MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES, VOL. 106 MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES, VOL. 106 | Page 8

find the Maya treasure. It was in a mud-brick house, two blocks from the main Catholic Church,
that Juan had earlier learned the tale from his uncle, Guillermo Gaeta. It was his uncle, who as a
young man was on an expedition in 1921 that first discovered an abandoned, ancient city in the
mountainous jungle. As this first group of ten men dug into the earthly depths of a royal burial
chamber of a Maya King, the tunnel roof suddenly collapsed during a severe rainstorm. The uncontrolled mud smothered and quickly killed eight of the men. They had just handed out only
one of the immensely valuable, gold leafs of a Maya book that they had discovered. Guillermo
and Eduardo, the two lone survivors, tried to unearth the other men, but the deep pit had rapidly
filled with water and heavy mud. In the downpour of rain the final blow came when a large stone
block bearing the image of the Spirit Zipakná fell across Eduardo’s legs. Guillermo desperately
dug him out while he was still clutching in his hands the gold page of Maya glyphs and numbers.
Eduardo’s legs were crushed and he couldn’t walk. To make matters worse, their pack burros had
been spooked by the thunder and lightning and had vanished. Guillermo valiantly shouldered the
burden of the wounded Eduardo and tried to carry him back to civilization. However, in less than
a week Eduardo died painfully of gangrene poisoning from his wounds. Guillermo buried him,
and about two weeks later, stumbled out of the living jungle onto a small rancho. There a family
took him in and nursed him back to health. When he was strong enough, Guillermo returned to
Oaxaca.
Fearing for his freedom and the safety of himself and his family, Guillermo refused to report
the incident to the authorities, and told his family only bits and pieces of what occurred deep in
the jungle. The sole piece of evidence of his misadventure was kept hidden beneath a small statue
of the Virgin of Guadalupe which rested in an alcove in the family room. Under the statue was
a loose brick and under the brick was an ancient object wrapped in a ragged scrap of old hemp
cloth. On the rare occasions the object was brought into the light, it shone with the unique luster
of pure gold.
It was the eve of Juan Vega’s departure from Mexico to the promised land of America that Juan
recalled. Guillermo had wanted to show his favorite nephew that Mexico also held the promise
of a bright future for those who worked hard. Juan Vega remembered holding and marveling
at the ancient relic, with its strange glyphs on one side and the seemingly indecipherable Maya
numbers on the other. Unable to read any of the Maya languages, Juan Vega wondered what message it might contain. Could it be a story, or a code? Perhaps the location of even more fabulous
treasures? While Juan admired the hand-hammered, embossed, and engraved sheet of pure gold,
which measured some two hundred and seventy centimeters by two hundred and eighty centimeters, and was only about as thick as ten sheets of paper; Guillermo related the harrowing tale that
took place twenty years before.
Before leaving the next day, Juan vowed to his uncle to return to Mexico one day to mount his
own expedition in search of the lost city of the Maya, and to find more pages of the mysterious
book.
Now, years later that day had finally come to be a reality. Upon returning to the city of Oaxaca, Juan and Jorge, along with their new partner, Thomas Abrams, were able to visit Guillermo’s
home. There around the kitchen table, Guillermo once again related the story of first finding the
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