Book of Secrets (2007)
Cibola, the Olmec City of Gold
From the film · 01:53:00
“Somebody has to be willing to die.”
Inside the mountain, a flooding chamber, my father holding a stone bottleneck open with his back
What we know
A vast carved chamber beneath the granite, with sun-disk, lake, and several thousand objects in worked gold
The chamber is what the legend has always promised, and what the Spanish never found because they were looking south of the wrong river. The Olmec influence reached north further than mainstream archaeology generally credits. Inside Cibola: an enormous sun-disk, columns of carved figures, a redirected stream feeding a circular pool, and gold objects in numbers I lose count of. There is also a counterweight system that locks behind us. There is a flooding mechanism that turns the pool into a rising tide. There is a single stone bottleneck that one of you, at some point, must hold for the others. My father held it. He is fine. He is also the most stubborn man on the eastern seaboard. We escape. We surface. The treasure goes, as treasure should, to the museums of the world. And I am asked, very quietly, to read Page 47.
The Puzzle
There is no next clue. There is only Page 47, and what Ben Gates' face does when he reads it. We will not elaborate.