Morning brought the helicopter buzzing overhead and a man dangling like a spider from the cable winch. I still hadn't cleared up enough for it to land but there was enough manoeuvring space for Rider to drop a man by winch, and the man proved to be Halstead. He dropped heavily to the ground at the edge of the cenote and waved Rider away. The helicopter rose and slowly circled.
Halstead came over to me and then looked around. 'This isn't where you'd intended to clear the ground. Why the change?'
'I ran into difficulties,' I said.
He grinned humourlessly. 'I thought you might.' He looked at the tree stumps. 'You haven't got on very well, have you? You should have done better than this.'
I -waved my arm gracefully. 'I bow to superior knowledge. Be my guest -- go right ahead and improve the situation.'
He grunted but didn't take me up on the offer. Instead he unslung the long box he carried on his shoulder, and extended an antenna. 'We had a couple of walkie-talkies sent up from Camp One. We can talk to Rider. What do we need to finish the job?'
'Juice for the saw and the flamer; dynamite for the stumps -- and a man to use it, unless you have the experience. I've never used explosives in my life.'
'I can use it,' he said curtly, and started to talk to Rider. In a few minutes the chopper was low overhead again and a couple of jerrycans of fuel were lowered to us. Then it buzzed off and we got to work.
To give Halstead his due, he worked like a demon. Two pairs of hands made a difference, too, and we'd done quite a lot before the helicopter came back. This time a box of gelignite came down, and after it Fallon descended with his pockets full of detonators. He turned them over to Halstead, and looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. 'You look as though you've been dragged through a bush backwards.' He looked about him. 'You've done a good job.'
'I have something to show you,' I said and led him along the narrow path I had driven the previous day. 'I ran across Old-Cross-eyes here; he hampered the operation a bit.'
Fallon threw a fit of ecstatics and damned near clasped Cross-eyes to his bosom. 'Old Empire!' he said reverently, and ran his hands caressingly over the carved stone.
'What is it?'
'It's a stele -- a Mayan date stone. In a given community they erected a stele every katun -- that's a period of nearly twenty years.' He looked back along the path towards the cenote. 'There should be more of these about; they might even ring the cenote.'
He began to strip the clinging creepers away and I could see he'd be no use anywhere else. I said, 'Well, I'll leave you two to get acquainted. I'll go help Halstead blow himself up.'
'All right,' he said absently. Then he turned. 'This is a marvellous find. It will help us date the city right away.'
'The city?' I waved my band at the benighted wilderness. 'Is this Uaxuanoc?'
He looked up at the pillar. 'I have no doubt about it. Stelae of this complexity are found only in cities. Yes. I think we've found Uaxuanoc.'
IV
We had a hell of a job getting Fallon away from his beloved pillar and back to Camp Two. He mooned over it like a lover who had just found his heart's desire, and filled a notebook with squiggly drawings and pages of indecipherable scribblings, Late that afternoon we practically had to carry him to the helicopter, which had landed precariously at the edge of the cenote, and during the flight hack he muttered to himself all the way.
I was very tired, but after a luxurious hot bath I felt eased in body and mind, eased enough to go into the big hut and join the others instead of falling asleep. I found Fallon and Halstead hot in the pursuit of knowledge, with Katherine hovering on the edge of the argument in her usual role of Halstead-quietener.
I listened in for a time, not understanding very much of what was going on and was rather surprised to find Halstead the calmer of the two. After the outbursts of the last few weeks, I had expected him to blow has top when we actually found Uaxuanoc, but he was as cold as ice and any discussion he had with Fallon was purely intellectual. He seemed as uninterested as though he'd merely found a sixpence in the street instead of the city he'd been bursting a gut trying to find, It was Fallon who was bubbling over with excitement. He was as effervescent as a newly opened bottle of champagne and could hardly keep still as he shoved his sketches under Halstead's nose. 'Definitely Old Empire,' he insisted. 'Look at the glyphs.'
He went into a rigmarole which seemed to be in a foreign language. I said, 'Ease up, for heaven's sake! What about letting me in on the secret?'
He stopped and looked at me in astonishment, 'But I'm telling you.'
'You'd better tell me in English.'
