MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES VOLUME 108 MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES VOLUME 910 | Page 8

following day, the three men bought a new Ford truck from a dealer, and an extra set of
Firestone tires and a couple of barrels of untaxed gasoline from a black-market racketeer. They then drove happily south. After two weeks of hard driving, they pulled into the
Mexican capital, Oaxaca. They could almost smell the treasure waiting to be found once
again.
Juan Vega thought back, as they drove towards the center of town, to when he first
wanted to 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
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