Black Rain

Danielle dimmed the lights and clicked a remote. A picture of a Mayan temple appeared on the screen at the front of the room. “We’re about to embark on a great adventure,” she began. “As some of you already know, we’ll be searching for a branch of the Mayan culture that certain scholars believe may have existed in the Amazon. But to say only that is to sell ourselves short. Our goal is far more ambitious. We’re looking for a place that the Maya considered the land of their own genesis, their Garden of Eden—a city called Tulan Zuyua.”

Susan Briggs turned to McCarter as she realized what Danielle was suggesting. “Are they serious?’ she asked.

McCarter nodded. “I think so,” he said.

Danielle clicked the remote and a photograph of a colorful mural came up. The mural depicted four men in native garb walking fearfully under a midnight sky.

She addressed Professor McCarter. “Feel free to correct me if I get any of this wrong.”

He nodded, expecting to be busy.

“According to Mayan legend, there was an age before the first sunrise, a time when the world was dark, lit only by a gray twilight that lingered on the edge of the horizon. Into the darkness of this pre-dawn world, the Mayan gods created the first humans and then called them to a place named Tulan Zuyua, where they presented each tribe with a patron god. The Quiche Maya, from whom the story comes, received the god Tohil, the creator of fire. And in a world of darkness, this gift set them apart, as they alone now possessed the power to create light and heat.

“Secure in this knowledge, the forefathers of the Quiche tribe set out from Tulan Zuyua in search of a place to call their own. As the legend goes, they left the city transporting their patron deity with them, his spirit contained in a special stone. After a trek across both land and sea they settled in Central America, in areas that became Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, never to return to Tulan Zuyua.”

She clicked the remote and brought up a new photo, a Mayan ruin somewhere in Central America. “Many in the academic world consider Tulan Zuyua to be a myth,” she explained. “And that we’re as likely to find it as we are to locate Atlantis or the Garden of Eden itself. And if it is real, most experts believe it will be found buried under some other Mayan site, the way old San Francisco is buried under the present-day city.

“We, on the other hand, expect to find the great city here in the Amazon, thousands of miles from where anyone would have even thought to look.”

Danielle clicked to the next slide. It displayed a weathered stone with raised markings on it, fronted by a tape measure for scale. “This artifact came to the NRI several months ago, though it was recovered from somewhere in the Amazon some time before that.”

Another click, another photo: a picture of the stone from a different angle. McCarter found himself squinting to make out any details.

“As you can see,” Danielle said. “The surface of the stone is extremely weathered and most of the markings are almost invisible. But through a type of computer-assisted analysis called a micro-density relief, we were able to reconstruct some of the patterns, and the results were surprising.”

The next slide displayed the same stone, this time with a computer-generated outline overlaying it. “These patterns are consistent with only one known writing system: Mayan hieroglyphics. And these two glyphs are well known. One is the name of a person, Jaguar Quitze, one of the original Mayan humans. The other, which was only partially reconstructed, is believed to represent Venus, the morning star.”

McCarter studied the pattern formed by the computer-drawn outline. Clearly Mayan in style, but the underlying rock was so worn down he wondered how they could derive anything from it at all. Well-meaning guesswork perhaps.

While McCarter considered this, Danielle explained more of the NRI’s theory. “Eight months of work has put us in possession of several other items that seem to confirm the existence of the Mayan writing system within the Amazon, but none of them offered proof quite so dramatically as the one stone we do not possess.”

The next image was different from the others, a scanned copy of an old, sepia-toned glossy, complete with a crease running diagonally through one corner and brown discolorations along the edges.

The photo showed two men beside a large rectangular stone. One man had his arms folded across his chest and a foot up on the block. The other man crouched beside it, pointing to something on its face. The image brought to mind a pair of fishermen posing beside a prize catch.

“This photo was taken in 1926 on Blackjack Henry Martin’s first expedition into the Amazon. He left from Manaus in April of that year and did not return until March of 1927, when he was finally chased out of the jungle not by native tribes, wild animals or swarming insects, but by two months of torrential, seasonal downpours.