The Lost Origin (41 page)

“I very much doubt they would have, Mr. Queralt,” the professor replied, captivated like me by the incredible representations engraved on the walls. “To begin with, because the Yatiri went to a lot of trouble to hide this place, and I don’t think it’s necessary to remind you of all the things we’ve had to do to get to this chamber. But even if Pizarro had gotten here (which, fortunately, he did not, because none of this would still be here), he would not have been able to understand what he saw. He was illiterate, he wasn’t familiar with letters and their function, and it can be supposed the ruffians and adventurers in his army were the same. Perhaps some priest
versed in Latin could have, but he would have had to get here after all the gold was removed and melted into ingots to be sent to Spain, so he wouldn’t even have seen the sheet on the wall with the invitation, or the other that represents a map and that we still have not studied.”

As if moved by a spring mechanism, the four of us turned on our axes without blinking and started back down the path to the sarcophagi, a movement which made us smile until we got to the sheet and stood in front of it.

“Hey, Proxi,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Why don’t you take a bunch of photos of Mr. Dose Capaca and this map?”

“Of the map, okay,” she replied, “but of the giant, I don’t dare. I know the light could damage him. In museums they don’t let you take photographs.”

“But that’s to make you buy the postcards at the exit, woman!” Jabba exclaimed.

“No, Marc, no,” the professor was alarmed. “Lola’s right. The concentrated light of the flash could alter the chemical properties of the mummy, setting off biological processes of decomposition. I would beg you, even, to put the cover back in its place so the Traveler isn’t further damaged by the oxygen in this chamber.”

“Speaking of that…,” I murmured, holding onto Jabba’s elbow and pulling him toward the sarcophagus to carry out the order. “Why does this place smell like gasoline? Haven’t you guys noticed?”

“Don’t worry about that, Mr. Queralt. It has a logical explanation. In the mummification process practiced in this part of South America, they used bitumen in abundance, obtained as a residue from petroleum distillation, as well as different classes of resins which when combined with the bitumen and subjected to the smoking process, also produce a strong odor of motor oil, even after hundreds of years.”

“After thousands of years, professor,” Jabba pronounced, out of breath, as he helped me to put the cover on the sarcophagus, “because that’s how much time this Capaca carries in his bones.”

Proxi, meanwhile, was taking photos of the strange map drawn on the second sheet of gold.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Marc,” Marta Torrent murmured, “I’m no bioarchaeologist, and my knowledge of mummification is limited to the practical technicalities in Incan Peru. But everything considered, it’s still surprising that this body is so well preserved. I can’t imagine what arts the Yatiri employed to make him last eight or ten thousand years. It’s absolutely surprising to me. Really, I would say it’s unprecedented.”

“Well, unprecedented or not,” I replied, returning to her side, “this whole big nave smells like gasoline, despite the fact that the five bodies are shut inside heavy gold sarcophagi.”

She remained silent for a few seconds, then she pinched her lower lip between her thumb and index finger in a very characteristic gesture of hers that reminded me of my mother interpreting her pantomime entitled
I’m Thinking Profoundly
.

“Well, when we find the Yatiri,” she said at last, very calm, “we’ll ask them. Okay?”

Jabba burst out in sonorous laughter that echoed throughout the nave.

“Good one, professor, good one!” he exclaimed.

And he kept laughing like a lunatic, without noticing that Lola, Marta Torrent, and I were watching him, completely serious.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked at last, surprised, drying the tears from his eyes. “Didn’t you think it was funny?”

Suddenly, a light went on in his head.

“Oh, no! None of that!” he exclaimed at the top of his lungs. “I won’t follow you into this
lunacy! We don’t even know how to get out of here! Are you guys touched in the head?”

The three of us kept looking at him without laughing. The truth is we must have seemed like a trio of dangerous lunatics coldly looking at their victim before starting to walk slowly toward him with criminal intentions, but there was fortunately no witness there to tell the tale, except for Jabba, of course, and he could easily be made to keep quiet with a bribe in the form of a raise.

“You’re right about one thing,” Proxi conceded, without changing her serious expression or her posture. “First we have to get out of here.”

“Right,” was my intelligent contribution.

“Well, come on, let’s go,” Marc joked, sitting on the stone step that supported the sarcophagus. “It’s very late and I’m hungry. I’m also tired and I need to take a shower when we get to the hotel. Oh, but… but it’s eleven thirty local time! So, maybe we should stay, what do you think? We can sleep here, and tomorrow we’ll see.”

“Shut up, Marc,” Proxi admonished, taking a seat at his side. “Didn’t you say the panels of
tocapus
on the second condor had awakened your programming animal? Why don’t you start up that magnificent hacker brain and analyze the situation as if it were a programming challenge?”

I dropped to the floor in front of them and carelessly let go of my bag.

“Sit with us, Dr. Torrent,” I told the professor. “Surely we’ll think of something.”

“You could start by just calling me Marta,” she replied, sitting with her legs crossed next to me. It was very cold in that damned place.

“Okay, but just so you know, I liked it very much that you called me Mr. Queralt. No one ever calls me that.”

Jabba and Proxi laughed.

“It’s just that you don’t look like a ‘Mister,’ Arnauet,” Proxi teased. “With that mane, that earring, and that nineteenth century gentleman’s goatee, you look more like a romantic poet or painter than a businessman.”

The silliness continued for a few more minutes. Like many other times since that strange story had begun, we needed to decompress. We were very exhausted and it was pleasant to forget for a moment the reality surrounding us, sarcophagi included. But finally we became quiet.

“We haven’t walked the whole perimeter of the chamber,” I remarked after a while.

“True,” Jabba agreed. “Maybe we’re here, wasting time, while there’s a beautiful door ajar somewhere.”

“Stop dreaming,” Lola told him, passing a hand over his hair to smooth an out-of-place lock.

“Fine, something similar,” he insisted. “A hole in the roof or something like that. I think we should split up. There are four of us, right? Well, each of us can take one wall of the chamber. If we don’t find anything….”

“It’s a bad plan,” I cut him off. “Whoever gets the wall with the door has to walk down the path in the middle or along one of the side walls to get there, which is a waste of time. I propose that we form two teams. We leave from here, from the sarcophagi, then each team covers a side and we meet again at the door. That way we can check if it can be opened, and if not, we come back here by the center path and start again. There has to be some way out.”

My idea was accepted, because, obviously, it was very good, but there was no time to put it into action. Before separating, it occurred to us to examine the stone dais of the Traveler’s sarcophagus, and it turned out that just where Jabba had been standing to take off and put back the cover there was a new panel of
tocapus
. Incredibly, he had stepped on it without noticing,
and luckily nothing unfortunate had happened to it. If the chamber had been lit, we would have found it right away, but since our only illumination was from our headlights, the area behind the sarcophagus had remained in complete darkness the whole time.

“Does it mean anything, Marta?” Lola asked, leaning over.

The professor glanced at it and nodded.

“‘You have already learned how the language of the gods is written. Come find us and we will help you to live. Don’t bring war because you will not find us. We want you to bring only the desire for knowledge.’”

“But isn’t that the same thing it says on the gold sheet?” Jabba said, angrily.

“Not exactly.”

Marta wrinkled her forehead and regarded the small panel pensively.

“It’s only part of the original message.” She turned and craned her neck to the left to look at it. “They’re phrases of the message, but not all of them are here.”

“Okay,” I laughed, “we’re on our way again. Let’s turn on our brains.”

“And which phrases are missing?” Proxi asked.

Marta Torrent, doing another neck exercise, pointed them out:

“A piece of the original question is missing, the concrete part that says ‘...and you are reading these words.’ Then the next complete phrase is missing, ‘You deserve to know their sounds as well.’ It still has the next sentence but fuses it with the fifth, composing a single one, taking out ‘neither the death of the sun, nor torrential waters, nor the passage of time have done away with us.’ The sixth statement is missing as well, ‘Say: We will find you because we want to learn,’ and then the rest is the same.”

“I can’t make heads or tails of it,” Proxi muttered, put out.

“I don’t think the key is in what’s missing,” I replied, “but in what they’ve left.”

“That part doesn’t make any sense either,” Jabba protested, untucking his shirttails from his pants to make himself more comfortable on the floor. “Could you repeat it, Marta?”

“‘You have already learned how the language of the gods is written,’” she read again in a dull voice. “‘Come find us and we will help you to live. Don’t bring war because you will not find us. We want you to bring only the desire for knowledge.’”

“There’s something fishy here,” I muttered, smoothing my goatee in annoyance. “I can smell it, but I don’t see it.”

The professor went to her backpack and took out a small canteen that flashed metallically under the lights. Suddenly I found I was drier than a desert.

“Do you want a little water?” she offered us. “It’s been a lot of hours since we’ve had a drink.”

“Yes, please!” Proxi exclaimed with all her heart.

What a trio of idiots! How could it not have occurred to us to bring water? The latest model Silva compass, the Wenger pocket knife, and the Bushnell binoculars, but at the moment of truth, no water or food. Bravo.

“There isn’t enough for the four of us,” the professor explained, “so please, don’t drink too much.”

I remember the distress I felt as the liquid trickled down my throat and fell coldly on my empty stomach. All I could think was that we either had to get our act together, or, as Marc had said before, in a few hours things would get pretty rough.

“You wouldn’t have anything to eat, would you, Marta?” Jabba asked her with an expression on his face that showed how black his thoughts were.

“No, I’m sorry. I only have water. But don’t worry,” she told him, energetic, “we aren’t going to stay here long. We only have to solve a small mystery and today we’ve already solved many, so there’s nothing to worry about.” Suddenly, a light went on in my brain, right behind the LED of my headlight.

“What if this mystery can be solved visually like you said we could have done with the others, Marta?” I asked her. “You claimed that by analyzing the order, the layout, and the repetition of the
tocapus
, you could get correct answer.”

She arched her eyebrows and smiled.

“You may be right, Arnau.”

“If it’s a code,” I said, opening the laptop, “I’m very good.”

“And we are, too!” Jabba burst out. “Did you take any photos of the text on the gold sheet, Proxi?”

“They’re still in the camera, with the photos of the map.”

“Well, take one of this panel on the floor,” I requested, “and then we’ll compare them on the computer screen. If there’s a logical structure, we’ll find it.”

And we found it. The professor was right. All of the Yatiri’s mysteries could be solved by their form as well as by their content. Those guys, if they still existed, must be really clever and strange. With the image of the sheet from the wall on one side and the image of the panel from the floor on the other, we discovered a repetition (just one) that gave the answer to the problem. It was so simple and clean that I marveled at its composition. I would have given a considerable pile of cash to hire on at Ker-Central the Yatiri who had rigged up that puzzle. It came from a very simple idea: There was a phrase that gave the key, that was the key, and that, at the same time, contained the fundamental idea of the message, and that phrase was “Say: We will find you because we want to learn.” The
tocapus
it was written with were the only ones that appeared repeated in the text, scattered here and there in the phrases of the short message. That’s why they had selected them, separating them from the whole. “We will find you” was made up of the
tocapus
that appeared in “Come find us and we will help you to live,” where we only had to invert the signs indicating the persons of the verbs. “Because” was exactly the same in “Don’t bring war because you won’t find us.” “We want” was the beginning of the last phrase, “We want you to bring only the desire for knowledge,” and “to learn” was the root
tocapu
of “learned” in “You have already learned how the language of the gods is written.” Simple and clean, as a good code should be.

We had barely finished pressing, in order, the
tocapus
that made up the phrase, when the panel split in two, along with the sides of what up to that moment had been one giant stone block, and, like bilge gates, the two sides sank and exposed a tiny stone staircase that descended into the depths. Although it might seem strange, such things no longer impressed us. We were beat, worn down, and, more than anything, desperate to get out of that cursed Pyramid of the Traveler, whom we’d already had the pleasure of meeting. We needed to return to the surface and see the sky, breathe fresh air, have an big dinner, and go to bed and sleep for twelve or fifteen hours.