The Gold of the Gods Read Free

any attention to a winged mother figure, between whose arms knelt a slit-eyed child in a crash-helmet, if I had not seen the identical figure, though in clay, during a visit to the American Museum in Madrid.
    Whole books could and
will
be written about these tunnels and their treasures. Among many other things, they will mention the 6-feet high stonemason’s works, representing beings with three and seven heads; the triangular plaques, with writing on them as if schoolchildren had been making their first attempts at writing; dice with geometrical figures on their six plane surfaces; the piece of soapstone, 3 feet 8 inches long and 9 1/4 inches wide, which is curved like a boomerang and covered with stars, etc.
    No one knows who built the tunnels; no one knows the sculptors who left behind these strange ambiguous works. Only one thing seems clear to me. The tunnel builders were not the same men as the stonemasons; their stark practical passages were obviously not meant to be decorated. Perhaps they showed the underground vaults to a chosen group and the latter fashioned in stone things they had seen and heard and stored the results in the depths.
    So far the entrance to this underground treasure-trove of human history is known only to a few trustworthy people and it is guarded by a wild Indian tribe. Indians lurk unseen in the undergrowth and watch every movement made by strangers. Moricz has been accepted as a friend by the chieftain of the cave guardians and three members of the tribe who are occasionally in contact with civilization.
    Once a year, at the beginning of spring, on March 21, the chieftain climbs down alone to the first platform in the underworld to offer ritual prayers. Both his cheeks bear the same signs as are marked in the rock at the entrance to the tunnels. To this day the tribe of tunnel guardians still make masks and carvings “of the men with long noses” (gas masks?) and they tell, as Moricz knows, of the heroic deeds of the “flying beings” who once came from heaven. But the Indians will not go into the tunnels for love or money.
    “No, no,” they said to Moricz. “Spirits live down there.”
    But it is a remarkable fact that Indian chiefs occasionally use gold to pay the debts they have incurred with the civilized world or present friends who have rendered their tribe a service with precious gold objects from their five-hundred-year-old past.
    On several occasions Moricz had stopped me taking photographs as we passed through the tunnels. He kept on making different excuses. Sometimes it was the radiation that would make the negatives unusable, sometimes it was the flash which might damage the metal library with its blinding light. At first I could not understand why, but after a few hours underground I began to sense the reason for Moricz’s strange behavior. You could not get rid of the feeling of being constantly watched, of destroying something magic, of unleashing a catastrophe. Would the entrances suddenly close? Would my flash ignite a synchronized laser beam? Would we never see the light of day again? Childish ideas for men engaged on serious investigation? Perhaps. But if you had experienced what it was like down there, you would understand these absurd ideas. Teams equipped with modern technical aids will have to work down there to see whether there are any dangers to be overcome or avoided.
    When I first saw the pile of gold, I begged to be allowed to take just one photo. Once again I was refused. The lumps of gold had to be levered from the pile and that might make a noise and start stones falling from the roof like an avalanche. Moricz noticed my frustration and laughed.
    “You’ll be able to photograph plenty of gold later, but not in such vast quantities. Will that do?”
    Today I know that the biggest treasure from the dark tunnels is not on show in South American museums. It lies in the back patio of the Church of Maria Auxiliadora at Cuenca in Ecuador, some 8,100 feet