He was a sharp old Gallego--none sharper--and the bit of stained and colored paper that a moment before had been condemned to the rubbish pile had suddenly acquired a value. Not much to be sure, but better than nothing by a long shot. Very possibly, I thought, it really belonged with the rubbish. But I was curious to learn what it was and, handing Don Miguel two pesos in addition to the price of the books, I slipped the paper into one of the volumes and departed with his fervent, “May you go with God, Señor,” in my ears. Little did I dream, as I made my way back to the ship, what a strange investment I had made or through what amazing experiences and remarkable places that ragged, folded paper would lead me. Indeed, at the time, I gave it so little thought that I completely forgot about it, until we were well at sea, when, in my cabin after dinner, I opened the “Explorations, Discoveries, Strange Sights and Remarkable Adventures in the Indies, etc,” by imaginative old Sebastian Gomez, and once more came upon my two-peso purchase. Unfolding it carefully, for it was creased and old, I actually gasped, staring incredulously at what I had revealed. My first glance at the fresher, cleaner inner surface of the sheet was enough. It was a codex--one of those strange pictographic records kept by the ancient Aztecs and Mayas! Less than a dozen originals, I knew, were in existence. Could this be an original? Could it be one of the lost Codices? If so it was priceless, irreplaceable, and with trembling fingers, almost reverently, I examined it and studied the texture of the material through my lens. The material was unquestionably ancient papyrus! The color, the technique of the green, red, blue and yellow figures proved it no copy! The old Spaniard had spoken more truly than he had imagined when he had jokingly called it “antediluvian.” Incredulously I studied the codex that, by sheerest good fortune, had come into my possession. I puzzled my brain to decipher or decode it, to recognize the figures of conventionalized human beings, of gods and other objects. I was familiar with Aztec pictographs, familiar with Mayan glyphs, but somehow this did not appear like either. And yet, of the two it was far more Mayan than Aztec. A hope rose in my breast, a hope that I had stumbled upon one of the long-lost, missing codices of the Mayas. Only three Mayan codices were known, yet there must have been hundreds, and in all probability many had been taken back to Spain as curios by the returning conquerors. Was it therefore beyond the bounds of possibility--even of probability--that some of these might still be preserved, their value unknown to their owners, perhaps regarded as worthless scraps of old maps, and that one of these should have been tucked between the pages of the ancient volume I had bought?