After another hour Remi looked at the map and then her watch. “We should be in Xuctzul soon.”
Five minutes later, they drove through the village. It was only about a hundred yards long.
Sam and Remi stepped out of the car at the edge of the village and stood in the gravel road. Sam and Remi looked at each other. The silence was profound. Off in the distance, a dog barked, and the spell was broken. A few people came out of buildings and looked in their direction as though the arrival of a car was an occasion for curiosity. One by one, they lost interest and went back to their homes.
The gravel road turned into a rutted cart path.
“I hope the Jeep is up to this. At least there seems to be a trail, but we’re in for a bumpy ride,” said Sam.
“I hope what trail we have is going in the right direction. I’m not looking forward to blazing one through the jungle,” Remi replied. “I was hoping the machetes were just for show.” Remi looked up at the sky, then at Sam. “It’s a long time before we run out of daylight — at least six hours.”
Each took a drink of water from his or her canteen, took out a machete, put it where it would be easy to reach, and then they began to drive up the trail.
For a time, Sam would periodically check his satellite phone’s GPS to be sure they were still heading in the direction they intended. The trail was winding and required steady climbing as it took them into the highlands of Alta Verapaz. Before darkness came they stopped and pitched their tiny tent, with its floor and zippered netting to keep the insects out. They cooked some dehydrated rations on a small fire and then slept. In the morning, they searched for water and found a couple of gallons that had been caught in a half-hollowed log. They filled two plastic containers, put in their military-grade purification tablets, and secured them in the back of the Jeep.
For each of the next five days they followed the same routine, checking the GPS each day to be sure they were on course. As they drove farther from the populated areas, they were surrounded by squads of chattering monkeys in the trees overhead, flocks of birds flying over at dawn and dusk, and many smaller birds that were invisible in the dense foliage calling out to one another. On the third day, the trail took them down from the crest of a high hill into a valley surrounded by smaller hills, the trail opening up to a surface that had been leveled by human activity.
There were big trees growing in places, and fallen leaves had turned to a thick humus and then become dirt, and then smaller plants had died, rotted, and then been overshadowed by taller neighbors. And even those trees had died, fallen, and rotted, several long generations of them. But the strip of land where this had happened was still flat. Remi and Sam looked at the low hills that rose on their right and then the ones on their left. They got out of the Jeep.
Sam put his compass on a level spot, raised its mirror, and used it to sight along the space at the foot of the hills on their right. “Perfectly straight,” he said.
He paced off the width of the flat space, from one hill to the one opposite. “Fifty of my paces,” he said. “Let’s try it farther along. I’ll grab the pack with the machetes and folding shovels.”
Sam and Remi walked two hundred yards, then set the compass again and sighted along the foot of the next hill, and the one beyond it. Sam paced the width of the flat strip.
“I assume it’s fifty,” said Remi.
“Of course.”
“What do you think the hills were?”
“From what I’ve read, they could have been anything. They used to put up buildings on top of the earlier ones.”
“Which do you prefer?” she said. “Would you rather dig down below our feet to establish that it’s paved or climb up there and dig to see if the hill is a building that was overgrown by the jungle?”
“If we’re way up there, we might be able to see for a distance,” he said.
“That’s what I think too,” she said. “It might be nice to look above the treetops, for a change.”
They left their packs, took their machetes and folding shovels, and climbed. The hill they chose was the center one on the right side. It appeared to be the highest. The hill was steep, rising to a height of about a hundred twenty-five feet, and its slopes were thick with plants and small trees, which they used as handholds.
When they reached the apex, Sam unfolded the shovel and began to dig. After about four shovelfuls, his blade hit stone. He used his machete to test a few spots nearby and the sound was the same. Remi walked a few yards to get past a thicket of saplings, growing on the top of the building. “Don’t get lost,” Sam said.
“Come here,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.”
He took the machete and shovel with him and went through the thicket to find Remi, looking out over the tops of the jungle trees. From here, the canopy looked solid, but there were a few places where it was sparse. She pointed down at the level area they had left. “It’s like a wide road. It starts here and runs between the hills in a straight line. But it runs only a few hundred yards.”
“And over there,” Sam said, “another flat strip comes in at an angle and meets it.”
“There’s another over there,” said Remi. “Five — no, six — strips, coming in from six directions to meet at one spot.”
“It looks like an asterisk with a high wall circling the center,” Sam said.
“You could fly over this area a hundred times and not really see it,” Remi said. “The trees make everything seem natural. The shapes are rounded off, but I’ll bet this hill we’re standing on is a pyramid.”
“It’s something big anyway,” Sam said. “Well, I guess we know where we have to go.”
“Of course,” she said. “The place where the roads meet.”
When Sam and Remi reached the bottom of the steep hill, Remi said, “This is creepy.”
“What’s creepy?”
“You know they’re not hills, they’re huge buildings covered with dirt and plants. And these trees around us would be the only things that aren’t creepy except that they’re growing in the middle of this road. I feel like the people who lived here are watching us.”
“Trust me, they’re not.” He looked over his shoulder. “Nope. Not one ghost. But, just in case, let’s leave the Jeep here.”
As they walked, Remi said, “Look at those trees. The cover was all pretty much the same until we got here. Now look. The trees are all in a straight line.”
Sam stood beside her and sighted along the flat strip, where trees of all sizes and many species all ran along the center in a line. He stopped, shrugged off his pack, and began to dig a hole in line with the trees. The dirt was a rich, composted loam that came up easily. Shortly, he had a hole three feet wide and about three feet deep. “Take a look,” he said, and stepped out of the hole.
Remi jumped in, looked down, and used her machete to probe the surface. “It’s V-shaped and has a stone lining. It looks like an irrigation ditch.”
Sam looked around him, turning his body slowly. “I think it might be something else.”
“What?”
“Think back. Dave said that whatever else was going on in the Mayan world during the late classic period, it was made worse by droughts — two hundred years of them at least.”
“What do you think this was?”
“I think this flat space wasn’t a road. The Mayans had no wheeled carts, or tame animals to pull them, so why make it fifty paces wide? And it doesn’t go anywhere. It looks like a plaza, except there are six of them in all directions. I think this place was designed to collect rainwater.”
“Of course,” she said. “Both sides have a subtle slope down to the groove in the center and the groove would direct the water where they wanted it.”