Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  The sky was pocked with high thunderheads. As the helicopter skittered under the clouds, the Ridingers traced the corrugated contours on the ground. Mary Lou glanced at her map, then at the earth again. Yes, this was the spot. But if they set down, they would expend the little remaining daylight, and they wouldn’t make it to where the imperial green was waiting. And since they weren’t sure they could ever afford to hire another helicopter, they might never have the opportunity to return. Still . . . what if there were jade here as well?

  They were mulling the dilemma when Robin, now in her twenties, spoke up. Why didn’t they drop her off to take a look? They could go on, then come back and pick her up later. Mary Lou and Jay hesitated. Not that they doubted her prospecting abilities—she was accomplished with a geologist’s hammer and a vial of bromoform—but they were reluctant to let her down alone in strange territory. Robin pointed out that she often wandered off by herself when they were prospecting on foot—what was the difference? No campesinos or combatants came up this high in the sierra. And the helicopter would be back in an hour anyway. What could possibly go wrong? Eventually, she persuaded them. Mary Lou signaled to the pilot, a round, bespectacled man named Ricardo, who brought the craft down on the ridge. Robin hopped out with her equipment bag and scurried from under the blades. As the helicopter took off, her parents could see her waving up at them.

  Mary Lou Ridinger held the map out to Ricardo and pointed to their next destination. He nodded, the helicopter turned to the east, and a few minutes later, they were circling the other site. They landed in a clearing and began chipping out some promising samples. But after an hour, they became aware of a dense fog forming around them. They grabbed their gear and jogged back to the helicopter. Ricardo started the rotors before they were even settled in their seats, and in a moment they were racing toward Robin.

  In the short time it took to get there, the earth had vanished; not even the flat tops of the mesquites and acacias poked through the mist. It was impossible to get their bearings. And even if they could find the ridge again, landing was out of the question. They circled for a long time, but the weather only worsened. They were getting low on fuel, Ricardo told them. Finally, he said that if they didn’t find Robin in ten more minutes, they’d have to leave without her.

  Sitting alone in the back seat, Jay felt paralyzed at first. Then he remembered an ancient legend that if two people were wearing jade cut from the same boulder, they could communicate through the stone. Jay, Mary Lou, and Robin all wore plain pendants, about the size of a half dollar, made from a single piece of green jade. Now, clutching his charm, Jay closed his eyes and focused fiercely on his daughter. After a few minutes, he pointed to a spot in the clouds and told Ricardo, “Go down there—she’s going to be standing right down there!” The pilot looked at him as if he were mad, but Ridinger insisted.

  The helicopter began a wary descent, with Ricardo watching the altimeter. And in that instant, the clouds parted just enough to reveal Robin, who was waving frantically—and standing precisely where Jay had pointed. They set down on top of the ridge, and Robin jumped in. Then, as they rose, they glanced down at the place where they’d landed; it was totally consumed by fog again.

  At least, that’s how Jay Ridinger described the incident to a reporter for Lapidary Journal. By nature, Ridinger had long been a searcher for more than jade. He’d dabbled in yoga, gone to Esalen, taken a course for shamans. Charismatic and intuitive, he was suspected by more than one person of having psychic abilities. And he believed in the mystical power of jade. He told how a Maya shaman had once explained to him that jade had to be “awakened.” “Jade is very lazy,” the wise man had said, “and being old, sleeps a great deal.” To demonstrate how to bestir jade, the shaman had taken two pieces from a pouch and clapped them together. That afternoon in the helicopter, Ridinger hadn’t struck his pendant, only clutched it and concentrated in order to rouse whatever power the jade possessed. But he told the reporter, “I am convinced this is a subject that deserves serious research and study.”

  Supernatural abilities have been ascribed to jade for thousands of years—the power not only to communicate with the spirit world, but to cure disease, revive the dying, even to ensure immortality. Over that long span, dozens of legends have illustrated the stone’s supposed faculties. In his classic book Jade: Stone of Heaven, Richard Gump, of Gump’s department store in San Francisco, recounts two stories from China in which jade serves as the agent of divine will. In the first, from the Han dynasty (about 200 B.C. to A.D. 200), a solid-jade coffin materializes inside the imperial palace. When the casket proves too heavy for even the brawniest of royal retainers to lift, the emperor accepts it as an augury of his death and takes his place inside. As soon as he’s situated, the top slams shut, the coffin suddenly is light enough to carry, and the ruler is buried with all the honors attendant to his rank.

  Gump’s other legend has to do with a carved jade seal that for two thousand years was considered an essential emblem of imperial power. In the 1700s, with the unruly Yangtze River again over its banks, Emperor Qiánlóngdì cast the seal into the current in a desperate attempt to appease the gods—and the floodwaters miraculously ebbed. Then, years later, as the emperor rested beside a jade fountain near Beijing, the gods saw fit to return the offering, and the seal appeared in the burbling waters.

  In Mesoamerica, mystical powers were attributed to jade for more than three millennia—and still are. Many of the Ridingers’ friends and employees in Antigua have their own tales about so-called jade magic. Gail Terzuola, ex-wife of master carver Bob Terzuola and co-discoverer of the Terzuola archaeological site, tells of a friend who was wearing a jade necklace that Bob had made. When a drunken policeman fired a stray shot, the bullet struck the woman in the neck—but ricocheted harmlessly off the heavy jewelry. Jane Swezey, wife of Bill Swezey, Mary Lou Ridinger’s professor from La Universidad de las Américas, tells how Jay Ridinger once insisted that she wear one of his oversized jade necklaces; finding it a bit gaudy, she politely resisted but ultimately ceded to his power of persuasion. And as soon as she slipped the jade over her head, she felt a strange, harmonious feeling that stayed with her the rest of the day, like nothing she’d ever experienced before or since.

  The Ridingers’ dynamic manager, Raquel Pérez, is also an advocate of jade magic. “Jade is history,” she says in her excellent English. “It’s part of us, our ancestors.” On her desk, she keeps a disk of Galactic Gold jade, which she rubs whenever she mulls an important decision. She believes that jade protects her and her family, and so her seven-year-old son has carried a coin-sized piece of jade in his pocket since the age of three. Raquel and her boyfriend also wear heart-shaped pendants carved from the same piece of jade, which they believe facilitate communication between them.

  The scientifically trained Mary Lou Ridinger was skeptical of jade magic at first. When Bill Swezey died, she did give Jane a piece of jade to place in his coffin—that was a tribute to her mentor, though, not an effort to confer immortality. But when she became pregnant and doctors warned her about the possibility of a premature delivery, she began to rub a piece of jade over her womb. Jake was born in May 1984, exactly at term, weighing nine and a half pounds. “Who knows if it was the jade?” Mary Lou laughs. But, she says, “Jade is an obsession. I believe in it. It brings fortune when given away. It’s a mystical thing. It’s my religion.”

  Geologist Josh Rosenfeld hasn’t lived in Guatemala for thirty-five years, but he still wears a jade ring and a large jade bead around his neck that was carved by his friend Bob Terzuola. Not only is jade beautiful, it makes him feel good. It’s a “very spiritual stone, as close to alive as a stone can be.” Does that mean he believes that jade has supernatural properties? “No,” he demurs, “I’m a scientist.”

  Bob Terzuola doesn’t believe in jade magic, either. To explain the stone’s preternatural coolness, he summons the laws of physics—be
cause of its density, the stone takes a long time to warm up and to cool down. But that’s not to say he doesn’t have a special regard for jade. He’s always felt in harmony with it, in a way that he hasn’t with any other type of stone he’s worked, he tells me, and he’s always felt that jade has been generous to him.

  A scientist who does believe he was touched by jade magic is Olaf Jaime-Riverón, a Mexican archaeologist completing his dissertation at the University of Kentucky. Several years ago, when he was surveying an Olmec site in the state of Veracruz, Jaime-Riverón was overcome by heatstroke and fell into a coma. By the third week, it seemed he might not regain consciousness. But, he tells me, when one of his professors touched an ancient blue celt to Jaime-Riverón’s forehead, he awoke. Ever since, he’s been convinced of the medicinal properties of jade—like Chinese sages and Mesoamerican kings before him.

  As for the Ridingers, they never did get back to Guatemala City that afternoon after rescuing Robin. Out of fuel, they made an emergency landing in the parking lot of a Pepsi plant in Teculután, just east of Manzanal. Robin reported that her outcrop showed no sign of jade. But her parents had better luck; based on the samples they took that day, they were able to expand their mining license to include that site as well. To extract the stone, they returned with burros, not a helicopter.

  Despite the sophistication of the Ridingers’ prospecting, no additional jade deposits deigned to reveal themselves. So, through the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Ridingers mined just two license areas—the one that they had found in 1974 and later expanded with their helicopter prospecting and the site with Olmec blue and Galactic Gold that Andy Duncan had discovered in 1987. The Mesoamerican Jade Project had suggested several other possible sources of pre-Hispanic jade in the Motagua, but if they existed, their location remained a mystery.

  Meanwhile, the Ridingers’ business continued to grow. By the early 1990s, they had opened five stores—three in Antigua, one in Guatemala City, and one in the Petén, near Tikal—and the family had become the largest purveyors of jade in Central America. At the risk of flaunting their prosperity, they had also bought a large, walled Colonial home on the south edge of town, once the center of a coffee finca. In typical Guatemalan fashion, success had bred imitation, and several other jade factories/showrooms had opened in Antigua. Some were operated by former associates of the Ridingers, including Jay’s ex-friend Jerry Leech, who had begun mining jade from two quarries of his own.

  The growth of the Antigua jade industry would have been impossible without the gradual resolution of Guatemala’s civil war. When reformist Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo had been elected president, his administration had been met with renewed hopes for peace. But by the end of his term, the country was suffering under a stagnant economy and rampant corruption, and labor unionists and campesinos were complaining that they had seen no betterment in their lives.

  Cerezo’s successor, the right-wing evangelist Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías, invigorated the economy and initiated peace talks with the insurgents. Then in 1993, when he grew exasperated with the slow pace of progress, coup music sounded again. Serrano dissolved the government and seized dictatorial control, but this move was met with widespread protests, and he was forced to flee the country. As his interim replacement Congress named Ramiro de León Carpio, a liberal who attacked corruption, introduced constitutional reforms, and continued negotiations with the rebels; over the course of his truncated term, a number of agreements were signed, including those on indigenous rights, resettlement of displaced persons, and agrarian reform. The year 1996 saw the election of Álvaro Enrique Arzú Irigoyen, known for his strong commitment to human rights, and on December 29, accords were signed bringing the civil war to a close. During thirty-six devastating years, two hundred thousand Guatemalans had been killed, the great majority of them rural Maya; another forty thousand people had disappeared, overwhelmingly the victims of government death squads; perhaps a million more were refugees.

  Peace wasn’t a panacea for all that ailed Guatemalan society. In the ensuing years, the economy continued to improve and the modest middle class grew, but again the benefits didn’t trickle down equally to the lowest strata of society. Instead of disbanding, the government’s newly unemployed security agents turned to organized crime. Today, corruption, crime, violence, and drug trafficking remain endemic, and Guatemala City finds its way onto some lists of the world’s most dangerous metropolises.

  Meanwhile, Guatemala still struggles to sort through two generations of civil war. In 2005, the archives of the former national police force were discovered in an abandoned munitions depot in Guatemala City—eighty million pages of documents, including some in cabinets neatly labeled Asesinos and Desaparecidos, “Assassins” and “Disappeared.” Researchers have been organizing the files into a digital database, an enormous project that will take several more years. Even with only a tenth of the documents scanned, the archive has exposed atrocities committed by the national police force, and several arrests have already been made. Not everyone in Guatemala is eager to see the truth emerge. There was an attempt to firebomb the archive, and after the government’s human rights ombudsman released a preliminary report on the project, his wife was kidnapped and tortured. But work continues, and it’s hoped that the files will finally give victims’ families, and the nation, long-awaited closure on this particularly abysmal chapter in Guatemala’s tortured history.

  In 1998, toward the end of the rainy season, Mary Lou, Jay, and Angela Ridinger, along with fourteen-year-old Jake and one of their local pickers, were searching for jade near the border of Honduras, a region notorious as the drug-trafficking capital of Guatemala. They had come because the prospector claimed to have found some boulders of lavender jade, an idea that Mary Lou met with skepticism.

  Jay Ridinger pulled their pickup off the side of the road, and the group began walking up one of the Motagua’s many tributaries. Mary Lou Ridinger had a sense of déjà vu. They came to an area just below a road, set on a tight curve with a steep cut on one side. Then she remembered. The road hadn’t been paved when she’d last been here, twenty years before almost to the day, and the dirt track had been nearly impassable even in their four-wheel-drive pickup. She told Jay, “This is where Charlotte Thomson and I turned around that time we were prospecting in 1978, and it looked like there was going to be war with Belize.” Mary Lou had meant to go back to the place, but something had always seemed to interfere.

  Their prospector led them to the boulders, which did have a lavender tint, veined with white.

  “That’s jade,” Jay Ridinger said.

  Mary Lou was still doubtful. Lavender jade, which owes its unusual hue to the presence of manganese, had never been reported in Guatemala—or as far as she knew, in any Olmec or Maya site.

  Lavender jade was mined in Burma, Jay persisted. Why not here? He said he’d always expected they would find stone of that color in the Motagua.

  When the assay came back from the States, they had their verdict: It was jade. In the meantime, Mary Lou had tracked down a single example of carved lavender jade in the archaeological record—a celt discovered on the Mexican island of Cozumel. But however beautiful or distinctive lavender jade might be to us, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on the Olmecs or the Maya. Although the color isn’t common around the Motagua, the ancients must have stumbled over some of the stone during thousands of years of prospecting. But it appears the Olmecs had an overwhelming preference for blue stone and the Maya for green—the brighter, the better. And if Maya artisans couldn’t obtain green jade, rather than resorting to lavender or other colors, they would generally work softer greenstone such as serpentinite.

  And so the Ridingers discovered their third jade source. Mary Lou had a large oval ring made from the lavender stone, with a white, x-shaped vein in the center. She calls it her x-marks-the-spot ring, and she wears it every day to remind her of
the value of persistence.

  Jay and Mary Lou Ridinger pose with pieces of lavender jade; it was the first time the rare stone had been reported in Guatemala. Courtesy of Mary Lou Ridinger

  It had taken the Ridingers more than two decades to locate their first three sources of jade, but beginning in 2002, they discovered another four in just two years. The new finds ranged over a wide area, from far north of the Motagua to far south, and from high in the mountains to the banks of the river itself. Most of the new jade lay in outcrops, and most was the typical gray-green. But source number five, the one nearest the Motagua, consisted of river boulders in a striking range of colors, including reddish-orange and blue-green; that site also had extensive evidence of ancient celt-making.

  The run of new discoveries, coming after such a long hiatus, wasn’t the result so much of skill or luck as competitive pressure. Early in 2002, the Ridingers learned that an American company called Ventana Mining was planning to enter the jade business in Guatemala, and the Ridingers decided to stake out as many new sources as possible before the interlopers’ arrival. The new venture did find jade and apply for some government licenses, but nearly a decade later, it’s still in the process of finalizing permits and securing funding. The company’s plans, once it does start operations, are to sell non-gem-quality jade for tile and similar uses, not to make jewelry or reproductions to compete with the Ridingers. Yet, thanks to Ventana’s ongoing interest in Guatemalan jade, the Ridingers more than doubled their inventory of sources.