Caine put both hands into the vessel and lifted out a thick brownish rectangle and gently set it on the table. He reached out slowly with only his gloved index finger, lifted the outer layer an inch. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Intact. I can’t believe it.” For a moment, he stood still, lost in thought. He withdrew his finger and only then seemed to notice the Fargos again.

His whole face brightened. “It’s a Mayan book, a codex. It seems to be undamaged. We have to take our time examining it because we don’t know how fragile it is, and there’s no way to know how many times a page can be turned or even touched.”

“I know they’re very rare,” Remi said.

“The rarest of all Western Hemisphere artifacts and by far the most valuable,” said Caine. “The Maya were the only people in the Americas who developed a complex system of writing and it’s good. They could write anything they could say. If they’d had the urge, they could have written novels, epic poems, histories. Maybe they did. There were once hundreds of thousands of these codices. Today there are only four that survived and made it into European museums—the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris. And there’s also the Grolier Codex, but it’s so inferior to the others that many experts think it’s a forgery. But the first three are full of Mayan knowledge—mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, calendars. This could be the fifth.”

“You said there were once thousands,” said Remi.

“Hundreds of thousands, is a better estimate,” he said. “But there were two problems. The codices were painted on a fabric made from the bark of a wild fig tree called Ficus glabrata. The fabric was folded into pages and the pages painted with a white mixture like stucco. That gave the Maya white pages they could write on. They were better than papyrus, almost as good as paper.”

“What were the problems?”

“One was the climate. Most of Mayan country was humid jungle. When books get wet, they rot. Some codices were buried in tombs—some at Copán, some at Altun Ha in Belize, some at Uaxactún Guytan. The fig-bark fabric rotted, leaving little piles of painted stucco fragments too small and delicate to ever be pieced together. But the biggest problem arrived in ships.”

“The Spanish conquest,” said Sam.

“Mainly the priests. They made a point of destroying anything having to do with native religions. Mayan gods looked like devils to them. They burned every book they found and then searched every hiding place so no book could survive. This went on from the beginning of the Mayan conquest in the 1500s until the 1690s, when they took the last cities. That’s why only four are left.”

“And now five,” said Remi.