Chapter 14: The Temple

Friday

The sun was already up when Mao and Beth drove back up the mountain to the campsite Thursday morning. While it wasn’t the first time she had ever done the ‘walk of shame’, returning to work in the same clothes she had worn the day before, this time it seemed especially significant! A couple of the kids, female undergrads, had welcomed her back with cheers and applause, and then asked her how it had been. Worst of all, Beth doubted that she and Mao had slept much more than an hour or two all night. After leaving the parking lot of the tiki bar, Mao had found a cheap motel and they had spent the entire night screwing their brains out. Even if they dozed off, as soon as one of them woke up, they woke the other and had another go. Beth had gotten more sleep on the trip back, even bouncing along the gravel road. She was simply exhausted.

Both Beth and Mao had slept part of the day and left the excavation details to Doctor Veracruz. That was the final preparation day before they opened the temple, scheduled for early Friday morning. Nobody in the camp got much sleep that night. For some it was excitement about what they might find on Friday. For Beth and Mao, it was something different. He joined her in her tent after dinner, and they spent the night screwing again. After a bit, however, she sent him back to his tent so they could both get some sleep before the temple was opened in the morning.

The entire camp was up at the crack of dawn on Friday. Everything was prepped, and the students were making bets on what would be found inside. Everything they had seen up to that point indicated the buried temple had not been breached already. That was a major problem in the Middle East! Some of the sites there had been buried for thousands of years, and grave robbing was a very lucrative profession. The odds of finding an undisturbed and unopened site were very low in Egypt, Turkey, and Mesopotamia.

On the other hand, the reality was that there wasn’t going to be much to find in the temple. The simple fact was that there were no precious metals in Polynesia. Nobody was going to find buried treasures of gold and silver. It was anybody’s guess what they would find. The ground penetrating radar had given them a good feeling for how to open the temple, and nothing indicated that there was anything more than a single room inside. They would just have to see after they opened it.

Doctor Veracruz was in charge of the opening and was giving very specific instructions. He had actually been a junior researcher on one of the Mayan tomb complexes and had been present when that team had opened some of the closed rooms and tombs. Now he was going to use those lessons to make sure that, whatever happened, no damage to the temple would occur.

In this the selection of the undergrad and grad students aided him. The Haka Nuva Temple project wasn’t all that big and didn’t have the budget of some of the big-name archeological projects around the world. As a result, many of the students weren’t archeology or history majors, but just kids looking for a summer internship or field experience. Their fix-it guy, Roger Horton, was a mechanical engineering student from Auckland working on his master’s; his inevitable nickname on the team was MacGyver. The photographer and videographer were both from the University of Maltesano, juniors working on summer internships. It went like that throughout the team. If any were getting paid it was peanuts; the real payoff would come when their names appeared on research papers documenting their work and how it related to their field of science.

The final meeting was held at the dig site itself. The temple had been dug into the side of an extinct volcanic mountain and was at the edge of a large flat plateau. Though the plateau was currently overgrown with jungle, one of the geography students had managed to determine that in pre-Spanish times the natives had kept it cut back and open. Whether that had any influence on the temple activities was not known. As it stood, the portion of the plateau in front of the temple door had been scraped clear giving the team room to pull the door stone free.

That was just the first job. Veracruz called the entire team together. “Okay, remember the rules. We are not here to rampage and pillage. After we get the door stone pulled away and secure, only a few of us at a time will enter. Everybody going in must wear dust masks and latex gloves. Touch nothing! I can’t repeat that enough. Touch nothing! We’ll give everybody a chance to go in and look, but we touch nothing. Mahani, Kailani...” Veracruz stopped and looked around.

Two girls with cameras stepped forward. “We’re here,” they said.

“You two are the first to go in after Doctor Maddox, Mister Smith, and myself. Again, you don’t touch anything, but I want everything documented. I don’t know what we’re going to find but take photos of everything! If you run out of battery life, swap it out. If you need a new memory card, swap it out. Make sure your satellite links to the server and the cloud are running. You two might find things the rest of us miss!”

“Got it, Doc!” said Mahani, a slight Polynesian girl.

“We’ll be ready, Doctor Veracruz!” added Kailani, a Eurasian girl.

He nodded and gave them a thumbs-up sign. To the others he reiterated, “Masks and gloves. We leave no trace behind, and we don’t breathe any dust. Sample teams?” Several students stepped forward. “We don’t know what we’ll find in there, but whatever it is hasn’t seen fresh oxygen or moisture in several hundred years. I know we’ve drilled for this, but just remember, extreme delicacy and we neutralize the oxygen and water vapor.”

Veracruz went on in this vein for several minutes more, a final reminder to the entire team of their job. Then he stepped back and looked at Beth and Mao. “Are we ready?” he asked, smiling.

“Let’s do this, Manolo,” replied Mao.

“Go!” agreed Beth.

“Right!” Veracruz turned back to the others and said, “MacGyver, do your thing!”

The young engineer grinned at that. The name was more appropriate than some thought, simply because the entire project was run on a shoestring. There wasn’t a lot of money floating around, or major international grants to pay for things. Most of the funding was through the University of Maltesano. Roger Horton was getting a small stipend; his main compensation would be a master’s thesis on environmentally conscious engineering at an archeological dig. “I’m on it, Doc!”

MacGyver went over to where his cables were laid. Over the last few days, he and some ‘volunteers’ had carried cabling and rigging gear from the campsite up the trail to the temple. Now, cable was laid from a small stand of trees to the doorway. Each cable went around a specific tree; the other end of each cable was connected to a single junction block. MacGyver connected the junction block to another cable connecting several cables to eyebolts drilled into the temple door. In between was a come-along, a hand-operated chain hoist.

Ordering everybody away, he began slowly to ratchet the come-along. It took several minutes for the cable to tighten, lifting off the ground and vibrating under the tension. MacGyver continued to ratchet the come-along. Dust began to stir around the doorway, and loud popping sounds could be heard as the door stone began to shift slightly.

The young man then stopped, letting the door stone settle. He continued slowly to ratchet the come-along, inching the stone free. There was a lot of groaning and screeching as the huge rock inched out. One of the primary objectives was not to destroy the door stone, or even tip it over. The ground penetrating radar indicated it had a flat base, and should be able to stand upright, but none of the team leaders wanted to hurry things and pull too fast, tipping it over.

Finally, after a seeming lifetime pulling the stone, there was a huge puff of stone dust and dirt, and the door stone pulled free. It wobbled, but the engineer immediately released the tension on the cable, and the stone stabilized in the vertical position. The entire team let out a collective breath as the stone stopped moving, and then began applauding. After that, MacGyver repositioned his cables and come-along, and was able to pull the stone far enough away from the opening that people could go inside the temple.

Veracruz went over to the sweating engineer. “Very nicely done, Roger, very nicely done!”

“Thanks, Doc, but don’t go any closer, not yet anyway. I want to give it a few minutes and see how stable it is. I might still need to brace it, and I have no idea how to do that yet. That could take up a day in itself.”

That didn’t sit well with several of the team members, most of whom wanted to rush into the temple and see what was there. Eventually, MacGyver gave his blessing; the door stone didn’t need bracing. The three team leaders adjusted their dust masks and pulled on latex gloves, and then grabbed high-powered flashlights. Veracruz was the first one in the doorway, followed by Beth and then Mao. The three moved inside, but refused to touch anything, not even setting their electric torches down. Unlike earlier explorers, they knew they needed to disturb as little as possible.

Beth looked around as her eyes got used to the darkness of the temple. They were in a long oval room, twenty feet across and extending twice that deep into the extinct volcano. They were standing on a flat floor. Veracruz commented, “This was originally a volcanic lava tube!” The others murmured in agreement. They ventured further inside, shining their lights ahead. The tube ended in a collapsed portion of the ancient volcanic tube, which had been smoothed over.

The first thing Beth thought was that for a Neolithic culture, the pre-Spanish natives were amazingly skilled at working with stone. The walls of the tube were smooth, any rough spots on the volcanic rock having been broken off and rubbed smooth. The floor of the tube was also smooth, filled in by rubble and tamped down as smooth as cut stone. Centered in the tube was a large square rock. Otherwise, not much was in the room.

Still, there had to be a reason why the ancient natives had gone to so much trouble as to bury the place. She turned and pointed the lights towards the wall. Mao did the same, though Veracruz began to look around the stone in the center. Mao made the first discovery. Gasping loudly, he exclaimed quietly, “Oh my God! Look at this!” The others came over to him. He had been standing near the doorway and had shone his light on the wall next to the doorway. There in the light of his electric torch was an intricate painting. He turned his light a few feet and found another painting, and then a third. The entire inside of the temple was covered in cave paintings!

“Every inch of this place will need to be photographed and videoed!” said Veracruz, excitedly. He pointed back to the first painting by the doorway. “Look at this! That’s a war canoe, and both men and women are on it!”

“Here’s another one!” said Mao, pointing to the next painting. “It’s a different tribe!”

“How can you tell?” asked Beth.

“Look at the detail here! This is amazing! See, you can even see the patterns of tattoos on the men!” He pointed at the two pictures, pointing out the differences.

That was enough for Beth. She moved further along the wall and found an even larger painting. This showed three groups of people, the two groups already seen, and a third tribe between them. All the paintings showed both men and women. She showed this to the others as well. That was enough for Veracruz and Mao. They called in the two girls, Mahani and Kailani, and ordered them to start taking photos of everything. Now that the temple had been opened, oxygen and moisture would begin a relentless attack on everything. When they left, they planned to cover the opening with plastic sheeting and take care of the atmosphere and humidity with nitrogen tanks and silica gel packs.

Beth moved over to the large stone. It was a cube of volcanic stone, roughly three feet on a side, but cut flat and smooth. It almost looked like an altar, but something seemed wrong. Manolo Veracruz came over. “Is this an altar?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s definitely not a sacrificial stone,” she answered.