on the floor in front of the block, and I crawled toward it and squeezed through, with little bits of rock rattling down around me and my braid getting caught on the edge of the slab. The stones were cold. Jan had the light trained through the crack for Rikki, so wherever we were was not yet visible, but I could sense we were in a bigger space. I could stand up, for one thing, and Jan, beside me, was standing at his full height too. For some no doubt deeply psychological reason, it was easier to breathe.
After we were all inside, Jan snapped off the light for a moment, and we stood there close together in the thickest darkness I’ve ever experienced. No sound, no light, no up or down. If there were eyes that could pierce the blackness, then we were at their mercy, because we were helpless as cave fish. I briefly wondered if death might be like a cave. My greater impulse, however, was to not think at all but find the nearest human being, which is what I did. As it turned out, I had snuggled up to Jan, who almost dropped the flashlight in his effort to get away.
“Look,” he said, sounding flustered, and clicked on the light. In less than three seconds, he’d managed to put half the chamber between us. I gave a mental shrug. He was either a lot more married than he looked, or there was something a wee bit off here. I’d met guys like him before. They were only dangerous if you were the kind of woman who engaged in a lot of self-doubt.
We were in some kind of vault, not large but much roomier than the passage. The walls, white stucco, were covered in glyphs painted in black, some of them as large as a man’s head. One group of them, in long vertical rows, looked calligraphic, as though they had been done by a professional; others were more like children’s drawings—simple, animal-like shapes with teddy bear ears and large noses. The number and complexity of the professional-looking glyphs meant that someone had spent a long time decorating this little chamber cut deep into the bedrock below the pyramid. My guess was that this was not art for art’s sake.
“Who was buried here?” I asked.
“A king and two sacrifice victims,” said Jan as he ran the light over the amateur side of the wall. He still sounded a little stiff, but that was his problem, not mine.
One by one, the simple shapes with their rounded ears and goggly eyes came into view. I saw that some of them had little arms, turned up at the ends where hands should be. “Did the Mayas have a thing about sacrificing kids?” I asked.
“These sacrifices were adolescents, maybe sixteen or so.”
“That means kids.”
He shrugged. I looked over at his son, who was studying one of the vertical lines of the glyphs, and remembered the way the sunlight had caught the edge of his ear on top of Temple IV. “His age,” I added, nodding toward Rikki.
Jan looked at his son, then at me. “So what is your point?” he said bluntly.
This time it was my turn to back off. Why was I even bringing this stuff up? It was not like I hadn’t seen much worse. I’d been in hospital camps in Darfur where the kids who were still alive looked like they were made out of pencils. I’d been in Iraq after the Kurdish genocide. So where did I get off begrudging Jan his two teenaged sacrifice victims? “Nothing,” I said. “What do you want me to shoot in here?”
He studied me for another long moment and I realized that I’d not yet seen him smile. He was a genuinely somber man, but I was actually starting to get used to him. You could count on him. Always preoccupied, unless you deliberately woke him up, as I had without meaning to when I leaned into him in the dark. He didn’t chat for the sake of chatting, or tell stories about his own exploits around the campfire at night, a habit endemic among the crowd I usually ran with. He didn’t joke. And most of the time, except when he was deep in thought or angry, he treated Rikki and me with old-time courtesy. A serious man. Aside from Stefan, who was lighter about it, I’d never met one before. I began to wish I hadn’t startled him so badly.
“Over here,” he said finally, and put his hand toward a glyph that had been partially obliterated by the crumbling of the stucco but was unmistakably a version of the same one I’d photographed in the first temple, back at camp. The four-petaled flower inside the squarish oval, but this time with no streamers attached. Once it had been pointed out to me, I couldn’t see how I’d overlooked it the first time. It stood out among the teddy bears, and it did not fit with the other glyphs either, almost as though a third artist had been at work. Too bad we didn’t have those cameras.
“There’s an easier way in,” said Jan, reading my mind, “but almost impossible to find from the outside at night. We will go out that way, leave Rikki to mark the entrance, and you and I will get the equipment.” He glanced at me. “If you don’t mind.”
Truce. I nodded.
At the other end of the vault was a small opening that looked completely blocked and was, indeed, a tight squeeze for Jan, who was not a large man, but then it quickly turned into a steep but spacious passageway made out of earth instead of rock, like a mine shaft. We climbed for fifteen minutes, the light bouncing ahead of us, and as we approached the end of the tunnel, it began to close around us once again until we came to another tight squeeze.
Though we were still inside, I could taste the first breath of night air and hear the faint throb of the frogs. Suddenly, I could hardly wait to leave the Underworld. “I’m smallest,” I said. “I’ll go through first.”
Jan hesitated, then handed me his flashlight, and I scrambled up into Rikki and Jan’s cupped hands and used their shoulders to lever myself out into the world. Tired as I already was, for a moment I thought about heading back to camp and leaving the two of them to their mysterious underground enterprise. Instead, I dutifully aimed the flashlight at the entrance so they could see their way out.
Naturally, the minute Jan and I had loaded ourselves up with the camera equipment, it began to rain. We were just stepping out of the shorter passageway for the hike back to where Rikki was waiting for us at the mouth of the shaft with only a penlight for company when the sky came bucketing down. You couldn’t see through it and of course we hadn’t brought the ponchos. And I wasn’t about to risk my cameras if I didn’t have to. I made eye contact with Jan, and he motioned with his drenched head for us to get back inside the passageway.
“What’ll we do?” I asked once we were out of the thunder of the rain. You could hear it, but it was muffled, like stones being shaken in a far-off box.
“Wait it out,” he said. “It will slow down soon—this is not the rainy season.”
So we spread out the wet packs and made ourselves comfortable on the floor against the wall. Then Jan turned off the light to save the battery. Silence, except for the hollow racketing outside. After a while I cleared my throat and said, “Rikki will crawl back inside the tunnel, won’t he?” It wasn’t actually meant to be a question—Rikki was a big boy, he could take care of himself—but it came out that way.
“Oh, yes,” said Jan out of the dark. I heard the snick of a match and the sound of him drawing on a pipe. I hadn’t known he smoked a pipe. I love pipes, don’t ask me why. Nobody at the tamburitza bar smoked them. Neither Milo nor Bruno smoked them. But somewhere in my misty infant days, I must have had a happy pipe experience with a person I’ve by now forgotten, somebody I trusted, whose fragrant pipe smoke was burned into my memory.
A little rosy glow lit up the bottom part of Jan’s face and the sweet aroma of burning tobacco rolled my way. I closed my eyes and took it in through my nostrils. Neither of us made any effort to talk. We were too tired after the long crawl, and there was too much left to do. Jan puffed away and I took surreptitious sips of his smoke and thought about my adventurous pal Dirk
