán. ‘How big?’

Fallon grinned cheerfully. ‘Rudetsky went around it with a theodolite and transit. He reckons it’s fifteen acres and averages a hundred and thirty feet high. It’s an artificial acropolis — 90 million cubic feet in volume and containing about six and a half million tons of material.’ He produced his pipe. ‘There’s one something like it at Copán, but not quite as big.’

‘Hell’s teeth!’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize it would be anything like this.’

Fallon struck a match. ‘The Mayas...’ puff — puff ‘...were an...’ puff ‘...industrious crowd.’ He looked into the bowl of his pipe critically. ‘Come and have a closer look at the temple.’

We walked over to the hill and looked up at the partly excavated stairway. The stairs were about fifty feet wide. Fallon pointed upwards with the stem of his pipe. ‘I thought I’d find something up there at the top, so I did a bit of digging, and I found it all right. You might be interested.’

Climbing the hill was a heavy pull because it was very steep. Imagine an Egyptian pyramid covered with a thin layer of earth and one gets the idea. Fallon didn’t seem unduly put out by the exertion, despite his age, and at the top he pointed. ‘The edge of the stairway will come there — and that’s where I dug.’

I strolled over to the pit which was marked by the heap of detritus about it, and saw that Fallon had uncovered a fearsome head, open-mouthed and sharp-toothed, with the lips drawn back in a snarl of anger. ‘The Feathered Serpent,’ he said softly. ‘The symbol of Kukulkán.’ He swept his arm towards a wall of earth behind. ‘And that’s the temple itself — where the sacrifices were made.’

I looked at it and thought of Vivero brought before the priests on this spot, and shivering in his shoes for fear he’d have the heart plucked out of him. It was a grim thought.

Fallon said objectively, ‘I hope the roof hasn’t collapsed; it would be nice to find it intact.’

I sat down on a convenient tree stump and looked over the site of the city. About a fifth of it had been cleared, according to Fallon, but that was just the vegetation. There were great mounds, like the one we were on then, waiting to be excavated. I said, ‘How long do you think it will take? When will we see what it was really like?’

‘Come back in twenty years,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll get a fair idea.’

‘So long?’

‘You can’t hurry a thing like this. Besides, we won’t excavate it all. We must leave something for the next generation — they might have better methods and find things that we would miss. I don’t intend uncovering more than half the city.’

I looked at Fallon thoughtfully. This was a man of sixty who was quite willing to start something he knew he would never finish. Perhaps it was because he habitually thought in terms of centuries, of thousands of years, that he attained a cosmic viewpoint. He was very different from Halstead.

He said a little sadly, ‘The human lifespan is so short, and man’s monuments outlast him generation after generation, more enduring than man himself. Shelley knew about that, and about man’s vanity. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”’ He waved his hand at the city. ‘But do we despair when we see this? I know that I don’t. I regard it as the glory of short-lived men.’ He held out his hands before him, gnarled and blue-veined and trembling a little. ‘It’s a great pity that this flesh should rot so soon.’

His conversation was becoming too macabre for my taste, so I changed the subject. ‘Have you identified the King’s Palace yet?’

He smiled. ‘Still hoping for plated walls of gold?’ He shook his head. ‘Vivero was mixed up, as usual. The Mayas didn’t have kings, in the sense that we know them, but there was an hereditary chief among them called Halach uinic whom I suppose Vivero called king. Then there was the nacom, the war chief, who was elected for three years. The priesthood was hereditary, too. I doubt if the Halach uinic would have a palace, but we have found what we think is one of the main administrative buildings.’ He pointed to another mound. ‘That’s it.’

It was certainly big, but disappointing. To me it was just another hill and it took a great deal of imagination to create a building in the mind’s eye. Fallon said tolerantly, ‘It isn’t easy, I know. It takes a deal of experience to see it for what it is. But it’s likely that Vivero was taken there for the judgement of the Halach uinic. He was also the chief priest but that was over Vivero’s head — he hadn’t read Frazer’s Golden Bough.’

Neither had I, so I was as wise as Vivero. Fallon said. ‘The next step is to get rid of these tree boles.’ He kicked gently at the one on which I was sitting.

‘What do you do? Blast them out?’

He looked shocked. ‘My God, no! We burn them, roots and all. Fortunately the rain forest trees are shallow-rooted — you can see that much of the root system on this platform is above ground. When we’ve done that there is a system of tubes in the structure where the roots were, and we fill those with cement to bind the budding together. We don’t want it falling down at this late stage.’

‘Have you come across the thing Vivero was so excited about? The golden sign — whatever it was?’

He wagged his head doubtfully. ‘No — and we may never do so. I think that Vivero — after twelve years as a captive — may have been a little bit nuts. Religious mania, you know. He could have had a hallucination.’

I said, ‘Judging by today’s standards any sixteenth-century Spaniard might be said to have had religious mania. To liquidate whole civilizations just because of a difference of opinion about God isn’t a mark of sanity.’

Fallon cocked an eye at me. ‘So you think sanity is comparative? Perhaps you’re right; perhaps our present wars will be looked on, in the future, as an indication of warped minds. Certainly the prospect of an atomic war isn’t a particularly sane concept.’

I thought of Vivero, unhappy and with his conscience tearing him to bits because he was too afraid to convert the heathen to Christianity. And yet he was quite prepared to counsel his sons in the best ways of killing the heathen, even though he admitted that the methods he advised weren’t Christian. His attitude reminded me of Mr. Puckle, the inventor of the first machine-gun, which was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Turks.

I said, ‘Where did Vivero get the gold to make the mirrors? You said there was very little gold here.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ contradicted Fallon. ‘I said it had been accumulated over the centuries. There was probably quite a bit of gold here in one way and another, and a goldsmith can steal quite a lot over a period of twelve years. Besides, the mirrors aren’t pure gold, they’re tumbaga — that’s a mixture of gold, silver and copper, and quite a lot of copper, too. The Spaniards were always talking about the red gold of the Indies, and it was copper that gave it the colour.’

He knocked his pipe out. ‘I suppose I’d better get back to Rudetsky’s map and plot out next week’s work schedule.’ He paused. ‘By the way, Rudetsky tells me that he’s seen a few chicleros in the forest. I’ve given instructions that everyone must stay in camp and not go wandering about. That includes you.’

That brought me back to the twentieth century with a bang. I went back to camp and sent a message to Pat Harris via the radio at Camp One to inform him of this latest development. It was all I could do.

V

Fallon was a bit disappointed by my diving programme. ‘Only two hours a day,’ he said in disgust.

So I had to put him through a crash course of biophysics as it relates to diving. The main problem, of course, is the nitrogen. We were diving at a depth of about a hundred feet, and the absolute pressure at the depth is four atmospheres — about sixty pounds a square inch. This doesn’t make any difference to breathing because the demand valve admits air to the lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water, and so there is no danger of being crushed by the difference of pressure.

The trouble comes with the fact that with every breath you’re taking four times as much of everything. The body can cope quite handily with the increase of oxygen, but the extra nitrogen is handled by being dissolved in the blood and stored in the tissues. If the pressure is brought back to normal suddenly the nitrogen is released quickly in the form of bubbles in the bloodstream — one’s blood literally boils — a quick way to the grave.

And so one reduces the pressure slowly by coming to the surface very carefully and with many stops, all carefully calculated by Admiralty doctors, so that the stored nitrogen is released slowly and at a controlled safe rate.

‘All right,’ said Fallon impatiently. ‘I understand that. But if you spend two hours on the bottom, and about the same time coming up, that’s only half a day’s work. You should be able to do a dive in the morning and another in the afternoon.’

‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘When you step out of the water, the body is still saturated with nitrogen at normal atmospheric pressure, and it takes at least six hours to be eliminated from the system. I’m sorry, but we can do only one dive a day.’

And he had to be satisfied with that.

The raft Rudetsky made proved a godsend. Instead of my original idea of hanging small air bottles at each decompression level, we dropped a pipe which plugged directly into the demand valve on the harness and was fed from big air bottles on the raft itself. And I explored the cave in the cenote wall at the seventy-foot level. It was quite large and shaped like an inverted sack and it occurred to me to fill it full of air and drive the water from it. A hose dropped from the air pump on the raft soon did the job, and it seemed odd to be able to take off the mask and breathe normally so deep below the surface. Of course, the air in the cave was at the same pressure as the water at that depth and so it would not help in decompression, but if either Katherine or myself got into trouble the cave could be a temporary shelter with an adequate air supply. I hung a light outside the entrance and put another inside.

Fallon stopped complaining when he saw what we began to bring up. There was an enormous amount of silt to be cleared first, but we did that with a suction pump, and the first thing I found was a skull, which gave me a gruesome feeling.

In the days that followed we sent up many objects — masks in copper and gold, cups, bells, many items of jewellery such as pendants, bracelets, rings both for finger and ear, necklace beads, and ornamental buttons of gold and jade. There were also ceremonial hatchets of flint and obsidian, wooden spear-throwers which had been protected from decay by the heavy overlay of silt, and no less than eighteen plates like that shown to me by Fallon in Mexico City.

The cream of the collection was a small statuette of gold, about six inches high, the figure of a young Mayan girl. Fallon carefully cleaned it, then stood it on his desk and regarded it with a puzzled air. ‘The subject is Mayan,’ he said. ‘But the execution certainly isn’t — they didn’t work in this style. But it’s a Mayan girl, all right. Look at that profile.’

Katherine picked it up. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ She hesitated. ‘Could this be the statue Vivero made which so impressed the Mayan priests?’

‘Good God!’ said Fallon in astonishment. ‘It could be — but that would be a hell of a coincidence.’

‘Why should it be a coincidence?’ I asked, I waved my hand at the wealth of treasure stacked on the shelves. ‘All these things were sacrificial objects, weren’t they? The Mayas gave to Chac their most valued possessions. I don’t think it unlikely that Vivero’s statue could be such a sacrifice.’

Fallon examined it again. ‘It has been cast,’ he admitted. ‘And that wasn’t a Mayan technique. Maybe it is the work of Vivero, but it might not be the statue he wrote about. He probably made more of them.’

‘I’d like to think it is the first one,’ said Katherine.

I looked at the rows of gleaming objects on the shelves. ‘How much is all this worth?’ I asked Fallon. ‘What will it bring on the open market?’

‘It won’t be offered,’ said Fallon grimly. ‘The Mexican Government has something to say about that — and so do I.’

‘But assuming it did appear on the open market — or a black market. How much would this lot be worth?’

Fallon pondered. ‘Were it to be smuggled out of the country and put in the hands of a disreputable dealer — a man such as Gerryson, for instance — he could dispose of it, over a period of time, for, say, a million and a half dollars.’

I caught my breath. We were not halfway through in the cenote and there was still much to be found. Every day we were finding more objects and the rate of discovery was consistently increasing as we delved deeper into the silt. By Fallon’s measurement the total value of the finds in the cenote could be as much as four million dollars — maybe even five million.

I said softly, ‘No wonder Gatt is interested. And you were wondering why, for God’s sake!’

‘I was thinking of finds in the ordinary course of excavation,’ said Fallon. ‘Objects of gold on the surface will have been dispersed long ago, and there’ll be very little to be found. And I was thinking of Gatt as being deceived by Vivero’s poppycock in his letter. I certainly didn’t expect the cenote to be so fruitful.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I thought of Gatt as being interested in gold for the sake of gold — an ordinary treasure hunter.’ He flapped his hand at the shelves. ‘The intrinsic value of the gold in that lot isn’t more than fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.’

‘But we know Gatt isn’t like that,’ I said. ‘What did Harris call him? An educated hood. He isn’t the kind of stupid thief who’ll be likely to melt the stuff down; he knows its antiquarian value, and he’ll know how to get rid of it. Harris has already traced a link between Gatt and Gerryson, and you’ve just said that Gerryson can sell it unobtrusively. My advice is to get the stuff out of here and into the biggest bank vault you can find in Mexico City.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ said Fallon shortly. ‘I’ll arrange it. And we must let the Mexican authorities know the extent of our discoveries here.’

VI

The season was coming to an end. The rains would soon be breaking and work on the site would be impossible. I daresay it wouldn’t have made any difference to my own work in the cenote — you can’t get wetter than wet — but we could see that the site would inevitably become a churned-up sea of mud if any excavations were attempted in the wet season, so Fallon reluctantly decided to pack it in.

This meant a mass evacuation back to Camp One. Rudetsky looked worriedly at all the equipment that had to be transported, but Fallon was oddly casual about it. ‘Leave it here,’ he said carelessly. ‘We’ll need it next season.’

Rudetsky fumed about it to me. ‘There won’t be a goddamn thing left next season,’ he said passionately. ‘Those chiclero vultures will clean the lot out.’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I said. ‘Fallon can afford to replace it.’

But it offended Rudetsky’s frugal soul and he went to great lengths to cocoon the generators and pumps against the weather in the hopes that perhaps the chicleros would not loot the camp. ‘I’m wasting my time,’ he said gloomily as he ordered the windows of the huts to be boarded up. ‘But, goddamn it, I gotta go through the motions!’

So we evacuated Uaxuanoc: The big helicopter came and went, taking with it the men who had uncovered the city. The four young archeologists went after taking their leave of Fallon. They were bubbling over with enthusiasm and promised fervently to return the following season when the real work of digging into the buildings was to begin. Fallon, the father figure, smiled upon them paternally and waved them goodbye, then went back to his work with a curiously grave expression on his face.

He was not taking any part in the work of the evacuation and refused to make decisions about anything, so Rudetsky tended to come to me for answers. I did what I thought was right, and wondered what was the matter with Fallon. He had withdrawn into the hut where the finds were lined up on the shelves and spent his time painstakingly cleaning them and making copious notes. He refused to be disturbed and neither would he allow the precious objects to be parted from him. ‘They’ll go when I go,’ he said. ‘Carry on with the rest of it and leave me alone.’

Finally the time came for us all to go. The camp was closed down but for three or four huts and all that was left would just make a nice load for the two helicopters. I was walking to Fallon’s hut to announce the fact when Rudetsky came up at a dead run. ‘Come to the radio shack,’ he said breathlessly. ‘There’s something funny going on at Camp One.’

I went with him and listened to the tale of woe. They’d had a fire and the big helicopter was burned up — completely destroyed. ‘Anyone hurt?’ barked Rudetsky.

According to the tinny voice issuing waveringly from the loudspeaker no one had been seriously injured; a couple of minor burns was all. But the helicopter was a write-off.

Rudetsky snorted. ‘How in hell did it happen?’

The voice wavered into nothingness and came back again, hardly more strongly. ‘...don’t know... just happened...’

‘It just happened,’ said Rudetsky in disgust.

I said, ‘What’s the matter with that transmitter? It doesn’t seem to have any power.’

‘What’s the matter with your transmitter?’ said Rudetsky into the microphone. Turn up the juice.’

‘I receive you loud and clear,’ said the voice weakly. ‘Can’t you hear me?’

‘You’re damned right we can’t,’ said Rudetsky. ‘Do something about it.’

The transmission came up a little more strongly. ‘We’ve got everyone out of here and back to Mexico City. There are only three of us left here — but Mr. Harris says there’s something wrong with the jet.’

I felt a little prickling feeling at the nape of my neck, and leaned forward over Rudetsky’s shoulder to say into the microphone, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘...doesn’t know... grounded... wrong registration... can’t come until...’ The transmission was again becoming weaker and hardly made sense. Suddenly it cut off altogether and there was not even the hiss of a carrier wave. Rudetsky fiddled with the receiver but could not raise Camp One again.

He turned to me and said, ‘They’re off the air completely.’

‘Try to raise Mexico City,’ I said.

He grimaced. ‘I’ll try, but I don’t think there’s a hope in hell. This little box don’t have the power.’

He twiddled his knobs and I thought about what had happened. The big transport helicopter was destroyed, the jet was grounded in Mexico City for some mysterious reason and Camp One had gone off the air. It added up to one thing — isolation — and I didn’t like it one little bit. I looked speculatively across the clearing towards the hangar where Rider was polishing up his chopper as usual. At least we had the other helicopter.

Rudetsky gave up at last. ‘Nothing doing,’ he said, and looked at his watch. ‘That was Camp One’s last transmission of the day. If they fix up their transmitter they’ll be on the air again as usual at eight tomorrow morning. There’s nothing we can do until then.’

He didn’t seem, unduly worried, but he didn’t know what I knew. He didn’t know about Jack Gatt. I said, ‘All right; we’ll wait until then. I’ll tell Fallon what’s happened.’

That proved to be harder than I anticipated. He was totally wrapped up in his work, brooding over a golden plate and trying to date it while he muttered a spate of Mayan numbers. I tried to tell him what had happened but he said irritably, ‘It doesn’t sound much to me. They’ll be on the air tomorrow with a full explanation. Now go away and don’t worry me about it.’

So I went away and did a bit of brooding on my own. I thought of talking about it to Halstead but the memory of what Pat Harris had said stopped me; and I didn’t say anything to Katherine because I didn’t want to scare her, nor did I want her to pass anything on to her husband. At last I went to see Rider. ‘Is your chopper ready for work?’ I asked.

He looked surprised and a little offended. ‘It’s always ready,’ he said shortly.

‘We may need it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Get ready for an early start.’

VII

That night we had a fire — in the radio shack!

I woke up to hear distant shouts and then the closer thudding of boots on the hard ground as someone ran by outside the hut. I got up and went to see what was happening and found Rudetsky in the shack beating out the last of the flames. I sniffed the air. ‘Did you keep petrol in here?’

‘No!’ he grunted. ‘We had visitors. A couple of those goddamn chicleros got in here before we chased them off.’ He looked at the charred remains of the transmitter. ‘Now why in hell would they want to do that?’

I could have told him but I didn’t. It was something else to be figured into the addition which meant isolation. Has anything else been sabotaged?’ I asked.

‘Not that I know of,’ he said.

It was an hour before dawn. ‘I’m going down to Camp One,’ I said. ‘I want to know what’s happened down there.’

Rudetsky looked at me closely. ‘Expecting to find trouble?’ He waved his hand. ‘Like this?’

‘I might be,’ I admitted. ‘There may be trouble here, too. Keep everyone in camp while I’m away. And don’t take any back-chat from Halstead; if he makes trouble you know what to do about it.’

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Rudetsky feelingly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what’s really going on?’

‘Ask Fallon,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story and I have no time now. I’m going to dig out Rider.’

I had a bite to eat and then convinced Rider he had to take me to Camp One. He was a bit uncertain about it, but since Fallon had apparently abdicated all responsibility and because I was backed up by Rudetsky he eventually gave way and we were ready for takeoff just as the sun rose. Katherine came to see me off, and I leaned down and said, ‘Stick close to the camp and don’t move away. I’ll be back before long.’

‘All right,’ she promised.

Halstead came into view from somewhere behind the helicopter and joined her. ‘Are you speeding the hero?’ he asked in his usual nasty way. He had been investigating the Temple of Yum Chac above the cenote and was chafing to really dig into it instead of merely uncovering the surface, but Fallon wouldn’t let him. The finds Katherine and I had been making in the cenote had put his nose out of joint. It irked him that non-professionals were apparently scooping the pool — to make a bad pun — and he was irritable about it, even to the point of picking quarrels with his wife.

He pulled her away from the helicopter forcibly, and Rider looked at me and shrugged. ‘We might as well take off,’ he said. I nodded, and he fiddled with the controls and up we went.

I spoke to Rider and he merely grinned and indicated the intercom earphones, so I put them on, and said into the microphone ‘Circle around the site for a bit, will you? I want to see what it looks like from the air.’

‘Okay,’ he said, and we cast around in a wide sweep over Uaxuanoc. It actually looked like a city from the air, at least the part that had been cleared did. I could see quite clearly the huge platform on which was built the Temple of Kukulkán and the building which Fallon referred to jocularly as ‘City Hall’. And there was the outline of what seemed to be another big platform to the east along the ridge, but that had only been partially uncovered. On the hill above the cenote Halstead had really been working hard and the Temple of Yum Chac was unmistakable for what it was — not just a mound of earth, but a huge pyramid of masonry with, a pillared hall surmounting it.

We made three sweeps over the city, then I said. ‘Thanks, Harry; we’d better be getting on. Do you mind keeping low — I’d like to take a closer look at the forest.’

‘I don’t mind, as long as you don’t want to fly too low. I’ll keep the speed down so you can really see.’

We headed east at a height of about three hundred feet and at not more man sixty miles an hour. The forest unreeled below, a green wilderness with the crowns of trees victorious in their fight for light spreading a hundred and sixty feet and more from the ground. Those crowns formed scattered islands against the lower mass of solid green, and nowhere was the ground to be seen.

‘I’d rather fly than walk,’ I said.

Harry laughed. ‘I’d be scared to death down there. Did you hear those goddamn howler monkeys the other night? It sounded as though some poor guy was having his throat cut — slowly.’

‘The howlers wouldn’t worry me,’ I said. ‘They just make a noise, nerve-racking though it is. The snakes and pumas would worry me more.’

‘And the chicleros,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve been hearing some funny stories about those guys. Just as soon kill a man as spit from what I hear.’ He looked down at the forest. ‘Christ what a place to work in! No wonder the chicleros are tough. If I was working down there I wouldn’t give a damn if I lived or died — or if anyone else did, either.’

We crossed a part of the forest that was subtly different from the rest. I said, ‘What happened here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harry, and sounded as puzzled as I was. ‘That tree looks dead. Let’s have a closer view.’

He manipulated the controls, and the chopper slowed and wheeled around the treetop. It was one of the big ones whose crown had broken free of the rest to spread luxuriantly in the upper air, but it was definitely leafless and dead, and there were other dead trees all about. ‘I think I get it,’ he said. ‘Something has happened here, probably a tornado. The trees have been uprooted, but they’re so damned close packed they can’t fall, so they’ve just died where they are. What a hell of a place — you gotta die standing up!’

We rose and continued on course. Harry said, ‘It must have been a tornado: the dead trees are in a straight line. The tornado must have cut a swathe right through. It’s too localized to have been a hurricane — that would have smashed trees over a wider area.’

‘Do they have hurricanes here?’

‘Christ, yes! There’s one cutting up ructions in the Caribbean right now. I’ve been getting weather reports on it just in case it decides to take a swing this way. It’s not likely, though.’

The helicopter lurched in the air suddenly and he swore. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’ He was rapidly checking his instruments. After a while he said, ‘Everything seems okay.’

No sooner had he said it than there was a hell of a bang from astern and the whole fuselage swung around violently. The centrifugal force threw me against the side of the cockpit and I was pinned there, while Harry juggled frantically with the controls.

The whole world was going around in a cock-eyed spin; the horizon rose and fell alarmingly and the forest was suddenly very close — too damned close. ‘Hold on!’ yelled Harry, and slammed at switches on the instrument panel.

The noise of the engine suddenly stopped, but we continued to spin. I saw the top of a tree athwart our crazy path and knew we were going to crash. The next thing — and last thing — I heard was a great crackling noise ending in a smash. I was thrown forward and my head connected violently with a metal bar.

And that was all I remember.