Tomb of the Clouds

With meticulous care the archeologist's pick & shovel gang cleared the entrance to another old tomb. Here, atop Monte Alban which overhangs the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, might be some treasure which the Spanish Conquistadores had missed. Monte Alban had been a fortress of the anciently rich and powerful Mixtecs, or Cloud People. Within the walls they had built their temples and palaces. Here too were tombs of the Caciques, feudal nobles. The hilltop now is all tumbled debris. Professor Alfonso Caso, archeologist of the National Museum of Mexico, has had a gang clearing buried walls, sifting dirt for turquoise and jade ornaments, prying into tombs. Every tomb promised a surprise. Six fooled the invaders. The men were at the seventh this day.

By way of a staircase with narrow treads and high risers they entered the tomb's antechamber. Nothing remarkable there. Beyond was a flat-ceilinged room. Again nothing remarkable. But there was a second room in whose murk things glittered. Professor Caso forbade any one to follow him except his wife and two other assistants. Carefully they crawled forward.

Around the walls were six heaps of what had once been six seated Caciques. In Professor Caso's plain archeologist's terms: "The long years had dealt severely with them. . . . Their skeletons had virtually disintegrated during the many decades since they had been placed there." At burial the warriors had been sheathed with jewel-clotted gold. For each face there was a gold-&-turquoise mask. Extraordinary objects of gold, silver, copper, jade, turquoise, coral, pearl, nacre, rock crystal, alabaster, lay ranged about. Trophy of one warrior was a human skull, richly encrusted with turquoise and shell. In the hollow of the nose was a flint knife.

Other bone mementos in the tomb of the Cloud warriors were "carved with a technique not surpassed by fine Chinese work on ivory," the carvings depicting events of history and details of ritual.

Best find in the tomb was a gold mask, four inches high, representing terrific Xipetotec,* the Cloud People's god of vegetation, gold, silver and grief. For Xipetotec's pleasure one of his priests would dance in a skin freshly flayed from a dazzling, dazzled woman.

If anything of like value had ever been discovered in the Americas, the digger was no honorable scientist. The gold alone in this Mixtec tomb was estimated at more than $1,000,000. Museums and private collections would pay almost any amount for the trinkets. This was treasure too precious for Professor Caso to keep in his home down in Oaxaco. Last week he secretly carried them to the vaults of the local branch of the Bank of Mexico. Then he dared make his report.

The news sent gold hunters dashing for Oaxaca. Everyone in Mexico knows that Hernando Cortes and his rough Spaniards, although they accumulated shiploads of wrought Indian gold, took only a fraction of the Mexican treasures. Priests and courtiers dumped roomfuls of gold into lakes, pitched them into caverns and crevices, plugged them in tombs. Four centuries of riflings have not found all the caches.

Federal troops last week protected Monte Alban from marauders. That, however, did not deter the treasure hunters. There are tunnels through the territory which the Cloud People once ruled. The tunnels, some of them 30 miles long, connected old cities, many of them vanished. A few of the tunnels which have not collapsed have been explored. Others may yield fortune to human moles eagerly groveling for Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec gold.

*Pronounced: Sheepetotec.

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