Sam and Remi reached a slope that had suffered an avalanche during the night and covered a stretch of the trail with dirt and rocks that looked like basalt. They made a detour above it, carefully navigating around the big boulders that had fallen. Then they both stopped.
One of the enormous chunks of basalt that lay in the path was not natural. It was a perfect rectangle with rounded corners at the top. Without speaking, they both stepped closer. They could see the carved profile of a man with the hooked nose and elongated skull of a Mayan aristocrat and an elaborate feathered headdress. There were columns of complex symbols that they could tell were Mayan writing. They both looked up the side of the mountain, their eyes following the gash in the green foliage upward, tracing the path of the avalanche to its beginning.
Irresistible attraction made them begin to climb at once. They went up the steep hillside to a surface that was perfectly flat like a shelf, about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. The space was bordered by trees, but there were none within the ring. They could see that a portion of the shelf had broken off and gone down in the avalanche.
Sam dug down a few inches with his knife, and they both heard the blade strike stone and scrape when he moved it.
Remi looked around her. “A patio?” she said. “Or an entryway?”
They looked at the sheer face of the mountain. There was one area that had a layer of new dirt on it, which had fallen from higher up on the mountain, and a bit of a recessed spot. “This looks like it might have slid down when the big block fell,” Sam said. He poked it with his knife, then set down his pack and took out his folding shovel. He used it overhand, scraping down more of the dirt from the rocky wall.
“Careful,” Remi said. “We don’t want to bring down the rest of the mountain.” But she took off her backpack, took out a hatchet they’d used for splitting firewood, and joined him. When the dirt was cleared, they faced a wall of black volcanic rock. Sam stabbed at it with his shovel a few times. It was brittle and porous like pumice and chipped off in chunks. He nodded at Remi’s hatchet. “May I?”
“Be my guest.” She handed him the hatchet.
Sam hacked at the layer of volcanic stone, knocking it away. “It looks as though at some point there was a lava flow, and it must have come down like a curtain.”
“Over the entrance?”
“I didn’t dare to put it that way,” he said. “We don’t know it’s an entrance to anything, but that’s sure what it looks like.” He hacked harder until a bigger chunk fell inward and a hole appeared.
“You just had to knock hard,” said Remi. “What do you think? Tomb?”
“Way up here? I’m guessing a sacred place, like a shrine to whatever god was in charge of volcanos.”
Sam enlarged the opening, took his flashlight from his pack, shone its beam into the hole, and then stepped through the opening. “Come in,” he said. “It’s an ancient building.”
Inside was a room made of cut stone, then plastered in white. All of the walls had been painted with colorful pictures of Mayan men, women, and gods in a procession of some sort. A few humans sacrificed to the gods by cutting themselves or pushing thorns through their tongues. But the figure that dominated the pictures on each wall was a skeleton with dangling eyeballs.
But Sam and Remi didn’t let their flashlights linger on any of these scenes. They both stepped deeper into the room, drawn by a singular sight. On the whitewashed stone floor lay the desiccated body of a man, dark and leathery. He wore a breechcloth, and a pair of sandals of woven plant fiber. In the stretched lobes of his ears were large green jade plugs. There were jade beads around his neck and a carved jade disk. They both ran the beams of their flashlights up and down the withered figure. Beside the man’s body was a widemouthed, lidded pot.
Remi twisted the neck of her flashlight to make the beam wider. “I’ve got to take some pictures before we get any closer.”
“Or before there’s another aftershock and the roof falls in.”
Remi handed Sam her flashlight, then took flash pictures with her phone. She circled the dead man, taking every angle. She shot the four walls, the ceiling, the floor, and then the pot by the man. “He’s mummified. He looks a bit like the Inca mountain burials and the Moche and Chimú on the Chilean coast.”
“He does,” said Sam. “But this isn’t a burial.”
“No,” Remi agreed. “It looks as though he was sheltering here, at least temporarily, and died. He’s got carved-out wooden vessels over here with some seeds in them. Probably the fruit just rotted away. There’s another one that could have been a rain catcher.”
“He’s got an obsidian knife in his belt, and a few flaked pieces he used for carving over by the wooden trough.”
Remi was photographing the pot, which was painted with Mayan scenes that seemed to be about one man — eating, wielding a shield and a war club, kneeling to a fearsome-looking deity that seemed part feline and part troll.
Sam said, “I wonder what was inside.”
“Whatever it is, it’s probably still there. The lid seems to be stuck on it with some kind of seal — like glue. We’d better not try to open it or we’ll damage it. Get out of the frame. I want to send these pictures to Selma before my battery dies.”
“Good idea.” Sam stepped out through the hole in the lava curtain, used his phone to take pictures of the entryway and the mountainside above and below him. As he shot downward toward the trail and the chunk of worked stone that blocked it, he saw the rest of the volunteers coming along. “Hey!” he shouted. “Up here!”
The column of people stopped and looked up, and he waved his arms so they would spot him two hundred feet above them. They hesitated for a moment and then began to climb toward him.
While Sam was waiting for the others to arrive, Remi came out of the shrine’s entrance onto the surface where he stood. “What are you doing?”
He pointed down at the others. “I asked them to come up to take a look.”
“I suppose we couldn’t keep this to ourselves.”
“Not even for a day. Not with that carved doorpost lying on the trail down there. We’re going to need their help to keep this place safe until we can turn it over to the authorities.”
“You’re right,” she said. “This could be an important find. I’m not aware of any other mummified Mayans.”
In a few minutes, Christina and Maria, the Mendoza brothers, and José Sánchez joined them. Christina looked around her. “What is this place?”
“We’re not sure,” said Remi. “It’s a Mayan ruin, and it seems to have been buried in a lava flow. We think it’s a shrine or holy place, probably dedicated to the mountain. The Mayans also had lots of gods that lived in the sky or the interior of the Earth. On a volcano, I suppose it could be either. I remember one called Bacab who did both.”
Maria looked at the entrance. “Can we go inside without damaging it?”
“We’ve been inside,” Sam said. “It should be okay as long as you don’t touch anything. There are the remains of a man in there. He’s been mummified — not intentionally but by the conditions. The altitude and the dry air up here probably preserved him the way it preserved the mummies in Peru and Chile. At some point, a lava flow sealed the entrance, and that probably made a big difference.”
The volunteers all took their flashlights and went in one at a time. As each one came out, another entered. When they had all been inside, they stood on the flat entry, hushed and looking awed.
“What do we do about him?” asked Paul Mendoza.
José Sánchez said, “We get the news out. Then people will pay to come up here.”
“No,” said Maria. “We’ve got to get the authorities up here. The archaeologists—”
“The archaeologists can’t do much right now,” said Christina. “The roads are closed, and, when they’re reopened, it would be wrong to evacuate a corpse first when there are people down there waiting to be transported to hospitals.”