by Ian Gibson
Walking through the mist helps to cool her off a bit—much to her relief—and the path leads her to a small tunnel through the monument’s body behind the waterfall. She comes out the other side and rounds the mountain again to see a hilly landscape that culminates in a distant mountain range. She’d stop to marvel at the view, but once she’s beyond the cool mist of the waterfall, the heat quickly sets back in, so she trudges along as quickly as she can manage on the steep slope of the footpath so she can return to the shaded side of the mountain. She peers upward to the sky overhead to try to catch any sign of that giant flying serpent, but she doesn’t see anything but the cottony whiteness of the clouds—she really hopes this trek is going to be worth all this trouble!
She then hears the distinct calls of a bird:
“Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!”
The calls are coming from underneath a cypress tree beside the footpath. Two birds with brown, mottled feathers are huddled on the ground in the shade. One bird is in a nest of twigs built on a carpet of dead leaves and is clucking angrily at the other next to it, who appears to be fanning its partner with a leaf, holding the stem in its tiny beak—or at least it was until it notices the girl passing by, at which point it flutters up to one of the branches in the cypress.
“A human!” the bird cries in shock, flapping its wings and dropping the leaf in its beak.
“Whip-poor-will you get back here!” clucks the other bird roosting in its ground nest.
“I whip-poor-will!” the bird responds embarrassedly, and flies to the ground after the leaf, but just as it lands on the ground to pick it up in its beak again, the leaf blows away in the breeze.
Itzel rushes after the leaf before it flies away, and shortly returns it to the little brown bird.
The bird flutters away fearfully as she approaches it.
“I won’t hurt you, little bird,” she says. “You dropped this.”
The bird tilts its head suspiciously at her for a while, then cautiously hops forward to take the leaf from her hand. “Thanks!” it says, but since it has to open its beak to express its gratitude, it drops the leaf again.
“Whip-poor-will you stop dropping the leaf and come fan me off some more!” the testy bird clucks at it from the nest while remaining comfortably in the shade. “The heat is unbearable!”
“I whip-poor-will!” the bird replies timidly.
Itzel guesses these birds are whippoorwills, judging from the fact that they keep announcing it over and over. She snatches the leaf before it blows away again. “Your friend is very demanding,” she whispers to the little whippoorwill as she kneels in front of it, holding the leaf in her hand again.
“She’s my wife,” the bird whispers. “She doesn’t take the heat at all well, so I have to fan her off all day.”
“Why don’t you build a nest somewhere that gets more shade than here?” Itzel suggests. Along the way she’s seen quite a few outcrops of rock and nooks in the mountainside that would be much more suitable to escape the heat.
“Believe me, I’ve thought of that myself many a time,” it says. “But this cypress tree has always been our home, so she built the nest underneath it. She refuses to move until she lays her eggs, but I keep telling her that’s never going to happen.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because we’re dead!” the whippoorwill answers succinctly.
“Oh, right.” Itzel had momentarily forgotten she’s in the land of the dead, now that the sky is bright, the trees are green, and the birds seem so very much alive. She feels a bit ashamed for asking. “I’m sorry, mister whippoorwill.”
The bird cocks its head at her again. “Sorry for what?”
“That you’re… dead.”
“It’s the Underworld—we’re all dead! No need to go around telling everyone that you’re sorry about it. We’ve gotten over it by now.”
“Whip-poor-will you come back here!” clucks the other bird.
“I whip-poor-will in just a moment, dear!” the bird responds as politely as it can while flapping its wings in a fluster.
“Then if you’re dead, why is your wife in a nest?” Itzel asks, thinking it a sensible question—she finds herself having to ask a lot of sensible questions here, in an attempt to understand a world that seems so nonsensical.
“You tell me!” the whippoorwill replies. “The dead can’t give life. Only the living and the gods can do that. But she thinks if she roosts long enough, an egg will appear eventually. Though as it’s already been hundreds of years, I don’t have my hopes very high.”
Itzel wonders if she somehow misheard. “Hundreds of years?”
The whippoorwill nods. “What can I say—time flies in the afterlife!”
She’s beginning to realise what the peccary meant when he told her the dead perceive time differently. “And you just fan her off all day long, every single day, for hundreds of years?”
“Yes,” the whippoorwill says exhaustedly. “And then she sends me off to forage for food during the night-day, when it’s cooler. I barely get a wink of sleep!”
She raises an eyebrow. “The night… day?” She vaguely remembers the howler monkey greeting her with a “Good night-day!”, but she was too worried about her poor eardrums at the time to ask what it meant by that.
“When the sky is red,” the bird says. “It’s neither night nor day, but too long to be called the twilight, so instead we call it the ‘night-day’. Do you not know about the night-day?”
“I’ve seen it.” She remembers the Sun when it was shining red like it would at twilight, except it was high in the sky, and despite how cryptically unsettling she found it to be, she finds herself slightly missing the “night-day” just because it was so much cooler then than it is now. “But I’m new here.”
“Whip-poor-will you come fan me off or not!” the bird’s wife clucks again impatiently.
The little whippoorwill sighs. “She’s always nagging me. ‘Whip-poor-will-you-do-this’! ‘Whip-poor-will-you-do-that’! And always I answer, ‘I whip-poor-will, I whip-poor-will’! The one time I said, ‘I whip-poor-won’t!’ she kicked me out of the shade!” It frowns with its little beak and laments, “Marriage was a lot easier when the heat didn’t make her so irritable.”
“I’m sorry, mister whippoorwill,” Itzel tells it sympathetically. If the days are always this hot, she can imagine that it can cause a lot of problems for everyone. She’s starting to doubt she’ll even be able to make it up the mountain at this rate.
“Thanks for the help! And try to stay out of the sunlight as much as you can, as you’ll suffer a heatstroke before long,” warns the whippoorwill, before taking the leaf from her hand and fluttering back to the shade under its cypress tree.
She sets off again, following the path as it spirals up and around the mountain, shortly returning to the shaded western side which provides some respite from the heat, but each time the path leads her back into the morning sunlight, the heat becomes all the more unbearable, and once she’s too high to feel the cool mist of the great waterfall, she simply can’t take it anymore. She doesn’t know how much farther she has to go because the cloud cover directly above shrouds the mountain summit, but she eventually decides to give up on the path entirely and starts climbing up the slope of the mountain—as at least she can stay in the shade this way—but it proves difficult to make much progress because it’s so steep. She picks up a stick and starts to use it as a walking stick, digging into the slope to pull herself along, and she finds that it helps her climb a little more easily, but the incline steepens the farther up she goes.
Once she climbs into the layer of clouds, it becomes difficult for her to see because it’s so misty around her, and the ground is damp and slippery, and not before long she loses her footing and swings her arms around in panic as she’s about to fall backward. A howler monkey appears on a tree branch before her, grabs her arm, and pulls her back to her feet just as she was about to take a nasty tumble. She smiles warmly at
it—it’s the second time a howler has come to her aid!
“Don’t give up! You’ve almost made it!” the howler screams at her as loud as it can—in typical howler monkey fashion—and its voice echoes through the valley that had until now been quiet ever since the tapir stomped away.
It’s the umpteenth time a howler has almost deafened her! She feels like her eardrums are bouncing around the sides of her head, and she’d have fallen backwards again were it not for the monkey’s firm grip on her arm. With her free hand she puts her finger to her lips, gesturing for it to be quiet.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” it yells, blowing her hair back with the force of its apology.
Itzel’s jaw clenches from the volume, and the howler looks very embarrassed for apologising so loudly.
“Do you need help, miss?” shouts another howler dangling above them.
The other howlers hush it with a scolding “Shhhh!”—although their hushing is about as loud as their howling.
Itzel looks up to find dozens of the howlers are hanging down the side of the mountain, each one gripping the other’s legs, as if to form a long ladder. The monkey at the bottom of the chain—the one who first screamed at her—points to the monkey-ladder to indicate that she can climb them the rest of the way.
Despite her ears still ringing, she’s taken aback by their kindness. “Thank you so much, howler monkeys,” she tells them, very softly, accompanying her words with the same gesture for them to be quiet, in case she falls back from the loudness of their response.
The monkeys quietly nod.
She grabs hold of the lowest monkey, and she starts climbing them, and they use any of their spare hands and feet to help her along as she does so. It’s still quite a long climb from here—and it’s a bit awkward climbing on a monkey-ladder—but she’d much prefer this than walking uphill in the hot Sun again. At last, she reaches the end of the footpath at the mountaintop and collapses to the ground, completely out of breath.
The howler monkeys had even been thoughtful enough to carry up her walking stick the same way they helped her up, and one of them presents the stick to her. “You dropped this, MISS!”
She winces, gnashes her teeth, and covers her ears. The howler monkey immediately realises its mistake and droops its head guiltily.
"Please, please, please, cover your mouths if all you can do is shout!" she pleads.
The other howlers climb to the top and, upon hearing her desperate plea, they all cover their mouths respectfully.
“You smell very nice!” one remarks, with its hand over its mouth to control its own volume. “I like your perfume!”
The other monkeys all nod in agreement. She bows her head and thanks them, then turns around to take in the view now that she’s at the summit. She’s above the clouds, and the sun shines so brightly she needs to shield her eyes from its glare, but she’s so high up that the air is cooler, and she no longer has to walk uphill, so she finds that the sunlight isn’t quite so overbearing now.
She passes a few sparse pine trees and comes upon a very long wooden trumpet mounted in the centre of the summit, curving slightly upward towards the sky. It looks dusty and old, like it hasn’t been used in a long time nor been taken care of. She rubs some of the dust off, and notices it’s hiding a faded painting along its length, so she gives it a few more rubs with the side of her arm. The painting looks like the winding body of a snake, and as she walks the length of it, she can see that the snake stretches from one end of the trumpet all the way to the other, with its tail at the mouthpiece and its mouth opening at the bell of the trumpet. She wonders if the trumpet was put on the mountain summit so people could use it to call the feathered serpent, but if it was, it doesn’t look like it’s been used this way in a very long time.
She then walks to the edge where the summit slopes sharply down the eastern side of the mountain, where she can hear the distant roar of the waterfall coming from directly below, but she can’t see it nor the mighty monument built into the mountainside through the blanket of clouds circling the summit, as if it were a rocky island in the middle of a great white sea. To her right she sees the familiar plumes of black smoke rising from the forest fires. Directly ahead she sees the vast lake, and yet more dark clouds, except these ones flash ominously with lightning and are rolling across the lake at quite a clip—she assumes it’s a thunderstorm.
Even the Underworld has thunderstorms?
It’s very far away, but she can see a slight red-orange glow in its clouds. She squints. Is that fire in the clouds? She’d have been thankful for some rain in this dreadful heat, but that storm looks like it’ll bring a lot more than just rain!
“I’ve heard of thunderstorms and even firestorms,” she thinks. “But never a thunder-and-firestorm!”
The longer she stares at it, the less she wants to stick around here for when it arrives. She turns around to the howler monkeys, who have been watching her every movement with a curious fascination. “I don’t see this feathered snake anywhere!” she says exasperatedly, dreading the thought that she hiked and climbed her way up this steep mountain for nothing. “Isn’t it supposed to be here?”
Just then, an enormous shadow creeps over her and engulfs the entire mountain summit. The howlers point to the sky behind her, and as she turns to what’s casting the shadow, she’s awestruck by what she sees—a giant flying serpent has breached the clouds like a leviathan swimming in a white sea, then swerves and swoops just overhead, slithering and curling through the blue sky, with a body covered in feathers—as vividly green as a quetzal’s—that shimmer in the sunlight. It flaps two birdlike wings at the top of its neck—although, seeing as it’s a snake, the neck is indistinguishable from the rest of its unfathomably long body, whose end she can’t see as it dips below the clouds. She thought the tapir god was big, but this snake looks so long that it could coil itself around the entire mountain from the base all the way to the very top and might still have enough body to spare.
“I’m supposed to talk to that?” she asks the howler monkeys gathered round behind her. She’s so small in comparison to the flying snake that trying to get its attention would be like a single leafcutter ant trying to get hers—she had only noticed the ants because there were so many, and even then, she was very close to stepping on them.
One of the monkeys kindly covers its mouth before speaking, as Itzel had asked of them, and responds, “King Kukulkan is the watchful Plumed Serpent—nothing that happens in Xibalba escapes his attention!”
She shouts to the snake god, waving her hands and jumping, but it’s swerved through the air in a wide arc so that its head is already so far away, and the gusts of wind from its flapping wings are so loud, that there’s simply no chance it’d be able to hear her. Despite what the howlers claim, this snake god doesn’t really seem to be paying any attention at all.
The howler monkeys scratch their heads.
“I thought that would work!” one shouts.
They all start howling into the sky to try to get Kukulkan’s attention, and though their collective howling is so loud that Itzel has to not only cover her ears, but also flee to seek cover behind a pine tree, the great and supposedly watchful feathered serpent still ignores them. When she peeks around the trunk and notices the old, dusty trumpet again, it occurs to her that she could try using that to get its attention—since she assumes that’s what it’s there for in the first place—so when the howler monkeys finally give up their howling, she rushes over to the mouthpiece of the trumpet and dusts it off.
“Have you used this before?” she asks the monkeys.
But the howlers seem baffled by the instrument.
“What is it?” one of them says.
“It looks like a trumpet to me,” Itzel responds.
The howler monkeys scratch their heads again.
“What’s a trumpet?” another asks.
Itzel realises that they’ve clearly never needed a trumpet before, considering how loud they can be without one, a
nd must have never been aware that the long, curved tube mounted on the mountaintop actually had a practical use. Once she’s dusted off the mouthpiece of the large trumpet, she puts her lips to it and blows. It blares a deep sound, like a didgeridoo, and she looks out into the sky with a hopeful smile, but to her frustration, the serpent continues flying away without any reaction whatsoever.
“What's the point of having this if he just ignores it too!" She turns to the monkeys, who are all looking at her with a combination of confusion and awe.
“Was that a… howl?” a monkey asks her. “We’ve never heard a howl like that before.”
“But it was very impressive! You’re the loudest human we’ve ever met!” another adds.
“Did you take lessons from a howler monkey?” says another howler, who seems convinced that she must have to be capable of such a feat.
"No,” Itzel says. “It’s a trumpet. It makes you louder if you blow into it. Please, could one of you try it?”
The howlers all exchange doubtful looks, but one daring monkey eventually steps forward from their group and inspects the mouthpiece with great curiosity.
"You just blow in here," she instructs it, pointing to the mouthpiece. The monkey draws a deep breath, but as it’s about to blow on it, she calls out, “Wait!” And she runs behind a pine tree much farther away than the last one she used for cover, and once she thinks she’s a safe enough distance—or at least hopes, as any farther and she’ll end up plummeting off the mountain—she gestures for it to continue.
