“Doesn’t say, I’m afraid. He was haunting them with visions of their lost ones—this must be the mimicking we’ve seen before. The people were terrified, and with all the sacrifices they were making, I think they actually started to thin out their population.” Matt was pointing at one of the images depicting hundreds of tiny figures kneeling before the waving tentacles.

“The people decided they had had enough and forced the king to act. The king assembled his army and put his two most trusted warriors in charge—this is the bit we know. It tells again of the brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque who are sent into the underworld to, it looks like, negotiate with Qwotoan, with—and here’s those number glyphs again—about two thousand warriors. Hard to tell whether their job was to fight or be sacrificed. Either way, the king hoped to attain some sort of peace for Aztlan.”

Matt moved along the wall again. “Ah. Damn it, and here is our brave Hunahpu’s reward.” Matt’s training had taught him to be dispassionate about events that occurred long in the past—they could not be changed, only learned from. Many cultures had very different concepts of mercy and sometimes an execution was actually an honour. However, he couldn’t help feeling sad for the brave little warrior whose footsteps they had followed, who had survived one of the most dangerous and fantastic journeys in the history of his or any race, and who had unwittingly even guided them up from the depths.

“After Hunahpu had led the royal troops into the underworld, after he had lost his brother, after he had found and fought the great beast and managed to return alive, he was executed by the king for failing in his divine duty.” Matt shone his torch on the pictoglyph. It showed a warrior figure being torn apart by several oxen-like creatures. Matt seemed to be in a trance and his eyes watered, not just from the dust they had been kicking up. To bring him back Monica pointed at the next picture along.

“Even I can read this one. They’re using fire to drive the creature off.”

“Looks like it. They used fire, or Kinich Ahau’s gift as they refer to it. I think they had their fires burning in the mouths of the caves for decades. It never drove it off, only slowed it down—the creature was always finding new ways to get to its food supply.” Matt moved to the next pictoglyph and started to read, “Their winters were growing longer and colder, and because of the change in seasons there was less food. They believed that Qwotoan had cursed them and all their land. This could be the onset of the glaciation epoch when Antarctica was becoming frozen again. The timing tallies with our geological and meteorological evidence that puts it at about twelve thousand years ago.”