Sam hacked at the layer of volcanic stone, knocking it away. “It looks as though at some point there was a lava flow, and it must have come down like a curtain.”

“Over the entrance?”

“I didn’t dare to put it that way,” he said. “We don’t know it’s an entrance to anything, but that’s sure what it looks like.” He hacked harder until a bigger chunk fell inward and a hole appeared.

“You just had to knock hard,” said Remi. “What do you think? Tomb?”

“Way up here? I’m guessing a sacred place, like a shrine to whatever god was in charge of volcanos.”

Sam enlarged the opening, took his flashlight from his pack, shone its beam into the hole, and then stepped through the opening. “Come in,” he said. “It’s an ancient building.”

Inside was a room made of cut stone, then plastered in white. All of the walls had been painted with colorful pictures of Mayan men, women, and gods in a procession of some sort. A few humans sacrificed to the gods by cutting themselves or pushing thorns through their tongues. But the figure that dominated the pictures on each wall was a skeleton with dangling eyeballs.

But Sam and Remi didn’t let their flashlights linger on any of these scenes. They both stepped deeper into the room, drawn by a singular sight. On the whitewashed stone floor lay the desiccated body of a man, dark and leathery. He wore a breechcloth, and a pair of sandals of woven plant fiber. In the stretched lobes of his ears were large green jade plugs. There were jade beads around his neck and a carved jade disk. They both ran the beams of their flashlights up and down the withered figure. Beside the man’s body was a widemouthed, lidded pot.

Remi twisted the neck of her flashlight to make the beam wider. “I’ve got to take some pictures before we get any closer.”

“Or before there’s another aftershock and the roof falls in.”

Remi handed Sam her flashlight, then took flash pictures with her phone. She circled the dead man, taking every angle. She shot the four walls, the ceiling, the floor, and then the pot by the man. “He’s mummified. He looks a bit like the Inca mountain burials and the Moche and Chimú on the Chilean coast.”

“He does,” said Sam. “But this isn’t a burial.”

“No,” Remi agreed. “It looks as though he was sheltering here, at least temporarily, and died. He’s got carved-out wooden vessels over here with some seeds in them. Probably the fruit just rotted away. There’s another one that could have been a rain catcher.”

“He’s got an obsidian knife in his belt, and a few flaked pieces he used for carving over by the wooden trough.”