Bagley, Desmond - The Vivero Letter Page 20

  Half of the hut was to be my living quarters and contained a bed with mosquito netting, a table and chair and a small desk. The other half of the hut was filled with gear. I looked at it and scratched my head. 'I'd like to get that air compressor out of here,' I said. 'And all the big bottles. Can you build a shack by the side of the hut?'

  'Sure: that's no trouble at all. I'll have it fixed by tomorrow.'

  We went outside and I looked at the cenote. It was roughly circular and over a hundred feet in diameter. Behind it, the ridge rose sharply in almost a cliff, but easing off in steepness towards the top where Vivero had placed the Chac temple. I wondered how deep it was. 'I'd like a raft,' I said. 'From that we can drop a shot line and anchor it to the bottom—if we can get down that far. But that can wait until I've done a preliminary dive.'

  'You just tell me what you want and I'll fix it,' said Rudetsky. That's what I'm here for—I'm Mr. Fixit in person.'

  He went away and I tossed a pebble into the dark pool. It plopped in the middle of the still water and sent out a widening circle of ripples which lapped briefly at the edge, thirty feet below. If what I had been told was correct, many people had been sacrificed in this cenote and I wondered what I'd find at the bottom.

  I went back to the hut and found Katherine waiting for me. She was looking dubiously at the pile of equipment and seemed appalled at the size of it. 'It's not as bad as that,' I said. 'Well soon get it sorted out. Are you ready to go to work?'

  She nodded. 'I'm ready.'

  'All the air bottles are full,' I said. 'I saw to that at Camp One. There's no reason why we shouldn't do a dive right now and leave the sorting until later. I wouldn't mind a dip—it's too bloody hot here.'

  She unbuttoned the front of her shirt. 'All right. How deep do you think it is?'

  'I wouldn't know—that's what we're going to find out. What's the deepest you've ever gone?'

  'About sixty-five feet.'

  This might be deeper,' I said. 'When we find out how deep I'll make out a decompression table. You stick to it and you'll be all right.' I jerked my thumb at the recompression chamber. 'I don't want to use that unless I have to.'

  I tested it. Rudetsky's electricians had wired it up to the camp supply and it worked all right. I pumped it up to the test pressure of ten atmospheres and the needle held steady. It was highly unlikely that we'd ever have to use it at more than five atmospheres though.

  When one is making a dive into an unknown hole in the ground you find you need an, awful amount of ancillary equipment. There was the scuba gear itself—the harness, mask and flippers; a waterproof watch and compass on the left wrist —I bad an idea it would be dark down there and the compass would serve for orientation: and a depth meter and a decompression meter on the right wrist. A knife went in the belt and a light mounted on the head—by the time we were through kitting ourselves out we looked like a couple of astronauts.

  I checked Katherine's gear and she checked mine, then we clumped heavily down the steps Rudetsky had cut in the sheer side of the cenote and down to the water's edge. As I dipped my mask into the water, I said, 'Just follow me, and keep your light on all the time. If you get into trouble and you can't attract my attention make for the surface, but try to stay a few minutes at the ten-foot level if you can. But don't worry—I'll be keeping an eye on you.'

  'I'm not worried,' she said. 'I've done this before.'

  'Not in these conditions,' I said. 'This isn't like swimming in the Bahamas. Just play it safe, will you?'

  'I'll stick close,' she said.

  I gave the mask a final swish in the water 'Paul didn't seem too happy about this. Why did he want to dredge?'

  She sighed in exasperation. Tie still has the same stupid idea about you and me. It's ridiculous, of course.'

  'Or course,' I said flatly.

  She laughed unexpectedly and indicated the bulky gear we were wearing. 'Not much chance, is there?'

  I grinned at the idea of underwater adultery as I put on the mask. 'Let's call on Chac,' I said, and bit on the mouthpiece. We slipped into the water and swam slowly to the middle of the cenote. The water was clear but its depth made it dark. I dipped my head under and stared below and could see nothing, so I surfaced again and asked Katherine, by sign, if she was all right. She signalled that she was, so I signed that she was to go down. She dipped below the surface and vanished and I followed her, and just before I went down I saw Hal-stead standing on the edge of the cenote staring at me. I could have been wrong, though, because my mask was smeared with water—but I don't think I was.

  It wasn't so bad at first. The water was clear and light filtered from the surface, but as we went deeper so the light failed rapidly. I had dived often off the coast of England and it is quite light at fifty feet, but diving into a comparatively small hole is different; the sheer sides of the cenote cut off the light which would otherwise have come in at an angle and the general illumination dropped off sharply.

  I stopped at fifty feet and swam in a circle, checking to see if the compass was in order. Katherine followed, her flippers kicking lazily and the stream of bubbles from her mask sparkling in the light of the lamps like the fountaining eruption of a firework. She seemed all right, so I kicked off again and went down slowly, looking behind from time to time to see if she followed.

  We hit bottom at sixty-five feet, but that was at the top of a slope which dropped into darkness at an angle of about twenty degrees. The bottom consisted of a slimy ooze which stirred as I casually handled it and rose into a smokescreen of sorts. I saw Katherine's light shining through the haze dimly, and thought that this was going to make excavation difficult.

  It was cold down there, too. The hot sun merely warmed the surface of the water and, since the warm water was less dense, it stayed at the top of the pool. The water at me bottom came from the pores in the limestone all about, and was never exposed to the sun. I was beginning to pet chilled as it sucked the heat from my body.

  I signalled to Katherine again, and cautiously we swam down the slope to find that it ended in a solid wall. That was the Absolute bottom of the cenote and I checked it at ninety-five feet. We swam about for a while, exploring the slope. It was smooth and level and nothing broke its surface. The ooze of which it was composed was the accumulated detritus of hundreds of years of leaf droppings from the surface and anything that was to be found would have to be discovered by digging.

  At last I signalled that we were going up, and we rose from the bottom of the slope up past the vertical wall of limestone. About thirty feet up from the bottom I discovered a sort of cave, an opening in the sheer wall. That deserved to be explored, but I didn't feel like doing it then. I was cold and wanted to soak some hot sun into my bones.

  We had been underwater for half an hour and had been down nearly a hundred feet, and so we bad to decompress on the way up. That meant a five-minute wait at twenty feet, and another five-minute wait at ten feet. When we began diving in earnest we'd have the shot line to hold on to at these decompression stops, but as it was we just circled in the water while I kept an eye on the decompression meter at my wrist.

  We surfaced in the welcome sun and swam to the side. I heaved myself out and gave Katherine a hand, then spat out the mouthpiece and took off the mask. As I closed down the valve on the tank, I said, 'What did you think of that?'

  Katherine shivered. 'You're right; it's not like the Bahamas. I didn't think I could feel so cold in Quintana Roo.'

  I took off the harness and felt the hot sun striking my back. 'It seems bloody silly, but we're going to have to wear thermal suits, otherwise we'll freeze to death. What else struck you about it?'

  She pondered. 'The ooze down there is going to be bad. It's dark enough without having to work in the muck we're going to stir up.'

  I nodded. 'A suction pump is going to come in useful. The pump itself can be at the surface and we'll pump the mud ashore—with a filter in the line to catch any small objects. That'll cut down on the fog do
wn there.' Now that I'd seen the situation, ideas were beginning to come thick and fast. 'We can drop our shot line from the raft, and anchor it to the bottom with a big boulder. We're going to have to have two lines to the bottom, because one will have to be hauled up every day.'

  She frowned. Why?'

  'Come up to the hut and I'll show you.'

  We arrived at the hut to find Rudetsky and a couple of his men building a lean-to shelter against one end of it. 'Hi!' he said. 'Have a nice dip?'

  'Not bad. I'd like that raft now if you can do it,'

  'How big?'

  'Say, ten feet square.'

  'Nothing to it,' he said promptly. 'Four empty oil drums and some of that lumber we're cutting will make a dandy raft. Will you be using it in the evenings?'

  'It's not very likely,' I said.

  Then you won't mind if the boys use it as a diving raft. It's nice to have a swim and cool off nights.'

  I grinned. 'It's a deal.'

  He pointed to the air compressor. 'Will that be all right just there?'

  That's fine. Look, can you lead that exhaust pipe away—as far away from the intake of the air pump as possible. Carbon monoxide and diving don't go together.'

  He nodded. 'I'll get another length of hose and lead it round the other side of the hut.'

  I joined Katherine in the hut and dug out my tattered copy of the Admiralty diving tables. 'Now I'll tell you why we have to have two lines to the bottom,' I said. I sat down at the table and she joined me, rubbing her hair with a towel. 'We're going down about a hundred feet and we want to spend as much time as possible on the bottom. Right?'

  'I suppose so.'

  'Say we spend two hours on the bottom—that means several decompression stops on the way up. Five minutes at fifty feet, ten at forty feet, thirty at thirty feet, forty at twenty feet and fifty at ten feet—a total of ... er ... one hundred and thirty-five minutes—two and a quarter hours. It's going to be a bit of a bind just sitting around at these various levels, but it's got to be done. Besides the weighted shot rope from the raft, we'll have to have another with slings fitted at the various levels to sit in, and with air bottles attached, because your harness bottles will never hold enough. And toe whole lot will have to be pulled up every day to replenish the bottles.'

  'I've never done this kind of thing before,' she said. 'I've never been so deep nor stayed so long. I hadn't thought of decompression.'

  'You'd better start thinking now,' I said grimly. 'One slip-up and you'll get the bends. Have you ever seen that happen to anyone?'

  'No, I haven't.'

  'Fizzy blood doesn't do you any good. Apart from being terrifyingly painful, once a nitrogen embolism gets to the heart you're knocking at the Pearly Gates.'

  'But it's so long,' she complained. 'What do you do sitting at ten feet for nearly an hour?'

  'I haven't done this too often myself,' I confessed. 'But I've used it as an opportunity to compose dirty limericks.' I looked across at the recompression chamber. 'I'd like to have that thing a bit nearer the scene of the accident—maybe on the raft. I'll see what Rudetsky can do.'

  IV

  The work went on, week after week, and I nearly forgot about Gatt. We were in radio contact with Camp One which relayed messages from Pat Harris and everything seemed to be calm. Gatt had gone back to Mexico City and was living among the fleshpots, apparently without a care in the world, although his band of thugs was still quartered in Merida. I didn't know what to make of it, but I really didn't have .time to think about it because the diving programme filled all my time. I kept half an eye on Halstead and found him to be working even harder than I was, which pleased Fallon mightily.

  Every day discoveries were made—astonishing discoveries. This was indeed Uaxuanoc. Fallon's teams uncovered building after building—palaces, temples, games arenas and a few unidentifiable structures, one of which he thought was an astronomical observatory. Around the cenote was a ring of stelae— twenty-four of them—and there was another line of them right through the centre of the city. With clicking camera and busy pen Fallon filled book after book with data.

  Although no one was trades-union inclined, one day in every week was a rest day on which the boffins usually caught up with their paper work while Rudetsky's men skylarked about in the cenote. Because safe diving was impossible under those conditions I used the free day to rest and to drink a little more beer than was safe during the working week.

  On one of those days Fallon took me over the site to show me what had been uncovered. He pointed to a low hill which had been denuded of its vegetation. 'That's where Vivero nearly met his end,' he said. 'That's the Temple of Kukulkan —you can see where we're uncovering the steps at the front.'

  It was a bit hard to believe. 'All that hill?'

  'All of it. It's one big building. In fact, we're standing on a part of it right now.'

  I looked down and scuffled the ground with my foot. It didn't look any different from any other ground—there was just thin layer of humus. Fallon said, 'The Mayas had a habit of building on platforms. Their huts were built on platforms to raise them from the ground, and when they built larger structures they carried on the same idea. We're standing on a platform now, but it's so big you don't realize it.'

  I looked at the ground stretching levelly to the hill which was the Temple of Kukulkan. 'How big?'

  Fallon grinned cheerfully. 'Rudetsky went around it with a theodolite and transit. He reckons it's fifteen acres and averages a hundred and thirty feet high. It's an artificial acropolis —90 million cubic feet in volume and containing about six and a half million tons of material.' He produced his pipe. There's one something like it at Copan, but not quite as big.'

  'Hell's teeth!' I said. 'I didn't realize it would be anything like this.'

  gallon struck a match. 'The Mayas .. .' puff—puff '.. . were an . . .' puff '. . . industrious crowd.' He looked into the bowl of his pipe critically. 'Come and have a closer look at the temple.'

  We walked over to the hill and looked up at the partly excavated stairway. The stairs were about fifty feet wide. Fallon pointed upwards with the stem of his pipe. 'I thought I'd find something up there at the top, so I did a bit of digging, and I found it all right. You might be interested.'

  Climbing the hill was a heavy pull because it was very steep Imagine an Egyptian pyramid covered with a thin layer of earth and one gets the idea. Fallon didn't seem unduly put out by the exertion, despite his age, and at the top he pointed 'The edge of the stairway will come there—and that's where I dug.'

  I strolled over to the pit which was marked by the heap of detritus about it. and saw that Fallon had uncovered a fear-some head, open-mouthed and sharp-toothed, with the lips drawn back in a snarl of anger. 'The Feathered Serpent,' he said softly. The symbol of Kukulkan.' He swept his arm towards a wall of earth behind. 'And that's the temple itself— where the sacrifices were made.'

  I looked at it and thought of Vivero brought before the priests on this spot, and shivering in his shoes for fear he'd have the heart plucked out of him. It was a grim thought.

  Fallon said objectively, 'I hope the roof hasn't collapsed; it would be nice to find it intact.'

  I sat down on a convenient tree stump and looked over the site of the city. About a fifth of it had been cleared, according to Fallon, but that was just the vegetation. There were great mounds, like the one we were on then, waiting to be excavated. I said, 'How long do you think it will take? When will we see what it was really like?'

  'Come back in twenty years,' he said. 'Then you'll get a fair idea.'

  'So long?'

  'You can't hurry a thing like this. Besides, we won't excavate it all. We must leave something for the next generation—they might have better methods and find things that we would miss. I don't intend uncovering more than half the city.'

  I looked at Fallon thoughtfully. This was a man of sixty who was quite willing to start something he knew he would never finish. Perhaps it was becau
se he habitually thought in terms of centuries, of thousands of years, that he attained a cosmic viewpoint. He was very different from Halstead.

  He said a little sadly, 'The human lifespan is so short, and man's monuments outlast him generation after generation, more enduring than man himself. Shelley knew about that, and about man's vanity. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"' He waved his hand at the city. 'But do we despair when we see this? I know that I don't. I regard it as the glory of short-lived men.' He held out his hands before him, gnarled and blue-veined and trembling a little. 'It's a great pity that this flesh should rot so soon.'

  His conversation was becoming too macabre for my taste, so I changed the subject. 'Have you identified the King's Palace yet?'

  He smiled. 'Still hoping for plated walls of gold?' He shook his head. 'Vivero was mixed up, as usual. The Mayas didn't have kings, in the sense that we know them, but there was an hereditary chief among them called Halach uinic whom I suppose Vivero called king. Then there was the nacom, the war chief, who was elected for three years. The priesthood was hereditary, too. I doubt if the Halach uinic would have a palace, but we have found what we think is one of the main administrative buildings.' He pointed to another mound. 'That's it.'