We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I could see a number of workers with sharp sticks and gourds of seed planting corn—The boy touched my shoulder and disappeared up the path in jungle dawn mist—
As
I stepped forward into the clearing and addressed one of the workers,
I felt the crushing weight of
evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged
molds, squeezing my spirit in
a soft invisible vise—The worker looked at me with dead eyes empty
of curiosity or welcome and
silently handed me a planting stick—It was not unusual for
strangers to wander in out of the jungle
since the whole area was ravaged by soil exhaustion—So my presence
occasioned no comment—I worked until sundown—I was assigned to a
hut by an overseer who carried a carved stick
and wore an elaborate headdress indicating his rank—I lay down in
the hammock and immediately
felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation—I turned on the
thoughts of a halfwitted young Indian—After some hours the
invisible presence withdrew—I had passed the first test
—
During
the months that followed I worked in the fields—The monotony of
this existence made my disguise
as a mental defective quite easy—I learned that one could be
transferred from field work to rock
carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and only after the
priests were satisfied that any thought
of resistance was forever extinguished—I decided to retain the
anonymous status of a field worker
and keep as far as possible out of notice—
A
continuous round of festivals occupied our evenings and holidays—On
these occasions the priests
appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or
lobsters—Sacrifices were rare,
but I witnessed one revolting ceremony in which a young captive was
tied to a stake and the priests
tore his sex off with white-hot copper claws—I learned also
something of the horrible punishments
meted out to anyone who dared challenge or even think of challenging
the controllers: Death
in the Ovens: The violator was placed in a construction of
interlocking copper grills—The grills
were then heated to white heat and slowly closed on his body. Death
In Centipede: The "criminal"
was strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes—These
executions were carried
out secretly in rooms under the temple.
I
made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a
shrill insect frequency that followed
the workers all day in the fields—However, I knew that to play
these recordings would invite
immediate detection—I needed not only the sound track of control
but the image track as well before
I could take definitive action—I have explained that the Mayan
control system depends on the
calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all
states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited
circumstances—These are the instruments with which they rotate and
control units of thought—I found out also that the priests
themselves do not understand exactly how the system works and that I
undoubtedly knew more about it than they did as a result of my
intensive training and studies—The technicians who had devised the
control system had died out and the present line of priests were in
the position of some one who knows what buttons to push in order to
set a machine in motion, but would have no idea how to fix that
machine if it broke down, or to construct another if the machine were
destroyed-
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