During the days, they pressed on with the Las Casas collection, making their inventory and, in the process, getting to know a little about the man who had owned these books. Most of them were books like the Rule of Saint Benedict, the work that set the tone for the monastic life, the Moralium Libri of Pope Gregory I, and others that were appropriate for a monk in the sixteenth century. They found several copies of the works of Thomas Aquinas, and a handwritten volume of commentary on them.

It was on their eighth day in the library that Sam and Remi ran into another trove of volumes in Spanish that had been written on vellum in the hand of Bartolomé de Las Casas. They were tall, in a ledger format, all in a sequence. The first were his attempts, written in Mexico, at collecting a K’iche’ language glossary. There were also observations on the other languages of the Mayans, written in 1536. The next volume was a journal recording the daily activities that had gone on at the Dominican missions he had founded at Rabinal, Sacapulas, and Cobán. Records of expenditures and harvests were interspersed with various notes on the building of churches in the region and the names of Mayan converts who had come to live outside Rabinal. Remi read that he was opposed to mass conversions of Indians. He believed in teaching each prospective Catholic and then letting him or her make an informed decision, so the inventory of converts made sense.

The date of the volume after that was October 1536, and it extended through April 1537. It began with the now-familiar columns of figures and notations on vellum that had been divided into columns by straight lines. It went on for many pages, and then, at a certain point, the quality of the vellum changed.

The first pages were routine quality, made from the skin of an animal, treated by removing the hair, wetting, stretching, and drying the skin until it was a thin white surface for writing on both sides. But sewn in after fifty or sixty sheets was a long section of pages of a different quality vellum. These had been rubbed so thoroughly with pumice stone or a similar abrasive to make a perfectly smooth writing surface that they were translucent.

Sam turned the first page in this section and saw a startling sight. It was an exact copy of the letter from Las Casas that had been hidden in the binding of the Mayan codex. He touched Remi’s arm, and they both stared at the familiar Spanish words:

“A todos mis compatriotas, benediciones. Este libro y otros de los maya se refieren a su historia y sus observaciones acerca del mundo natural. No tienen nada que ver con el Diablo. Ellos deben ser preservados como una manera de entender nuestras tareas con los maya.”

“I can make out most of the words and can hardly believe it,” said Sam.