The Lost Origin (34 page)

That woman was as reckless as the devil.

“Why don’t you memorize them and enter them into the computer?” I replied.

“Okay. Good idea,” she said, coming out of her hiding place.

“What gave you the idea to stick your head down there, woman?” Jabba rebuked her.

“Well, because it was logical, right? There was a panel missing, and it had to be somewhere. The condor’s head was the only place left.”

“But you threw yourself on the ground without thinking twice. And if they’d put it up there?” he pointed.

“Yes, well, that was the next step, obviously,” she agreed, very calm, taking the laptop from my hands. We watched as she played with the virtual loom, and we saw her sigh deeply before lifting her head to give us a look of stupefaction.

“‘Two cut in two root of one,’” She murmured. “‘Two increased in five root of…’”

“Of what?” I urged.

“Of it doesn’t say. Remember there are only nine
tocapus
and in the two lateral panels there are ten.”

“Well, that’s what we have to figure out,” I said. “And it can’t be too difficult…. Really, if we look closely at the four texts available to us, the hidden logic of the key can be guessed. Let’s see.” I picked up the laptop and opened the word processor, then wrote the four premises. “‘Six cut in two root of three,’ ‘six increased in five root of three,’ ‘two cut in two root of one,’ ‘two increased in five root of…’ We’re going to solve for x, okay? Let’s put it in numbers. Let’s suppose Jabba was right when he said they were simple divisions and multiplications. Six divided by two equals three, and six multiplied by five equals thirty.”

“No, the phrase says three, not thirty,” he clarified, meticulous.

“Fine, but there’s a factor we haven’t taken into consideration: according to what the professor told me, the Inca and pre-Incan cultures, despite their great mathematical and astronomical understanding, didn’t know the number zero, so they didn’t have a numeral to represent nothing, the void.”

“Okay, Root, you’re right,” Proxi admitted, keeping us on track, as always. “But the cultures that didn’t know zero, and there were a lot of them, knew how to represent multiples of ten, of a hundred, a million…They just used different symbols, or repeated the same one as many times as necessary. Your theory doesn’t work.”

“It does work,” I insisted, “because we’re speaking of roots, of the irreducible and unalterable part of a word or a mathematical operation, and remember that the Aymara language is made up of roots to which suffixes are added ad infinitum to form all possible words. Look at
the phrases: ‘six cut in two root of three,’ ‘six increased in five root of three.’ If you eliminate the zero in the solution of the multiplication by five, the root is the same as in the division by two.”

“Which means adding zeros doesn’t change the numerical root,” Proxi agreed, thinking out loud. “The root is still the same, you use the sign or notation that you use to represent multiples of ten or a hundred.”

“Exactly!” I agreed. “And look at the second operation: ‘two cut in two root of one,’ meaning two divided by two equals one, and ‘two increased in five root of’ x, as we said, or rather two multiplied by five equals ten. Root, therefore, one.”

“The only thing clear to me,” Jabba remarked, “is that if we take out the zeros, dividing by two is the same as multiplying by five.”

“Which seems absurd?” I smiled.

“No,” Proxi declared, “it’s consistent with a numeric symbolism: If you remove the void, the nothing, which is the zero, and you keep the important part, which is the root, what does it matter if you divide or multiply? The result is the same.”

“Okay, fine,” Jabba argued, “but how does knowing that help us?”

Lola, smiling, leaned slightly toward him, and, holding his big head in both hands, gave him a small kiss on the cheek. They weren’t usually very demonstrative in front of other people, so it surprised me.

“Even if it doesn’t seem like it,” she told me, “inside this sumo wrestler’s body there’s a sensible and intelligent soul.”

Then, while the astonished Jabba took his time to react, she stood, and with an agile movement, threw herself headfirst onto the ground again, and got under the condor’s beak, for which she didn’t seem to have the least bit of respect. Once there, she turned face up, and we watched her grope at the stone with great confidence. At first, we didn’t know what she was doing although it was easy to guess, but suddenly, the enormous piece made up of the forehead, eyes, and upper part of the beak lifted in the air with a squeal of rock and metal that sounded like the noise made when two stone slabs rub together, or of an iron bridge under the weight of an advancing truck. Although, of course, what squeaked and ground together couldn’t be iron, because iron was unknown in pre-Columbian America.

Jabba, frightened, jumped so quickly toward Proxi that I couldn’t see his movements; I could only make out what he did afterwards, when he was already dragging her by her feet to get her out from under the head. I, for my part, was completely frozen. The whole scene was surreal: sitting on the ground with my legs crossed, watching Jabba pull Proxi while the mouth of the condor opened like the visor of a helmet in the midst of a deafening noise that wasn’t far from being that of the end of the world. Was it going to devour all three of us? Because I wouldn’t have been able to move to save my life.

But no, it didn’t devour us. It stopped exactly at the height of the roof and stayed there, revealing a new passage, identical to the one we were in. Jabba, pale and puffing like a horse, got in Proxi’s face:

“What the hell did you do, huh?” he shouted. “What’s wrong with you? You could have killed yourself and killed us too!”

“First of all, don’t yell at me,” she replied without looking at him, standing, “and second, I knew perfectly well what I was doing. So come on, calm down, you’re going to make yourself dizzy again.”

“I’m already dizzy! Dizzy from thinking that you could have died squashed by that old
stone!”

She, very calm, headed toward the bird’s mouth.

“But I didn’t die, and you didn’t either, so come on, let’s go.”

“What did you do, Proxi?” I asked, following her inside the open beak.

Jabba, furious, stayed where he was.

“The only obvious thing I could have done: if the root of ‘two increased in five’ was one, there was only one
tocapu
among the nineteen that could represent that number, the one shown by the solution of ‘two cut in two root of one,’ so I got under the condor’s chin again, and the
tocapu
that ‘JoviLoom’ said was ‘one’ sunk under the pressure of my hand. You already know what happened next.”

While she was giving me this explanation, we crossed through the bird’s beak and arrived in the new passage. I was getting ready to yell at Jabba to hurry up and come with us already, when I thought I heard a metallic “click,” and, with no further ado, the condor’s beak began to close. Proxi turned, scared:

“Marc!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, but the noise from the stones was too deafening. “Marc, Marc!”

Before the stone visor closed again, my fat friend threw himself through the opening as if he were diving into a pool. For an instant I saw his legs, which were still on the other side, in danger; but without giving us time to react, while Proxi and I took his hands and pulled desperately, a side wall almost three feet thick came out of the left wall and started to close off the head from behind. Luckily, although Proxi had to back up at top speed to keep from being squashed, we managed to give the definitive pull on Jabba’s arm at the last minute, and he came out whole, although dirty and bruised.

I dropped to the ground, exhausted, and stared at the roof of the passage, illuminated by my headlight, whose beam moved with the accelerated rhythm of my respiration. That air, so oxygen-poor, wore us down, turning any effort into a superhuman task that made our hearts leap into our throats.

“Don’t do that to me again, Marc,” I heard Proxi murmur. “Do you hear me? Don’t ever be such an ass again.”

“Fine,” he replied in a miserable voice.

I tried to stand and couldn’t; it was a terrible effort. It wouldn’t have bothered me to stay there a while, resting and recovering my breath, but, of course, who could sit down and rest inside a Tiwanakan pyramid buried underground for hundreds of years, on a hard stone ground that appeared to be full of bugs and had its only exit blocked by a sliding wall and a giant condor head? It was a disagreeable idea, really, so I had to gather all my will power to manage to stay seated on the ground, with my head just a little higher than my bent knees.

And then I knew with complete clarity where I was. In my mind, I pictured the map hidden on Thunupa’s pedestal, on the Gate of the Sun, and remembered that ten long necks sprouted from the central chamber where the horned serpent hid, four with puma heads on the top and six that ended in condor heads on the sides and the base. Meaning we’d just crossed the first condor head on the right (given that we’d entered through the shaft located to the east of the Gate of the Moon) and we were in the neck. If I wasn’t mistaken, after a short ascent to the heart of the pyramid, we would arrive at the walls of the chamber.

“Hey, you two!” I exclaimed, smiling. “If you stop acting like idiots for a bit I’ll tell you something very interesting.”

“Spit it out.”

I explained to them about the condor’s neck, but they didn’t seem very impressed. Of course it was nothing new: We already knew the pedestal was a map, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that the ground we were walking on corresponded to the exact design of what was carved under the Staff God.

“Come on, let’s go,” I proposed, standing with difficulty. “Now we should find a staircase or something like that.”

“I hope it’s that and not another of those tests from hell,” Jabba croaked.

“What did you just promise me?” Proxi rebuked him, glaring at him.

“Fine, Okay! I’m not going to complain anymore.”

“Well, you wouldn’t know it by listening to you,” I told him, starting to walk.

“I always keep my promises!”

“Let’s see if that’s true, because my grandma would be more bearable than you.”

“I’d swap them right now!” Proxi exclaimed, letting out a guffaw.

And then, as I shouldered my bag, I saw a stone pillar at my right, almost touching the wall. It looked like one of those water fountains they put in parks that are of the right height so that kids can drink (with help) but not play with the water. I went up to it slowly and saw on it, like a book on a lectern, some kind of stone tablet the size of a sheet of paper, randomly peppered with small holes.

Jabba and Proxi came over to look.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Do you think I’ve been briefed about this place?” I protested, putting the stone on my head. “A hat.”

“It looks terrible on you,” Proxi remarked, looking at me with expert eyes and then blinding me with a flash from the camera.

“Should we take it with us?”

“Of course,” she said. “I say it was there precisely so we would pick it up. Who knows? Likely we’ll need it later.”

So I stashed it in my bag, and when I lifted the bag back onto my shoulder it felt like its weight had doubled.

We walked for a good while, on the lookout for the smallest detail, but despite my conviction that we would find a staircase or a ramp soon, the passage stayed flat and didn’t seem to have any incline at all.

“This doesn’t seem right,” I murmured after fifteen minutes of walking.

“It doesn’t to me either,” Proxi agreed. “We should be going up the neck of the condor to get to the exterior wall of the chamber, yet we’ve been walking horizontally for a long time.”

“How long did it take us to get through the last passage?” Jabba asked.

“About ten minutes,” I replied.

“Then we’ve already gone too far.”

And, because he had to say it, as soon as my friend closed his big mouth, another condor head came into sight in front of us. It was much smaller than the last, and it stuck out of the middle of a solid wall of stone. I felt my mood change from gray to black when I saw that on both sides of the head, the wall was completely filled with some very large
tocapus
. The suspicion of another Aymara ambush weighed on my mind.

“Good, well, now we’re here,” Proxi said when the three of us stopped with expressionless faces in front of the little animal. “Get out the laptop, Root.”

“I was about to,” I replied, but honestly, I had been reflecting that if that small stone head
was the conduit we had to pass through, it would be very hard for Jabba to get through it.

“No, no, wait,” he exclaimed suddenly, distancing himself. “Look. They’re the kneeling figures that are on the sides the Staff God!”

And while he said it, he pointed to some of the
tocapus
on the right-hand wall. He pointed up, down, sideways…. The little winged genies that some took for angels sprouted, higgledy-piggledy, from the Aymara text.

“The ones on this side all have condor heads.”

“Yes, like on the door,” I agreed.

“And the ones here,” Proxi had placed herself on the left, “human heads.”

“Do they follow some pattern? Are they symmetrical?” I asked, stepping backward to take in the whole wall at once. I counted the
tocapus
in the upper row of each panel (five) and the ones in the first columns (ten), so there were one hundred
tocapus
in total, fifty on each side, and ten of them were little winged genies: five with condor heads on the right and another five with human heads on the left. And it wasn’t necessary for anyone to answer my questions, because with the panoramic view, and once I had located the ten discordant elements, the shape they outlined was easily recognizable: the tip of an arrow at each side, pointing at the head in the middle. If it hadn’t been separating them, they would form an x.

“As you can see,” Proxi remarked. “Perfect symmetry.”

“We should translate the text so we know what it says,” Jabba proposed.

A distant clamor of stone came from the end of the passage, startling us.