Farah said, “I wouldn’t normally condone digging any further, but I mean, we are making a film here.”

Andy couldn’t help but think back to Farah saying how she would resign if they so much as dug around one clay pot. But now, on the precipice of finding treasure, she was leading the charge.

With Libby providing direction, both cameramen zoomed their cameras in while Andy, Farah, and Cala began excavating more stairs descending into the earth.

When seven were visible, there was a soft rumble. Farah’s head poked above the five-foot hole.

“The wall caved in!” Farah yelled. “Hand me a flashlight.”

Nathan Buxton pulled a flashlight from his backpack and handed it down.

Andy leaned over the hole and watched as Farah ducked through the four-foot opening and disappeared.

He saw the ambient light of her flashlight partially illuminating the opening.

She reappeared twenty seconds later, a look of bewilderment on her face.

“Gold?” Cala asked.

“No,” Farah said, shaking her head. “Hieroglyphics.”

≈

Andy ran his fingers over the grooved characters etched into the wall of the bunker. The room was small, maybe six feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high. The walls on both sides were filled from top to bottom with hieroglyphs.

Most people associate the word hieroglyphics with ancient Egypt, and for good reason. That’s where the name originated. But when the European explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered ancient Mayan writings, they found their general appearance reminiscent of Egyptian “hieroglyphs.” Over the course of the next few centuries, hieroglyphics became a generic archaeological term to describe writing that combined logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements.

Andy traced his finger over a circular character with a line through the top half. After spending another few minutes in the bunker, Andy ducked out of the opening and climbed the seven stairs.

His peers stared at him solemnly. They’d already realized what the presence of hieroglyphics meant, but Andy couldn’t resist. He fought down a grin as he said, “This proves that, without a doubt, these ruins aren’t Incan.”

The Incas didn’t have an alphabet, they didn’t have logograms—they had no writing of any kind. They recorded everything using quipus.

Andy added, “I’m almost positive the hieroglyphics are Tupi.”

The Tupi were an ancient civilization indigenous to Brazil. Over time, they migrated outward, eventually occupying Brazil’s Atlantic coast, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they’d lived in the rainforest.

Andy had recognized a few of the characters carved into the wall from the Tupi-Guarani alphabet, which derived from Old Tupi.

He said, “Archaeologists have found a few other Tupi ruins in Mato Grosso and other parts of Brazil. In fact, come to think of it now, they found a cache of offerings near one of the pyramids as well.”