Temple of the Inscriptions

by Humphrey Price

Table of Contents

Chapter 4: The Pyramid

I snatched my backpack and crawled out the hatch. Something wasn’t right. Karyn was nowhere to be seen, and I was in a completely different room. I realized that the capsule must be an elevator, and I was on another floor. Perhaps I felt ill from the motion of the elevator, but having never been prone to motion sickness, that was hard to believe.

Still feeling woozy, I thought about taking the elevator back to the other floor to get Karyn, but when I looked back at the capsule, the hatch had closed. I tried pushing the bulls-eye button to get it to open up, but to no avail. It probably required the meteorite pendant to activate.

I went searching for other buttons or options. The walls of this new chamber were more primitive-looking than the rest of the construction I had seen at the Temple of the Inscriptions. Everything looked older. Parts of the walls had crumbled leaving piles of debris and fine powdery dust on the floor. Conduit lined the walls with junction boxes just like the previous chamber, and four cylindrical lights provided illumination.

There was a panel with script like the one in the other room, but the writings were only in Egyptian hieroglyphics and some other ancient language. I explored the room and found a box on the wall that had a bulls-eye button. Without a lot of thought or agonizing, I pressed it with my finger.

RUMBLE RUMBLE... I heard the awful noise again, the room shook, and a door opened on the wall next to me. This one was different in that it didn’t open vertically or horizontally but slid down diagonally to the left. It was of cruder construction and not seamless with the opening, as if it had been built by less skilled craftsmen than those who made the other door.

Outside the opening, there was no illumination, and I could not see what lay beyond. I had a decision to make: wait in the chamber to see if Karyn showed up or embark into the unknown darkness with my single flashlight to see if there was a way out of the Temple of the Inscriptions. I decided to head out, as I thought that would be the most likely way to be able to contact the local authorities and secure a rescue party for my friend.

I held my breath and stepped over the uneven threshold. What I could see was not particularly encouraging. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the corridor were rough-hewn and did not appear to be a magnificent work of engineering. It was so unlike what I had seen before in the Mayan ruins. This looked like a bunch of drunken sailors had hacked it out with pick axes.

The passageway was just large enough to walk in, but bordering on claustrophobic. It angled up at a severe slope, but someone had left a crude wooden ladder on the floor so that I could use the rungs as footholds and climb upward. The passage eventually reached a horizontal landing, and there was a dead end.

The wall at the dead end was different, constructed with a refined type of stone, harder and less porous, and it was polished to an exacting flatness and finish. The drunken sailors didn’t build this part of the pyramid. On the wall was a loose square block of stone about ten centimeters on a side. There were indentations on the sides, like finger-holds. I clutched the indents and found that the stone could be removed. After pulling the stone free, I set it down on the floor of the landing.

With my light, I inspected the inside the exposed niche. At the back was a familiar sight: the bulls-eye. I pushed it, waited, then heard a rumble, though not nearly as loud as the previous ones. I aimed my flashlight at the smooth wall. This time a door was lifting straight up. When it reached the top, it was perfectly flush with the ceiling and stopped without a loud noise.

I decided to leave the stone block on the floor with the niche exposed in case Karyn came this way. Grabbing a notepad from my backpack, I left a message that I’d gone through the doorway. I propped it up with the stone so it could be prominently seen, then took one last look around the landing and ventured through into a very large space.

The ceiling was so high that I could barely see it with my feeble light. The batteries were almost dead. I sat on the floor and replaced them, which was a bit of a trick since it was pitch-black once I turned the light off. While in the dark, I heard the rumble of the door which must be closing. I was now trapped in this new catacomb, but I figured it couldn’t be worse than where I had been.

After the fresh batteries were installed, I looked around and was dumbfounded. This was a huge and magnificent chamber, beautiful and exquisitely constructed. There were smooth walls and floor, but the ceiling was incredible. Towering over my head was an inverted V structure of tremendous proportions forming a vaulted ceiling.

It dawned on me that the distance I had covered and the magnitude of this room were far greater than what could possibly fit within the confines of the Temple of the Inscriptions. The only rational explanation I could come up with was that these structures and passageways must to be beneath the pyramid. If that was true, it meant that the elevator had taken me far underground.

One of the walls had an open passageway. There was a similar passageway on the opposite wall. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo. I picked one and entered. It led a short distance to another cavernous chamber but was a dead end. I was getting really worried about Karyn, and I knew I needed to find help quickly to get her out.

I returned to the first huge room and decided to leave more notes for Karyn. By the opening I had just come from, my note said, “Señor Frog says don’t go this way.” By the passageway at the other end of the room, my note said, “Señor Frog went this way.” I then ventured out. It was another claustrophobic tunnel that angled upward in a steep incline. Someone in more modern times had added wooden handrails and steps on the floor that greatly aided my progress. It was a long tunnel, but I was in a hurry, and in a couple of minutes I could see daylight at the end. That seemed strange since it should have been night by now. At the end of the tunnel, I stepped outside.

A blast of heat almost caused me to faint as I emerged onto a small platform in blinding sunlight. I was disoriented to find I was high above the ground overlooking a desert landscape that could not possibly be in Yucatan, Mexico. In the far distance was a smog-shrouded city with skyscrapers. Scattered around, both near and far, were pyramids: big ones, small ones, some with huge terraced steps, and some that were crumbling and falling apart. In fact, it looked like I was perched on the side of a huge pyramid made of rough, red stone blocks.

Leading down from my platform was a winding concrete stairway that descended to the base of this red pyramid. There were two military vehicles parked below and three uniformed men pointing at me and shouting. I guessed that I was in big trouble. The thought of running back into the pyramid occurred to me, but I was exhausted, I had no idea what I was doing, and I couldn’t see how running would help.

I stumbled down the steps in the mind-numbing desert heat. Waiting for me at the bottom were the three men in uniform. They looked Middle Eastern with short, clipped dark hair and neatly trimmed moustaches. One had a machine gun pointing at me, one was speaking into a walkie-talkie in an unknown language, and one had handcuffs open and ready to slap on my wrists, which he did.

Handcuff Man yelled at me in the unknown language, and I rambled back in English and Spanish. “Where are we? We’re not in Mexico. I have a friend who’s trapped back there! ¿Habla usted Español?”

Handcuff Man just yelled back incomprehensibly and pointed and gestured excitedly with his hands.

As I was led toward a camouflaged military vehicle, I glanced to the side and saw a whacky looking pyramid not too far away. The lower half had steep sides, and then halfway up it angled in so that the top half was a shallow angle. It was a huge structure, perhaps as big as the megalithic classic-looking red pyramid behind me which blotted out half the sky. I entertained the thought that this was all just a fever or heat-induced hallucination, but I was probably not so lucky.

Handcuff Man confiscated my backpack and set it aside. Then he searched me about as thoroughly as possible while keeping my clothes on. He undid my shirt, looked inside and then buttoned it back. He turned my pockets inside out and looked in my socks and shoes. He seemed really disappointed not to find anything.

I was prodded to climb into the vehicle with Machine Gun Man keeping a good bead on me. Handcuff Man whipped out another set and handcuffed my handcuffs to a steel bar on the back of the seat in front of me. Machine Gun Man relaxed. I wasn’t getting away now. Walkie-Talkie Man drove, Machine Gun Man rode shotgun, and Handcuff Man was in the back next to me rifling through my backpack. The big red pyramid faded behind us in a cloud of dust.

Proceed to Chapter 5...

Copyright © 2023 by Humphrey Price