Page 156 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Indeed, it would not have looked out of place in the Valley of the Kings.
But there was one major difference. The scene carved on top of the
sarcophagus lid was unlike anything that ever came out of Egypt. Lit in
my torch beam, it showed a clean-shaven man dressed in what looked
like a tight-fitting body-suit, the sleeves and leggings of which were
gathered into elaborate cuffs at the wrists and ankles. The man lay semi-
reclined in a bucket seat which supported his lower back and thighs, the
nape of his neck resting comfortably against some kind of headrest, and
he was peering forward intently. His hands seemed to be in motion, as
though they were operating levers and controls, and his feet were bare,
tucked up loosely in front of him.
Was this supposed to be Pacal, the Maya king?
If so, why was he shown operating some kind of machine? The Maya
weren’t supposed to have had machines. They weren’t even supposed to
have discovered the wheel. Yet with its side panels, rivets, tubes and
other gadgets, the structure Pacal reclined in resembled a technological
device much more strongly than it did ‘the transition of one man’s living
soul to the realms of the dead’, as one authority claimed, or the king
6
‘falling back into the fleshless jaws of the earth monster’, as another
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argued.
I remembered ‘Man in Snake’, the Olmec relief described in Chapter
Seventeen. It, too, had looked like a naïve depiction of a piece of
technology. Furthermore, ‘Man in Snake’ had come from La Venta, where
it had been associated with several bearded figures, apparently
Caucasians. Pacal’s tomb was at least a thousand years younger than any
of the La Venta treasures. Nevertheless, a tiny jade statuette was found
lying close to the skeleton inside the sarcophagus, and it appeared to be
much older than the other grave-goods also placed there. It depicted an
elderly Caucasian, dressed in long robes, with a goatee beard.
8

Pyramid of the Magician

Uxmal, Yucatan
On a stormy afternoon, 700 kilometres north of Palenque, I began to
climb the steps of yet another pyramid. It was a steep building, oval
rather than square in plan, 240 feet long at the base and 120 feet wide. It
was, moreover, very high, rising 120 feet above the surrounding plain.
Since time out of mind this edifice, which did look like the castle of a
necromancer, had been known as the ‘Pyramid of the Magician’ and also
as the ‘House of the Dwarf’. These names were derived from a Maya
legend which asserted that a dwarf with supernatural powers had raised

The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 70.
6
7 Time Among the Maya, p. 298.
8 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 95-6.

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