She had found the Aztec stone.
16
The stone was too unwieldy to carry any distance, so Summer and Dirk left it in place and swam out of the cave. Dirk had carried a small lift bag attached to his buoyancy compensator. He inflated it with his regulator and tied it to a rock near the entrance. The small bag floated to the surface, providing a marker for the cave. Dirk and Summer followed it up, then swam along the ridge wall to where Torres waited impatiently.
The archeologist leaped like a drunken leprechaun when Summer described their find. “It was carved in a semicircle?”
“Yes,” Summer said, “exactly as if it had been cut in half. It was full of carved glyphs, just like the ones in the codex.”
“Fantástico! Can you remove it from the cave?”
“Yes, but we’ll never get it here.” She pointed to a tiny orange speck in the water. Dirk’s float bag lay almost a quarter mile away.
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“We’ll have to move the van closer,” Dirk said. He eyeballed the top of the ridge, then borrowed Torres’s topographic map. “If we circle around the back of the ridge, I think we can drive over the top and descend directly above the cave. There’s a tapered gully nearby where we could access the lake.”
Summer nodded. “We could hoist it straight up the face of the bluff. There’s a coil of rope in the back of the van we can use.”
Torres laughed. “We have nothing to lose but my van. Let’s give it a try.”
They loaded their gear and drove around the east side of the ridge, following a weather-beaten dirt track that snaked down the hill to the reservoir’s dam. Finding a moderate incline to the ridge, Torres turned off the track and drove up the hillside. The ground was hard and compact, providing firm traction for the van’s worn tires.
The surface turned to solid rock as Torres reached the top of the ridge. Dirk got out and guided him down the other side and toward the edge, just overlooking the buoy marker. Torres stopped in front of a pile of boulders and stuck his head out the window. “How’s this?”
“Perfect,” Dirk said. “Just remember to put it in reverse when it’s time to leave.”
Torres applied the parking brake and turned off the engine. Summer was already out the door, uncoiling a length of nylon rope. Tying one end around the van’s door post, she flung the remaining line over the side, watching as it splashed into the water forty feet below.
“It’s a hundred-foot line,” she said. “Should be just enough to get us there.”
Dirk unloaded their dive equipment and two thin sleeping pads from their camping supplies.
“Can you grab my new camera?” Summer pointed to an underwater Olympus camera within her brother’s reach.
Torres helped them haul their gear to the nearby gully, which offered a steep but navigable path to the reservoir. “Be very careful, my friends,” he shouted as they prepared to enter the water.
“We’ll bring it up in one piece,” Dirk replied, knowing Torres’s chief concern was the artifact’s safety.
He slipped on his mask and stepped into the water, carrying the sleeping pads under one arm. Summer swam past him, retrieving the dangling rope. They met at the lift bag and dove to the cave entrance, another thirty feet down.
At the fire pit, Summer snapped multiple pictures of the stone in situ. Setting her camera aside, she helped Dirk muscle the heavy stone on top of one of the sleeping pads. Dirk wrapped the other pad over the exposed side, creating a protective cover, which he secured with Summer’s rope. Standing on the cave floor, he pulled the rope to give it a test. With a concerted effort, they slid the bundled stone across the muddy floor.
Nodding at Summer, he dragged the stone out of the cave, while his sister swam above it, guiding it free of any obstacles. Once clear of the entrance, Dirk pushed the stone upright on the ledge, then shot to the surface. They had agreed Summer would stay in the water and monitor the stone’s ascent while Dirk and Torres hoisted it to the van.
Dirk hardly had to assist Torres. By the time he had jettisoned his dive gear and hiked to the van, Torres was pulling like a madman. Adrenaline was clearly pumping through the archeologist’s veins. But his aged muscles began to fade as the stone broke the lake’s surface and Dirk pitched in for the remaining distance. Summer exited the water and joined the out-of-breath men as they removed the rope and pads.
The white half disk glistened under the afternoon sun. Torres dropped to his knees and grazed his fingertips across the surface. The glyphs were crisply cut, though along the edges they had worn thin.
Summer could see the glyphs were carved in bands that would have encircled the entire stone before it was cut in two. “Can you read what it says?”
“Portions,” Torres said with a nod. “This section relays an important journey across the water. Though we are missing half the stone, I suspect we’ll be able to piece together much of its intent.” He smiled. “Between this stone and the codex, you’ve given a pair of old archeologists quite a few years of steady work.”
“Just promise us,” Dirk said, “you won’t keep it all stored away in a dusty archive.”
“Heavens, no. This will easily be the centerpiece at the university’s museum. Which reminds me, were there any other artifacts?”
“No, I checked when I photographed the stone,” Summer said. “Oh, no!” she burst out suddenly. “My camera! I left it in the cave.”