Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [26]
“You can’t be serious.”
I nod. It feels good to be right; smugness is an old shoe.
“This is from Quetzl-Quezo?”
I know what he’s doing. He’s working back through his memory, trying to see the rock carvings in the chamber below the subflooring. We took pictures with my brand-new camera and then spent weeks analyzing them, but at the time they resisted translation. If I had my files with me, I could pull up a duplicate of what is on the page in front of my friend. I have my laptop but, after five years of teaching, all it holds are tests, grades, and the promise of a satellite Internet connection. I might be able to get someone back at Evanston to scour my apartment for an old CD-ROM that may be buried under mountains of mail, magazines, and old research, but there’s a strong possibility the pictures are lost for all time. The piece I submitted for peer review is long published in a second-rate magazine, and it has spent years alternating between obscurity or as the subject of erudite debates by esteemed but drunken archaeology professors on poker night.
It’s rare that someone in my former profession discovers something like Quetzl-Quezo. In a field built on incremental discovery, where one researcher builds on the work of others, to find something that turns accepted theory on its head is like picking lottery numbers. It’s the sort of dig that, with a little luck, can put one in history books. Without luck, though, finding an ancient temple of probable Mayan design somewhere it’s not supposed to be can turn out to be a confounding riddle—and difficult to study when the dig isn’t sanctioned by the Venezuelan government. Creeping around like criminals, surreptitiously ferrying gear into the jungle, paying the locals to keep quiet—all of these make it difficult to document an excavation. And few journals like to publish articles by young, trespassing archaeologists, because that’s an easy way to find your reporters and photographers harassed at customs.
Nestled in the jungle in the mountainous north of the country, a stone’s throw away from the Columbian border, Quetzl-Quezo is hundreds of miles from the most southerly advances of Mayan civilization. That, the stylistic differences between it and others situated in their proper places, and the fact that the markings on the inside are unlike any we’d seen have caused many of my peers to disqualify it as a Mayan structure. Instead, most believe it belonged to another people group—either indigenous to the region or on a migratory track. The latter might be correct; the former is almost certainly wrong. The fact is, none of the great ancient civilizations native to Central and South America had influence here. The Aztecs were farther north than the Mayans, the Incans clung to South America’s western border, and even the short-lived Toltecs failed to venture this way. In my reckless youth I created a new classification for the structure: proto-Mayan. I’m older now, and I’ve learned that most of the theories espoused by the young are ridiculous, yet I’ve held on to this one. So Quetzl-Quezo is a moniker of the people who would settle farther north but already showing the discipline and skills necessary to carve a nation from the jungle.
It’s always bothered me that we were never able to finish our work, and that no other team has been able to conduct a more thorough study of the site.
“This guild, then,” Romero says. “This means they must have known about the temple at least two hundred years ago.”
“Longer,” I say. “Much longer.”
“That’s not a stretch,” Esperanza