Maya Monuments of Yucatan, Mexico

For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see buzzsprout.com/1970784   

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Every year, about 34 million people pass through the Cancun airport.  I can’t count that high, but 34 million people is about the number passing through DFW or LAX or O’Hare, and it’s more than enough to keep me away.

Many Cancun visitors take a side trip to Chichen Itza, a Maya ruin a bit over a hundred miles inland.  I’m not sure how many, but Chichen Itza is the most visited of all Maya ruins, with four million tickets sold annually.  That’s more than 10,000 daily, and I suppose most of the visitors come from Cancun.   I imagine them saying, “It’s so crowded. Can we find some shade?”’  I also imagine them saying: “Wow, it’s big,” at the same time as inwardly they’re shuddering at the thought of hearts cut out of living bodies and tossed down stairs slippery with gore.  

Wait a minute, scholars say.  The conquistadors exaggerated the number of human sacrifices. They did it because it helped justify the conquest of Mexico.  A few scholars take a completely different tack.  Pyramids existed here a thousand years ago, they will say, but the ruins that so impress visitors see today have been heavily restored or even rebuilt since 1900.  There are lots of information signs, but none that explain how much work has been done to make the ruins good as new, spiffy, camera-ready.

Without this cosmetic surgery, visitor numbers would crash, and that’s probably reason enough to carry on with restoration, but the work wasn’t begun for tourists.  It was begun to make Mexicans proud of their nation.   Think of the battlefield of Gettysburg.  Americans come away thinking, “Lord, how could Americans butcher each other?”  Bingo: it’s called monuments for nation building.  Mexico’s archaeological sites have been renovated and in a sense destroyed for a good cause.

Now archaeologists look at a Maya ruin and ask questions beginning with “What is this?”  It’s not always an easy question to answer, not when major structures were built over centuries and when they grew to envelop or swallow earlier structures, including entire buildings.  But then there’s the question of when a particular ruin was built.  That’s also complicated.  And by whom.  And for what purpose.  And how the style of the ruin relates to neighboring as well as more distant ruins.   And what the ruin reveals about the society that built it. 

Last month I finally spent eight days in the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had never been there, though for several years I had been hoping.  Finally, a window opened.   I went for my usual reason, which is to be reminded how to live.  If I need help figuring this out, some will say I’m past help.  But I didn’t say that I wanted to learn how to live.  I said I wanted to remember.  I’m an old car whose engine needs oil with every tank of gas, and in my defense I will say that it’s easy to forget how to live when you’re in traffic or in a business meeting or shopping. It’s not just easy to forget how to live, it’s almost impossible to remember.  

So far as I can remember at this moment, the way to live is to be consciously aware that you are part of something.  God knows, I’m not talking about joining a group.  I concede that we are social animals–more’s the pity when you see us in crowds–but we’re not doomed to be lemmings.  Neither are lemmings.  I’m thinking of that wolf Aldo Leopold once shot.  It wasn’t quite dead, and when Leopold went up next to it he saw the light dying in the wolf’s eyes.  I’ve seen something like that, too.  I knew at once that the animal that had been alive a moment ago was now dead, and I knew it just from its eyes, which were still open but had instantly clouded in the dry heat of North Africa.  That animal, like Leopold’s wolf, had been part of a place where it belonged.   

So on a Friday night–it was actually Good Friday–I arrived at the airport in Merida, the biggest city on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Forget Cancun; forget Chichen Itza.  I took a taxi to a Hilton or a Marriott or a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt.  It’s  hard to remember.  They’re all bunched up within a short walk of a Walmart and a Starbucks.  A very nice Starbucks, by the way, a conversion of an old mansion. 

The next morning I walked south a mile to colonial Merida, saw the crowded main plaza, saw the cathedral, and saw the facade of a 16th century mansion built by the city’s founders.  The facade is decorated with the figures of two Spanish soldiers standing on the heads of Indians, each Spanish foot planted on one anguished Indian head. It’s odd that these figures survive.  After all, there’s a worldwide decolonizing industry.  It knocks Cecil Rhodes and Christopher Columbus and lots of other old white guys, but these two soldiers so far have stood firm.  They’re eloquent, although some people will see them as stalwart defenders of exploitation and others as proof of its inhumanity.

I saw a bunch of other stuff, too, some of it interesting, but then–bang–the wolf’s eyes.  It was a wooden door set into the side of an old church.  Not the cathedral. The door was maybe a bit over six feet high and three wide.  It was made simply of half a dozen planks set vertically.  They were three inches thick, unfinished, and rift-sawn, so the annual growth rings appeared as parallel, vertical lines running all the way from the top of the door to the bottom, as though scored by a giant comb.  Weathering had worn the planks so much that the growth rings would rasp your knuckles or catch your fingernails.  It’s a great door, the most beautiful thing I saw in Merida.

I picked up a rental car late Sunday and set out the next morning for Xpujil, a town 175 miles or so to the south.  I had chosen Xpujil, a town of roughly 5,000 people, because it’s at the center of a cluster of four comparatively ignored Maya ruins, five if you include Calakmul, which is a bit farther away.  Google Maps said that the drive from Meria would take about six and a half hours.  I’m a slow driver, and I didn’t want to drive at night.  An airline agent at check-in hadn’t helped.  He was Hispanic, perhaps from Mexico, and when he learned I was planning to drive myself, he said, “be very, very careful.” 

Anyway, about an hour out of Merida I passed Uxmal.  According to the late Michael Coe, a prominent Mayanist, Uxmal is one of the six “must-see” Maya ruins.  Should I stop? I decided I would, despite the crowd.  I paid a parking fee and two more fees before I could enter.  A hundred people were bunched up at one chokepoint, and this was Monday, quieter than the weekend.  Once inside, I admit, the crowd thinned, but there were always people around, more here, fewer there.  No way I could be alone, which brings me back to what some people might call my anti-social attitude.  But I can’t read if you’re standing over my shoulder.  It’s funny how that works, and when I’m at a new place I similarly want to give it my undivided attention.  People get in the way, even my favorite people.

In the next hour or so I verified the existence of four Uxmal structures I had read about: the Pyramid of the Magician, the Nunnery Quadrangle, the Governor’s House, and the Great Pyramid.  These names are all post-Conquest inventions, but fanciful and misleading names are probably better than the names given by archaeologists today when they find a site.   They’ll call its parts Structure 1 or Structure 2.   I went to one ruin near Xpujil with a Structure 20.  Try remembering the difference between two ruins when they’re named that way.

I faintly overheard a couple standing in front of the Great Pyramid.  Out of character, I piped up and asked, “Is that German I hear?”  The woman replied, “No, we’re Dutch.”  I learned long ago that the Dutch don’t appreciate this particular mistake, but she forgave me.  Then, looking at the pyramid, she said, “Isn’t it lovely?”  I said “No.  It’s  impressive but not lovely.  Lovely implies love, and there’s no love in that thing.”  She said,”You’re right.  This was a place of slavery.”  I don’t know if she was literally correct, but it would be hard to disagree with her unless you believe that people hauled up to the top of a pyramid for cardiac excision are, pardon the pun, whole-heartedly compliant.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have added, “It’s not even real.  This magnificent stairway to heaven was built a few decades ago under the supervision of a Mexican archaeologist.  Nineteenth century drawings show nothing but a steep, heavily forested hill.”

She might have said, “It doesn’t matter.  This way we can see what it looked like in its prime.”  That’s not quite true, because three sides of the pyramid are still heavily forested, but she’s right about the fourth side, the one we were looking at.

If I knew then what I know now, and if later in the day we had been sitting around being sociable, which is possible, I might have mentioned an essay by J.B. Jackson published around 1980.  The title was “The Necessity For Ruins.”  I’ve always been bothered by Jackson’s choice of prepositions.  I think it should be “the necessity of ruins.”  Picky, picky.

Anyway, Jackson wrote that monuments once existed to make people aware of their debt to the great men who have created or defended society.  Today–and Jackson didn’t say when this change occurred–we have much less respect for great men. Damn near none, I’d say.   Instead, Jackson wrote, we want monuments that remind us of the past, even the perfectly ordinary past–a frontier town, for example, or a pioneer homestead. 

I’ve always been frustrated that Jackson didn’t take the next step and explain that we want to know where we are, not only in three dimensions but in four.   GPS systems don’t bother with that fourth dimension, but I’d say you can’t be located without it.  The trouble with rebuilt pyramids is that they are cheats; the chronology is all wrong.  When we learn that they aren’t ancient, we’re more lost than ever.

Consider Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Uxmal in 1975.  She wasn’t the first European queen to visit.  A hundred years earlier, Carlotta, wife of the doomed Emperor Maximilian, had come.  There was no electricity in Carlotta’s day, but for Elizabeth the authorities wired the Nunnery Quadrangle so they could put on a Light and Sound Show.  How great is that?  They also decided that it was time to cover the nearby Pyramid of the Magician with new stone cladding.  Patches of the original remained, but they were removed because they weren’t the same color as the replacement stone.

The surviving bits of the original skin, in other words, were tossed aside so a new skin of a uniform color could be applied.  I assume everybody clapped–I have never been to a Light and Sound Show, but I assume people clap like crazy–but they might as well have been clapping for a pyramid in Vegas.  They might have replied that they didn’t want Vegas.  They wanted the real thing.  But they weren’t getting the real thing.  

That’s not all.  The work was done in such a hurry that archaeologists had no opportunity to dig a bit into the pyramid.  They weren’t even allowed to inspect the trenches dug for the wiring installed for the great show.   It’s no coincidence that we know the name of only one of Uxmal’s ancient kings, and it’s known only because it was written on a freestanding block found by chance near the Governor’s House.  

Deciphering that block required cryptographer-grade skills, partly because there’s never been a multi-lingual Rosetta Stone for Mayan and partly because the great bulk of Mayan writings was deliberately burned by the learned Spanish priest whose own book about the Maya became, of necessity, foundational to the study of the pre-Conquest Maya.   We’re left with the few surviving codexes, or folding books written on bark paper, that eluded this pyro-priest.  His name was de Landa.  And then we have ithe nscriptions carved in stone.

The most celebrated early explorer of Maya ruins was an American named John Stephens.  He visited Uxmal in 1840–I remind myself that this was a decade before the California Gold Rush– and he was particularly drawn to the Governor’s house, which is a long, low building, without towers but with its upper half covered by a wide ribbon of carved blocks, each stone part of a larger picture.  Stephens hesitantly called it a carved mosaic.  

It’s a startling name–whoever heard of a mosaic with individually carved stones?–but it’s a good name, I think, and the building is often praised.  A leading Mayan archaeologist of the early 20th century, Sylvanus Morley, called it the most beautiful structure in pre-Columbian America.  It’s hard to top that.  Of course Morley had the advantage of seeing it alone, not with people milling about and with ropes and guards keeping everyone at a distance.  Those things get in the way of an esthetic response.

What the mosaic meant was another matter.  Stephens said simply,  “no man knows,” but epigraphers, those readers of inscriptions, have made some progress.  For example, there are many identical faces at the corners of the Governor’s House.  Each face is made of separate blocks for the forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth, but whose face is it?

It’s the same face I saw an hour or two later at Kabah, a smaller site a dozen miles farther along the highway toward Xpujil. 

I saw it on a building at Kabah called the Palace of the Masks.  The building is literally covered with the face, copies of which are stacked  atop one another like a totem pole, except that in this case it’s like dozens of totem poles cheek to jowl.  It may be overkill: one famous Mayanist thought the building lacked a second floor because the builders decided to call it quits.  But whose face is it?  

I might have guessed the face of a king–after all, you’ve never met a king who thought that his kingdom had too many pictures of him–but old guidebooks say that the face belongs to Chak, the rain god.  It’s plausible because there is certainly a shortage of water in the dry season here.

Along comes the Mayanist Karl Taube.  He seems to have won general acceptance of his argument that the face is not a god at all.  Instead, it represents a place.  Taube writes, “rather than portraying rain gods or mythic birds, the faces are depictions of Flower Mountain.”  I ask, how does a face represent a place?  Then I say to myself, well, flags don’t look anything like countries, yet they represent countries perfectly well.  

Taube offers a bit more explanation: “there has been a tendency to focus on darker aspects of Classic Maya religion, such as bloody offerings… [but] there was also a strong orientation towards a solar celestial paradise, a shining place of flowers and beauty… Flower Mountain was both the home of gods and honored ancestors, and the means of supernatural ascent into the heavens.” 

Reading this, I feel like a soldier talking to a villager through a translator.  I would have looked all day at the faces covering the Palace of the Masks and never conceived of Flower Mountain. Now, even if Taube’s interpretation is wrong, the faces remind me that I see only a sliver of reality.  Most of the time I am oblivious of what’s inside the leaf in front of me.  If I try to comprehend the entire tree, it’s frightening.  The faces on the Palace of the Masks shame me for thinking that I know what’s going on.

Alas, I get back in the car, fire it up, and head onto the highway.  I’m already forgetting what I was just taught, because at 45 miles an hour on an otherwise fine, peaceful road I keep hitting chuckholes camouflaged by shade from overhanging trees.  Warning signs?  Don’t kid yourself, and some of the holes are so big that the jolts turn on my windshield wipers.  I worry about breaking down in a place without cell-phone coverage and where my total lack of Spanish might be a problem.  

The car survives.  No issues.  The biggest shock comes a mile from Xpuhil, where I see a station for the Maya Train, a project that I had hoped might be abandoned before a rail was laid.  No such luck, work was proceeding with the intensity of a Chinese high-speed rail project.  It was a good to visit Xpujil.  

I had booked a small place with cabins a few miles from town.  It was fine, and the next morning I went to a ruin called Hormiguero, “anthill” in Spanish.  It was less than an hour away, first over a good road, then over an unpaved but decent road, and finally over a road so rutted that I wasn’t sure the car would make it.  I finally landed in a parking lot that belonged to me and one SUV filled with a family.  Selfishly, I walked quickly to get ahead of them.

No tickets here, no guards, no gift shops, no cafes.  Just a trail leading through a dense forest of small trees.  Then, bang: I’m looking at a building atop a stone terrace maybe 10 feet high.  The building’s facade is symmetrical, with towers near each end and with a wide central entrance conventionally rectangular but unconventionally rimmed with huge stone teeth.  There are eyes above the mouth, and on both its sides there are stylized snakes looking towards the door.  

The other family comes up, and I ask what they make of this place.  Was it rude for me to ask this in English?  It seems so to me, or at least arrogant, but my only choice was to keep quiet.  Fortunately, they spoke English and weren’t annoyed.  They said they called it the Earth Monster.  Well, that’s not quite what I asked, but I said that when I looked at it I thought that this was Donald Trump’s dream.  They laughed, as I hoped they would, and they understood that I was at least half serious. 

Hormiguero was discovered in 1933 by Karl Ruppert and John Denison, archaeologists with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.  That word “discovered” needs clarification.  I mean that on their own the two men would never have found it: even the main road from the coast to Xpujil didn’t get paved until 1968.  But Americans in the 1930s liked chewing gum, and the raw gum came from the sapodilla tree, which grows in these forests and was regularly tapped by chicleros.  Ruppert and Denison hired a chiclero and paid him to spend four months asking other chicleros about the ruins they had seen.  At the end of the four months, the chiclero told Ruppert and Denison what he had learned.  That’s how Ruppert and Denison discovered, quote unquote, Hormiguero.

They report all of this, which I think is admirable, but their report is otherwise clinical.   Here’s what it says about the mouth: "The motif of the face decoration above the doorway is a mask with the teeth projecting down over the lintel, and to either side is an elaborate serpent face in profile.” 

I wanted something that would help me see those wolf’s eyes, and I was happy to find it in the writing of the late Paul Gendrop.  He writes, "Upon gazing at these gigantic menacing jaws we can recall one of the invocations of Itzamna as Hapaycán, 'the serpent that imbibes or swallows."  Echoing Taube, Gendrop explains that he sees the face as a personified version of a sacred mountain where a cave entrance leads to a world of supernatural beings and ancestors who can bring, in Gendrop’s words, "benefits from the beyond...."   Here’s his clincher: "And if, to our Western eyes, this recalls some Dantean vision of hell, it must have been for the Mayas of the time a poetic and stimulating sign of life and hope." 

I’m reminded that in common speech we understand that something awful is bad but that if we retreat into archaic or literal meanings it ain’t necessarily so.  It’s just that awful things in that literal sense are rare these days.  It’s easier for me to joke about the earth monster as “Ol’ Toothy.” It’s actually a smart way to defuse the fear that at last I might otherwise feel.  A photograph taken by Ruppert and Denison shows the mouth still emerging from rubble and vegetation.  It hasn’t been cleaned up yet, and, if I let down my defenses, the picture gives me a little shiver. I’m reminded of Joyce Kelly, an intrepid photographer who wrote that if without warning she had come upon one of these earth monsters–the one I’ve been talking about isn’t the only one–she would have fainted.  

She was speaking of a nearly identical building seven miles away.  The site is called Chicanna and was not discovered until 1963, further evidence of the camouflaging power of the Yucatan forest.  

I visited Chicanna.  There was nobody around, and when I came upon the monster I wasn’t scared at all.  I was cocooned in my own culture, the one that allows me to call him Ol’ Toothy.  That’s true even when I walked on a path through the forest to Structure 20, a tower with a monster that has not only upper teeth but lower teeth built at the edge of a projecting terrace so that they stick out like a prognathous jaw. You climb stairs on the sides of the jaw and then walk into the mouth.  You can go up some more stairs before dead-ending at a stack of Flower Mountains.  

The archaeologists working to restore Chicanna found this structure–they call it Structure 20–only in 1970.  It’s amazing because Chicana is only a bit over a mile from Becan, another a major ruin found in 1933 by the same Carnegie men.  By major I mean that Becan has at least three or four towering pyramids along with peripheral buildings.

I met two men at Becan, father and son speaking Portuguese.  I asked if they were from Brazil.  No, the son said, Portugal.  Lisbon?  No, Porto.  We were the only people around, and it could hardly have been quieter, but the father told me to head over to Structure 10. “It’s so quiet there,” he said.  I’m guessing they had been to Uxmal or maybe even Chichen Itza.

Behind Structure 10, I found a bit of cleared ground and then the seemingly infinite forest.  Maybe because of the season, there were no bugs.  I don’t remember birds, either, although sitting on the porch in front of my cabin early that morning there had been a riot of singing and screeching. 

I wonder now how the chicleros found their way around.  A thousand years ago this part of the world was settled by farmers whose skill in building their own stone houses was used in building Maya cities, but the countryside these days is nearly empty.  I have no idea how the chicleros didn’t get lost.  

Did I mention Becan’s Structure 9?  It’s Becan’s tallest pyramid and has a long, long flight of steps.  I didn’t count them, but archaeologists from Tulane must have, because the steps were in ruins in the 1960s, when the team went to work.  The steps are perfect now.  I didn’t have the energy to climb them, and I’m glad that there weren’t any kids around, because they would have taken the steps as a game, a lark.

Are the steps of Structure 9 lovely?  Again my answer is no, and of course they’re fake to boot, but they do raise the specter of human sacrifice.  I wish they didn’t.  I wish I could think only of Flower Mountains, but it doesn’t work that way.  

I’m trying to find a positive way of looking at pyramids. Why spend an infinity of person-years cutting and moving and stacking rocks?  Well, I remember when in college in the very early 1960s ROTC was compulsory.  We had weekly parades in uniform, and we were accompanied by the battalion’s marching band.  I thought it was fun. I really did, although one week I skirted disaster when I begged forgiveness from a grizzled old sergeant for appearing in street clothes.  I explained, in all innocence, that I had forgotten my costume.

Maybe the people who built these pyramids really worked on them as happily as I paraded.  But could they have been happy living at the base of a social pyramid?   This question came to mind at a nearby ruin called Xpujil, like the town because it’s next to it.  There was an unusual temple here, one with three towers instead of the two at Hormiguero and Chicanna.  Standing in front of it there was a large house, identified as such by the Tulane team.  I assume their identification is correct, and I ask why only one family has a big house in front of the temple.  

I conclude that it’s a lot like waterfront property, too expensive or too important for the hoi polloi.  This gets depressing, because Karl Taube writing about Flower Mountain says, "Rather than being enjoyed by all deceased, this realm was probably limited to special individuals."  Wouldn’t you know it: the big shots.  One minute Taube teaches me something I want to know.  The next, he spoils it.

There were bigshots at Calakmul for sure.  The site is about 40 miles southwest of Xpujil, and it remained unknown to archaeologists until 1930, when an economic botanist named Cyrus Lundell spotted it from the air.  He saw two small hills rising above the otherwise level plain, but he was interested enough to explore a bit and find that the hills were, of course, overgrown pyramids.  He named the site Calakmul, meaning simply two hills or pyramids, and word of his discovery came to Sylvanus Morley.  

I mentioned Morley earlier as the man who called the Governor’s House the most beautiful building in pre-Columbian America.  Morley headed the archaeology department of the Carnegie Institution, and in 1931 he launched an expedition to Calakmul.  The following year he published an account of how difficult it had been to get there.  The expedition had included a 5-ton truck struggling over roads, Morley wrote, that were impassible in the wet season and not much better in the dry.  One stretch of 70 miles took 20 hours.

His account amuses me because of the contrast with my own experience.  I drove west about 30 miles from Xpujil on a good highway, then turned south for another 35 miles on what everything I had read suggested would be a peaceful one-lane road to the ruins. Just goes to show you can’t trust the internet.  I passed a ticket booth as big as a Texas gas station.  A couple of hundred yards farther I came to a construction site, yes,  for the Maya Train. The right-of-way was almost painfully bright from ground-up limestone.  The road to Calakmul would soon cross the track with an overpass built to interstate-highway standards.  A couple of hundred yards to the right there was a train station under construction like the one at Xpujil and equipped with two long platforms, one on either side of the track.  

Past the rail crossing, it looked at first as if I’d have smooth sailing on a brand-new two-lane road.   Instead, I almost immediately began a 35-mile stretch of road construction.  Sometimes it was sandy with such fine grains that the forest looked snow-covered.  Sometimes it was muddy from a water truck trying to keep the dust down.  Sometimes there was one lane of concrete, with forest on one side and a 10-inch drop on the other to the lane awaiting paving.  There were long stretches of this, and I worried about meeting somebody.  I didn’t want to have to back up a mile.

I passed a hotel under construction.  It was in a style I would see on other hotels serving Maya Train passengers.  The plan was mostly conventional, two floors in a straight line.  The rooms had balconies, and the entrance was in the middle of the structure, but the roof line was interrupted there by a high and decorative thatched portico.  Was the thatch real?  I couldn’t tell, because a guard chased me away the moment she saw me try to take a picture.  The Maya Train is unpopular enough that I suppose the government doesn’t want to give opponents any ammunition.  The project was the darling of the Mexican president, who I suppose would say that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.  I wonder if that cliche exists in Spanish.

Eventually I got to a parking lot with perhaps 30 or 40 vehicles.  It was rough and unpaved, but a new and proper lot was under construction.  So was a museum.  It wasn’t ready, but there was one thing on display.  It was a stele, which is to say a stone slab or flattened pillar.  Sylvanus Morley (his friends were kind enough to call him “Vay” rather than the full Sylvanus) had found over a hundred of these steles in 1932.  Most were eroded to the point of illegibility, but this one had been buried face down.  It showed a king, in profile and taller than life size.  Perhaps he is smiling faintly, and I suppose he looks benign until you see that one of his hands holds a spear and the other holds a severed head.  That’s not all.  I didn’t  notice at first, but the king stands on the back of someone bent over double and almost crushed into the ground. 

Ironically, Calakmal was in decline when this king died.  The king’s predecessor, with the friendly name of Fiery Claw, had led his army to battle against Tikal, Calakmul’s traditional enemy, about 70 miles of forest away to the south in what today is Guatemala.  Fiery Claw lost, but he made it back to headquarters and is buried in Calakmul’s biggest pyramid. 

Large parts of Calakmul were closed to the public, but I did get to the Grand Plaza, framed on four sides by stepped buildings.  Two pyramids faced each other across the longer dimension of the plaza and two lower structures faced each other across the shorter dimension.  Those lower structures were apparently used for astronomical calculations, but they still had stairs grand enough for any public building I’ve ever seen.  The  archaeologist in charge of the site in recent years, Ramón Carrasco, has written that the pyramids were seen as mountains of creation surrounding the primordial sea of the plaza. 

This is interesting, which means I don’t really understand it, but I find my attention drawn to something that the late Michael Coe wrote. I mentioned him earlier in connection with what he called the six “must-see” Maya sites.  Calakmul was not one of them, but with regard to Calakmul Coe wrote that the larger of the two pyramids on the Grand Plaza–it’s called simply Structure 2–symbolizes the “overwhelming power of this city-state.”  Coe has written elsewhere that the reign of Yuknoom the Great brought Calakmul to “the closest the Maya got to an empire.”  

The scale of the pyramid does help me understand why the Maya Train will stop here, because we have a weakness for things that make us feel small, whether it’s the Kremlin or the Forbidden City or, now in ruins but still instructive, the parade ground at Nuremberg.  

If you climb the tremendous flight of steps–I did not, but it’s easily seen on the internet– you discover that you’re not at the top.  It’s like a mountain, with a higher summit hidden until you’re at what you thought was the top.  The forest still laps against three sides of the structure, and without trying to sound apocalyptic, I imagine that the forest will at some time in the future reclaim the one side that has been cleaned up to impress us.

Calakmul has a so-called grand acropolis, but it was closed.  It also has a small acropolis, and it was open.   A young man and a young woman were mortaring some loose blocks at one building.  They were friendly but said that photography was forbidden.  I could take photos to my heart’s content of finished work, but not work in progress.  The rule makes sense, if we are supposed to see Maya ruins looking good as new.  

In the small acropolis I saw another building, a platform of three stacked terraces, each about 10 feet high and almost sliced in half by a central stairway.  I noticed a steel door set into one corner.  Only later did I appreciate its importance, because it leads to an older structure completely hidden from view but painted with murals of daily life.  Here, in the imperial capital of mighty men, is a mural that shows, in the words of the archaeologist Carrasco, “people preparing and dispensing foodstuffs together with others who consume them.  Other characters are engaged in transportation: bearers are weighted down with large pots or rope-tied bundles, each carrier with a tumpline over the forehead… another figure is accompanied by a scarlet macaw perched on a pole stand.” The door to the mural stayed locked, but the mural is online in great detail. 

Archaeologists digging into the ruins of Calakmul have found many things that, for safekeeping, are now in one of two museums in Campeche, a city on the coast about 125 miles to the northwest. They’re there because Calukmul is in the state of Campeche.  The city was founded by Francisco de Montejo, and it’s the Montejo House in Merida that has those appalling soldiers standing on Indian heads. Campeche became in the colonial period the chief port of the Yucatan Peninsula.  It was repeatedly attacked in the 1600s, which is why by about 1700 it was protected by a mighty wall with mighty bastions.   And that’s why the city today is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  

Like most World Heritage sites, Campeche is being spruced up for tourists, and one of the bastions on the old wall is now an archaeological museum.  So is a hilltop fortress a couple of miles down the coast.  I saw in these museums three funerary masks.  They’re made of pieces of jade fitted together..  One belonged to Fiery Claw, that king who lost the great battle with Tikal.  His mask is spectacular, and it’s displayed in a room amounting to a dedicated chapel.  But is it lovely?  You know the answer, or at least my answer.

The museums do have items that are lovely.  One is an unpainted statue of a woman. It’s just brown clay about two feet high.  I’d have walked past if it wasn’t for her hat, which is almost her height.  I’ve seen similar hats on women in Yemen, and I wonder if the open space above the head actually provides not only shade but some convectional cooling.  Her expression is demure, with her eyes closed, and if she’s at all like the women in Yemen, she wouldn’t have wanted her photograph taken.  Still, I can’t help but smile when I see her. It’s like seeing children playing on the grass around the Pentagon.

I also saw a clay dish about the shape and size of half a thoroughly scooped-out cantaloupe.  The clay at one end of the dish had been drawn out to create the head of a bird.  I’m not sure what kind.  The eyes and nostrils had been painted black, and a lattice of black lines hinted at feathers.  The bill and the eyebrows were painted red.  The sides of the bowl had wings reduced to fins a bit like those of old Chevrolets  There was a tail, too.  This was a bowl that my wife would have loved to display on a shelf.  Everybody who saw it would smile.

Which do I like more, these clay objects or the jade mask of Fiery Claw?  That’s like asking me which I like more, the wooden church door in Merida or the Spanish soldiers standing on Indian heads.  

Do you think people missed Fiery Claw?  Why should we care about pyramids, except as physical expressions of social pyramids?  I suppose somebody will say that the best society is the one with the biggest pyramid.  I prefer seeing these pyramids as reminders of how hard it is to combine that thing we call progress with that thing we call freedom.  The bad news is that, unlike a building crew getting nearer and nearer to perfection, the only time freedom advances is when the social pyramid crumbles a bit.  Think of the American colonies breaking from Britain.  Think of any revolution before the reaction sets in.  I began by saying unkind things about Cancun, and I still have no plans to see the place, but I can think of worse things than a sandy beach and blue water.