Page 154 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Palenque.
What was being said here? No one knew for sure because the
inscriptions, a mixture of word pictures and phonetic symbols, had not
yet been fully decoded. It was evident, however, that a number of the
glyphs referred to epochs thousands of years in the past, and spoke of
people and gods who had played their parts in prehistoric events.
1

Pacal’s tomb

To the left of the hieroglyphs, let into the huge flagstones of the temple
floor, was a steep descending internal stairway. This led to a room buried
deep in the bowels of the pyramid, where the tomb of Lord Pacal lay. The
stairs, of highly polished limestone blocks, were narrow and surprisingly
slippery and moist. Adopting a crabbed, sideways stance, I switched on
my torch and stepped gingerly down into the gloom, steadying myself
against the southern wall as I did so.
This damp stairway had been a secret place from the date when it was
originally sealed, in AD 683, until June 1952 when the Mexican
archaeologist Alberto Ruz lifted the flagstones in the temple floor.
Although a second such tomb was found at Palenque in 1994, Ruz had
2
the honour of being the first man to discover such a feature inside a New
World pyramid. The stairway had been intentionally filled with rubble by
its builders, and it took four more years before the archaeologists cleared
it out completely and reached the bottom.

The Atlas of Mysterious Places (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London,
1
1987, p. 70.
2 The Times, London, 4 June 1994.

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