The students’ attitudes had changed considerably from when they had first arrived at the site. That always happened—it was a rite of passage, especially for those who had never actively worked on a dig. At the start, when they were all bright-eyed and full of gung-ho exuberance, they would take copious notes when Walt would lecture on the day's findings. Then they would all get together for communal dinner, drink beer, and talk. It was like being in the best and most exciting summer camp in the world. They loved it, even when it hurt like hell.
By the end of the first week, though, when they'd had bellyfuls of work under their belts, the note-taking became more desultory. Days of painstaking toil under the hot, unrelenting sun made them too exhausted to make much of an effort, and their notepaper turned to mush in the heavy, oppressive vegetal moisture. Besides, being here wasn't about learning from books, observing a subject from a distance through an abstract prism. This was learning by way of your calluses, performing hard, meticulous, grinding work. The expectation was no longer a good grade and being part of history-making, as it had been when they signed up. Their desires became immediate and mundane—a cold beer at the end of the day, a change into dry clothes. Maybe sex, if you got lucky. In that regard a loose decorum was observed, which was breached easily and without fuss—those who needed privacy would disappear into the jungle for an hour at the end of the workday.
Now, their summer of work was over. Everyone except Walt was sleeping—they were exhausted. The last few days had been spent cataloguing the work they'd done here on-site, gathering the items they were allowed to remove for study, and securing their tools, photo equipment, all their various and sundry gear they were bringing back home.
Walt wasn't wearing his watch, but he could tell from the position of the moon that it was well past midnight. From out of the darkness came the cacophony of the jungle: howler monkeys screeching in the trees, cries of predatory cats tike puma, calls of frogs, insects, other nocturnal animals. After decades of living in the jungle, Walt's mind, on a conscious level, had adjusted to tuning out the noise. Now, though, he wished to hear every sound as clearly and distinctly as he could. He wanted all his sensations to be acutely tuned in, this last night before departing.
Savoring the feeling, he was still for a moment. Then he switched on his flashlight and set off for the center of La Chimenea, half a mile away.
Despite the lateness of the hour it was powerfully hot out, and as humid as the inside of a Turkish bath—the normal state of affairs for this time of year. Earlier, shortly before sundown, it had rained, a hard, fast downpour. That was another of Walt's concerns—that his small convoy reach the paved road before the skies opened tomorrow. This was the rainy season; it rained almost every day. An hour or two, usually in the late afternoon. That didn't matter when they were here, on-site; but to get stuck in the middle of the jungle in a downpour could screw things up badly, even though the vans they were traveling in had four-wheel drive. There's a point where even four-wheel drive won't cut through the deep, sucking mud. That's the point where you can find yourself in serious trouble.
Walt didn't want to think about that now. He'd deal with whatever came up, when and if it happened. He always did.
He walked along the narrow path that cut through the thick growth and high trees, taking care to avoid the thorn trees that can pierce flesh worse than saguaro cactus. The thin beam of light from his flashlight was a slender knife-cut through the darkness, a darkness so deep he could almost feel it, like a cloak around his body. He was careful to stay on the path; so close was the jungle that in twenty minutes, if you didn't pay attention, you could be hopelessly lost and at the mercy of the elements. Tourists had gone lost at sites as developed as Tikal and Palenque. La Chimenea, by contrast, was almost virgin, a small clearing surrounded by dense, threatening jungle.
Walt relished these moments of being alone. He could let his mind go wherever it wanted, conjure up all kinds of magnificent visions, the stuff of dreams: what the life here was like in those long-ago times when this wouldn't have been jungle, but a bustling metropolis.
He had originally come to Central America on a whim, between his junior and senior years in college. He had been fired from his summer construction job for showing up drunk, so he had gone down to Tikal, in Guatemala, with a friend from Princeton who was studying archaeology. It was going to be a vacation, a lark; but instead, from the moment he climbed to the top of the highest temple and looked out over the endless jungle, the rest of his life had fallen into place: he had discovered his life's work. He went to graduate school at Penn, got his Ph.D., started teaching at Wisconsin, met Jocelyn, married her, became renowned in his field. And fathered three boys.
Thinking of his sons brought him back to the present. He missed them. He'd be glad to see them in a couple of days, when he and Jocelyn were back home and they'd all get together again. They were grown now, they were capable men, but they would always be his boys.
He felt the jaguar's presence before he saw it. He didn't know what it was, precisely, that he was sensing, but he knew it was something extraordinary. It was as if one of the ancient kings of this city-state had suddenly materialized here; that's how powerful the jaguar's proximity felt to him. The rest of the jungle knew it, too—the sounds had died away, almost as a homage.
Slowly, he looked up. And there it was, lying on a thick tree branch twenty feet above him, right over him, its head between its big paws, looking down at him. The great cat, the lord of the new world.
It was a male—he could tell from the size. Jaguars in this region rarely weighed much more than one hundred pounds, but this one looked like it weighed close to two hundred: a mighty specimen.
It didn't seem afraid of him, like big cats usually are of humans, especially jaguars, which are elusive, shy creatures. This one seemed to be sending out a telepathic message:
I'm the king here. You and the others are merely passing through, handfuls of dust in the wind, and long after you've gone to dirt and the jungle has once again reclaimed all of this, I will still be here. My spirit will always be here.
Walt felt this, strongly. The jaguar was the defining animal symbol of the ancient Maya. And here, against the greatest of odds, was one in the flesh. In all the years Walt had been traveling throughout Central America, to this site and others, he had never seen a jaguar up close like this; the few times he'd spotted one the animal had been a flash, running away in the undergrowth.
He stared at the jaguar. To his astonishment, the jaguar stared back. Fleetingly, he wished he'd brought his camera with him; but then he thought, no, it's better to be here with this as it is, in the moment. To live it, but not to capture it. Because you can't—no photograph could do justice to what he was feeling.
Slowly, as Walt watched, frozen in place, the jaguar stood on the thick branch. Then it leapt from the tree and was gone, a flash of mottled fur disappearing into the jungle.
For how long Walt stood there he didn't know; maybe a minute, probably less. He didn't believe in God, not in any traditional, Western fashion, but this brief but spectacular encounter had been a truly religious experience. Maybe this was a portent that something special was going to happen. What that might be, he didn't know. But this was so unique a sighting that it had to have an incredible meaning to match its specialness.
He realized, too, that he wasn't breathing—he might not have drawn a single breath since he'd seen the jaguar. Now he sucked in air greedily. He was shaking. What a way to end this journey! And the phenomenon was his, his alone. He owned this moment, he wasn't sharing it with anyone, not even his wife, with whom he shared almost everything.
Almost
everything; a few situations, he had learned from the hard-gained wisdom of hindsight and painful revelation, are best kept secret.
Gathering himself with one more deep, cleansing breath, Walt entered the Central Plaza. Several structures were clustered around the courtyard: a large acropolis, two massive temples, each over forty meters high, that faced each other, east and west, so that the sun could be worshipped when it rose and when it set, a palace in which the nobility would have dwelled, two pyramids as big as the temples, and a ball court.
This area was the only section of the ancient kingdom that had undergone excavation. At other parts of the vast site there had been some minor digging, but most of it was still overgrown by jungle. That wasn't going to change, certainly not in Walt's lifetime. It took years to unearth one sector, and incredible amounts of money. Over the course of the past three years, since those first
chicleros
stumbled on to the site, over five thousand mounds, each covering a building of some kind beneath them, had been located. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people had lived here at the height of its prominence.
Walt walked until he was in the center of the plaza. He could feel the pulse of the place surging, a psychic feeling signifying the turbulent life that had existed here for almost two millennia. In some unknowable but very palpable way, the ghosts of the ancients still dwelt among these stones. This was hallowed ground, a place upon which one should tread lightly, with reverence.
He stood still, taking everything in. There was an elegant grandeur to this reaching back into the past, digging up ancient burial grounds, unearthing old secrets. As some men dream of reaching for the stars, traveling to distant planets and pushing forward into the future, others, like him, look back to ancient worlds of mystery and desire. He had thought at times, over the years, about what his life's work said about him. Why was the past more important to him than the present or the future?
He had never come up with an exact answer; he wasn't sure he wanted one. What he did know was that the discovery of a new site, a new branch of an old civilization, seemed as fresh and real to him as flying through the heavens must feel to an astronaut. When he was at an ancient site, as he was now, those who had occupied this space came alive, and were here with him.
Crossing the plaza to the far end, he went into the ball court and climbed the steep limestone steps that had been cut into one of the walls. Only a small section of this area had been reclaimed from the jungle; most of it was still under a fifteen-meter-high mound of dirt and trees. Plopping himself down on the top step, his back against the wall, he looked to the floor below.
Ball courts were Walt's favorite locations—he was an old ex-jock, he loved those areas where physical action had taken place. And this was definitely where the action had been; the ball game was the Maya's version of the seventh game of the World Series, the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl.
This was a particularly impressive ball court. Seventy meters long, it wasn't as large as the famous one at Chichén Itzé, but it was still impressive—grander than those at Tikal, Caracól, or Palenque. And like the great Yucatan ball court—the largest in the Maya world, measuring a hundred and forty meters, longer than a football field and a half—the acoustics were startling. A person standing at one end, talking in a normal voice, could be heard clearly all the way at the other end, almost an eighth of a mile away. This unique feature reminded Walt of the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building, which also had this wonderful, eerie quality. Walt had visited the House and Senate numerous times as an archaeological expert witness. He was very persuasive in those committee meetings—senators and representatives ate out of his hand.
The cleared-away section of the wall that Walt was using as a backrest was adorned with elaborate hieroglyphics, which told of a fierce battle between La Chimenea and a nearby rival that had taken place during the Late Classic Period, around
A.D
. 800. La Chimenea, whose ruler was named Smoke-Jaguar—and a mighty ruler he was, so it was carved in stone—had crushed its rival, burned the other city to the ground, and had captured many of the losers’ nobles and brought them back here. And then, in homage to the Maya gods, the losers played a ball game, a prelude to sacrificing one of them to the gods.
The ball game and its attendant rituals were highly structured, beginning with the king's preparations. On the morning of the day the game began Smoke-Jaguar would undergo a bloodletting ceremony. Hidden away in the sanctum sanctorum of the holy temple, he would pierce his penis with a sharp nettle, and, spinning like a dervish, would bring forth his own offering of blood, that he and his people might be blessed with victory, as they had been in this battle. After he was finished his bloodletting a priest would bind his wound, and he would join the other high-ranking members of the kingdom in watching the ball game, right where Walt was sitting now.
Ball games, although violent and physical, were not sporting contests. They were solemn religious events, homages to the gods. The object of the ball game was for a player to get the ball through one of the rings, which were slightly larger than the ball. The ball was solid rubber, and heavy—it weighed thirty or forty pounds. The rings, carved out of stone, were suspended from the sides of the walls that surrounded the court. The game was similar to soccer, except that players not only couldn't use their hands, they also couldn't use their feet. They had to advance the heavy ball by use of wrists, elbows, shoulders, rear ends, knees, hips, and their heads.
The game could go on for a long time—it wasn't easy knocking a thirty-pound ball into a hoop without the use of your hands or feet. If a player managed to put the ball through a hoop, the game was over. The winners were awarded the losers’ clothing and jewelry, as well as clothing and jewels from some of the spectators, who would make bets on the outcome.
Then would come the sacrifice. One of the losers, generally the highest-ranking of the captured nobles, sometimes even their king, would be killed, usually by beheading. Even if no one from either team got the ball through a ring, there would still be a sacrifice.