When I reached the stone-paved platform at the pinnacle, I felt Alex Goddard clasp my arm and turn me around to face the plaza below.
"They are waiting," he said, pointing toward the hazy square.
I looked down, and at first I couldn't see anything except rain and smoke, but then slowly a crowd materialized. The scattering of men I'd seen earlier had become an undulating sea of upturned faces painted with stripes and swirling circles of blue and white and red, a torch-lit garden of brilliant blossoms. They all were looking up at us, at Sarah and me.
Next he held out a mirror whose reflecting surface was a polished silver metal.
"Behold yourself, Morgan. As befits a royal one, a special one, your nose has been built up with clay and pierced with lustrous blue feathers and a giant topaz. Your front teeth have been filed to a point and inlaid with jewels, your royal skull has been shaped back and flattened."
I gazed into the mirror and gasped. I was monstrous, a Halloween harpy.
Then he moved over to a waist-high censer stationed there on the edge of the platform and began adding balls of sticky white copal resin, together with bark and grasses, which he ignited by the quick friction of a fire stick spun by a bow.
Finally he turned to me and held out his hands. "Now we will make a miracle, the miracle of Baalum."
Heavy smoke from the censer was pouring out into the rainy sky as we started a stiff pas de deux, the strains of a clay flute drifting around us. Was it the "ceremony"? Was I dreaming it?
As the incense billowed, our Maya dreamtime dance became ever more intense, and then a faint form began to writhe up out of the haze between us, an undulating serpent the deep color of jade. As Alex Goddard wrapped his arms around it, it began to form into two dark heads, then pirouette above us. Finally, as the two-headed specter opened its mouths and gazed down on the platform, Sarah stepped toward it and held out her arms.