Fallon grinned cheerfully. 'Rudetsky went around it with a theodolite and transit. He reckons it's fifteen acres and averages a hundred and thirty feet high. It's an artificial acropolis -- 90 million cubic feet in volume and containing about six and a half million tons of material.' He produced his pipe. There's one something like it at Copan, but not quite as big.'
'Hell's teeth!' I said. 'I didn't realize it would be anything like this.'
gallon struck a match. 'The Mayas .. .' puff -- puff '.. . were an . . .' puff '. . . industrious crowd.' He looked into the bowl of his pipe critically. 'Come and have a closer look at the temple.'
We walked over to the hill and looked up at the partly excavated stairway. The stairs were about fifty feet wide. Fallon pointed upwards with the stem of his pipe. 'I thought I'd find something up there at the top, so I did a bit of digging, and I found it all right. You might be interested.'
Climbing the hill was a heavy pull because it was very steep Imagine an Egyptian pyramid covered with a thin layer of earth and one gets the idea. Fallon didn't seem unduly put out by the exertion, despite his age, and at the top he pointed 'The edge of the stairway will come there -- and that's where I dug.'
I strolled over to the pit which was marked by the heap of detritus about it. and saw that Fallon had uncovered a fear-some head, open-mouthed and sharp-toothed, with the lips drawn back in a snarl of anger. 'The Feathered Serpent,' he said softly. The symbol of Kukulkan.' He swept his arm towards a wall of earth behind. 'And that's the temple itself -- where the sacrifices were made.'
I looked at it and thought of Vivero brought before the priests on this spot, and shivering in his shoes for fear he'd have the heart plucked out of him. It was a grim thought.
Fallon said objectively, 'I hope the roof hasn't collapsed; it would be nice to find it intact.'
I sat down on a convenient tree stump and looked over the site of the city. About a fifth of it had been cleared, according to Fallon, but that was just the vegetation. There were great mounds, like the one we were on then, waiting to be excavated. I said, 'How long do you think it will take? When will we see what it was really like?'
'Come back in twenty years,' he said. 'Then you'll get a fair idea.'
'So long?'
'You can't hurry a thing like this. Besides, we won't excavate it all. We must leave something for the next generation -- they might have better methods and find things that we would miss. I don't intend uncovering more than half the city.'
I looked at Fallon thoughtfully. This was a man of sixty who was quite willing to start something he knew he would never finish. Perhaps it was because he habitually thought in terms of centuries, of thousands of years, that he attained a cosmic viewpoint. He was very different from Halstead.
He said a little sadly, 'The human lifespan is so short, and man's monuments outlast him generation after generation, more enduring than man himself. Shelley knew about that, and about man's vanity. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"' He waved his hand at the city. 'But do we despair when we see this? I know that I don't. I regard it as the glory of short-lived men.' He held out his hands before him, gnarled and blue-veined and trembling a little. 'It's a great pity that this flesh should rot so soon.'
His conversation was becoming too macabre for my taste, so I changed the subject. 'Have you identified the King's Palace yet?'
He smiled. 'Still hoping for plated walls of gold?' He shook his head. 'Vivero was mixed up, as usual. The Mayas didn't have kings, in the sense that we know them, but there was an hereditary chief among them called Halach uinic whom I suppose Vivero called king. Then there was the nacom, the war chief, who was elected for three years. The priesthood was hereditary, too. I doubt if the Halach uinic would have a palace, but we have found what we think is one of the main administrative buildings.' He pointed to another mound. 'That's it.'
It was certainly big, but disappointing. To me it was just another hill and it took a great deal of imagination to create a building in the mind's eye. Fallon said tolerantly, 'It isn't easy, I know. It takes a deal of experience to see it for what it is. But it's likely that Vivero was taken there for the judgement of the Halach uinic. He was also the chief priest but that was over Vivero's head -- he hadn't read Frazer's Golden Bough:
Neither had I, so I was as wise as Vivero. Fallon said, The next step is to get rid of these tree boles.' He kicked gently at the one on which I was sitting.
'What do you do? Blast them out?'
