Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  Founded in 1543 as Santiago de los Caballeros, Antigua occupies a flat bowl, surrounded by three volcanoes and rugged, forested hills that extend to the edge of town. The city was once the Colonial capital of Guatemala, which at the time included not only the present-day country of that name but also current Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Mexican state of Chiapas. With a population of more than sixty thousand, Santiago was considered one of the loveliest towns in the New World, renowned for its churches and monasteries. But after devastating earthquakes in 1717 and 1773, the government relocated to present-day Guatemala City, some twenty miles away (not far enough, it turned out, since the new site was also devastated by temblors). The old capital was largely evacuated, and known as La Antigua Guatemala, it settled into gentle neglect. By 1973, when the Ridingers’ Dodge Travco turned into town, exactly two centuries after the fateful earthquake, the city claimed less than half the population of its glory years.

  Antigua’s brightly painted, prudently one-story houses were still punctuated by toppled Colonial churches, which studded the city like Maya ruins. On the main square, the cathedral, once among the grandest in Central America, was more rubble than church, having been only partially rebuilt. But a few grand places of worship survived: On the northern edge of town, graceful, exuberant La Merced still rose like a marzipan wedding cake, with its white tracery of vines, leaves, and flowers set against a soft-yellow background.

  There wasn’t much happening in Antigua in the 1970s. Siesta was religiously observed, and even when the shops reopened at two o’clock, there was little to buy. Cars were rare, and the few American expats joked that if they needed to locate a friend, they could just walk outside and find the other’s vehicle. Like the Johnson sisters in San Miguel, the young Ridingers had trouble adjusting at first. But their father fell in love with Antigua and everything about it—the people, the climate, the lush landscape. To Jay Ridinger, it was a world of Sunday afternoons, with no Monday mornings in sight. In Antigua, he decided, he would realize the long-harbored, romantic vision of life he could never fulfill in Chicago, or anywhere in his native country. He would reinvent himself yet again, on an even grander, more adventurous scale.

  He began wearing a loose-fitting safari jacket and a bush hat as his daily uniform. Some said the costume was an effort to make himself memorable. Others considered it a more personal statement, a resolute shedding of the suit and tie he’d worn all those years in Chicago. And still others thought it had a practical purpose, to free him from deciding what to wear each morning. Whatever the motive, the outfit became his trademark, along with the monocle he adopted after corrective laser surgery was successful in only one eye.

  Ridinger rented a house on the north edge of town, near the old Convento de Santo Domingo. Built in the seventeenth century, the monastery was once the largest and most opulent in Central America, until an earthquake left it in ruins. Retired American archaeologist Edwin Shook and his wife, Ginny, had bought the property and restored it as their home, encircled by old walls and lovely gardens.

  The Shooks invited their new neighbor for cocktails. Jay Ridinger had never developed a taste for alcohol, so he sipped Coca-Cola as he told his hosts about his life in Chicago. But Ginny Shook grew suddenly cold, letting him know that his type—real estate developers—weren’t welcome in Antigua. As Ridinger would discover, the couple of hundred foreigners, mostly retirees from the U.S. State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had a conservative bent in those days. With the near-perfect climate leaving little weather to talk about, dinner-party discussions were dominated by the price of real estate, the trouble finding good help, and the internecine intrigues at the American embassy in Guatemala City. Ridinger began to call his fellow expats “the pachyderms,” for their Republican leanings as well as their stodginess.

  Personal connections were crucial in Guatemala, in the foreign community as well as among the locals, and there was suspicion of outsiders and a reluctance to go beyond one’s circle. In time, Ridinger and the Shooks became close friends, but the rest of the establishment wasn’t sure what to make of the flamboyant newcomer. There was no denying his charm or intelligence. But he had a habit of giving advice whether it was solicited or not, and he had an odd way of aggrandizing people when he introduced them, so that army sergeants found themselves promoted to colonels and teachers to superintendents. “If you lift people up, sometimes they’ll stay there,” he’d explain. Ridinger also had the drive and competitiveness of a natural entrepreneur, and some of his new neighbors suspected him of being a sharp operator.

  Jay Ridinger in his trademark bush hat and safari suit.

  Courtesy of Mary Lou Ridinger

  He began to wonder whether he’d made a terrible mistake, whether he could ever find a place for himself in Antigua. So one evening, he called his new friend Betty Kempe, who by then had installed a telephone in the Villa Santa Monica in San Miguel. Find a housekeeper, Betty told him. Put the girls in school. Study Spanish. Calmed, Ridinger realized he needed something to occupy himself—and he had to find a niche, something that would justify his presence in Antigua to his fellow expatriates. He also began playing in the expat poker game, not only a major social event but also a crucial source of gossip.

  There were two antiques stores in the city, and Ridinger stopped in regularly. He bought old furniture to complement the decorative pieces he’d brought from Chicago, his china, crystal, ivory, and miniature wooden boxes. Also in the shops were pre-Columbian jades that had been looted from archaeological sites. In fact, illicit antiquities were so common in Antigua that one American sold them out of his trench coat on the street, like a Times Square pornography peddler. Ridinger especially admired the jades, for their age and artistry, their physical and cultural heft, their sense of mystery.

  Like so many before him, he began to wonder where the raw jade for all these carvings had come from. He had never heard of William Foshag or Robert Leslie, didn’t know of their discovery nearly two decades earlier. He also hadn’t heard that, even as he was preparing to go to Guatemala, a team led by British archaeologist Norman Hammond was finding two more outcrops of jade in the Motagua Valley, at the towns of Usumatlán and El Jute. He just knew that his neighbor Ed Shook had spent years searching for the pre-Columbian jade mines but, to Shook’s immense frustration, had found only the occasional rock in a river or field.

  Jay Ridinger also met American archaeologist David Sedat. Born in Guatemala of missionary parents, Sedat had teamed up with his former mentor, Robert Sharer, to investigate Preclassic settlements in the nearby Salamá Valley, looking for evidence of early trade in goods such as jade and obsidian. His team had discovered significant greenstone artifacts and a greenstone workshop at El Portón, and they had scouted for jade in the Motagua Valley, close to Foshag and Leslie’s outcrop at Manzanal. (Greenstone is a general term for rock that resembles jade but is actually something else; archaeologists sometimes call it “social jade” or “cultural jade.”) At Sedat’s invitation, Jay and the girls drove up in the Dodge Travco to San Jerónimo in Baja Verapaz, northeast of Guatemala City, to tour some of the area’s archaeological sites.

  Sedat was won over by Ridinger’s charm and openness to ideas, and impressed by his flair for business. When Jay confided that he was searching for a different direction in life, Sedat thought that his new friend might have the assets—personal, professional, financial—to take up the search for Guatemalan jade. He took Ridinger to an unreported jade workshop in the Motagua, and he showed him a geological map of the country depicting rock formations likely to contain the stone. Though the Guatemalan government had made such information virtually a state secret, Sedat gave Ridinger the name of a man who brokered the maps.

  And so the old daydreams came flooding back: Jay in his safari shirt and bush hat, cutting a swath through intractable jungle. Jay the Eagle Sco
ut, sleeping rough, cooking his meals over an open fire. Jay the amateur archaeologist, on the trail of vanished civilizations. Jay the entrepreneur, claiming a treasure that had been lost for centuries. Now he knew what niche he would carve for himself in Guatemala: He would discover the lost jade mines of the Maya.

  It was November 1973, and Washington, D.C., was cold, damp, gray. Hugging his overcoat, a tall figure trotted past the statue of Neptune and up the great Renaissance staircase, through a massive bronze door, and into the Great Hall of the Library of Congress. Conceived as a shrine to learning, the library was among the most ornate public buildings in America when it opened in 1897, and it still was nearly a century later—the work of dozens of sculptors and painters and countless craftsmen. Barely slowing his pace, the visitor passed under the gold-leaf ceiling, over the inlaid marble floor, past the busts of Washington and Jefferson, the double marble staircase with its bronze statues raising the Torch of Knowledge. Then he entered the heart of the library, the octagonal Reading Room, with more marble columns, arches, and statues; bronze busts; massive stained glass windows; and rising above it all, the great dome with its mural dedicated to Human Understanding.

  In the center of the room was a circular wooden desk. Jay Ridinger approached the librarian stationed there. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have a question.”

  Her eyebrows lifted.

  “What’s your favorite restaurant in Washington?”

  Her brows lifted further, then her eyes crinkled and her dimples showed. She told him.

  “I’ll make you a proposition,” Ridinger said. “I need every journal article and book in the Library of Congress having to do with Mesoamerican jade. If you’ll make copies for me, I’ll buy you lunch there.”

  That fall in Antigua, Ridinger had been absorbing everything he could find about jade. Yet, he realized he needed to learn a great deal more. After spending Thanksgiving with his family outside Chicago, he’d left the girls with his parents and had boarded a plane to Washington.

  The following day, he returned to the Library of Congress to see what his accomplice had turned up. Taking a seat at one of the wooden desks ringing the Reading Room, he began to scan the stack of photocopies. There were nearly fifty, mostly technical reports from geology and archaeology journals, with polysyllabic titles that meant nothing to him. The librarian’s search hadn’t uncovered Foshag and Leslie’s brief letter to American Antiquity reporting the jade outcrop at Manzanal. But toward the bottom of the stack, Ridinger came across a stapled sheaf thicker than the rest. The title was also slightly less opaque: Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade, by William F. Foshag.

  Ridinger opened the monograph and began to read. It was an education, more information than he’d ever seen in one place regarding New World jade—its chemical formula, the measure of its hardness, locations where ancient jades had been discovered, techniques used to work the stone in early times. But there was more. As to the source of Maya and Olmec jade, Foshag suggested that anyone searching for the stone in Central America should look for deposits of serpentinite. And Mesoamerica’s largest outcrops of that mineral were found in the Sierra de las Minas of Guatemala, just a few hours’ drive northeast of Antigua. Ridinger flipped back to the title page. The monograph had been published by the Smithsonian Institution. He collected his papers and coat, made a date to take the librarian to lunch, and hurried out the library’s huge bronze door.

  He rushed past the Supreme Court and the Capitol, then down Constitution Avenue, skirting the museums on the north side of the Mall. At Ninth Street, the Washington Monument looming closer, he turned left and took a quick right onto Madison Drive. Then he jogged up the wide steps and through the sober classical columns of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Glancing neither right nor left, he went straight to the gift shop on the building’s ground floor.

  “I’m looking for a monograph titled Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade,” he told the young woman behind the counter. “It was published by the Smithsonian in 1957.”

  “Nineteen fifty-seven?” she asked dubiously. “The Smithsonian publications are over here,” she said, leading him to a set of shelves across the store. They both riffled through the publications, but Foshag’s wasn’t among them.

  “Is there anyplace else it might be?” Ridinger asked.

  “Just a minute,” she said and disappeared behind a door.

  Ridinger paced among the souvenirs. Finally, she returned with a thin paperback. “I found it. It was on a shelf in the back room.”

  “Is that the only copy?”

  “No, there are about a dozen.”

  “I’ll take them all.”

  William Foshag could not have explained why jade was so often found as veins and nodules within the rock serpentinite. He had died in 1956, the year before the Smithsonian issued his Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade. Had he lived just a few years longer, he would have seen a revolution in our understanding of how the earth works.

  As early as 1600, after European voyages of discovery had begun to yield more accurate maps, people began to remark how the continents’ coastlines seemed to complement each other. Then, three hundred years later, German meteorologist Alfred Wegner made the startling suggestion that the continents were once joined but had drifted apart, and were drifting still. He couldn’t explain how the huge landmasses moved or why, and his notion won few supporters. But by the time of Foshag’s death, geologists had begun collecting data and proposing mechanisms to support Wegner’s idea. Over the next decade, refined and expanded by other researchers, the concept of continental drift had matured into the theory of plate tectonics, offering a compelling new picture of how the surface of the earth is constantly reshaping itself.

  We now know that the brittle, sixty-mile-deep surface on which we walk (the lithosphere) floats over a hotter, more ductile layer (the asthenosphere), which is slowly churning due to differences in density and temperature. The lithosphere consists of about a dozen large, independently moving “plates,” which fit together like a poorly made jigsaw puzzle. As the asthenosphere beneath them flows, the plates shift. Where they bump into or slide past each other, they give rise to mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes—and jade.

  The top layer of ocean plates (those beneath the sea) consists mostly of basalt, a volcanic rock formed when lava seeps up through cracks in a mid-ocean rift, then hardens. Ocean plates are thinner than continental plates (those under landmasses), but denser. So when they meet a continental plate, they generally dive beneath it, a process geologists call subduction. The resulting increase in temperature and pressure forces some of the water out of the subducting plate, working like the rollers on an old-time washing machine. Since the major components of jade—sodium, aluminum, and silicon—are relatively soluble, they dissolve out of the metamorphosing basalt and are carried away and introduced into the overlying plate.

  To achieve jadeite’s high density, its light elements have to be packed tightly together within their crystal structure, similar to the way graphite must be subjected to tremendous pressure in order to become diamond. In the case of jadeite, this pressure ranges from 6 to 20 kilobars (six to twenty times the pressure of the earth’s atmosphere at sea level), which occurs from about ten to forty miles deep within the earth. On the other hand, temperatures must be relatively low during these processes, less than about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, or the jadeite may melt in the presence of water, ceasing to be solid mineral. (Nephrite, the other jade, requires a completely different set of circumstances to form, including only about 1 kilobar of pressure, which is found about two miles beneath the earth’s surface—explaining why jadeite and nephrite are not found together, and why jadeite is denser.)

  Jadeite’s companion serpentine is also formed in the presence of watery liquid, by reaction of the rock known as peridotite, which makes up the earth’s mantle (the viscous layer bet
ween the crust and outer core). The peridotite forms the ceiling of the subduction channel, and as it cracks from tectonic movements, water squeezes in. The peridotite sucks up the water like a sponge and reacts to form serpentinite. The sodium, aluminum, and silicon dissolved in the fluid crystallize to form jadeite rock, the way that material precipitating out of tap water forms incrustations on the insides of household pipes.

  The jadeitite moves along faults created by compression where tectonic plates come together. But it’s a long and perilous journey, and much of the mineral can be destroyed before it ever reaches the surface. The problem is that jadeite is not stable under moist, low-pressure, low-temperature conditions. If it doesn’t rise relatively quickly, it may combine with the water all around it to create minerals such as albite, which forms a rock called albitite that is often found along with jade. But serpentinite also plays a role in jade’s rush to the surface. The jade is embedded in the serpentinite like raisins in a pudding, and though jade is dense, the serpentinite is relatively lightweight; as the lighter rock is buoyed upward, the jade rides along with it.

  Geologist George Harlow, curator of minerals and gems at the American Museum of Natural History, calls jadeite “nasty,” meaning that its chemistry can make it complicated to track a piece of jade back to its source. Whereas obsidian forms from a more-or-less homogeneous flow of lava, giving it a uniform composition, the chemicals that give rise to jadeite can vary from vein to vein and even within a single vein over time. With jadeite, lots of other elements that were present in the water solutions in very small amounts, called trace elements, can substitute for the sodium, aluminum, and silicon. As a result, each piece of jade carries these trace elements as a kind of birthmark, making it slightly different from every other piece of jade in characteristics such as color, luster, and texture.