You Can't Always Get What You Want, But... (Yucatan)

Merida, Uxmal, Kabah, Hormiguero, Chicanna, Began, Xpujil, Calakmul, and Campeche.  For a transcript, see   https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784           

Transcript

    You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But… (Yucatan)

Every year, about 34 million people pass through the Cancun airport.  That’s about the number passing through DFW or LAX or O’Hare, and it’s enough to keep me away.  If I need more persuading, I ask Google Maps to show me Cancun hotels.  They line up like soldiers in a battalion parade.

Many Cancun visitors take a side trip to Chichen Itza, a Maya ruin a bit over a hundred miles inland.  With 4 million visitors annually, Chichen Itza is the most visited of all Maya ruins.  True, four million is nothing alongside 34 million, but it’s still over 10,000 people daily.  Wanna go?  Not me.  I hear visitors saying, “It’s so crowded,”  or “Can we find some shade?”’  I also hear them say: “Wow, look how big it is.”   I think they’re visualizing hearts cut out of bodies that are pushed down vertiginous stairs.  

Wait a minute, scholars say.  The conquistadors exaggerated the number of human sacrifices. They did it because big numbers helped justify Spain’s conquest of Mexico.  Some scholars go further and admit that the pyramids aren’t a thousand years old.  Yes, pyramids existed here a thousand years ago, but the ruins visitors see today have been heavily restored or even rebuilt since 1900.  There are lots of information signs, but they say nothing about how much work has been done to make the ruins good as new.  I say it would be better to leave the ruins hidden in vegetation and half-buried by tumbled-down blocks of stone.

I know, if the Mexican government hadn’t paid for all this cosmetic surgery, visitor numbers would crash, but the work wasn’t done, or at least wasn’t begun, for tourists.  It was to make Mexicans proud of their nation.   Think of the battlefield at Gettysburg.  Americans come away thinking, “Lord, how could Americans butcher each other?”  Bingo: it’s called monuments for nation building.  Mexico’s archaeological sites were renovated and in a sense destroyed for a good cause.

Now archaeologists may say “Wow, it’s huge,” and they too may be patriotic, but as scientists they look at a Maya ruin and ask,  “What is it?”  That’s not 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.  There’s a world of work waiting for archaeologists in Mexico.

Now 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 did not go there for a vacation or to think about the purpose of monuments or to do anything scientific.   I went for my usual reason, which is to be reminded how to live.  I’m well past three score and ten, so 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 like 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 meeting or shopping or paying some bill. It’s not just easy to forget, it’s almost impossible to remember.  

The way to live, so far as I can remember at this moment, 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.  Lemmings aren’t either.  I’m thinking of that wolf Aldo Leopold once wrote about.  He had shot it, but 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, and like Leopold I haven’t forgotten.  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.  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.  I took a taxi to a Hilton or a Marriott or a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt.  They’re bunched up within a short walk of both Walmart and Starbucks.  The next morning I walked a mile to colonial Merida, saw the crowded main plaza, saw the cathedral, and saw the appalling facade of a 16th century mansion built by the city’s founders.  I say appalling because 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.  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.  The door was maybe a bit over six feet high and three wide.  It was made 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 raked by a giant, fine-toothed comb.  Weathering had worn the planks so much that the growth rings would rasp your knuckles or catch your fingernails.  There’s a photo of that door on my website, greatmirror.com  It’s a great door, the best thing I saw in Merida.

I picked up a rental car late Sunday and early Monday set out for Xpuji, a town 175 miles or so to the south.  I had chosen this town of roughly 5,000 people because it’s at the center of a cluster of four comparatively ignored Maya ruins, five if you count Calakmul, of which more near the end of this episode.  Google Maps said that the drive would take about six and a half hours.  I’m a slow driver, and I figured I shouldn’t dawdle, because 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, quote, “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 crowds.  I’d be like somebody who sees the Mona Lisa and says, “There it is. What do you know? It actually exists,” then moves on.  You can do the same thing with places, and I don’t think it’s a waste of time. I’ve never seen the White Cliffs of Dover, for example.  I don’t doubt that they exist, but I am more confident about the existence of the nearby Brighton Pavilion, which I have seen.  I’m not absolutely sure that I should trust my senses more than I trust what people say, but th White Cliffs are less real for me than the Pavilion.  I suppose I’m saying that virtual reality isn’t real and bucket lists aren’t all bad. 

I paid a parking fee and two more fees to enter.  A hundred people were bunched up at this 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, but when I’m at a new place I similarly want to give it my undivided attention.  People get in the way.  Even people I like.

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 even fanciful and misleading names are probably better than the names given by archaeologists when they find a site.   They’ll call its constituent parts Structure 1 or Structure 2.   I went to one ruin near Xpujil with a Structure 20.    

I faintly overheard a couple standing in front of the Great Pyramid.  Out of character for a moment, I said, “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?”  In a gentle tone, I said “No.  Impressive perhaps but not lovely.  Lovely implies love, and there’s no love in that thing.”  She conceded and said,”You’re right.  This was a place of slavery.”  I agreed with her now.  It would be hard to disagree unless you people that people hauled up to the top of a pyramid for cardiac excision are whole-heartedly compliant.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have said, “No, it’s not lovely.  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.  It’s picture perfect.

I concede that restoration helps visitors understand what these places looked like, but that’s not the whole story.  I’ll put it this way.  In about 1980, J.B. Jackson, the editor and publisher of the magazine Landscape, published an essay called “The Necessity For Ruins.”  I’ve always been bothered by his choice of prepositions.  I think it should be “the necessity of ruins.”  Anyway, he 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 address the purpose of these new monuments.  We want the past because in today’s world we feel adrift.  Jackson might have extended the argument to link these new monuments to the controversies that erupt when somebody wants to knock down an old building or demolish a neighborhood or even cut down a tree.   Well, maybe he didn’t say these things because he didn’t believe they were true, but I do.  I say that the past can give us a sense of attachment and that fake pyramids give us fake attachment.  When we learn that the pyramids are fake, we’re more adrift than ever.

The Dutch lady might have zoned out in the middle of this little dissertation, but nobody listening to this podcast is likely to be sweating in the lowland tropics, so let me wax more specifically.  Queen Elizabeth came 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.  Not only that, they 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, but they might as well have been clapping for a pyramid in Vegas.  They might have replied that they didn’t want Vegas and that they wanted the real thing.  But they weren’t being given 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 in the nunnery quadrangle. It’s no coincidence that we know the name of only one of Uxmal’s ancient kings.  It’s known because it was written on a freestanding block found near the Governor’s House.  

We know what the stone says because of the work of people who apply cryptographer-grade skills to deciphering the pictographs and glyphs or ideograms used by the Maya.  There’s been no multi-lingual Rosetta Stone, and the great bulk of Mayan writings was deliberately burned by the Spanish priest whose own book about the Maya became ironically, and of necessity, foundational to the study of the pre-Conquest Maya.   We’re left with a few surviving codexes, the folding books written on bark paper that eluded this pyro-priest–his name was de Landa–plus inscriptions carved in stone.

The most celebrated early explorer of Maya ruins was an American named John Stephens.  He visited Uxmal in 1840–before the California Gold Rush, by golly– 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.  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.  What the mosaic meant was another matter.  Stephens said simply,  “no man knows.”  

Thanks to epigraphers, those readers of inscriptions, archaeologists are no longer completely in the dark.  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?

Ropes kept me and everyone else at such a distance from the building that I couldn’t see the mosaic up close, but I did get up close to the same face at Kabah, a smaller site a dozen miles farther along the highway toward Xpujil. 

There are two prominent buildings at Kabah, and one of them–appropriately called the Palace of the Masks–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.  The design may be a bit much: one famous Mayanist thought the building lacked its second floor because the builders decided they had already overdone things.  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 was burdened with too many pictures of him–but old guidebooks say that the face belongs to Chak, the rain god.  There is certainly a shortage of water in the dry season, which makes the suggestion plausible, but the subject of Maya divinities is daunting.  Paul Schellhas, a German lawyer who made Maya religion his lifelong hobby, created about 1900 a framework for the study of those gods.  Scholars use it today.  Hundreds of named deities are grouped as emanations of a small group of gods identified simply as A, B, C, and so forth.  Chak, the rain god, is one of many forms of God D.

Fortunately we don’t have to get into this, because Karl Taube, a Mayanist at UC Riverside, 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, quote: “rather than portraying rain gods or mythic birds, the faces are depictions of Flower Mountain.”  Unquote.  How does a face represent a place?  Well, flags don’t look anything like countries, yet they represent countries perfectly well.  Taube offers a bit more explanation, quote, “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.” Unquote.

This makes me feel like a soldier in a distant country talking to a villager through a translator.  I could have looked all day at the faces covering the Palace of the Masks and not had a clue. Now I look at the pictures I took (there are a few on my website, greatmirror.com) and I see the faces as metaphors reminding us that we see only a sliver of reality.  I see a leaf and am oblivious of what’s inside.  If I try to comprehend the entire tree, it’s a bit frightening, like those masks.  It’s funny that we operate as though we know what’s going on.

There is of course the possibility that future epigraphers will interpret the face differently, but Taube reminds me how I want to live, aware of the world of which I am part.  Alas, I get back in the car, fire it up, and head onto the highway.  I’m already forgetting what he’s taught me, and I get into a worse humor because at 45 miles an hour on an otherwise fine, peaceful road I keep hitting chuckholes camouflaged by the mottled shade cast by overhanging trees.  Warning signs?  Not a prayer.  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.  But the car survives.  No issues.  The biggest shock comes a mile from Xpuhil, where I see under construction 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 high-speed rail project in China.  This was definitely the time to visit Xpujil.   Not for much longer would visitors be able to have the ruins entirely or very nearly to themselves.

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 teeth.  There are eyes above the mouth, and on both its sides there are shapes I do not recognize  but which I know now represent the heads of snakes looking towards the door.  Sounds scary.  

The other family came up, and I asked what they made 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 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 what Donald Trump wanted to be.  They laughed, as I hoped they would, and they laughed in a way that told me they understood that I was at least half serious.  There are pictures of the building on my website, greatmirror.com

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 this place: 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 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 miserably clinical.   Here’s what it says about the mouth, quote: "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.”  Unquote  It sounds to me like a pathologist’s report.

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, a naturalized Mexican who later taught at Berkeley.  He wrote, quote, "Upon gazing at these gigantic menacing jaws we can recall one of the invocations of Itzamna as Hapaycán, 'the serpent that imbibes or swallows."  Unquote.  Both these gods, by the way, are, like the rain god Chak, forms of God D.  Gendrop then brings me back to Flower Mountain, because he explains that he considers the face to be 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, quote,: "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." Unquote.

Reading this, I’m reminded that in common speech we understand that something awful is something 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 far and few between.  In fact I have joked about this earth monster as “Ol’ Toothy,” but this denigration says more about my shallowness or the shallowness of my culture than it does about the figure.  My website, greatmirror.com has a photo of the scene taken by Ruppert and Denison.  The mouth is still emerging from rubble and vegetation.  It hasn’t been cleaned up yet, and, if I relax, 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 at Hormiguero 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 discovered as late as 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.  It sounds like fun as I write it, but at the time I was mostly just trying not to bash my head on some rock.

The archaeologists working to restore Chicanna found Structure 20 in 1970.  It’s amazing because Chicana is only a bit over a mile from Becan, 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 here, 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 behind Structure 10.  I think he pointed rather than using that sterile term.  “It’s so quiet there,” he said.  I’m guessing they had been to Uxmal or maybe even Chichen Itza, and when I got behind Structure 10, there was 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 knew 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 today and in recent times has been nearly empty, and landmarks seem very scarce.

Did I mention Becan’s Structure 9?  Of course not.  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 Tulane team went to work.  The steps are perfect now, and a bit daunting.  I didn’t have the energy to climb, and I’m glad that there weren’t any kids around, because they would have taken the steps as a challenge.  Can you imagine those kids transported in a time machine and scampering up the steps a thousand years ago?

I recall the Dutch lady at Uxmal.  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 even without the abomination of human sacrifice.  Who wants to 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.

That’s a good story, and maybe the people who built these pyramids really worked on them happily.  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.  Nobody knows why it has three towers, but 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.  It’s a lot like waterfront property, I conclude, and I bet the Xpujil beach was private.  Of course there is no beach, I mean that commoners didn’t cavort between the mansion and the temple.  They knew they’d be cited or worse.

The question of social hierarchy has been lying low in this episode..  (Speaking of which, isn’t Social Hierarchy and Its Discontents the title of one of Sigmund Freud’s books?)  Anyway, social hierarchy  was there at Uxmal and Kabah.  It’s there not just in the stones but in something I learned from Karl Taube writing about Flower Mountain, quote, "Rather than being enjoyed by all deceased, this realm was probably limited to special individuals."  Unquote.  Well, wouldn't you know it?   

The bigshots pop up in so many places.  I’m thinking now of Calakmul, the site that brought me to Xpujil in the first place.  It’s about 40 miles southwest of Xpujil, and it remained unknown to archaeologists until 1930, when an economic botanist named Cyrus Lundell somehow found it.  What he found was two small hills rising above the otherwise level plain, but he was interested enough in history to explore the hills and find that they were, of course, pyramids.  He named the site Calakmul, meaning simply two hills or pyramids, and word of his discovery came to Sylvanus Morley.  I mentioned him 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 the new site.  The following year he published an account of just 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.

It may not have been an epic journey, but I find it amusing 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 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 wet, as a water truck tried 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 concrete.  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 adopted for other hotels serving Maya Train passengers.  The plan was conventional, two floors in a straight line.  The rooms had balconies, and the entrance was in the middle of the structure, where the roof line was interrupted 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 parking lot was under construction.  So was a museum.  It wasn’t ready, but there was one thing on display.  It was a stele, 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 dust. (Before you go to see this stele for yourself, I suspect it’s a replica and that the real one is in Mexico City.)  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.  Today Tikal is in 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 pyramids were seen as mountains of creation surrounding the primordial sea of the plaza. I find this interesting, 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, quote, the “overwhelming power of this city-state.” Unquote.  Coe has written elsewhere that the reign of Yuknoom the Great brought Calakmul to, quote, “the closest the Maya got to an empire.”  Unquote.

I’m sure I’m supposed to be impressed, but I balk.  The scale of the pyramid does help me understand why the Maya Train will stop here.  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 it will at some time in the future reclaim the one side that has been cleaned up for 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 only in pristine purity.  

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.  What’s this?  Only now do I appreciate its importance, because it leads to an older structure completely hidden from view but painted with murals of daily life.  Good heavens, I want to say!  Here, in the imperial capital of mighty men, is a mural that shows in the words of the archaeologist Carrasco, quote, “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.” Unquote. The door to the mural stayed locked, but the mural is online in great detail.  There’s a link on my website, greatmirror.com 

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 a fine 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 as a work of jewelry, and it’s displayed in a room amounting to a dedicated chapel.  But is it lovely?  You know the answer: lovely implies love, and there’s no love here.

The museums do have items that qualify.  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 to choose between the wooden church door in Merida or the Spanish soldiers standing on Indian heads.