The Pyramids of Mexico

== In Coleshill's Footsteps ==
Seventh of the Tavistock Expeditions
=== Sessions 1-2 ===
The Pyramids of America (By Bartholomew Coleshill, published 1886)
This book relates the adventures of Mr. Coleshill in 1884.
He was a well-known explorer and author of bestselling books about his travels,
clearly pitched to attract a predominantly female audience. Mrs. Tavistock,
though born two generations too late to be one of his original readers, is a
big fan. She has decided to send the next Expedition to verify the findings in
his third book, for which he could not provide sufficient verification for
academic purposes. The crate with his photographic negatives and rubbings was
stolen en route for home. 
The party were therefore to travel to Veracruz in Mexico,
then up the Rio Papaloapan to find an Aztec pyramid-temple complex occupied,
when Coleshill was there, by a neo-Aztec cult reviving the ‘old ways’ of
worship, including human sacrifice and ‘tame’ jaguars accompanying the priests.
Coleshill reported that the High Priest had a definitely
Egyptian-style sacred ibis pectoral, which he saw clearly through his spyglass.
Unfortunately, though the priest was killed in the subsequent battle, the
pectoral went missing. Coleshill then found that the carvings at the top of the
central temple pyramid were variants on Egyptian hieroglyphics, of which he
made photographs and rubbings.
Without those documentary proofs, Coleshill’s claim that
there was a mystical link between the Egyptians and the Aztecs was dismissed as
‘not proven’ by the academic authorities of the time. However, some of the
Tavistock Foundation’s favourite psychics back his claims of a link which
explained their sharing of pyramid power. Mrs. Tavistock therefore wants the
Expedition to bring back documentary evidence of the carvings as evidence of
the psychic significance of pyramid power. If it is also possible to uncover
more details of the neo-Aztecs and obtain that pectoral it would be a massive
feather in their cap – it will be a real item of power after all these
centuries. 
The party started their research phase. Kohath focused on
the diseases and venomous flora and fauna of the area, but was mostly concerned
with were-jaguars. He confirmed that they’ve been associated with the religions
of the area since the Olmec days. Like other were-beasts they are resistant to
most forms of damage, but silver affects them normally. He suggested that they
should carry silver bullets, but so that they could all share them they should
all carry the same calibre of weapon – specifically pistols, since jungle
encounters with them are not likely to be at the kind of range where rifles are
useful. After long discussions of the ‘best’ handgun, they decided on the Smith
& Wesson Police Special in .38 calibre as it was the heaviest Albert could
fire with any degree of accuracy. 
Their journey to Veracruz was uneventful, though Kohath was
somewhat paranoid about the German string quartet sharing their ship to
Savannah, Georgia. Three of them were older than the SS-Ahnenerbe agents they had encountered earlier, and four isn’t as
many as they encountered before, but still…
In Veracruz Donald managed to find an English trader who
could recommend reputable suppliers of the equipment they’d need for jungle
exploration, and a boat-owner they could rely on and who spoke English: Capt.
Ramon Rodriguez. His boat, the Mexican
Queen, is a motor-boat crewed by two of his sons and a nephew, plus his
widowed sister-in-law Annabella to do the cooking and cleaning. 
Capt. Rodriguez boasted that he knew the Rio Papaloapan like
the back of his hand – he’s been sailing it since 1913. But he didn’t recognise
the name of the town Coleshill visited, San Miguel del Verde. It is quite
common for villages on the river to vanish – when the local soil is exhausted
the villagers move on to a new site – but not towns. Rodrigues thought that
Coleshill may have exaggerated its size for dramatic effect, or changed the
name for English readers uncomfortable with the long Indian words for Mexican
towns. 
He also doesn’t know of any abandoned mission stations along
the river, but there has been one in about the right area as long as he’s been
working the river. Perhaps between Coleshill’s visit and his arrival it was
rebuilt. 
And he’s never heard of a crocodile or alligator snatching
someone off a boat. They don’t grow as big as the one Coleshill described any
more, and are scared of boats because they make good eating. 
On their new trader friend’s advice, they loaded up with
insect repellent and head-nets, packed textiles as gifts for the tribespeople
in the interior, and set sail on the Mexican
Queen. The journey was uneventful for the first six and a half days, giving
them some time to master the basics of Latin American Spanish (as opposed to
the European Spanish they had learned in English classrooms) and life on the
river. 
St Anthony’s Mission, six and a half days up-river, is the
only local mission station Rodriguez knows about. But the jolly Jesuits in
charge (Father Easter and Brother Cooper) say that this cannot be the place:
this mission has been here since 1868, when it was started by a pair of
Americans who felt they needed to demonstrate repentance for their actions in
the Indian Wars. The local tribes make war on each other occasionally in border
disputes, but they are not cannibals. They have no knowledge of any other
mission station being attacked in such a way. They haven’t heard of San Miguel
del Verde either – neither of them has been here as long as Rodriguez. And the
direction of the mountains was wrong too: they were visible in the south-west,
not slightly west of south. That direction was up-river: Coleshill would not
have left the river to march through the jungle in that direction. 
The Jesuits confirmed that there are still inter-tribal wars
in the area, though it’s at peace now so if they want to explore they can pass
from one tribe’s area to another easily. There are reputed to be were-jaguars
in the area – Father Easter has even spoken to someone who claimed to be one. (It
was a moral dilemma: he should have tried to destroy the devil-beast within the
traveller, but he couldn’t attack the reasonably polite human passing through
the mission.)
Another day upstream is a place where the condition might be
right: the river turns north-west and some mountains do lie just south of west
from there. Beyond that range of hills, the river turns south-west and there is
a town in approximately the right place, but it’s called Tlacojalpan, not San
Miguel. But then the regional Governor and his Army contingent was mentioned.
The Governor’s office is in the regional capital, over 100 miles away through
the jungles to the north. To get there, they’d need to go back down the
Papaloapan, forty miles up the coast past Veracruz, and up the Rio Actopan.
The party decided to check out the river up past Tlacojalpan
as far as a sailing boat could possibly have travelled in twelve days, stopping
at any place where the locals may be able to give them a clue. If that doesn’t
work, they’ll repeat the expedition up the Actopan. 
=== Session 3 ===
A place that seemed to meet the description in Colesford’s
book was found a half-day upstream of the mission station, where the river
turned back north-west and the mountain foothills to the south-west seemed to
have a ‘notch’ in them that fitted his description. 
The first order of business was to hold a séance to check
out whether the lumps in the ground were the remnants of the mission station
Colesford described, or just another abandoned village. Despite his best
efforts, Willie couldn’t find any spirits of Western missionaries to talk to,
just Mexican farmers irate that their homes had fallen down and their fields
were reverting to jungle. (They had no idea of the passage of time so didn’t
realise the soil had been exhausted and their descendants moved on.) 
The party discussed heading off into the jungle to
investigate, but decided to carry on up the river to check out Tlacojalpan
first. When they asked his opinion later, Capt. Rodriguez reckoned that since
Tlacojalpan is on the far side of the first foothills it would be closer to the
possible ‘notch’ so it might be better to go from there anyway. 
Tlacojalpan proved to be a lively market town. Capt.
Rodriguez guided Donald to the Mayor’s office and acted as their interpreter
while Mrs Stanley went in search of women in their 60s who might have been
around when Coleshill was present. Neither the mayor, nor his father whose
father had been mayor at the time, nor the gossipy old women could remember the
events Coleshill talked about. 
The mayor’s father did recall one group of Europeans who
went into the jungle seeking Aztec pyramids, but it was in 1908. Their guides
returned and relayed the sad news that all the Europeans had died of diseases
or animal bites (two spiders and a snake). He had to check the records to find
their nationality – they had been French. 
With the link between the natives and werejaguars in mind,
Donald asked the mayor if he knew of any of them in the area. The mayor said
yes, there was a family of them living not far away, the Perez Alonsos, and
there was often one of them in town to sell their crops. Donald was a bit
surprised to hear that they lived openly in the area – what happens if someone
strays into their territory during the full moon, for example? Clearly the
mayor wouldn’t want to go to a lot of effort: if someone was killed by a
werejaguar, there would be no way to be sure which of the extended family it
was, or even that they hadn’t been attacked by a natural beast. So people just
stayed away from their territory at the wrong time of the month. Now they were
just a couple of days before no moon, so everyone feels safe with werejaguars
trading in town. 
Asking for the Perez Alonso stall in the market led them to
José Perez Alonso, a man in his mid-20s of clear Indian descent. He confirmed
that he was a werejaguar. He also knew that there was an old pyramid a couple
of weeks’ trek into the jungle, but he’d never been there himself. His uncle
had told him about it – his uncle is a bit of a wanderer and enjoys new sights
and exploration. Yes, his uncle probably would be willing to guide tourists
there – in fact he used to guide tourists at the dinosaur realm in Venezuela (a
reference to the previous Beresford Travellers campaign of the early 1870s, who
found the ‘lost valley’ which is now a significant tourist attraction for
wealthy travellers.) He even learned to speak English there. 
José was expecting to be in town for a couple of days more
to sell his stock and then buy the necessary supplies for his family, so they
agreed to meet at dawn on the third day. 
Having been warned to keep expenditure down on this
expedition, the party decided to let Capt. Rodriguez make a trading run back to
Veracruz rather than pay him a retainer to sit at the dock. They reckoned that
he could probably get to Veracruz and back before they managed to walk to the
pyramid, do a reasonable archaeological survey, and return. 
So the only faces they knew disappeared down-river, and at
dawn on the third day they assembled at the marketplace as José arranged, to
find canoes and local paddlers waiting for them. It is apparently much easier
to get to the Perez Alonso territory by boat…
=== Session 4 ===
Paddling deep into the jungle in a pair of canoes, the party
left ‘civilisation’ far behind them and put themselves at the mercy of a family
of were-jaguars… Who received them warmly and haggled a price to provide a
guide (Uncle Paco) and bearers for their expedition. 
They had a party the night before departing, and Willie
spotted a feature from Coleshill’s book: the brightly coloured war-bonnets he
had described and photographed were being worn by the men for dancing. There
was much muttering in the shadows about that – whether ‘savages’ would wear
bright colours in war-bonnets to show their lack of fear of the enemy, or take
them off so they could blend into the jungle. Asked about them by Donald, José explained that the feather bonnets were a
sign of the wearer’s hunting prowess: the more and brighter the feathers they
contained the better a hunter he was because he had to get close enough to the
birds to take them down. A bonnet wouldn’t last much longer than ten years –
some of the old men were still wearing older ones than that but they were
looking very bedraggled after years of flashing around the dance-floor. The
party never directly asked whether they were war-bonnets…
Mrs Stanley enjoyed
the local moonshine rather too much and leapt up to join in the dancing,
dragging a highly embarrassed Albert with her till he could break away with a
promise to find her another drink. 
They marched out
next day with Mrs Stanley rather the worse for her hangover, plunging deep into
the uncharted jungle (though after the first day Mrs Stanley had recovered
enough to start making her own chart). There were no great hazards in the
expedition, just endless days of slogging through the jungle. Albert, Haggart,
and Mrs Stanley kept the interest level up with snake-bites, spider-bites,
waterborne diseases, and painful rashes from the local vegetation. There were
few days when Kohath’s magic wasn’t called upon to neutralise venom, toxins, or
bugs – even a broken ankle one day when Haggart slipped off a rock. 
Fresh meat was
provided at intervals by Uncle Paco and Juan, one of his nephews who was a
bearer: the two stripped off and left the camp to transform to jaguar form to
hunt, bringing back deer and pigs. (The other bearers were not were-jaguars,
just normal Indian stock.) This was taken as a sign that they weren’t coy about
it so the party asked more details. The oral history is that the were-jaguar
line are descended from the guards of the Olmec priests – their God bestowed the
‘gift’ on the elite corps of guards to make them a hereditary line. Later, they
had a tradition of serving as guards to the Aztecs, but the job fell through
when the Conquistadors arrived as the Catholics did not see were-jaguars as an
asset. Uncle Paco is not the only one of the extended clan to have worked in
the dinosaur park – their toughness in were form has given the brighter dinos a
certain wariness about attacking humans.
Eventually, ten
days out – two days later than Uncle Paco had estimated since the party hadn’t
kept up the speed he expected – he guided them to the pyramid as the afternoon
was fading to dusk on the first full-moon night. While the normal bearers set
up camp, Paco and Juan left to get clear of the area because they realised how uneasy
the party was becoming, and the party immediately started the first scratchings
at the overgrowth. By the time the light had faded, they had a section of wall
cleared to reveal closely fitting unmortared stonework, and a test pit found
the edge of a flagstone forced within a foot of the surface by a tree root. 
Next day the
digging started in earnest. In full daylight they could see the slight
difference on the northern side where the stairs were – unfortunately it was
different because the steps had allowed greater soil accumulation than the
steeply-banked sides, so there was more vegetation to dig out. From the top
they could see that this was a single pyramid, none of the other eight of the
complex reported by Coleshill broke the canopy. 
A week’s hard
digging by party and bearers alike confirmed that this was exactly what they’d
expect of an Aztec pyramid: no hieroglyphics, no traces of sacrificial fires
where the victims’ hearts were burned, no bullet-strikes from the Mexican army
battle Coleshill described. The nearest village, just two hours’ march away,
told them that the locals didn’t know the story of an Aztec renaissance fifty
years earlier, they didn’t know of any complex of nine pyramids, and they’d
never seen anything like the hieroglyphics they were shown. The nearest other
pyramid they knew of was to the south – from their description, Paco estimated
that it would take about eight days for the party to reach it. 
Kohath was in
favour of packing up and leaving quickly, but was argued down by Mrs Stanley
who was insistent that now they were here, they’d do a proper archaeological
survey, record everything properly, and clear up any speculation about this
having ‘Egyptian’ links, so no future expeditions would waste their time.
Willie tried to do a séance to speak with the spirits of the place, but they
resolutely ignored this heathen intruding on their sacred space and he heard
nothing. 
Eventually, they
had all the evidence they could gather. The discussion about going on to the
next known pyramid was brief – by now, no-one had any faith in Coleshill’s
book, and even if he had been telling the truth, the next pyramid was more than
three times the travel time from the riverside town that he’d described. Ten
more days of jungle marching brought them back to the Perez Alonso homestead
for another party, then back to Tlacojalpan for a hot bath and a boat
down-river. 
They had to lounge
around in Tlacojalpan for a few days before the bad news came: a letter from
Capt. Rodriguez. On the way back from Veracruz to pick them up, the Mexican Queen had collided with some
unknown obstacle and sank. Luckily, it sank slowly enough that everyone got off
safely, but they would need to find other transport. The Papaloapan was busy
enough that they had no trouble doing so, and on the way back down-river they
drafted the message for the Foundation. 
By this time,
no-one saw Coleshill’s book as a reliable record. The possibilities were that
he had falsified the timeline and gone further up-river into the mountains, or
that he had gone up the Rio Actopan instead to put him closer to the regional
capital Xalapa, which would be in keeping with his managing to enlist help from
the regional Governor. They could extend the expedition to check further up the
Papaloapan, or to Xalapa, or write it off in their belief that there was
basically no truth in Coleshill’s story.
They met up with
Capt. Rodriguez back in Veracruz, where he was working on the boat he had been
able to buy with his insurance money. It wasn’t as good as the Queen, but they would be able to make it
so with a month or two’s work. Donald pitched in to help till they received a
response from the Foundation.
As they walked
through the streets towards the hotel, Willie noticed the local
newspaper-sellers and realised that turning out the Army to deal with murderous
cultists would surely have made the papers, so they could check out which river
it had actually been on. Mrs Stanley arranged researchers in the central
library and the newspaper archives to look for the story – not just in 1884,
when Coleshill said that it happened, but for some years before to check
whether he had stolen someone else’s story. 
They found no
mention of Coleshill, his expedition, or the Army turning out to deal with an
Aztec resurgence. Moreover, the publicity-hungry regional Governor he named had
existed, but had resigned from his office in 1882 to avoid corruption charges,
so Coleshill couldn’t have enlisted his help two years later. They added this
information to the cable back to the Foundation, and eventually the response
came back from Dalgetty: give up and come home. Don’t waste any more time or
money on it. 
Though some people
were sceptical from the beginning, Willie got the
experience points for being the first one to realise “He’s Captain Park!” (A
reference to the Cheapass game Captain
Park’s Imaginary Expedition, on which this scenario was closely based.)
Category:Tavistock Expeditions