The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  The only reason we can read those books, in a bit of an ironic twist, is because of de Landa. Because he described how he burned all these Maya books in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, which he wrote when he got back to Spain. In this not-very-long book, he wrote down page after page explaining the Mayan calendar, and their cosmology of gods. And he also transcribed a Mayan alphabet.

  Why did he take the time to write down a whole calendar, and the stories of different gods, and a whole alphabet? Did he feel bad about burning all the books before? Who knows? Probably he intended to understand the Mayans in the hopes that knowledge of their wicked ways might be useful in converting them to Catholicism. As for the local Mayan man who taught him all this, it’s said that after he died and was buried de Landa had his bones scattered into the fields because he suspected him of backsliding into his old religion.

  As it turned out, nobody who was trying to read the mysterious Mayan writing could use de Landa’s alphabet anyway, not for a long time. His Relación got filed away someplace, and everybody forgot about it for three hundred years.

  That was just when people started getting curious. In 1822, a thirty-two-year-old French hypergenius named Jean-François Champollion announced he could read the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians. He had the advantage of the Rosetta Stone, hauled from Egypt by Napoleon’s invading troops. Carved into the Rosetta Stone was the same inscription written in three languages: ancient Greek; Demotic, or medium ancient Egyptian; and Egyptian hieroglyphics. With this clue, Champollion worked his way to deciphering hieroglyphics.

  Champollion’s discovery blew the minds of every intellectually interested person anywhere in Europe or in the United States. It was like Oh, wow, this brilliant weirdo figured out how to read writing from four thousand years ago, which is Bible times, basically.

  People truly lost their marbles over this reading the writing of the ancients. Some of them turned their attention to the hieroglyphics of the Maya, and lost their marbles over that.

  But the first amateurs and scholars to try Mayan hieroglyphics had nothing like the Rosetta Stone. They didn’t even have de Landa’s alphabet, lost in the library. Instead, they followed their wild imagination.

  For example, Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough. He put two and two together—pyramids, hieroglyphs—and came to the obvious conclusion that the Yucatán must’ve been settled by the ancient Israelites. Since he had a comfortable family fortune, Kingsborough spent an enormous chunk of money publishing Antiquities of Mexico: Comprising Fac-similes of Ancient Mexican Paintings and Hieroglyphics, Preserved in the Royal Libraries of Paris, Berlin and Dresden, in the Imperial Library of Vienna, in the Vatican Library; in the Borgian Museum at Rome; in the Library of the Institute at Bologna; and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Together with the Monuments of New Spain, by M. Dupaix: With Their Respective Scales of Measurement and Accompanying Descriptions. The Whole Illustrated by Many Valuable Inedited Manuscripts, by Augustine Aglio.

  Nine volumes. Two of the Big Three codices plus a bunch of Aztec and Mixtec writings or at least detailed illuminations. This is a serious book. A copy weighs something like thirty pounds.

  Demand for it was not off the charts. Also it was insanely expensive to print. There were only nine copies ever, but that was enough to put a dent in any family’s finances.

  On top of that, it turns out Kingsborough didn’t actually have the family fortune he thought he did. For sure he didn’t have it after what he blew publishing his thirty-pound book. He died in Sheriffs’ Prison in Dublin. On the plus side, he got a Nahuatl codex named after himself.

  How Mayan glyphs were decoded is a great story. A bunch of wacky geniuses take on the world’s hardest crossword puzzle, where the clues are hidden in the jungle might be the logline. There’re excellent twists, unlikely heroes. Nineteenth-century pornographers, amateur scientists, expeditions, the surprising impact of a new fad for chewing gum, adventure in the creepy-crawly ruins, and mysterious deaths and mind-blowing leaps made in dusty libraries by maniacs—all played a role in translating Mayan.

  Take, for example, de Landa’s alphabet. It was rediscovered in the Royal Library in Madrid in the 1860s by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who was convinced of his own theory: that the Maya came from the lost continent of Atlantis. Most scholars now do not agree with this idea.

  De Landa’s alphabet is pretty simple: For every letter of the Spanish alphabet, he wrote down the corresponding letter or glyph in the Mayan alphabet. Simple, right? Except: Mayan writing doesn’t have twenty-six letters. It has, I dunno, three to five hundred?

  So what the hell had de Landa recorded? What use can be made of it? For years, students of Mayan were lost in baffled, confused argument that led them nowhere.

  Whether Yuri Knorosov really did find a rare reproduction of the three existing Mayan codices in the burning ruins of the National Library of Berlin as the Red Army invaded in April 1945, I can’t say. Somehow, this legend emerged. One way or another, he’d gotten his hands on reproductions of Mayan writing, and he set himself to work trying to read the hieroglyphics.

  Knorosov (please, do yourself a favor and Google up a picture of him, the one with him holding his cat) probably figured reading this centuries-old language from another hemisphere, of which only three books existed, wouldn’t be too hard. He already knew Russian and Chinese and Arabic, Egyptian hieroglyphics obviously, probably Uzbek, and he’d been messing around with ancient Indian scripts. Why not crack Mayan? So, first, he taught himself Spanish and read de Landa.

  Knorosov suggested that maybe what happened was a Mayan scribe wrote down for de Landa the Mayan glyphs that sounded like the sounds de Landa said. Like de Landa would say “bay” (Spanish b) and the Mayan guy would write down whatever sounded the most like that in his system. Some of the glyphs might be whole words, and some of them might be pieces of words.

  That wasn’t much, but it was a start. Knorosov and other geniuses started to crack Mayan down, breaking it into its smallest pieces, sorting it out, squabbling with each other in articles and journals and letters and sometimes in person. Meanwhile, in the jungles of Central America, new sites were discovered, with new hieroglyphs carved into stone, giving new clues, adding new riddles.

  It seems surprising how long a time it took for it to dawn on anyone that maybe the languages the people spoke in the highlands of Guatemala and the Yucatán might have something to do with this writing. This wasn’t Knorosov’s fault. He was stuck in the library in Moscow, rarely allowed to leave. But in tiny increments, Mayan writing started to crack.

  The story of how they broke it open is excellently told in Michael D. Coe’s book Breaking the Maya Code. I recommend this one. Michael D. Coe is so gentlemanly and enthusiastic, careful to include you in his clear excitement over decipherment. Best of all, Coe is opinionated. He writes with feeling. He knew half the people involved, and he’s always trying to be fair to them while also admitting that most of them were, in one way or another, bonkers. His book has a few tricky passages about things like “preferred” transitive sentence order, whether verb-object-subject or subject-verb-object and so on. It’s not easy to describe the rules of one language in another language. But that just reminds you how hard it must’ve been to work some meaning out of these symbols. Coe’s a kind of intellectual hero, in my opinion, not just for his work on this project but also for trying to tell the story of how it all happened.

  I read the book twice I enjoyed it so much. But I must confess to you, Reader, that despite that, I myself cannot read Mayan.

  This is a shame, especially as I’m pretty sure I’m above-average interested in ancient and bizarre languages. If I’m not gonna read Mayan, who is? Well, luckily, the answer is “some people.” They’re at work on it even as we speak, and what they discover is amazing.

  Guatemala Pam in the Lacandon Jungle

  In the jungle or the forest northe
ast of the ruins of Palenque, there’s a stream, and along the stream is a ruin that’s called the Queen’s Bath. Whether this was truly some kind of stone bathhouse for the royal elite, I don’t know. Archaeological fights get shockingly intense—I’m staying out of it. All I know is, there’s this ruin by the stream, and it’s out a ways from the ruins of the main squares of the city. If you go there first thing in the morning, you can be the only person around.

  In the forest around the edges of the former city, there are ruins that might have been something like apartments. Whether they were more like a slum or a royal guesthouse is the kind of thing archaeologists spend years of their careers digging in the heat trying to work out. Is it any wonder that once, exhausted, they make a guess, they spend the rest of their careers quarreling at conferences with anyone who disagrees?

  At the edge of the forest, there’s grass. Whether it’s some local grass, or what, I don’t know, but it looks almost like you’re stepping onto a golf course. I can’t imagine that Palenque ever looked like that in its heyday. I bet in fact in the year AD 700, all this was earth pounded hard by thousands of people.

  Either way, then or now, there are buildings that tower over you. One is pretty much exactly that, a tower. Perhaps it was used by astrologers, maybe it was a royal penthouse. The Mayans were very into the movement of objects in the sky, that is undisputed. Michael Coe tells us that astronomers in the Mayan city of Copán worked out the lunar cycle so exactly that their estimate is .33 seconds off ours. The tower is four stories tall and has a simple, pleasing style like a pagoda. It’s part of a complex called the palace, but maybe it was something more like a university or an academy or the Vatican.

  Across the grass, there are also staggered pyramids and temples. Whether the pyramids were sometimes tombs as well was a very explosive argument for a while in Mayan studies. Now we know they were both, because dead kings were found buried in chambers inside them.

  The most amazing tomb, found in the Temple of the Inscriptions, is the tomb of Pakal, or K’inich Janaab’ Pakal. Lord Shield. Undisputed, all-time greatest ruler of Palenque. Hard even to compare him to anybody. People just don’t dominate the way he did. He practically built Palenque, or bossed the slaves and crews who did, and he ruled until he was eighty (probably). Whether this is really his grave or not is another fight. There’s some concern about dating the age of the teeth in the skeleton—they seem like the teeth of a younger man. You can poke your head into the shaft where Lord Shield or Not Lord Shield was put down and from where he was removed 1,270 years later.

  The carved lid of Pakal’s tomb is an incredible, trippy work of art. It is hard not to look at it and at least consider the possibility that Pakal is flying a rocket ship. A German hotel manager slash petty criminal named Erich von Däniken claimed in his book Chariots of the Gods? that this is exactly what was happening. This book was wildly popular after it came out in 1968. Whether or not Erich von Däniken was just a talented con artist, and yes, that’s definitely what he was, he fired up a lot of people about all kinds of ancient sites in Central and South America. Sometime in my boyhood I got my hands on a copy and read it in shocked amazement that these secrets had been kept from me.

  I myself no longer believe visits from space aliens were a part of Mayan development. The thing is, there’s no need to add weirdness to the mysteries of the Maya to make them any more interesting. Whatever they were up to is plenty baffling on its own. Take the ball court. Palenque has one. Most Mayan cities do. We know the Mayans played some kind of ball game with a rubber ball. It seems like you couldn’t hit the ball with your hands. Oh, and also the losers or possibly the winners were human sacrificed.

  One theory says that if you got captured by the warriors of Palenque, you might end up being forced to play Ball Game against the hometown heroes, and if you lost, you’d get your heart cut out, etc., on top of one of the nearby temples. Very doubtful your captors spent too much time, either, answering your questions about the rules or letting you practice.

  There’s all this stuff to examine and ponder at Palenque. An enriching experience, surely, to ponder Palenque. But you’re in the jungle: By ten a.m. or so, it was unpleasantly hot. There was only so much pondering I could do.

  Luckily, I’d set up base at a wonderful magical place, just down the road from the ruins, called Mayabell, where there’s a clearing in the forest, with a campground and some cottages. A few trailers belonging to benevolent-seeming wanderers from all over the continent and beyond were parked there. There’s an abandoned pool, drained for it looked like a long time, but that didn’t stop me from sitting by it. In the early evening you could hear what you’d swear is the loudest animal howl you’ve ever heard. If you’re me, you’ll assume it’s a jaguar until someone explains to you it’s a howler monkey. You’ll try to act real casual about thinking it was a jaguar and wondering about jaguar procedures.

  The howler monkeys came down to the edge of the pool while I was there, a rare occurrence, I’m told. Perhaps they came because I’m well-known in monkey communities for my friendliness.

  At Mayabell, there’s a bar with a thatched roof, and plenty of people drink at it. There’s a restaurant, where your food might take an hour or more from the point at which they remember you ordered it, but it’s pretty good.

  If you are interested in the kinds of women and men who travel alone and sit at the end of the day and write in little notebooks, you will find them here.

  That’s how I met Guatemala Pam.

  It was around noon, just when I was considering that my goal of observing and studying Palenque might best be served if I stayed right here, at the bar, all afternoon, and rather than exert myself physically, in the sweaty heat, perhaps I could reflect on the glories of the lost civilization while transporting myself to a mystical open state by drinking five or so beers.

  When I saw her, Guatemala Pam was being held captive by a shirtless French hippie.

  Conversationally, anyway. He was across from her at her table and holding forth unbroken on traditional hippie themes like Fukushima radiation, the extraterrestrial origin of magic mushrooms, and how his body was made of healthy protein.

  I’d seen her the day before, actually, at Agua Azul, a small Asian girl in a ridiculous sun hat, chattering in an unembarrassed and giggly American voice to two Israeli guys. At the time, I’d been jealous of their situation, young people having fun while I was stuck with the imperious Spanish woman and my middle-aged, heat-wilted van mates.

  Now here she was, and she seemed to have no idea how to get out of her present situation. She was pinned. The shirtless Frenchman was complaining disingenuously about the “ceremony” he was supposed to attend that night, and how he hates when ceremonies go on too long, and how the combinations of various hallucinogens don’t affect him in negative ways as they do less-evolved people stifled by their pathetic societal hang-ups. Pam was responding with politeness, as if for instance she was talking to one of her mother’s friends she’d run into at the grocery store.

  The shirtless Frenchman showed no sign of relenting. In fact, he was making himself more and more comfortable contorting his body into yoga poses of (I suspect) his own invention while looking at Pam as if to suggest, “Oh, do my lithe and sinewy limbs impress you? I forget so easily the laws of this crude physical plane, that of course my stretched proteins are alluring to you.”

  She was helpless. I could never forgive myself if I let this go on, or worse yet, walked away. It was clear the honorable thing was to fall on a hippie-babble grenade and rescue her. With a pull on my beer for courage, I got up, walked over, introduced myself, asked if I hadn’t seen her the day before, and sat down.

  If you travel, sooner or later you will talk to a hippie. Be prepared, know how to handle it. When you talk to a hippie, you must practice judo. Agree with everything they say. Even suggest they’re not going far enough. This defeats them. For example, whe
n the shirtless French hippie says that the world’s leaders held a secret conference at which they agreed to suppress the fact that all vegetables and milk on Earth have become hopelessly irradiated, look back with slight confusion, as if you don’t want to be rude, but you’re not sure why you’re being told something so well-known if not obvious.

  Like all male hippies, the shirtless Frenchman’s prattle was just poor and obvious cover for his actual goal: to pleasure himself sexually. On Pam’s body in this case. Now that I was there, this had become a more difficult puzzle, a problem beyond his mushroom-addled calculation ability. So, huffily, he declared, “This isn’t the real Mexico.”

  He stared at me as if daring me to disagree. They’re all the real Mexico, dumbass was what I thought. Instead of saying it, though, I just stared back at him with doubled condescension.

  “That’s why I’m thinking of going back to India,” he said. The ultimate card for any hippie to play. Now his hand was empty.

  “Well,” he said. He got up and retreated to his tent, leaving me and Pam alone there. For the next three days, we traveled together.

  I was surprised when I learned, later, that Pam was thirty. She had a precocious-child quality, like a girl detective in a chapter book. She was plucky and relentless but oddly innocent. She laughed loudly at unpredictable times, which was very jarring, especially because she never laughed at the many hilarious jokes I made. Those seemed to baffle her. We were a pretty odd pair, but she was fascinating.

  Her story was crazy. Her parents were Korean immigrants who ran a store in Wisconsin. She’d gotten a master’s degree in marine biology but burned out on it. At random she’d picked New Orleans as a city to move to, a crazy choice because she was morally upright and didn’t drink. She worked as a waitress in a restaurant where (she said this as if I, too, would be shocked) all her coworkers were doing drugs and sleeping with each other. The amazing part of her story was that because her mother would consider it a disgrace for her to be a waitress, she had constructed an elaborate lie that she worked as a researcher for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. She had invented an impressive and supportive boss, filled a whole imaginary office with fictional colleagues, and described large-scale, well-funded, made-up research projects. Whenever she got enough money together, she took a trip, traveling rough for a few dollars a day in pretty out-there places, while telling her mother she was on research trips under the careful supervision of her made-up bosses. In December she’d spent a month in Nicaragua, for example. She described this as a majestic adventure, though the actual facts of it, once stripped of her gloss, sounded a bit grim. In her tale of her magical Christmas, for instance, the basic story was that some impoverished children took pity on her.