‘Like that Macaw up there.’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother pointed to the top of the canopy.
Jim stared where Pep’Em Ha’s brother pointed. ‘No. I can’t see anything.’
Pep’Em Ha took Jim’s head in her hands. She aligned his face to the Macaw perched high in the trees. He still could not see anything although he liked how Pep’Em Ha held his head.
Eventually, after some movement he saw a shape and a hint of color, perhaps red but he was unsure.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Jim said with disappointment. ‘It’s a bird. Great.’
‘You don’t see many of those anymore,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother said as he peered into the canopy and then laughed. ‘Actually, I’ve never seen many of those. It’s the old men who say that.’
‘Am I becoming one of the old men?’ he asked his sister.
‘You’re beginning to look like one,’ Pep’Em Ha replied. She grabbed Jim by the shoulders and easily moved him between her and her brother. Jim was surprised at her strength. Pep’Em Ha’s brother pretended to raise his arm to strike. Pep’Em Ha giggled like she was ten years younger and ran a few steps up the path, away from her brother.
They continued along the track in single file. Pep’Em Ha’s brother gave his sister a push in the back as pay back.
‘Anything more than just birds?’ Jim complained as he trudged along last in line.
‘Yes, Jim,’ Pep’Em Ha called back. ‘We’re going to see more than just birds.’
The path through the jungle became difficult. Jim was moving into territory few Western visitors had seen. He was excited. He looked over his shoulder and there was nothing to show the way back. The ground at his feet was slightly compressed but Jim could not have found the path Pep’Em Ha briskly followed. He made sure he kept up, he did not want to be left behind, even if the two KulWinik did it as a joke.
They came to a steep incline. At that place there was a recognizable path but it was slippery from the jungle’s perpetual dampness. The two KulWinik slowed, but moved effortlessly up the slope. Jim had to hold onto tree trunks and branches to stop himself sliding back.
Jim called up the slope. ‘Slow down. I’m not a jungle-boy like you are.’ Jim had given up pretending that his limited experiences in the New Zealand forests matched living in the Central American jungles.
Pep’Em Ha’s brother laughed at Jim bending over, holding onto the ground. Jim’s eyes were plaintive and his neck stretched upwards.
Pep’Em Ha came down to Jim and stopped just above him.
‘Don’t worry where your next step will be,’ she said. ‘It’s like that story you told me about you and your twin brother, when you jumped from boulder to boulder, on the New Zealand beaches.’
Jim’s face was at the same level as the hem of her tunic. He stared at it. It was darkened with spattered mud. Her sandaled feet, ankles and lower legs were a mottled mixture of olive skin, darker damp mud and the grey of dried silt. Jim thought she may have been about to offer him her hand to help him climb the slope. He prepared his refusal but then thought otherwise. Holding her hand and continuing to hold it after it was no longer needed for support was not a bad idea. He was surprised that he had not thought of that before. He had held her hand once, he remembered, when Yax K’in had pressed their hands together in greeting. However, he had not thought of Pep’Em as a woman. He wondered why that was.
Pep’Em Ha turned and climbed the slope without offering her hand. Jim watched her for a few seconds. He thought of the options his insight made possible. Sex, mostly, he thought. She was attractive, she liked him, at least as a friend, and that was a good start, he believed. Although he was unsure how to move from friendship to a sexual relationship. He assumed it happened spontaneously. However, he liked Pep’Em Ha too much, as a friend, so he dismissed his sexual musings. He did not yet know that a simultaneous friendship and sexual relationship was possible.
Jim began to climb using Pep’Em Ha’s instructions. He fell and slipped often but he travelled, overall, much quicker. However, his hands, knees and lower legs were filthy.
Pep’Em Ha and her brother stopped before they reached the top of the slope and observed Jim’s progress. He was glad he did not slip while under their gaze. He joined them and placed his hands on his hips as if he was waiting for a further climber to arrive.
Next to them was a natural opening into the hill. It was waist high and wide enough for a person to easily scramble through. Adjacent to the opening was a discarded cabinet, as if abandoned from someone’s living room, with two ill fitting doors that met in the middle. Over the top was a black plastic tarp that remained in place, fastened to the ground with tent pegs. The plastic covering attempted to protect the wood from the weather but had failed. The cabinet had deteriorated and was held together by chords fastened around it.
Jim’s face and eyes lit with excitement as he examined the cave entrance.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked Pep’Em Ha.
Pep’Em Ha’s brother laughed at Jim. ‘Do you mean the entrance to Xibalba and the home of the ancestors?’
Pep’Em Ha ignored her brother. His humor was feeble, as if he was trying too hard to be a Westerner. ‘The opening is small,’ she said. ‘But it’s huge inside.’ Jim’s excitement was contagious and she caught some of it.
Pep’Em Ha fiddled with the ties holding the cabinet together. She opened one of the doors and took out three flashlights. She turned them on and off. She gave one to Jim and the other to her brother. Jim saw that the cabinet contained many other things as well, like the ritual items displayed in the temple hut in the village.
Pep’Em Ha bent over onto all fours and sidled sideways into the opening. Her brother did the same after she had disappeared. He returned and put his head outside. ‘Watch out for your head,’ he said and disappeared into the hill again.
Jim was left on his own by the cave entrance. He turned his flashlight on and off then looked down the slope he had climbed. Although he was excited, he was enjoying the moment of being alone in the jungle, miles from the village. If anything happened to his friends he knew he could never find his way back. He noticed, for the first time since leaving the village, how noisy the jungle was. There were sounds of insects, many strange noises came from high in the canopy and there was a low rumble like distant traffic. Although, he thought, that may be the sound of his own blood racing. He was hot now that he was not moving. Perspiration ran down his face, chest and back. He took a sip of water then noticed that Pep’Em Ha and her brother had left their water bottles behind. He took another drink and left his next to theirs.
Pep’Em Ha’s brother’s head emerged. ‘We’re waiting jungle-boy,’ he said and disappeared again.
Jim followed.
Chapter 27
Jim had to crawl, sideways, for a few meters until he stood beside Pep’Em Ha and her brother on a wide ledge. The light from their flashlights reflected from the opposite wall thirty meters away. It was pitch dark below and above. Jim turned his flashlight on and ranged its light around the inside of the cave. The roof sloped up for a few meters behind him, followed the steep angle of the slope they had climbed then leveled off. The floor of the cave was four meters below them. There was a knotted rope that fell off the ledge.
‘This is awesome,’ Jim said in English. He peered over the edge and shone his light along the cave floor as if he intended to mark the way they should travel.
‘Have other people, I mean not KulWinik, been in here before?’ Jim asked, speaking Maya again. He hoped the answer was no. He had personal visions of great discovery.
Pep’Em Ha watched the shape of Jim’s body, she saw his movements as his head turned one way then the other, then up and down. His body shuffled in place with excitement as he stared at a fissure in the rock on the other side of the cave.
‘Just Arthur and Michelle. No others as far as I know. That was the first time Yax K’in brought me here too. I was only a child,’ she said.
‘Y
ax K’in performs rituals here,’ Pep’Em Ha said. ‘Only a few of the elders knew of this place. That only changed when I was a child. I was the first non-elder to come here, with Arthur and Michelle. My grandfather is buried here. Yax K’in says he wants to be buried here too.’
‘Do you want to be buried here?’ Jim asked her.
Pep’Em Ha laughed. ‘I never want to be buried. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it,’ she said.
‘It has been used for centuries,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother said. ‘Arthur told our father that it might have been used for thousands of years.’
Pep’Em Ha was satisfied with the cave’s initial impression on Jim. She tried to see it with his eyes. She remembered the many shadows the first time she had seen the place. She had been seven years old and the darkness had frightened her.
Jim was impatient to start exploring. ‘So, we climb down by this rope, do we?’ he asked.
Pep’Em Ha went first. She tucked her flashlight into her tunic and held the knotted rope with both hands as she climbed down to the cave floor. Jim noticed her light silhouette her legs as she climbed. His fleeting sexual image returned. He looked away and tried to make the image dissolve.
‘You go next,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother said.
The surface of the cave was damp and slippery. When Jim let go of the rope his foot slipped. He put out his hand to brace himself but only Pep’Em Ha’s shoulder was there. His foot stopped sliding before his hand touched her. He withdrew his arm as he wobbled to a stop.
Pep’Em Ha led them along the ancient, well worn way to the other side of the cave. The fissure was a tall and thin tunnel, wide enough for one person and tall enough that Jim did not have to lower his head. The adjacent cave was as expansive as the one they had left. Pep’Em Ha stopped in the middle of the chamber and shone her light at the base of the rock wall, twenty meters away. It was littered with ceramic pots, some were intact but many were broken with the pieces carefully arranged together.
‘These are old god-pots. They have been buried here, just as if they had once been alive, as if they had been members of our village,’ she said. Her moving light came to the last group. ‘And these are the last ones that Yax K’in placed here.’
‘Yax K’in makes it here? Recently?’ Jim asked. He was astonished.
‘Yes, of course,’ Pep’Em Ha said with surprise. ‘He’s not so frail.’
‘I don’t think Hamish could have made it up that hill,’ Jim said.
‘Yax K’in comes at his own pace,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother said. ‘It’s too slow for us. It would be a good pace for you, Jim.’
Pep’Em Ha did not like her brother’s joy in teasing. He said quite offensive things with a straight face that confused her. She wished her brother had not come. She wanted Jim’s enthusiasm to herself. She worried that the trip could easily become a loud, boys-only affair.
‘So, everyone from the village comes here, do they?’ Jim said. He was disappointed. He had an unfounded hope that the three of them had made a special, magical discovery, like ones at the beginning of stories that led the participants on an exciting quest.
‘No, Jim, not everyone,’ Pep’Em Ha said.
A chest-high tunnel led out of that second chamber. The narrow exit fell steeply for twenty meters. Progress was difficult as they crouched and steadied themselves with their hands on the damp floor and walls of the tunnel. They had to crawl in one place where the roof dipped down. They clambered out into the next chamber which was smaller. The floor climbed to a central mound four meters high. The only clear path followed the edge.
Jim trailed Pep’Em Ha as she led around the chamber perimeter. She stopped a quarter of the way around and waited until Jim was next to her. She unveiled the rock wall with her flashlight and Jim took a loud, involuntary breath. Pep’Em Ha was pleased.
Pep’Em Ha’s light revealed a display of red and black painted pictures and pictographs. They covered the wall for three meters above Jim’s head. He had seen similar images in the books his grandfather had been reading but those rock drawings were stark and beautiful beyond images in books. They were fresh and alive.
Pep’Em Ha’s light illuminated the closest image, a Mayan king with an enormously ostentatious head-dress. He had been painted in profile, his eyes following the rock wall. He had one arm bent pointing skywards and the other arm pointed in the direction he faced. He sat on a throne, a natural part of the rock wall that had been emphasized by a splash of red and a few dark lines. Seated next to the king was a woman although Jim could not have explained why he thought the image was female. Her face was as stark and angular as the seated king’s. Her tongue was extended. There was a bowl on the ground, at her knees, covered with what Jim realized represented the blood that dripped from her mouth. Over her head was a drawing of a dragon, Jim thought, with a small person sitting in its open mouth. Next to the two figures and the dragon was a series of square-shaped glyphs, the Mayan pictographic writing. Jim guessed they described the picture and who the people were.
‘Can you read this stuff?’ Jim asked Pep’Em Ha without taking his eyes from the images.
‘No,’ Pep’Em Ha said.
‘No KulWinik can read that writing,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother said. ‘It’s the writing of dead people. You have to go to the gringos if you want to have it translated.’
‘Michelle can read it,’ Pep’Em Ha said.
‘Have you had it translated for you?’ Jim asked.
‘Michelle read some of it when she was here. It’s not easy to read like it’s Spanish or something,’ Pep’Em Ha said.
Jim placed his hand on the writing instinctively believing he could read the glyphs if he touched them.
‘That one is a king,’ she shone her light near Jim’s hand, ‘And the woman before him is a blood relation. The first part of her name is K’ul Kelem. There’s more to her name.’ Pep’Em Ha shone her flashlight onto the series of glyphs next to the woman. ‘But Michelle wouldn’t read it.’
‘Would Arthur know? Do you think?’ Jim asked, impatiently. The images were oddly compulsive as if they reflected a story he had heard as a child and had forgotten, but remembered that it was exciting.
‘I don’t know. Probably,’ she said. ‘She’s blood letting by pulling the stingray barb through her tongue. That’s that thing,’ Pep’Em Ha’s light shone on an object protruding from the woman’s tongue. ‘Arthur said there are similar images in other places.’
‘Her blood is collected here,’ she pointed her light at the woman’s knees, ‘and it’s burnt as an offering. Her suffering has brought to life the Vision Serpent. That’s what’s floating above her head.’
‘Who’s it eating?’ Jim asked.
‘It’s not eating anything. The picture is of an ancestor being summoned from the dead, she had brought them back to life to offer her and the king advice, perhaps. Or it could be a god that she’s summoned, from Xibalba. If you look really closely, the image is broken. There are two ancestors inside the mouth of the Vision Serpent.’
‘Blood letting has nothing to do with us KulWinik,’ Pep’Em Ha’s brother impatiently interrupted. He was bored with the images so he turned and ranged his light over other parts of the cave.
Immediately above the Vision Serpent was an image of two ancient Mayans sitting cross-legged and facing each other. They wore elaborate head-dresses and held their arms out to each other, but without touching. Their faces were happy as if they had been reunited after a long absence. One of them had blotches on his skin. Next to them was a vertical series of glyphs.
‘What are those?’ Jim asked. He could see that they were twins and that was his interest in them.
‘They’re the Great Twins,’ Pep’Em Ha said. ‘From the creation stories. They’re celebrating their reunion, having been returned from the dead. It’s from a moment at the end of creation. Before they had defeated the Lords of Xibalba. Yax K’in says the Great Twins were the first mixing between our people and the gods. Hach
akyum was their grandfather. They learnt from him how to outwit the gods. Through the Twins the world was destroyed.’
‘Do you believe all that stuff?’ Jim asked.
Pep’Em Ha’s brother answered quickly. ‘No. Of course not. It was only the old ones who are dead that really believed that stuff. I don’t think Yax K’in believes it the way people used to believe those stories. I hope not, he’s a sensible man my father. We are just the same as you,’ he said firmly, as if he was convincing himself as well as Jim. ‘Those are just old stories, although some of them are really good. Especially when Pep’Em Ha tells them. She spices them up if Yax K’in isn’t there.’
‘What about you, Pep’Em Ha,’ Jim asked.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said slowly. ‘The stories don’t sound strictly true. I think they’ve been re-told too many times.’ She laughed. ‘Although Yax K’in gets upset when I spice them up, as my brother likes, I think that has happened often over too many years. There may be a tiny bit of each story that’s true but how do we know which bit?’
At the End of the World Page 11
