Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [42]
We all have masks on, purchased from a hardware store in Rubio, and I still feel as if I have dust coating my insides. I know my team feels the same way because they’re all taking more frequent breaks, navigating the winding stairs and the free-swinging ladder to the open air above. But what we’ve found keeps me pressing on, despite the fact that our lack of protocol means I’m likely destroying valuable material, that there will be things lost to science. There’s a second floor beneath the first, of the same period, one produced on top of the other. It’s unprecedented in Mayan architecture and, while I keep telling myself that this isn’t a true Mayan structure, the reminder holds little weight. I’m feverish with excitement, my mind parsing the possibilities. This is a level, a sophistication, of temple development that doesn’t match the antiquity of the structure, as if they borrowed the idea from somewhere else.
The real payoff is that we’ve found etchings—just the barest hint of them, a few dark lines peeking out from beneath the last row of stones we pulled up. Once we get the next row removed, I’ll have a better idea what we’re dealing with. We’re working in the western corner of the structure, which is a bit surprising because carving out that point of the compass for special significance is a quintessentially Egyptian characteristic. Even so, there’s much here that doesn’t match the accepted South American schematic, so I won’t put any undue emphasis on this inconsistency.
Several minutes pass as we raise the last of the stones. Antonio and another man from the crew are levering a chipped three-by-three paver off to the side. I’m right there, not waiting for the dust to clear before I’m on my knees with a brush, moving dirt that’s been undisturbed for longer than most people can fathom. I ignore the tickle in my throat, my burning eyes. The two men find a place for the stone and let it fall, and the sound reverberates through the chamber. The silence that follows is full of something. I feel it, and apparently so does Espy, who has appeared at my side. Even the men feel it; they’re hovering just behind, anxious to see what their labor has unearthed.
It seems to take forever before the dust settles and I can start to make out more of the markings on the subfloor as they resolve themselves into . . . I’m not aware of having dropped the brush, yet it’s no longer in my hand. It takes me a while to wrap my brain around what I see, during which I’m unable to speak. Espy places a hand on my shoulder. She sees it too, even if she may not fully understand the significance.
“It’s impossible,” I breathe.
“This is Egyptian, isn’t it?” she says.
“Coptic. It’s a form of demotic Egyptian rendered from the Greek alphabet. It was in use from the first century through the seventeenth.” I’m talking fast, trying to make sense of this singular find. It shakes the foundation of everything I thought I knew about South and Central American cultural development—not the least of which is that no record of any kind indicates contact between the Americas and peoples from the other side of the ocean at the time this temple was built.
Espy digests the information and, since she knows more about the timeline for this part of the world than I could ever hope to, she now understands the importance of this find. “We shouldn’t see something like this for at least another thousand years.”
While she’s coming to grips with that, I’m wrestling with another possibility: that my original dating for the construction of this temple was off by more than five hundred years. Coptic did not exist as a written language until the first century. If people from North Africa somehow migrated here during that period, it would place the construction