Aaron Elkins: Curses!

When they had made their way to the top they turned to look back out over the site. Five and a half years hadn't changed it much. Only the eight-foot chain-link fence surrounding it was new. It had been erected by the government a few months after the site had been shut down.

They were facing west into an early-evening sky just shifting from a pale blue to a rich, red-ribbed mauve. Below them were the rest of the buildings, trailing long shadows and scattered with no apparent design around the edges of the grassy plaza: the thickly overgrown cube of the Priest's House, where the newly discovered skeleton lay; the twin ramps of the modest ball court, where much of the current work centered; the cluster of three small, collapsed buildings, little more than foundations now and unimaginatively dubbed the West Group by Howard Bennett.

The clump of knobby hummocks along the northern border of the plaza just inside the fence had also once been structures of some kind, but the jungle had long ago broken them up and engulfed them. To a casual eye they were no more than irregular humps of dirt and debris covered with soil and sprouting tangles of weeds and bushes. No one would even be able to guess at what they had been until they were cleared and excavated in the years to come.

And that was it, except for the archaeologists’ shed of limestone stucco, its thatched roof flaring to salmon as the slanting rays of sunlight struck it. Immediately beyond the square plaza, on all sides, the rain forest pressed in, a lumpy, scrubby mat, endless and impenetrable.

Or so it seemed. Invisible under the green canopy was the trail they had walked to get here. Decrepit now, collapsed and pulled apart by time and roots, it had once been part of the complex system of raised Mayan “highways” that had linked the great centers. This one cut arrow-straight through the jungle for three-quarters of a mile to Chichen Itza, conveniently passing within fifty yards of the Mayaland's grounds on the way.

But from here the Mayaland might have been on another continent. There was nothing to see beyond this silent, thousand-year-old place of ghosts but jungle, nothing to hear but the thickening drone of insects as the evening came on. It was an astonishing thought that they had been drinking iced beers in a posh hotel only twenty minutes before. Even the air was primeval, full of the sharp, burnt-straw smell of Yucatan. Here they still cleared their cornfields for next year's crop by setting them aflame, just as they had done when Tlaloc bustled with life.

"Come,” Abe said. “I want you to have a look inside the temple."

The entrances to Mayan temples are generally doorless, but this one had been sealed by the government with a thick plywood barrier, now warped and spongy. A clumsy arrangement of metal bars and a massive padlock held it in place.

Abe grasped the padlock. “Yesterday when they sent me the key, I came up to have a look around. And this," he said dramatically, “is what I found.” When he lifted the lock it slid apart in his hand.

"It was already open?” Julie said.

Not merely open, but sawn neatly through the hasp.

"Looters?” Gideon wondered.

"Ah, you tell me,” Abe said. “Let's go in."

When the wooden barrier was wrenched out of the way, they found a jumble of stones and dirt inside, some of it piled three feet high. The collapsed stairwell in the center, re-excavated down to the landing by the police in 1982, was now crudely dug out a further six or seven steps. A dusty pickax lay at the bottom of the shaft. There was a spade propped in a corner, and a yellow plastic bucket on one of the dirt piles.

Abe turned to Gideon. “So, did it get left like this in 1982?"

"No, of course not. The police cleaned up after themselves, and I was here when the government sealed it. There have been looters here, all right."

"Just what I figured,” Abe said with a sigh. Then, mildly, as an afterthought: "Vay is mir."

"Woe is me,” Gideon abstractedly translated for Julie. He had been through enough crises with Abe to know the expression well. He was kneeling, looking closely at the spade in the beam of his flashlight, using his fingers to break up some clods of earth that had been stuck to it.

"But do you mean the Mexican government hasn't been guarding the site?” Julie asked. “Anyone can see it would be attractive to looters. Where there was one codex they'd think there might be another one."

"Highly unlikely,” Gideon said. “Wildly unlikely."

"Sure, you'd know that, but would they?"

"It was guarded,” Abe said. “One of the guards from Chichen Itza walked over twice a day to have a look around."

"Twice a day? But anybody-"

"Julie, certain things you got to understand. You know how many archaeological sites there are in Yucatan?"

Julie shook her head.

"Well, you're even with everybody else,” Abe said. “Nobody knows. A thousand for sure; probably two thousand. In all of them there's stuff worth stealing, but that's a lot of places to guard twenty-four hours a day."

"But still-"

"They put a fence around it,” he said with a smile, “which is more than most of them have. But what kind of robber would it be who lets himself be stopped by a fence?"

"Well, at least they've saved us some work,” Gideon said, brushing the dirt from his knees and standing up. “We'd just have had to redig those steps ourselves."

"That's a point,” Abe said equably.

"I don't understand you two!” Julie exclaimed. “How can you stand there so calmly? There have been looters in here! Who knows what they got away with?"

"They didn't get away with anything,” Gideon said. “At least I don't see how they could have. They didn't do any new excavating. All they did was re-dig a few steps that we'd already excavated before the cave-in. We'd gotten down thirteen steps below the landing, if I remember."

"Twelve, according to the site report,” Abe said. “Altogether, twenty-four down from here.” He looked at Julie. “So all they did was clear away some more of the rubble that fell down when Howard, that bum, caved in the tunnel."

"Oh.” Julie subsided, looking unconvinced, and peered down into the dim shaft. “Is that where you found the chest? On that landing?"

Gideon flicked on his flashlight again and the three of them walked down together. “Here it is.” The heavy chest was still in the little chamber, four massive limestone slabs standing on their edges around a fifth slab that served as the base, all of it grit-coated and painfully empty. The mutilated lid, since patched together, was now in the Museum of Anthropology in the capital.

Gideon played the beam of light over the walls of the once-sealed room. No more fairyland down there; no pristine crystal cave. The stalactites and stalagmites were still there, but they had turned a dingy gray, thickly scummed with lichen and pulpy fungus. After a millennium of perfect preservation, five years of exposure to the fecund air of Yucatan had turned what had once seemed like glittering cascades of ice into nasty excrescences. There were even a few pallid, frightened-looking plants in crannies here and there, cowering deep inside a pyramid, ten feet below the surface of a sealed, windowless, lightless building.

"So what were they looking for?” Abe said, as much to himself as to anyone else as they walked back up the stairs. “With a thousand places to hunt for treasure, what's so special about Tlaloc? And why dig under the temple, where it's already been dug once?"

"Could they have heard about the possibility of another sealed room at the bottom?” Gideon asked.

"No, no, this I doubt very much. De Waldeck's book was never translated from the French, and as far as I know there are only two copies, the one I saw at Dumbarton Oaks and one in Paris. No one ever even mentions it in the literature. Only by luck did I stumble on it myself. Besides, another sealed room is a long shot, no more. And even if there is one, who says there's anything in it worth robbing? No, if I was a looter I could spend my time a lot better."