Читать книгу The Serpent and the Eagle - Bruce Dow - Страница 2

July 20 1520; Cactus Rock (Tenochtitlan) Mexico

The powerfully built dark bearded man barked out orders in a rapid fire staccato, his face a mass of sweat mixed with rain. His voice was scarcely heard over the din of charging horses and blasting harquebuses. Soldiers were yelling, screaming and dying. Through the darkness and drizzle he saw a host of Indian warriors in canoes closing on his position. His men were now trapped on the narrow causeway. The Indians had torn down the Acali, the canoe passage which separated the last section of causeway from the mainland. Two large wooden barges teetered at the edge of the break in the causeway. The four horses which had been pulling the barges were cut loose; they thrashed disconnectedly, trying to make their way to shore; panic stricken soldiers were clinging to saddle straps and horses' manes. The remainder of the contingent on the causeway stuffed their pockets and even the wide tops of their jackboots with whatever gold artefacts they could snatch from the barges - Cups, plates, jugs, medallions. Many soldiers jumped frantically into the breach only to sink beneath the swirling, murky waters, laden down with steel armour and gold.

In the centre of the City fires began to burn atop the Great Pyramid. The beleaguered men on the causeway heard the dull thud of drums signifying that their comrades left behind had been captured alive and would soon be bent backwards over the altar stone atop the Great Pyramid. Their pulsating hearts would be torn from their living bodies. There was no time to think about their fate or to attempt a rescue. The Indian warriors had disembarked from their canoes and were charging along the rain slicked marble stones of the causeway toward the survivors. The two men nearest the leader went down. One had taken an arrow frontally through the neck, splitting his adam's apple. The second soldier groped in front of his face, madly yanking at the arrow shaft which was protruding from his eye. He pulled at the arrow with inhuman strength. It dislodged. He fell, the shaft still clutched in his hand as brain tissue oozed from the vacant socket. Their leader gave the order one last time. The surviving soldiers heaved as one man. The barges swayed momentarily, and finally, still heavily loaded with gold, plunged into the lake, filling most of the gap in the causeway. Men scrambled over the barges as they sank. But, a dozen yards of open water still remained before the safety of the mainland. The water was too deep to wade across. There seemed to be no escape. Yet the greed of the dead was to be the salvation of the living. For the last thing the pursuing Indians saw through the pervading drizzle were the figures of their arch enemies, the short dark bearded leader and his tall red bearded lieutenant running over and stomping under the partially submerged bodies of their comrades which had piled up one on top of the other.

As 'The Sad Night' ended, the lifeless forms of many conquistadors, their doublets bulging with gold, continued to sink to the bottom of the lake, their bones to be swallowed up with the precious metal for which they had forfeited their lives.

August 07, 1995 Teotihuacan ( the place where the Gods gathered) forty miles north - east of Mexico City.

The temperature had soared past 100 degrees F. Professor Jeremy Lake’s skin was a red pin cushion of insect bites. It is worth all the discomfort, he thought.

Professor Lake had been doing field work for twenty-five years. His Digs were habitually underfunded. But this time, the funding was lavish. In addition, the Mexican authorities had authorized his group to excavate anywhere along the ‘Way Of The Dead’. Even the great Pyramid of the Sun was not off limits to him. Whoever headed the foundation for which he worked must have friends in very high places.

The initial site that professor Lake had chosen yielded artefacts spanning seven thousand years of Indian civilization. Several well differentiated strata had been identified. Over the millennia, the periodic lava flows from nearby Mount Xitle had done much to seal in the history of long vanished cultures. As they dug deeper, they went back in time, from Azteca/Tolteca, classic Mayan, and pre -classic Omak, straight through to paleo-American.

Unfortunately, this particular ‘tell’ yielded nothing of significance: a few ‘coo’ (digging sticks), clay pellets for blow guns, and pot shards of clay and obsidian. Mundane artifacts, which had been duplicated at hundreds of earlier digs.

Professor Lake moved his crew to a secondary site. He chose a mound just beyond the walls of the Citadel of Teotihuacan, a little to the east of the Pyramid of the Moon. Within the walls of the Citadel, there stood an ancient temple. The balustrade of the temple displayed a huge sculpted head of the Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl. The visage was in the likeness of a serpent, a plumbed serpent.

It didn’t take long for the student diggers to figure out that they had stumbled onto something unusual. Within a foot of the top of this secondary mound, their shovels struck a solid object. As they removed the surrounding earth, taking great care so as not to damage the object, they realized that whatever was buried under the mound was huge. Furthermore, it had form and design. This was not simply an oversized boulder. They continued to dig, painstakingly. The encased object began to take shape. It required the better part of a week to fully unearth it.

When the monolith was finally exposed, Professor Lake, his associates and students looked upon a wonder: a gigantic stone figure; a reclining man; fully twenty feet from toe to head. The head was twisted. The socketless eyes faced west, to the setting sun. In its lap was a large bowl; it was the size of a bushel basket.

Extensive skeletal remains were unearthed around the huge frame. Five individual skeletons were pieced together. Detailed examination of the remains that each had been beheaded. Additionally, the skeletal evidence suggested that extensive trauma had been inflicted in the chest area. The conclusion - their hearts had been cut out.

One other thing of note was found. The oversized concave receptacle perched on the stomach of the reclining figure contained a rolled up document. It had been remarkably well preserved.