The next morning we slept in until seven. We had earned it and our bodies demanded it. When I crawled out from beneath the mosquetero, I saw that we had made camp in a large clearing, the first open sky since Carmelita. The morning jungle was a cacophony of birdsong and monkey howls. Some of those aviary melodies were the most exotic, the most inexplicable, the most beautiful, the most wondrous sounds ever to grace my ears. Toucans and parrots took flight, splashing their color across the sky. Troops of howler monkeys patrolled the clearing's perimeter, roaring their cries of dominion over the dawn. The early-morning condensation began to vaporize, rising through the canopy, forming wisps of cloud to be whisked away by the desolate jungle winds.
I sat upright in the hammock and pulled my legs in for examination. There were now hundreds of small pus bulbs of infection where I had cut the garrapatas from my flesh. In several places, the garrapatas had launched their first wave of attack in clusters, and thus clustered the agents of infection.
The infections had merged into large, dangerous areas of red and white flesh, amplifying the itch, pain, heat, and burn. I drained the bulbs with a pocket knife, poured water over them, applied anti-infection ointment, and wrapped the major wounds with a makeshift dressing held in place by duct-tape, a favorite material of my late grandfather-I thought of him and smiled.
While Fernando watered the mule, I built a fire and made coffee. Gave both cups a nice heap of sugar. We ate a hearty breakfast of sausage, eggs, tortillas, onions, and chiles, relaxed and took in the morning.
Later, we led the mule into the thick of the jungle and Fernando gave me the rope.
"Hold him," he said.
I stood with the mule, and what happened next was astounding. Fernando climbed thirty feet up a thin tree, cut off its leafy top, and this he repeated with two other trees. Did I mention that Fernando was seventy years old? We gathered the treetops into a pile for the mule, tied him to a tree, and left him there to feed.
We spent the morning exploring the ancient ruins, an entire city-state buried in jungle. Buried. Every structure transformed into a hill or a mountain, covered in the same vegetation and trees found throughout the jungle, indistinguishable save for their loft and the scars inflicted by tomb raiders. Around noon, we climbed El Dante, the Temple of the Tapir, the highest in the Mayan world, piercing the canopy twenty stories into the heavens. The summits of these tallest temples, at the border between heaven and earth, are the only Mayan structures in the jungle exposed by natural forces. The surfaces of the crowns are shaped like three king-sized beds lined side by side. The scouring winds sweep them clear of enough soil to prevent full-blown organic takeover, permitting only small trees, scrub brush, and exquisite flowers. Far below, as far as we could see in every direction, was a sea of jungle, an endless ocean of green.
I thought the jungle was flat. It isn't. In every direction, on every horizon, were mountains of green, connected to other mountains of green by undulating serpentine mounds of jungle. On the distant horizon whence we'd come rose La Florida and El Tintal. I gasped. Fernando laughed at me. It was hard to believe how far we'd trekked. Giant city-states in every direction, connected by elevated roadways, suburbs, and outliers. In their prime, these stone structures were surely surrounded by vast tracts of housing constructed of timber and thatch, long since consumed by the jungle. It seemed obvious to me that during the height of the Mayan civilization, there was no jungle here, or virtually none; it had been chewed to pulp and cleared by ferocious urban sprawl.
Long captivated by the Mayan mystery, I had come searching, seeking clues, needing answers. It was shocking to learn that the dense mass of sprawling mounds on all horizons was cities and roads. I had never expected it; never saw it coming. It took my feeble brain a moment to process the information, and then the realization hit me with such force that, for a brief moment, my breathing stopped. The clues and the answers I sought were now in front of me. There was no mystery here, only the natural cosmic mandate of existence. I was disappointed for weeks afterward, because the answers I found shattered the mystery that had driven me for so many years. It wasn't until much later that I realized the profound personal import that those answers held, and how much more valuable they were than the continued belief in a mystical tale. And I learned that the true magic of such tales lies in following them to their source, in finding one's own answers.
I knew a sprawling metropolis when I saw one. The Maya were not a fully enlightened human race that had ascended into the heavens without a trace. They were an advanced civilization, arguably as advanced as their European counterparts, an organism that, like all terrestrial creatures, depended on the bounty of the Earth for survival.
That organism had evolved as a species over thousands of years into a highly advanced, complex, ordered superorganism. It had started as a babe, at the mercy of the jungle's intricate web of life. The organism began to cluster. Safety in numbers afforded some protection from the harsh dictates of the environment. The clusters grew and learned to tame the jungle, to bend it to their will, to harvest its fruit, to drink of its mother's milk. Somewhere the organism passed the inflection point. The clusters grew fat, and peaceful harvesting progressed to the voracious feeding of adolescence and growth. Always growth. The jungle's fragile balance of life shifted. The clusters began to merge into one biological web of city-states, the only organism in the jungle that could destroy the jungle itself, and indeed it did destroy the jungle, its womb, its mother, its host, and in the process it destroyed itself.
The jungle is a living monument to efficiency, a perfectly balanced system of maximum production, with no waste. It commands complete buy-in, total obedience and participation from its subjects. There is no deviation from its laws, and no tolerance for error. Its energy and nutrients are perpetually recycled between its towering canopies and thin soils, supporting an incredible wealth and diversity of life. Specialist organisms from miniscule tree frogs to fleshy seed-bearing fruits to parasitic vines to pillar trees are all eventually refolded into the soils, where insects and fungi transform them to mulch nutrition, from which the cycle begins anew.
While temporarily destroying the jungle, the Mayan superorganism was unable to conquer it, to conquer nature. Every relationship that develops askew, too far from balance, ultimately expires under the crushing weight of its own imbalance, to be recycled, to seek balance anew. Like every other organism of the jungle that destroys its host, the Mayan organism was recycled. Its cells and structures and vital systems disintegrated and dispersed, returning to their basic units, still visible in the genetic markers of the Mayan and mestizo villages to the west. Extropy devoured by entropy. All that remains now of the mighty Mayan beast is its stone skeleton, and in time, it too will be devoured completely.
Perhaps the Mayan fate was an essential example of polarity, of duality, of balance, the cosmic mandate, escapable by none. All life struggles to create order, systems, support platforms from which it might leverage more growth, more order. Is it true that evolution supports life? Or is it the wolf in sheep's clothing, the opposing force, entropy-the sly agent behind the veil, continually dismantling the ingenious attempts at order? The eater of the cosmos, worshipped in rituals of fire the world over, ever oxidizing the universe.
The net consequence of this eternal opposition of forces is change, the only constant. And fortunately so, because therein lies the secret that our realities are but fleeting holograms and that anything is possible. Anything.
I wonder how long it would take for an abandoned Manhattan or Hong Kong to be reclaimed by the earth. I ask this of others, and they invariably reply that it could probably never happen, because the structures are so tall, and made of steel, and so on. I wonder if the Maya thought similarly.
We sat atop El Dante for at least an hour. The sky was blue, without a cloud, the sun high, the wind stiff. "Aire fresco," said Fernando, "calidad." He inhaled deeply, and motioned for me to do the same. The purity of the air was astounding. Fernando explained that it blew in from the Caribbean and the canopy scrubbed it like a filter. He showed me how to identify trees in the canopy below. We watched birds and troops of monkeys from above. Waves of wind rolled across the endless ocean of green beneath us. There were no mosquitoes, and no garrapatas, only butterflies.
We continued our exploration of El Mirador, hiking for miles, from one temple to another. Fernando taught me about the jungle, about which trees contained useful resins, and which plants would blind you with their fluids if hacked by machete. He showed me the parasitic vines deposited as seeds by birds high in the canopy, from which they would launch their parasitic existence, down to the jungle floor, growing as large as the host tree itself, appearing unified and strong, solid and sturdy. It was an illusion, he said. The vine would ultimately bring the massive tree down, along with itself, to be recycled by the agents of the jungle floor.
"¡Como mujeres!" he joked. Like women.
Late that afternoon we climbed El Tigre, the Temple of the Jaguar. We spoke little at the summit. I spent the bulk of that time breathing and watching an eagle soar and hang and be on currents of air below. I could feel Fernando's deep reverence for this place.
On our return to camp we ran into one of the guards on the payroll of the archaeological team and its financial backers, stationed at El Mirador to prevent the removal of artifacts from the site. Thus guarded, the archaeological team and its financial backers would, in time, be able to remove artifacts from the site.
Fernando asked the guard if there was any water for the mule. The man replied that there was, and quoted his price. We bought the water and headed for camp. Fernando was furious. Never, in all his thirty-five years in the jungle, he told me, had anyone charged him for water. The jungle was changing.
At camp we stripped down to our underwear for a short afternoon siesta in the hammocks. Fernando and I took turns cutting garrapatas from each other's backs. Fernando then used a shaving mirror to locate and remove them from the rest of his body. It took him twenty minutes to remove his, and then he dozed off. I couldn't understand why I was infested and he wasn't.
For the next two hours, using Fernando's shaving mirror technique, I searched my legs and body for garrapatas, cutting them from my flesh with a pocket knife. They had advanced north of my knees to places where they were most unwelcome. They were drunk and gorged on my blood, and were no longer tiny. Removing the duct-tape dressings from my legs hurt like hell, and revealed that the infectious bulbs had grown during the day. I cut them open again, drained them, applied anti-infection cream, and applied another dressing of duct-tape bandages. Never did take a siesta.
When Fernando woke up, he handed me the machetes and a metal file, showed me how to work an edge, and put me to the task. He'd be back later, he said. For the rest of the afternoon I ground the hell out of those rusty machetes and felt pretty good about the edge I put on them.
Fernando returned with a sack full of fruit that he'd gathered from the jungle. Oranges-naturally packaged juice-and a host of other fruits I'd never seen before, succulent fruta pura.
Just before dusk, we climbed to the top of nearby El Mono, the Temple of the Monkey, to watch the sun splash into the chlorophyll horizon. El Mono, El Tigre, and El Dante, roughly equal in height, form a large triangle at the heart of El Mirador. Fernando rolled the jungle herb and we smoked. The sky was clear-no haze, no moisture. Still, the setting sun split the horizon into discrete shades, light and dark, of yellow, orange, and red.
In the dimming twilight, I noticed Fernando's eyes. They were crimson like the horizon, ancient, wild. I hadn't noticed them before. I wondered whether the jungle made them wild. Then I wondered what my own eyes looked like.
I commented to Fernando that from atop the temples, the jungle resembled a green ocean. He said he'd much rather be in the jungle than on the ocean. He'd taken a ferry once from Livingston to Puerto Barrios and gotten sick.
"I don't like the up and down of the waves," he said. "I don't like the ocean. It's too dangerous."
"More dangerous than the jungle?"
"¿Cómo no?" he replied-of course it was. "You can drown in the ocean. There are sharks in the ocean, and other monsters. There's no fresh water, no wood to build signal fires."
I thought about our own shortage of water, the garrapata infections, the barba amarilla, about what a force this man was in the jungle, tough, rawhide. I could only laugh.
Back at camp we built a fire, made coffee for our sugar, rested. We fried onions, dumped in a few cans of sardines, and shoveled it down with tortillas. 'Twas excellent. Fernando continued to tortillar for the next morning.
In Santa Elena, when Fernando had indicated his affinity for sugar by tossing a pound of it in the shopping cart, I decided I'd introduce him to different kind of sugar, and threw some into the cart as well. At the campfire, I whittled points onto two thin, green branches, skewered some marshmallows, and held them over the coals. Fernando looked at me like I was crazy, and did a poor job of hiding his disgust.
These, I was determined, would be the best damn marshmallows I had ever roasted-evenly melted, no lumps, with the perfect singe of caramelized sugar. I took my time, with the focus of a surgeon. I could feel Fernando's look of disgust change to curiosity. The marshmallows were done, and yes, they were perfect. I sandwiched two between honey crackers with a square of chocolate, and handed it to Fernando.
"Come," I told him.
He hesitated, dubious.
"Come," I repeated.
He took a bite, chewed reluctantly once, then again. His eyes widened and he looked at me. "¡Mmmm!" He finished chewing and swallowed. "¡Buenísimo!" He inhaled the rest. Could I make him another one, he asked. Could I ever. He ate four of them.
We talked by firelight. He told me how he had started out as a chiclero. How, in the seventies and eighties, wealthy businessmen from the States and Guatemala City had financed teams of chicleros to dig out treasures from the temples in these most inaccessible regions of the jungle. How the money had been too great for him to refuse. How he had taken part in the treasure hunting, and of the amazing artifacts he'd unearthed. How he had been a rich man then, and how the spirits of the jungle had exacted their revenge, driving him into poverty and one of his children into an early grave. How he had spent years trying to recover, to salvage his life, when his only expertise was the jungle itself. How he had now chosen to seek forgiveness from the spirits of the jungle, by guiding people like me into the recesses of its beating heart so that the world might come to recognize it as the living, breathing spirit that it is, so that the world might abandon its assault, so that the spirits of the jungle might survive the reckless arrogance of man.
Fernando was taken with emotion and hung his head. I suspect this was his first and only confession on the matter. I passed no judgment, and think he knew that. We sat together in silence until the fire had burned down to a bed of pulsating, glowing embers.
Fernando stood, tossed a log on the coals, and walked over to the bag of fruit he had harvested from the jungle that afternoon. He returned with a handful of thick, waxy leaves of a deep, blackish green. He started extracting the essence of the leaves, an oily, pungent liquid, into the frying pan. Then he spoke.
"We are the Ancient Ones, a brotherhood of blood across time, keepers of this jungle. I know you have communed with her these past days. I know your pain. I know the voices. You have nightwalked beneath her shroud. Your silence throughout shows more respect than you can understand. I know you feel it, no television, no phones, no water, no electricity, no computers. It has been an honor to bring you here."
He continued. "The Ancient Ones are the human guardians of the spirits of the jungle, but there are others as well. We have existed since long before the Maya, though we count many Mayan initiates among us. They were here for many epochs, and still their influence falls heavy. They were not good keepers of the jungle, nor have I always been, but the Ancient Ones among them protected the line of our knowledge into modern times. I was initiated into the first of many rituals after many years as a chiclero. This is the first of those rituals."
He unwrapped three shanks of rust-colored hard dry wood from a plastic sack, placed the end of one on the edge of the ember bed. It began to smoke, an intoxicating, aromatic incense. He sat the frying pan of oily leaf extract on the coals, and it began to sizzle and fume, also a powerful aromatic. In a tongue that was not Spanish-nor did I recognize it as one of the Mayan dialects-he began to speak.
We did not retire to our hammocks until well past midnight.