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Sam used his cell phone to dial Dr. David Caine’s office at the university. “Dr. Caine?” he said. “The delivery I was waiting for has arrived. Would you like to take a look?”
“I’d love the chance,” Caine said. “When can I come?”
“Anytime from now on. We’ll be here until evening.” Sam recited the address.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Sam terminated the call and then turned to the others. “He’ll be here in an hour. I’d better wipe this sparkly paint off right away or he’ll be as horrified as Selma.”
An hour later, their guest arrived. Dr. David Caine was in his mid-forties, very fit and tanned, wearing jeans and a summer-weight sport coat over a black polo shirt. As he stepped through the doorway into the vast office space, he saw the pot on the table across the room and could barely draw his eyes away from it. He stopped and shook Sam’s hand. “You must be Sam. I’m Dave Caine.”
Remi stepped up. “I’m Remi. Come this way. I can tell you’re dying to see the pot.”
He followed her across the open hardwood floor, but
when he was still six feet from the pot, he stopped and stared at it for a moment, then walked around it, looking at it from every angle. “I read the article and looked at the pictures you sent me, but seeing one of these in person is always a moment,” he said. “I always feel a bit of excitement. The pottery, the paintings, always contain a little bit of the personality of the artist. When I see a water pitcher shaped like a fat little dog, it’s like going back in time to meet the potter.”
“I know what you mean,” Remi said. “I love that too, when the actual human being is staring back at you from a thousand years ago.”
Caine came in toward the table and looked closely at the pot. “But this one is different. It’s obviously a prime piece, classic period. A day in the life of the king of Copán.” He straightened and looked at the Fargos. “You know that discoveries like this have to be reported to the government of Mexico, right?”
“Of course,” said Sam. “We were in the middle of a natural disaster and there wasn’t any reasonable, safe way to do that or any authorities who had time to deal with it. We’ll return the pot when we’ve had a chance to learn what we can about it.”
“It’s a relief that you know the rules,” he said.
Remi said, “Are you sure it’s from Copán? We found this at Tacaná, north of Tapachula, Mexico. That’s at least four hundred miles from Copán.”
Caine shrugged. “Native people in the Americas sometimes covered a lot of ground on foot. There’s also trade.”
“How old is it?”
Caine cocked his head and looked. “Wait. Here we go. The king is Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the sixteenth ruler of Copán. It says so here.” He pointed at a group of vertical columns with rounded designs like seals.
Sam said, “You can read those?”
“Yes. These columns each consist of one to five glyphs and each glyph is a word or phrase or an indication of a position in a sentence. You read from top left to right, but only for the first two columns, then go down a line and read the left one and the right one and so on. There are eight hundred sixty-one glyphs that we know.”
“There are over twenty Mayan languages,” said Remi. “Does this form of writing work for all of them?”
“No,” he said. “The only ones we have were written in Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatec.”
Sam stared at the pot. “So this comes from Copán. I wonder how it got from Honduras all the way across Guatemala to the border of Mexico.”
“And when,” said Remi.
“Exactly what I was wondering,” said Caine. “We could do a carbon date on any organic material associated with the find and on the man himself. That would do it.”
“I’ll call Dr. Talamantes and Dr. Garza and see if they can arrange to have the man tested,” said Remi. “He’s in a hospital morgue in Tapachula. They signed him in, mostly on the strength of the goodwill they built up with the medical community in the area after the earthquake.”
“Are they also archaeologists?” asked Caine.
“No, just medical doctors,” said Sam.
“Then would you mind if I stepped in and got a couple of Mexican colleagues to go to work on this? They’re first-rate scientists and very well respected.”
“We’d be delighted,” said Remi.
“Then I’ll call them this afternoon and get them going on it. You’ve done a good job of keeping his location quiet since the first blast of publicity, so there hasn’t been a crush of people trying to get in and see him. But you can be sure that lots of people are waiting and listening—some scholars and scientists, and some crackpots and some charlatans as always.”
