The craft bristled with so many spears it resembled the back of a porcupine. The weapons were in the hands, of men wearing what looked like
football helmets. Other men rowed with long oars that were angled back along the side of the ship. There were twenty-five rowers, which meant there would have been a total of fifty, counting those on the side not visible. What appeared to be a row of shields hung off the rail. She used the human figures to estimate the approximate size of the craft at more than. one hundred feet.
Moving along the frieze she saw more warships and what appeared to be merchant vessels with fewer soldiers, the decks crowded with rectangular shapes that could have been boxes for goods. Men she assumed were ship's crew stood in the yardarm hauling on lines to trim the sail. In contrast to the helmeted men, they wore odd, pointed headgear. The motifs were varied, but this was clearly a flotilla of merchants being escorted by armed protectors.
Chi watched her walk around the building, an amused gleam in his dark eyes, and she realized he never intended to show her carvings of marine life. He wanted her to see the ship scene. She stopped at one ship and shook her head. On the bow of the boat was a carving of an animal.
"Dr. Chi, doesn't this look like a horse to you?"
"You asked me to show you sea life."
"Have you dated this?"
He stepped forward and ran his finger along the inscribed border.
"These carved faces are actually numbers. This one represents zero. According to the hieroglyphics that are carved here, these ships were pictured about a hundred and fifty years B.C."
"If that date is even remotely correct, how could this ship be carved with a horse's head? Horses didn't arrive until the fifteen hundreds when the Spanish brought them in."
"Yes, it is certainly a puzzle, isn't it?"
Gamy was looking at a diamond shape in the sky over the ships. Hanging from it was the figure of a man.
"What on earth is this?" she said.
"I'm not sure. I thought it was some kind of sky god when I first saw it, but it's none I recognize. This is a great deal to absorb all at once. Are you hungry? We can come back and look at this again."
"Yes, fine," Gamy said, as if coming out of a daze. She had trouble pulling herself away from the carvings, but thoughts were buzzing around in her head like a swarm of bees.
A few steps away was a round drumshaped stone about a yard high and a couple of yards across. While Gamay went behind the monument and changed from her jeans to more comfortable shorts she'd brought in her pack, Chi prepared lunch on the stone's flat top. The professor took a small woven mat and cloth napkins from the rucksack and spread them out over the carved figure of a Mayan warrior in full feathered dress.
"Hope you don't mind eating on a bloodstained sacrificial altar:" Chi said with a poker fare.
Gamay was catching on to the professor's morbid humor. "If the sharp stub I just sat on is any indication, this was once a sundial."
"Of course," he said innocently. Actually, the sacrificial altar is over there near that temple." He dug' into the rucksack. "Spam and tortilla roll-ups."
Handing Gamay her neatly wrapped sandwich, Chi said, "Tell me, what do you know about the Maya?"
She unwrapped the clear plastic and nibbled a bite of tortilla before answering. "I know that they were violent and beautiful at the same time." She swept her hand in the air. "That they were incredible builders. That their civilization collapsed but nobody is certain why"
"It is less of a mystery than some suppose. The Mayan culture went through many changes in the hundreds of years of its existence. Wars, revolutions, crop failures, all contributed. But the invasion of the conquistadors and the genocide that followed put an end to their civilization. While those who followed Columbus were killing our people, others were murdering our culture. Diego de Landa was a monk who came in with the conquistadors and was made bishop of Yucatan. He burned all the Mayan books he could find. `Lies of the devil' he called them. Can you imagine a similar catastrophe in Europe and the damage it would have done? Even Hitler's storm troopers were not so thorough. Only three books escaped destruction that we know of."
"So sad. Wouldn't it be wonderful if more were found one. day?" Gamay surveyed the plain from their perch. "What is this place?"
"I thought at first that it was a center of pure science, where research was conducted away from the bloody rituals of the priests. But the more I uncovered, the more I became convinced that it was actually part of a greater plan. An architectural machine, if you will."
"I don't think I understand."
"I'm not sure I do, either." He produced a bent cigarette from his shirt and lit up, saying, "One is allowed small vices with age." He took a puff. "Let me start with the micro. The frieze and the observatory."
And the macro?"
"The siting I was talking about. I have found similar structures at other sites. Together with other buildings they remind me of a rather large printed electrical circuit"
Gamay couldn't help smiling. Are you saying that the Maya could add computer science to their other accomplishments?" .
"Yes, in a crude way. We're not looking at an IBM machine with endless gigabytes. More like a code machine perhaps. If we knew how to use it we could decipher the secrets in these stones. Their placement is no accident. The precision is quite remarkable, as a matter of fact."