Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Underneath the sharks, a manta ray glided along the bottom. Its giant wings swept the water. It moved more like a bird than a fish, only centimetres off the sandy ocean floor. Manta rays aren’t as dangerous as sharks, of course, unless you have the misfortune to step on them. Then their whiplike tails can plunge razor-sharp barbs into you, leaving you paralyzed.

  A snorkelling boat bobbed above me. The water wasn’t that deep, and a local guide from that vessel was already in the water. He had a handful of meat and was chumming the water to entice the sharks through the break in the coral. Now, I thought, is this really a wise idea? I mean, you’ve got to be kidding, right? Here was a man swimming not two metres from me with a bag of meat floating from a rope tied around his waist. I watched as the manta ray circled around him and, amazingly, took the chum from his hand as playfully as a dog would.

  The sharks were different, though. They circled in as well, but when one veered toward the man, he let go of the soggy meat and jerked his hand away just in time so that the meat was left floating, slowly descending to the bottom. The shark arrowed in on it, and it was gone in one great unhinging of its jaw.

  I swam a little way off while the other divers splashed into the water around the boats. Underneath me great fans of coral waved in the currents, and the brain coral, lumpy bits of underwater oatmeal, shimmered with tiny neon fish. My own silver bubbles percolated toward the surface, and the deep intake and exhalations of my regulator formed a Darth Vader soundtrack.

  It was then that I noticed a shark coming at me. I tried to hold on to the thought that it was just a reef shark and not dangerous, but this one definitely had its eye on me. It was big and was bearing down on me. As the shark’s mouth, still closed thankfully, came within an arm’s reach of my face, a very curious thing happened. I placed my hand on top of the shark’s head and pushed down. I had no idea why I did this. I only remember that the feel of its skin was a lot like sandpaper. It wasn’t smooth or slimy like a fish’s skin. It was rough and hard.

  I pushed, and the shark went down. I continued to press, applying a slight pressure downward, and the shark disappeared beneath me. It kept on going forward, shooting between my legs, and then off behind me into the murky depths.

  I’m pretty sure now that it thought I was the one chumming the water with meat. Obviously, it didn’t realize I was mostly made of meat. In retrospect I think the shark might have been old … or sick. Perhaps it was slightly wonky with age. Whatever the case, the shark swam off and I kept all my limbs as well as the odd kinesthetic memory of the creature’s leathery skin on my hand.

  Belize is a fascinating mix of people and customs. It’s the only country in Central America where English is spoken as the official language. Historically, though, Belize was the land of the Maya, as interesting a people as one is ever likely to come across. There are a few left, mostly in the south. There’s also a large population of mestizos who are of mixed Spanish and Mayan descent. Then there’s the Garifuna, descendants of escaped slaves from Africa, and finally there’s the ever-growing contingent of expatriates from the British Isles.

  The patter between the different groups is a lilting Creole. In linguistics this means much more than broken English. It’s true that when the first British arrived the local islanders picked up a few words of the new language in order to trade their goods. This is called a “pidgin” language and would have been merely a simplified, stilted version of English. The word pidgin is thought to be a Chinese bastardization of the English word business. And that’s exactly what it was used for: “You buy? Me be selling dis.”

  Creole, however, is something else. We have to go back to Noam Chomsky to understand it. Language, he said, is hardwired into the brain, and Creole languages are as neat a proof of that as one is likely to find. In Belize an amazing thing occurred. When the first trading encounters took place, while the wouldbe merchants were struggling with their broken pidgin, the children at their feet picked up something more.

  Languages emerge from children’s brains like butterflies from cocoons, and for the offspring of “pidgin” speakers something completely new developed quite naturally. It had all the grammatical finesse, all the embedded phrasing and past perfect tenses, all the conditionals and modal verbs, everything that exists in any proper language on the planet. Somehow their infant minds wired and spliced together a new language from stunted pidgin, and Creole was born. Today it’s no longer merely a broken approximation of English with a few Mayan or English words stuck into it; it’s a fully functioning language in its own right.

  I took a creaky bus up to Orange Walk in the north of Belize and from there, one early morning, went down the crocodile-infested New River with a Mayan guide unaccountably named Mario. He was short, barely coming up to my shoulders, but he was stocky and laughed so deeply that his whole body shook. Mario took me in a dugout canoe up the lazy brown river, stopping every few hundred metres to point out something in the water, turning off the thumping little outboard engine he’d rigged to the rear of the boat, and gliding for a moment in perfect silence. He pointed out the Jesus Christ birds hopping between lily pads and appearing, I suppose, as if they were actually prancing on water. Mario showed me spider monkeys and cormorants, and orchids and trees with roots that dripped off branches like melted wax.

  At one point in the rain forest canopy a great bird took off into the blue, and Mario whistled. “Jabiru,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A Jabiru stork. She’s the largest bird in the western hemisphere.” The stork had the wingspan of a small plane, and with a great whoompf it pulled itself above the treetops and was gone.

  The trip upriver took much of the day, but in the late afternoon the dugout canoe pulled into a widening in the river. A wooden dock stuck out from the bank of trees ahead. This was Lamanai, the ruins of a Mayan settlement deep in the jungle. The name itself is an ancient word that means “Submerged Crocodile.” The muddy water swirled around the boat as we pulled into the dock, and I did indeed spot a small crocodile sunning itself on the opposite bank.

  Lamanai is still a full-fledged archaeological site. In fact, I would be staying at the Lamanai Outpost Lodge with the very archaeologists working on the Mayan ruins here.

  The golden age of the Maya was from about 300 A.D. to maybe 900 A.D., though there are Preclassic cities much older, and in the Yucatán there are later ruins, remnants of a final phase that petered out completely with the arrival of the Spanish. By all accounts, in their Classic phase, the Maya were the most advanced civilization in the western hemisphere. They developed the only clearly defined writing system in the New World and created a fairly complex set of mathematical charts. The charts were used to predict eclipses of the sun and the moon accurately. The Maya also calculated the exact orbit of Venus with an error of only fourteen seconds per year and knew the planet was alternatively the morning and evening “star.”

  It’s believed that the Maya were the first society on the planet to employ the notion of zero in their mathematics, represented in their writing by the glyph of a seashell. That’s pretty good for a people who were basically still living in the Stone Age. The Maya never mined or used metals. Nor is there any indication they used the wheel for the transport of goods. Much of their writing and mathematical calculations were carved into solid rock. They were also unbelievably bloodthirsty, performing unspeakably cruel acts on prisoners they had captured from rival city states. So, I thought, here was an interesting culture. What kind of butterfly had emerged out of this cocoon? The Maya had absolutely no contact with the European world (or the Asian one, for that matter), yet they developed a highly sophisticated society with a writing system and a profound knowledge of mathematics. How did that happen? What exactly was their story?

  Out of the shade, the sun was blistering. The air was thick and musty, filled with the scent of ever-growing vines and tendrils. Mario took me through the jungle, pointing out spice leaves and a particular berry burned by the Maya fo
r incense. He crushed another leaf in his hand and held it up to me. It smelled exactly like root beer. Butterflies as big as my hand fluttered past us. Down one trail, Mario showed me a tall ceiba tree with smooth white bark. For the Maya the ceiba was sacred.

  “This tree,” Mario said, “we call Yaxche, or the World Tree. It stands at the centre of all things. For us, you see, there are five directions.”

  I paused for a moment because I could only think of four — north, south, east, and west. Mario was waiting for my question and chuckled even as I turned toward him in puzzlement. “And the fifth direction?” I asked.

  Mario pointed at the tree above us. “The fifth direction is vertical. Up and down. You see, the roots reach deep into the earth, down into the underworld, and then the ceiba’s trunk rises through our world into the sky. Did you know that the blossoms on this tree come out only in the evening? Small white flowers like stars.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and the branches of the tree … well, do you know the Milky Way?”

  “The Milky Way? The stars, you mean?”

  “Yes, the branches of the World Tree form the Milky Way. The underworld is the realm of death, but the sky is the place of creation. And that’s the most important thing. We Maya think a lot about creation and destruction.”

  I nodded. “I heard that the ancient Maya believed the world was created and destroyed four times.”

  “The ancient Maya?” Mario slapped his paunch merrily. “We’re not gone, my friend. Look at this fat belly. We haven’t gone anywhere. I’m still here. We’re all still here.”

  Trudging through the jungle trails, we eventually came into a clearing. In it sat a great stepped pyramid — typical of Mayan temple architecture. It was fronted with a steep stone staircase.To one side, over a stone carving, a thatch shelter had been set up by the archaeological team. The archaeologists weren’t working there at the moment, so we went in to look at the carving. Mario told me that it was a giant stone mask depicting Lord Smoking Shell, one of the ancient leaders of Lamanai. The Maya had great names like that, names the archaeologists have managed to transliterate from name glyphs. I glanced up at the huge stone face, noting the hooked nose, the arrogant sneer, but I couldn’t see any resemblance between it and Mario’s calm smile.

  Back out into the hissing sun, we clambered up the stairs of the temple. The stones were pocked with holes and the steps were littered with loose pebbles. The steps were ferociously steep, so we stayed on all fours, moving almost crablike to the top platform where the priests would have enacted their rituals.

  I gazed out over the jungle below. To the yellow south I spied the lagoon sparkling in the sun. It was too hot to stay up there long, so after breathing in the view for a while we climbed down to the shade of the jungle.

  Alongside another temple, farther in, was a strange valley of stone ledges. Mario sat on one of these and patted the space beside him, indicating I should join him. “Do you know what this place is?” he asked.

  I looked up at the slanting walls and narrow thoroughfare between them, then shook my head. It looked familiar, but I wasn’t quite sure.

  “This,” he said, spreading his arms expansively, “is the ball court.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “This one is largely symbolic. It’s too small for an actual game. Under the centre stone the archaeologists found a large amount of mercury, like silver water. It told them this was an important place.”

  “Is it true that the loser of a ball game was decapitated?”

  “Yes, sometimes. That was a great honour. How can I explain it? The ball court is more than just a ball court.”

  “It’s a metaphor?”

  “Sort of. It’s the entrance to the underworld, you see. It’s like a glass-bottomed boat over Xibalba — that’s the name for the underworld. Listen, I’ll tell you a story … Once upon a time, just after the third destruction, two boys were playing ball on a court much like this one. With all their yelling and running around, they disturbed the gods of Xibalba. The gods there, you must understand, are the gods of death. They’re the scary ones. Anyway, these gods were angry at being disturbed and dragged the boys down into Xibalba.”

  “Like Hell.”

  “Yes, a little bit like that. There were nine levels in Xibalba, and the boys were taken to the very bottom. It’s a long story, but these two boys had many adventures getting back to the top again. They played riddles with the gods, outsmarted them, and gradually returned to the surface, taking with them all the warriors who had been previously killed. In the end, these two boys — the Hero Twins, we call them — were raised into the sky. One became the sun and the other became the moon, and the many warriors they resurrected became the stars.”

  “But …” I paused, confused. “I thought the Maya understood astronomy. I mean —”

  “That’s your science, not ours. It’s true we were able to understand the movements of the skies to a great degree, but it wasn’t science as you understand it. We were trying to work out the cycles of creation and destruction. That’s all. We were trying to work out the great clock of the universe.”

  Mario and I plodded through more ruins. A dog followed us for a long time. It was friendly, though I wondered how it could bear the heat. On a stela, a standing stone marker, Mario showed me the number system. It was actually quite easy to read — a series of bars and dots.

  “Mayan mathematics,” Mario explained, “is almost completely taken up with the measurement of time. You could say we were quite obsessed with it. Have you seen the Mayan calendars?”

  I had. There were replicas in the shops in Belize City — fantastically complex charts, rows and rows of strange block glyphs.

  “It takes fifty-two years to run through a complete cycle,” Mario said. “The day you were born on, according to these calendars, is very important. It determines your life. Say you were born on seven Ahau.”

  “Seven Ahau?”

  “Yes, that’s the name for one of the days, one day in the fifty-two-year cycle. So, say you were born on that day. It determines everything about you — the name you receive, the day you’re married, everything. And these fifty-two-year cycles keep rotating over and over. This we call the Long Count.”

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “You can read our calendars and, still to this day, you can work it out. The start of the Long Count, in your calendar system, would be August 11, 3114 B.C.”

  “That’s pretty exact.”

  “We’re an exact people.”

  “Do you know the end of the Long Count?” I asked.

  “I do, yes.”

  “And?”

  “The Long Count will end in the year 2012.”

  “But that’s only a few years away.” I must have looked worried.

  “Yes, I know.” Mario became thoughtful. “It was all worked out more than a thousand years ago by the priests here. The priests were the mathematicians, the astronomers if you like. In your year 2012 there will be a planetary alignment and then … that’s it. That’s the end of the Long Count.”

  “So that’s the end of the world?”

  “That I don’t know,” Mario said, beginning to rise. “That I don’t know.”

  I flew out of Belize in a four-seater Cessna, a propeller plane that mosquitoed into the light blue sky and headed west into Guatemala. A world of unbroken greenery rolled beneath us. The Petén is a vast area, almost completely undeveloped, at the centre of the peninsula that squiggles between North and South America. This endless canopy of leaves and vines once held the very heart of the Mayan world. Deep in the jungle was the great city of Tikal.

  We landed on the shores of Lake Petén, and I was mobbed by taxi drivers. I ended up paying one of them an exorbitant $20 to take me to Tikal. The trip took about an hour on a thin road that sliced into the jungle deeper and deeper until we finally arrived at the lodge where I was staying. I dropped my bags in one of the lodge’s rooms, a cavernous concrete cube
with mosquito netting over a cot and a solitary flickering light bulb hanging from the ceiling, then set off to explore.

  A dirt path led from the lodge into the jungle. A little wooden shack stood beside the path. In it was a guard who was supposed to check that I had a pass for the archaeological site at Tikal. The guard was fast asleep, his chair leaning against the side of the shack. For all the many times I passed by, this guy was always sitting there, head lolling on his chest, gently snoozing.

  Just past his shack the jungle took over, and pathways led into the green tunnels of intense vegetation. I scrambled down one trail, wondering where it would take me. Through the deep foliage, here and there, I could just make out a collapsed wall, a line of stone in the tangle of vines and leaves. At a little clearing there was a structure not much bigger than a modern house. A tree had wrapped itself around the crumbling walls, its thick branches caressing and holding the stones. The doorway was a triangular archway, a corbelled vault, and I knew I was on the edge of Tikal.

  Tikal, more than a thousand years ago, was one of the most important Mayan city states, a sort of New World Rome or Paris. At least five major temple pyramids stand in the city centre. Spreading out from them are hundreds, if not thousands, of other buildings. Only something like 5 percent of Tikal has been excavated, and in the dense jungle, radiating for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, are mounds and crumbles still waiting to yield their stories.

  Sixty thousand people once lived here, which was hard to imagine now in the silence on the sun-dappled paths. The name Tikal comes from the Mayan word ti ak’al, or “at the water hole,” and it’s true that these people constructed great water reservoirs between the palaces and temples. No river flows through Tikal, so all the water in the reservoirs had to be supplied by rain. But that wouldn’t have lasted long. In no time the water would have burned off under the treacherous sun or bled into the porous limestone. The bedrock here is riddled with caves and wormholes. It’s the land of spirits, of Xibalba, the dark underworld.