“And if not?”
“Then we get to see how good I am with the Webley.”
PAUSING TO LISTEN every ten paces or so, they proceeded down the left-hand tunnel. After forty feet the tunnel suddenly broadened out into a roughly circular chamber. Remi’s headlamp swept over a dark elongated object on the floor. They both started and backpedaled ten steps, their feet skidding in the sand.
Remi whispered, “Was it—”
“I don’t think so.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Enough to get my heart going, though. Come on.”
They moved forward until their beams again found the object.
“Looks like a rotted telephone pole,” Remi said.
And it did. But almost immediately Sam noticed what looked like a trio of wooden cross braces affixed to the pole, then bindings of some kind, mostly crumbled to dust but intact enough to retain their basic shape.
“It’s an outrigger,” Remi whispered.
Sam nodded and kept panning his headlamp along the cross braces to a point where they merged with an elongated heap of partially rotten wood, this one a few feet longer than the “telephone pole,” and four to five times its diameter.
“Sam, that’s a canoe.”
He nodded. “A big one. At least thirty feet long.” Together, they sidestepped around the craft to the other side, where they found a corresponding cross brace/outrigger setup. The body of the canoe was five feet wide, and four feet tall from keel to gunwale, with a tapered bow and jutting bowsprit and a squared-off stern. At midships, rising eight feet from the hull, was what looked like a shattered mast; the upper part, about ten feet long, lay on the ground, its end propped up on the gunwale. Ahead of the mast the hull was topped by a shallow, double-pitch roof.
“Sam, step back,” Remi whispered.
He followed her back a few paces. She pointed at the ground beneath the vessel. What they’d taken for simply a high point in the floor was in fact a two-foot-high platform constructed of carefully placed stones.
“This is an altar,” he said.
AFTER A QUICK CHECK on their anti-croc flare, which had burned down to the halfway mark, they got busy examining the outrigger, Remi taking in situ pictures for scale and design before moving in for close-ups. Using the tip of his Swiss Army knife, Sam took trace samples of the wood and the bindings.
“Everything’s coated in some kind of resin,” he told Remi, sniffing the material. “It’s thick. At least an inch.”
“That would explain its remarkable condition,” she replied.
Sam stepped over the starboard side outrigger, walked to the gunwale, and peered inside the craft. Lying around the base of the mast was a mound of what he could only describe as decomposed canvas. Mottled brown and gray, the material had partially congealed into a gelatinous mass.
“Remi, you need to see this.”
She joined him at the gunwale. “Big sail,” she said and
began taking pictures.
Sam unsheathed his machete and, with Remi hanging on to his belt lest he fall in, leaned forward and gingerly slid the blade into the pile. “It’s like onion skin,” he muttered. He lifted free a tattered section of the material. Remi was ready with an empty Ziploc bag. As he slid the sample inside, it broke into three sections. Remi sealed the bag and walked back to her pack to deposit it with the other samples.
Sam stepped around to the stern. Jutting from the transom was a bulbous wooden object, like a gnarled football leaning forward on a kickoff tee. Like almost everything else about the outrigger, it took Sam several seconds and several tilts of his head before he realized what he was seeing. Remi came up behind him.
“Our mystery bird,” she said.
Sam nodded. “From the Orizaga Codex and Blaylock’s journal.”
“What did he call it? The ‘great green jeweled bird,’” Remi mused. “Though I don’t think this is what he was talking about.”
She took a dozen pictures of the carving with her digital camera.
“Let’s check the bowsprit,” said Sam. “When it comes to boats, these kinds of things often come in pairs.”
They walked to the bow. As Sam had guessed, the bowsprit also bore a carving, this one in better condition than its counterpart. In fact, the bowsprit itself was the sculpture: a serpent, its mouth agape, feathered plumes streaming backward from its head.