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March 29, 2012
4 AM
Today is the day, my last archeological expedition; I am so excited I can barely sleep! My plane leaves for the Mayan city of Tik’al in just a few hours, we will be arriving in the city of Flores on the 30th and plan to have a camp set up by the 31st as the city is only 40 miles southwest of Flores. It is a pity that this is to be my last trip but with my daughter entering college it is no longer economically feasible for me to continue these trips as a hobby. At least on this last trip my old friend Mark will be with me to share in the adventure. It seems just yesterday we met while attending Brown University; he was studying linguistics and I was majoring in archeology, we quickly struck up a friendship that has lasted our entire lives and even though I have had to give up archeology as a full time job to support my family we have stayed in touch. It will be great to go on one last expedition together before I retire for good and begin working full time as a curator of a museum, a prestigious position to be sure but not one I envisioned for myself when I was young, but that is how life goes sometimes. Now I must finish packing before it is time to leave!
We have set up camp just outside the city of Tik’al; my group plans to explore the city for a few days then continue on to different locations to explore a few of the different ruins of the once great Mayan civilization located on the Yucatan peninsula. Tomorrow we enter the city and the exploration begins. The city of Tik’al was the capital of a conquest state and housed around 10,000 citizens, the name Tik’al may come from the Yucatec Mayan language and is a relatively new name meaning “at the waterhole”. Ancient hieroglyphs have been found in the ruins and translated stating that the city’s original name may have been Yax Mutul or First Mutual.I cannot think of a better way to end my adventures than with Mark, he hasn’t changed a bit since college and exploring with him makes this all the more worthwhile; I remember when we shared a dorm and used to dream of making great discoveries together. Of course we never did discover anything of great importance but it was a fun thought and who knows maybe we will find something in Tik’al!
Mark and I while exploring deep in Tik’al discovered set of hieroglyphs that have yet to be translated, the strange thing about them is that they do not follow any of the standard form other Mayan writings do, after Mark and I puzzled over these strange glyphs for a while he realized what they were. They seem to be a combination of every other ancient form of writing that the modern world knows of, Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec to name but a few, the glyphs seem to each contain little bits of each cultures distinct style of writing. Even using all of our best methods to translate them, it has been in vain; Mark thinks that there may be a cipher some where in Tik’al and our party is searching for it but our group plans to move on soon to another location and if they are not translated soon we may never get another chance to solve this mystery. Mark plans to report this find to a professional archeological organization upon returning to the states but it would be fantastic if we were able to solve this mystery while we are here. This is what Mark and I used to dream of in college and now that we have found it we don’t have any time spend on studying what we have found, it seems unlikely we will discover the cipher to these glyphs in a single but stranger things have happened, if it is meant to be, it will be.
We were unable to decipher the glyphs and our party is leaving Tik’al this morning. It’s a pity but there are plenty of other areas to explore, I would like to return to Tik’al if I am ever given the chance; we need time to study the glyphs more closely. Who knows maybe some young aspiring pseudo archaeologist will unravel the mystery after we are long gone but I cannot shake the dream I had last night; in the dream Mark and I had become world famous for the discovery of the glyphs, they had clearly led to the discover of something much bigger and we had as much funding as we needed to continue our studies. Because of the discovery we had made more than enough money for my daughter to go to the college of her choice, upon waking I found it strange that I remembered the dream. Dreams often slip away as soon my eyes open but I cannot shake this one, I would like to think it is a vision of the future. I have never believed in such nonsense but who knows. We are leaving Tik’al now to study the ruins of a wall recently discovered deep in the rain forest. We have hired a local to guide us there but he has charged us an extraordinarily steep fee and we must pay as any other guide we asked refused. The locals are very superstitious and many still seem to believe in the old deities, many made mention of a curse upon the area we plan to explore, foolish people but they have lost our business.