We’re never told outright what Ixta’s father was up to when he disappeared from the garden, all those years before – neither in the televised version, or in the novelisation (where Ixta is the temple builder’s grandson). Logically, the body of the High Priest Yetaxa must have already been in situ when Ixta’s father disappeared – so why was he going back inside the tomb? To rob it, evidently, and not for the first time – hence the brooch he gave to Cameca, which “came from Yetaxa’s tomb”.
This part of the narrative owes more to ancient Egyptian lore than Aztec history – since it’s remarkably similar to a legend of the probablyfictitious pharoah King Rhampsinitus, as told by the Greek scholar Herodotus in Book II of his Histories (circa 440 BCE). As translated in the mid-1800s by George and Henry Rawlinson with John Gardner Wilkinson, the story goes that the hugely wealthy Rhampsinitus proposed to build ‘a vast chamber of hewn stone’ to store his silver’ – but that the builder he commissioned, ‘having designs upon the treasures’, built into its outside wall ‘a stone which could easily be removed from its place by two men, or even by one’ (just like the serpent stone in the garden wall). The story continues: ‘Time passed, and the builder fell sick… finding his end approaching, he called for his two sons and related to them the contrivance he had made in the king’s treasure chamber… Then he gave them clear directions concerning the mode of removing the stone, and communicated the measurements, bidding them carefully keep the secret’ (just like the mysterious ‘drawings’ supposedly left with Ixta). The father died, and so his sons ‘went by night to the palace, found the stone in the wall of the building, and having removed it with ease, plundered the treasury of a round sum…’