Dateline: Atlantis (2 page)

Amaryllis watched him lecture, as his black eyes gave off sparks of enthusiasm. He was a man in his thirties, educated, and there was no doubt that he spoke of his direct ancestors. She decided to ask the questions he wanted to hear.

How sophisticated must the Maya have been to quarry, dress, and raise boulders of such enormous size? How was this accomplished if they hadn't discovered the wheel? To invent a monument of such astronomical accuracy, the Maya must have had other uses for the temple than simple human sacrifice. What did the temple represent? What secrets did the Maya have that the Spanish destroyed?

Gabriel considered each question. No one had the answers, he said. But Amaryllis had gotten his attention. He asked where his questioner worked. When she mentioned the
Los Angeles Star
, he slipped her his business card.

“I'll tell you the history no one wants to print,” he said, taking a deep breath into his tight-fitting khaki shirt. She saw his pectoral muscles flex and felt her face flush.

Restless now, poking through the fire, Amaryllis realizes he has told her nothing yet. She interrupts his monologue.

“So what did the Spanish want to keep quiet?” she asks and then munches on a roasted marshmallow, part of Garret's junk-food stash. She avoids the photographer's curious gaze. Gabriel looks into the flames and pauses as if he's not going to answer.

“Young Garret Lucas here probably believes everything the Western world has told him about the Maya,” Gabriel says, never lifting his eyes from the fire. Garret scowls, but lifts his shoulders in anticipation of some real conversation—the kind with more than one participant.

“All I know is that they were cannibals and sacrificed virgins,” Garret says. “And I came down here to take some photos Amy said are gonna blow the socks off archaeologists.
National Geographic
material. That's all I know.”

“Amy?” Gabriel looks over at her with another one of those unreadable smiles.

She closes her eyes for a moment. “Yes, it's Amy in Los Angeles. Amaryllis Quigley is such a stupid byline.”

Garret, to her amazement, doesn't laugh. He nods his head, considering the suitability of her given name.

“So what do we have here in these caves, Amaryllis?” Gabriel pronounces her name as if testing a delicate French pastry.

“We have some ruins that no one has found before,” she says, feeling the men turn their attention to her, sensing the bareness of her legs, the warmth of the fire on her knees and the goose bumps on her thighs. “They have been completely hidden for centuries, maybe thousands of years.”

“Much longer,” Gabriel says, turning his bronze face to the night sky.

#

Amaryllis had been snorkeling, bobbing on the bathwater-warm waves with Natalie Pritchard, the only person on the whole damn journalist's junket with enough gumption to abandon the agenda and try some unscheduled activity. At Amaryllis' urging, they ditched a dismal hotel tour in Cancún and ended up on the Quintana Roo coast, far south of Tulum, gazing at fish and diving to view beds of coral.

It had been one of those days in the Caribbean that was shockingly lucid. The blues were so pure and the air so bright that the landscape vibrated and hummed. A person could feel the clarity deep in the marrow of her bones. These things happen after storms. A hurricane had passed over the week before
the journalists landed at Cancún. When they touched down, the last of a tropical depression had moved offshore.

The high-pressure zone slid in to take the storm's place, instantly purifying the atmosphere and calming the ocean swells. Stirred up only hours before, the ocean floor was alive with coral reefs and sapphire and topaz fish. However, more than wildlife came to light.

Along the coastline lay a surprise. Partially submerged, rising from the water, sheer-edged cliffs beckoned like sugar-glazed pastries. Huge limestone caves, unmapped, just released from a thousand-year bath. Solidified—like Aphrodite—from ocean foam.

“Nice caves,” Natalie called, as Amaryllis swam away from her, away from everyone and everything predictable and sane. She stayed in the caves until dark, long after Natalie took the rented Jeep back to the hotel. Back on the beach, Amaryllis reached into her jeans pocket, gritty with sand, and fished out Gabriel's card.

#

“This can't be here.”

Garret stands, as Amaryllis had three weeks before, at the rear of the last cave, looking through a cramped passage into a clearing. After the closeness of the subterranean world, the sudden opening of light, air, and space brings a bit of relief. That is until Amaryllis realizes she is gazing at a landscape with hills, only the hills aren't hills, but triangular structures. Then, even on second viewing, she gulps hard when realizing that the buildings are pyramids, structures of the Maya that have slept under the sea for untold centuries. This stretch of coastline could only been above water during the Ice Age, about eleven hundred years ago.

“They always were there,” Gabriel says, through the narrow chasm and striding across a vast beach where the caves open again to land. The beach once was a seafloor crawling with crabs and starfish. “You didn't know where to look.”

Amaryllis puts her hand on Garret's shoulder and feels blood pounding through the large artery near his neck. He shakes her off, for he's already snapping photographs.

“It's real,” she mumbles, then turns to follow Gabriel.

What can a journalist say about a wonderland that she is witness to? What can she feel when she stumbles upon a treasure so ancient, so unexpected, so ghostly that it makes her want to weep? In fact, Amaryllis did weep when she found this place. For a short time, she wandered around the neighboring town in the Yucatan, crying in bookstores and libraries, dropping her tears on page after page of history books. She cried for the Maya and their lost world. She cried over the wanton destruction by the arrogant Spaniards. She sobbed for the burned books and smashed treasures. But mostly, she wept for what would become of her when she let the world know of this hidden land. No longer would she be a young reporter slugging away at stories about plucky entrepreneurs. She wouldn't be pining for a Pulitzer Prize anymore. She'd have one. And what would she do then? The entire trajectory of her life will have changed.

Gabriel hurries to the first pyramid, which is so thickly encrusted with barnacles, shells, and crustaceans that it's barely recognizable as stone and masonry. It looks instead like a giant sea palace, fashioned by crafty dolphins and deft ocean turtles. Rounded and softened by the constant ocean currents, the pyramids have none of the sharp angles associated with the Maya culture. They look like lumpy sandcastles ready to dissolve back into the surf.

The guide chips at the coating on the walls until he reaches bare rock. They catch a glimpse of Maya glyphs. They are unmistakable, although completely unreadable to the Anglos. Gabriel taps at the rock until he finds the complete phrase.

“Jaguar prize,” he says.

Clicking and whirring fill the reporter's ears as Garret records the moment. In a second, what has been covered for centuries is now written in light in Garret's mechanical box.

They spend the afternoon exploring the pyramids, four in all. Three of them are small, fifty feet or so in height, and appear to be ceremonial structures, for the restored artwork depicts activities sacred to the Maya: bloodletting, vision-questing, hunting. Garret asks about the human sacrifices. Gabriel throws down a small hammer and walks away.

“The Spanish used sacrifice as an excuse to wipe out the Maya culture,” Amaryllis whispers to Garret as Gabriel disappears behind some rock. “The Aztecs gave everyone a bad rap. The Maya rarely resorted to human sacrifice.”

“The pyramids were supposed to be altars…”

“Forget it, Garret. The pyramids were astronomical structures.”

“I was taught…”

“They taught us all wrong…”

By the time they work their way to the final pyramid, Garret fills his camera bag with used film and digital chips. Nearly out of ammunition, he loads his final chip. He needs to take his shots wisely now, for the last pyramid, a huge structure, looks to be much more than a ceremonial center. Amaryllis' skin begins to sizzle. She realizes the pyramid has a narrow opening.

Gabriel is inside when they squeeze through, climbing slowly up the dripping staircase. Inside the pyramid, the air is torrid and the walls seep a lichen-laden fluid. In the dark, aided only by the occasional flicker of Gabriel's flashlight, they climb what could be one hundred feet. At the apex is a tiny chamber containing a jaguar-shaped throne, encrusted with jade.
Steal it. Sell it now on the black market and we'll be richer than a computer baron. No one would ever know.

“Look at the floor,” Gabriel hisses.

Beneath Amaryllis' feet are square limestone blocks. Gabriel points at a crack that has split a stone in half. In the gap, something shines for his flashlight. She creeps on her hands and knees to the gap and views a glistening, iridescent material.

“Mica,” Gabriel says, still whispering. This glassy mineral means more to him than twenty jade jaguars. The journalists trade confused glances, but the Mexican man offers no explanation. Now, Amaryllis wants to know everything. What is this world? Who could have built it? And more than anything else, how can she get this story? It is sure to win her the prizes and acclaim she's been working for all her adult life.

#

Their dinner is well deserved after the day's spectacular find. They sup on tamales and green salsa, a posole soup and some Twinkies that Garret fishes out of his voluminous camera bag. All the while, Gabriel's voice rises and falls with the cadence of a master hypnotist.

At Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, remains of a fantastic Toltec City were discovered, Gabriel says. The area was so old that it completely returned to forest by the time the Spanish invaded. Over centuries, humans ripped back the jungle carpet to find a meticulously designed city with pyramids, canals, and observatories. Some claim the structures comprised a precise map of our own solar system, with a mound even representing Pluto—which hadn't been “discovered” until the 1920s by Percival Lowell.

“The mica?” Garret asks, licking Twinkie frosting from his stubby fingers.

“There are two main pyramids: the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun,” Gabriel says, handing his opened dessert to Garret. “When the Pyramid of the Sun was excavated by a so-called archaeologist—just a pathetic hack, really—they
discovered that a layer of the pyramid was constructed of mica sheets.”

The mica proved too valuable to leave in a pile of rotting stones, and the adventurers removed it for a quick sale. But questions remained. Mica is not native to central Mexico. What sort of transportation available to the Toltecs would allow them to cart sheets of highly fragile, nearly transparent mineral from South America, the closest source for this rare substance? What purpose could the mica provide? They stare at Gabriel, awaiting an answer.

“Mica is an extremely efficient semi-conductor,” Gabriel says.

Semi-conductor. Amaryllis has no idea what a semi-conductor does, but she knows it has to do with electricity. And the Maya, they say, had not even invented the wheel. Yet, toys were found in Central America. Little toy carts with working wheels, attributed to the Olmecs, the mysterious predecessors of the Maya and the Toltecs. No one has any idea what these ancient people really were capable of doing
. Maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe societies don't
always march toward progress. Maybe there are periods of regression
.
Maybe the Maya of the conquistadors' time merely forgot what their ancestors had achieved. Look what happened to Europe in the Middle Ages.

#

This morning the sea has changed. Yesterday, it was cobalt blue with small, creamy white eddies swirling in the distance. Today, the little milk-colored tempests have stopped. Once stirred up by recent storms, sand has returned to the ocean floor, leaving the sea sparkling and limpid. Amaryllis doesn't know why, but she has a sudden urge to be out there where the sea and land have an uncertain boundary. She wants to see where the edges lie.

She slips into a bathing suit. She's not uninhibited enough to jump in
au naturale
, not with Garret along. And certainly not with Gabriel able to pop up, unseen at any time. She frets over her Victorian mindset, until she dips her toe into the Caribbean. It swirls warm as bathwater, even now, in January, two weeks after the solstice.

As she pulls herself away from the shore, she allows her muscles to loosen and she floats on the waves. She begins to imagine a series of networked cities, all ancient, joined by Maya ceremonial roads. She envisions the pyramids as new and fresh, covered with red paint and golden ornamentation. Inside a priest sits on a jade jaguar throne, holding an orb, clear and immaculate, searing with radiant power. The priest hums and chants syllables of majesty that cause the air to vibrate. He holds the sphere to the sky. Power surges from the orb, through the pyramid to its base, charging the atmosphere of the city with a purple glow. The priest raises his eyes, and she recognizes Gabriel's stare.