Read Online One Rough Man by Brad Taylor - Free Book Online

meters from the temple, basically due north.”
    Eduardo said, “Let’s get going. We’ve got about an hour of daylight left.”
    With Olmec leading, the young men slipped into the jungle. After thirty minutes of fighting through the foliage, Olmec called a halt. He had been diligently keeping his pace count, a method to measure distance by counting the number of times his left or right foot hit the ground, and had hit four hundred meters.
    “We’re pretty close to the professor’s spot on the map,” Olmec said. “Keep your eyes open from here on in. If the temple’s here, we could walk right over it and never know.”
    They continued for no more than five minutes when Olmec hissed at his friend. He saw something in the jungle. A hump that didn’t fit. A tangle of vines and shrubs that didn’t seem natural. The gathering gloom was making him jumpy, like a child in bed at night who imagines the towel on the rack is a burglar. He was ready to return to the camp.
    “We’ve gone far enough,” he said. “Let’s go back.”
    Eduardo nodded in agreement. “Okay. Let’s just fan out a little and see if we can find anything.”
    Olmec had walked less than ten feet when he heard Eduardo trip and fall. He saw him sitting down next to a rectangular stone.
    “Look!” Eduardo said. “This is man-made. The temple is here!”
    Olmec, once reluctant to continue, became infected with the thought of discovery. He quickened his pace toward the hump he had seen. It was about eight feet tall and appeared to be a solid mass of earth. As he got closer, he saw that draping vines gave an illusion of mass, but that it was actually some sort of cave. Setting down the GPS and map, he moved the vines aside. A few meters inside the opening, just at the edge of light, was a gallon-sized sack made of woven grass encased in stucco.
    “Eduardo! Get over here! I think we’ve found what we were looking for!”
    “What is it? Is it gold? Jade? What?”
    Olmec moved toward the sack, sure that it contained something of wealth.

14
    T he professor grew tired of the back-and-forth discussion among the men in the local Mayan dialect.
    He addressed the shaman, who acted as the villager’s spiritual leader. “Speak in Spanish. What’s the problem?”
    “There is no problem. We simply will not go any farther. The area you’re leading us into is full of blackness and death.”
    This was the third time the shaman had made such a statement, without any elucidation of what he meant. The professor was about to explode into a tirade when it struck him that this could be proof of the temple’s existence. He wished he had asked thirteen years ago where they didn’t want to go.
    He had always been fascinated by the Mayan civilization, and was convinced that all theories of their demise were incorrect. The Maya had reached their height at about 900 A.D., and had a civilization that rivaled any in Europe, the Middle or Far East. For reasons known only to Maya ghosts, they had simply ceased to exist. It was one of the enduring mysteries of human existence, and many theories attempted to explain their downfall, ranging from outlandish alien invasions to the more mundane. The professor thought that everyone was looking at the problem backward. In his mind, it wasn’t outside influences that had caused the people to disappear, but something in the cities themselves that caused them to leave.
    The professor’s theory revolved around his interpretation of a fairly new Maya codex called the Grolier Codex. The last of four known Maya codices, it was found under suspicious circumstances in 1965 and was considered by many to be a fake. Others had determined it to be authentic and maintained that it detailed the Maya calendar as it related to the planet Venus.
    The professor had reached an altogether different conclusion. At the time of the Mayan decline there were two ruling elites in competition with each other: the political royalty and the religious