The Martian Sentence, page 2
Manwaring, trying to think of a way to move the crowd along, noticed the embroidery on the front of the man’s shirt. The image on the pocket consisted of the classic alien head with lettering circling the three-inch outline. The letters read Area 51 Research Association.
The man was a truther, Manwaring thought. Knowing that any response that did not agree with the man’s beliefs would be a waste of breath, he opted not to continue their discussion.
“Well, I know everybody had a long drive here, and there is more to see, so please look around and ask my field crew if you have any questions. You have ten minutes before you need to return to your motor coach, where the driver will take you to the main ruins at Copán.”
He turned, removed his glasses, and pulled a bandana from his pants pocket. Starting with his cheeks, he wiped backward to the nape of his neck and under his ponytail, as he stepped toward the mound with the intent of checking in with the crew on top, but the man with the Area 51 shirt left the dispersing crowd and stopped him.
“I know you said the Mayans built all this stuff themselves,” the truther continued, “but how do you explain the Nazca Lines? They weren’t discovered until the 1950s. When aircraft started flying over the high plains of Peru. There was no way anybody could have laid out those lines unless the ancient Incas had ariel-borne supervisors.”
Manwaring stopped and turned to face the man. The crowd behind them split up with half of the group, including the bald fat man, woman, and girl who asked the questions, walking behind the mound to see what artifacts his students were bagging. At the same time, the three teenagers wearing the earbuds walked the opposite way toward the tree shading the nearby limestone stela.
The ornately carved stone monument appeared just as weather-beaten as everything else within the enclosure and was in danger of being tilted over because of the exposed root growing under it. And it was just like the hundreds of other such stelae spread across the region, with most serving as portrait monuments of Mayan leaders and their gods and goddesses. Sculptors worked on at least one side of a stela, sometimes all four sides, and carved animals, figures, and hieroglyphic text; each side formed part of a single composition or honorific motif. In the center of one side would be a depiction of the human, or deity, the monument was meant to honor. This monument honored a being known as Huracán, or One-legged—one of the three gods involved in all three attempts to create humanity—and fashioned during the Mayan post-classic period.
Answering the truther’s question, Manwaring kept an eye on the teenagers, Manwaring saw that something on the lower half of the monument caught their attention. They started pointing at the stela and talking excitedly.
“Experimental archaeologists have demonstrated that the people there constructed hot-air balloons out of reeds and animal skins to elevate the supervisors and observers to oversee the construction of those glyphs. The supervisors could even have stood on the slopes of the nearby foothills.”
“But how do you explain Teotihuacán? It’s known as the Cape Canaveral of Mesoamerica for a reason, and... ”
Before the man could finish, Manwaring shouted, “Oy! Hang on!”
The man with the Area 51 polo shirt jumped to the side as Manwaring lurched past him. The British archaeologist quickly made his way toward the teenagers. Two of them remained standing, while the third busied himself, bent over, and picked at the stela with something in his hand. They hadn’t heard him because of their earbuds. Manwaring, almost running by now, reached the young man and slapped his hand away from the face of the stone monument.
Startled, the pimply faced young man jerked back while dropping a cruise-ship pass card from his hand. “Hey, man!”
“What in the bloody hell are you doing? What made you think you could bugger up an artifact with a keycard?”
“It’s cool, man!” the teenager stated with a dismissive, and angered, tone. He still wore his buds in his ears. “We’re just poking around.” He looked back at the face of the stela. “I noticed the outline of a secret compartment under that figure on the stomach. We play Beowulf’s Creed, and in the fourth game, they have hidden compartments in their statues, too.”
Manwaring said brusquely through clenched teeth, “This isn’t a treasure-hunting video game. This stela is hundreds of years old. And it has nothing to do with video games. Now, get back with the rest of your lot.”
The young man snorted while bending over to snatch up his pass card. He muttered asshole as he straightened up.
#
Manwaring ignored the comment while the teenagers stepped past him to join the tourists already queuing up at the motor coach’s door.
Taking a cleansing breath, Manwaring returned his attention to the stela.
Just like others, incisions, and intricate carvings of all kinds of animals and Mayan writing covered the surface of this monument. Having spent time last season documenting the monument, he knew it was meant to honor Huracán. The carved relief revealed a man with an elongated skull and a high forehead, a large hooked nose, sleepy eyes, and enormous hooped earrings that hung from his ears. The body was short in length and breadth, and at the waist of the body, the deity’s only leg was bent in front of him as if he were sitting. His hands came together in the center of his abdomen, holding a cup against his stomach.
Manwaring squatted to inspect the area the teen had been picking at—the container held in Huracán’s hands. He had documented this stela before, and drew sketches of it in his field book, but did they find something he missed? After all, crowded carvings covered the stela’s four sides, so missing something could be excused. Adjusting the glasses on the bridge of his nose to get a better look, he reinspected the cup that was used for collecting blood during self-sacrifice. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he peered under the cup and planted his eyes an outline. One shaped like a slice of sandwich bread. In the center, the carving of an animal, half jaguar half reptile, with a pointy snout protruded from the stone. Though he had documented that section of the stela before he realized today, something different.
Mesoamerican sculptors used a variety of materials such as basalt or obsidian to fashion tools such as chisels. Tools sculptors used to create their carvings in stone blocks but, after today’s attention, Manwaring noticed that the incision creating the outline under the blood-collecting cup appeared to be slightly different from other carvings covering the stela’s surfaces.
For unknown reasons, Manwaring found himself stuck on that oddity, and after about thirty seconds, it struck him. Someone had used something other than stone chisels to create that outline.
Intrigued about why he hadn’t seen it before, he reached down for the trowel holstered to his hip. Pulling it out of the leather holster, he flicked the edge of the tip with his thumb and leaned in to get a better look at the outline. Yes, indeed, somebody had used something other than the tools available to Mayan stone smiths at the time. Using the tip of the trowel, just like the teenager did with his cruise-ship pass card, Manwaring traced the outline and, as grit fell away, his heart started to pound forcibly against the inside of his chest. The sound of metal scraping against the stone added to the mystery before him.
He took a deep breath and blew on the incision. Flecks of stone flew back against his glasses. He removed the glasses from his face and cleaned them with his damp handkerchief. Just as he put his glasses back in place, he heard a voice.
“Geoff, it’s half past one, and I told the crew to start wrapping up for the day.”
Manwaring jerked his head so hard his ponytail almost slapped his cheek. He saw Bethany Rogers, the project’s assistant principal investigator. In her late twenties, with a slight build, freckles, and bobbed blond hair poking out from under the brim of her straw cowboy hat, she wore the same work clothing as everybody else and carried her field notebook in her hand. Straggling tourists were boarding the motor coach behind Bethany. One of his students backed up their white van to another breach in the enclosure’s wall. With the engine and AC running, he left the vehicle in park to open the rear doors.
“It’s that time already?” he said, glancing at his wristwatch.
While the student made the van ready to receive their equipment, the other students fell into a familiar routine. The students at the picnic table in the rear of the complex started carrying black plastic file boxes and Tupperware totes to the van. Others folded the tripod screening stations and began to carry them, and their shovels, screens, and five-gallon buckets to an aluminum tool shed hidden behind the dirt-covered central building. The mapping crew on top of the mound reeled in the measuring tape, leaving behind pin flags pushed into the dirt, and gingerly stepped down the side of the mound. Lastly, two security guards from the Honduran Tourism Bureau helped a female student with carrying her daypack and empty plastic bucket.
“Right,” Manwaring said, standing to reach into his pant pocket for his field book. “Go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute. I am thinking about opening a new unit over here. I’m going to take some notes.”
“Right,” Bethany said as she turned and walked toward her crew.
Leaving Manwaring to his notetaking, Bethany thought about what had just happened. Manwaring had a reputation for being standoffish or distant, so nobody at this field school paid any attention to his demeanor; however, she noticed something different about him just now. But what that was, she didn’t know. When she reached the van, she threw her field book into a tote already half-filled with other field books.
Alone again, Manwaring returned to the incision and pushed against the area with the palm of his hand. It held steady. Was the incision just the start of another feature that the sculptors hadn’t finished?
He pinched the protruding stub and tweaked it. Still, it didn’t move. After taking his hand away, he thought for a moment until it hit him. “Impossible!”
Looking over his shoulder, he saw the last tourist disappear inside the motor coach. He also saw that Bethany and the students were busy closing the site for the day. Returning his attention to The Beast, he stuck his index and middle fingers up under its protruding nostrils. His fingers fit perfectly into two small holes. Like pulling out a dresser drawer, he tugged gingerly at first but then harder when he felt no movement. After two more tugs, he felt the movement. He tugged even harder now, and without warning, the plate gave way. Holding one hand in front of his face, he pulled the two-inch-thick stone cover off his fingers with the other hand and placed it gently on the grass next to him. With an excitement he hadn’t felt in years, he reached down to his belt for his mini Maglite. His twitching thumb pushed the rubber-covered button at the end as he pointed it into the chamber. The interior of the chamber was square and slightly smaller than the thick cover plate, and the beam of light gleaned off something shiny and round. With his other hand, he reached into the hole. His hand grabbed a cylinder. He pulled it out and hefted a gold-colored cylinder in his hand. It was the length of his forearm and hand, covered with lines of inscriptions running lengthwise, and sealed at both ends with bulbous caps.
Despite his years of being a Mesoamerican archaeologist with all kinds of finds under his belt, he slowly rose to his feet, awestruck. But as he stood up straight, he quickly recovered his senses. He looked over his shoulder again.
Bethany was still busy supervising the students who were now placing sheets of black plastic over the square units dug into the ground at the base of the mound and securing the plastic in place with sandbags around the edges. The Honduran guards were also busy helping the blond-haired female student with her sandbags.
Seeing everybody’s attention was elsewhere, Manwaring dropped the cylinder behind a bush growing out of a tree stump next to him and turned to inspect the ground behind him, pretending to scout out an area to lay out a new excavation unit.
Normally, on Saturdays, he allowed his staff to work until the scheduled cruise-ship tourist groups arrived from Puerto Cortés. Once the tourists left, his staff wrapped up their work and turned in their field books for Manwaring’s weekly review so that they could enjoy a short night in the port city. Their Sunday routine included sleeping in at their rented house in Copán. They used the day to rest up and to tend to their dig kits and field gear before Monday. The trip to town also gave Bethany time to pick up her phoned-ahead supply list of items not found in the mountain city. Or to have access to a more reliable FedEx office in case they needed to ship something back to the university. But after seeing what he’s just held in his hand, he could not go to the coast this Saturday night. He left the cylinder hidden behind the stump and pushed the cover back in place. Looking around to make sure he did not leave anything out, he walked to the van as his crew finished with the last of the sandbags.
Removing his straw cowboy hat, he wiped his forehead with his bandana while walking to the rear of the van. Replacing his hat and stowing his bandana in his back pocket, he reached into a tote for a scrap of plastic sheeting. Bethany opened the driver’s side door and dropped her day pack into the space between the two front seats. “I’ll see you back at the fieldhouse,” Manwaring said.
“Fine,” Bethany answered as she stepped up and sat in the driver’s seat.
Manwaring, holding a folded sheet of black plastic, watched his students pile in through the open side doors and slide onto the vinyl-covered bench seats. He closed the rear doors and stepped to the side as Bethany gave the engine some gas. The vehicle’s tires crunched the loose gravel as it headed toward the large gap in the enclosure’s wall. The Honduran guards, climbing into their own vehicle, a red pickup truck parked off to the side, also fired up their engine. The guards were not supposed to leave until everybody, including Manwaring, were off the site; however, once the young female student they took a liking to was gone, the guards appreciated the food stand down the road and the cold beer sold there.
#
Now, with everybody gone, he returned to the stela and retrieved the container. After rolling it up in the piece of plastic he retrieved from the van, he cradled it in the crook of his arm and stepped toward the breech in the stone wall. Once outside the wall, he walked the short distance to the gravel parking lot, and his beat-up yellow Geo Tracker. An aged vehicle with a cracked windshield, bald tires, and a missing front bumper. After placing the container in his frayed canvas Alpine backpack on the front passenger seat, he turned the key in the ignition. It took more than one turn of the key, but the worn-out engine finally caught. Letting the engine warm up under the tropical sun, he retrieved a bottle of local whiskey from the pack and uncapped it. Taking a pull, a little whiskey leaked past the corners of his trembling lips.
The afternoon sun flashed through the overhead tree branches as he drove down the long gravel road and toward the suburbs of the modern town of Copán itself. Yet, the Morse-code-like messaging reaching out to him through the trees failed to even make him blink; his mind was elsewhere. Taking sideways glances at the Alpine backpack on the passenger seat, he could not wait to get to their house. The artifact in that pack was none like he had ever seen before. Despite his years as an archaeologist.
Part of his annual funding paid for a sparsely furnished, four-bedroom, two-bath home with a studio apartment, equipped with a half bath, in the backyard. While the house was where they ate and slept, the studio served as their conservation laboratory where they photographed, logged, and started the initial conservation treatment for recovered artifacts. And prepared them for shipment back to the university at the end of the season. Where the artifacts would receive further treatment and study before repatriation back to Honduras. It was also where the tote containing the student’s field notebooks remained, waiting for Manwaring’s weekly, or weekend, review. At the end of the dig season, he and Bethany would place the filled-out field books into blue curation file boxes for shipment and storage back at the university in England.
While Bethany and most of the students crowded themselves into three of the four bedrooms and the one hallway bathroom in the main house, Manwaring took the master bedroom, and its bathroom, for himself. Because of his position as field director, the privilege defaulted to Manwaring, and one he had no problem with accepting, for more than one reason.
Pulling through the open gate, and past the cinder-block wall enclosing the lot, he parked next to the van already parked in the driveway. He exited his beat-up Geo Tracker, stepped up to the porch, and opened the front door, while carrying his backpack over his shoulder. Bethany, and two young men, the same young men who were part of the group who came down with a case of bad tacos, sat on the living room sofa now freshly showered and wearing clean jeans and Magellan shirts.
So now Stephen and Mark seem well enough to go into town now, Manwaring mused. Good.
They drank bottles of Imperial beer while watching a show on the home’s only TV, which is one reason four students opted to sleep on the living room floor in sleeping bags every night. Manwaring recognized the show they were watching. A show titled Expedition Horizon. One of those treasure-hunting shows with actors past their prime pretending to be archaeologists searching for German U-boats filled with Nazi treasures, or Coronado’s lost gold in the American southwest. An open Igloo cooler sat on the floor next to the sofa. As he walked past, he grabbed a beer from the cooler and pulled the magnetized bottle opener from the metal trash can next to the cooler. Ignoring the scene on the TV screen but listening to the rest of the students in their bedrooms and in the hallway bathroom getting ready for a night out on the town, Manwaring popped the cap, letting it drop into the trash can. Raising the bottle to his lips he spoke to them. “Have a good time in Puerto Cortés, lads. And Bethany, while you are in town pick up more bundles of zip ties.”
