| General Non-Fiction posted January 8, 2017 | Chapters: |
...6 7 -8- 9... 
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Tikal - the realm of Lord Chocolate
A chapter in the book A Tale of Yucatan
A Tale of Yucatan - Part 8
by tfawcus
| Background A turn-of-the-century travelogue. 19 days on the Yucatan Peninsula. |
Tikal conceals layers of history. Its fortunes waxed and waned under a succession of rulers between 700 BC and 700AD, sometimes rising on the tide of fortune, sometimes sinking in the ebb and flow of internecine strife. The spectacular ruins which stand there now date mainly from around 700AD when, as the guidebook says, a renaissance occurred. A new and powerful king, glorying in the name Ah Cacau [Lord Chocolate], ascended the throne, restoring not only the military strength of the city but also its primacy as the most resplendent city in the Mayan world.
Most of the ruins there today date from that time. Awe-inspiring temples rise up, between one and two hundred feet from the jungle floor; steep, square structures aligned with passage of the sun and precisely measured to carry the echo of voices and music effortlessly over the space between them. Some effort of the imagination is required to see them as they might have been; painted according to a complex code in which white, yellow, red and black signified north, south, east and west, the four cardinal compass points; reverberating with of the sound of music; alive with the splendour of ceremonial head dress, jaguar and quetzal masks and flowing robes.
Today the jungle has reclaimed them, stripped them back to grey, decked them with vines and creepers and made their crevices home to small exotic birds. Way back on the far side of the complex we reach what is unromantically classified as Temple IV, the mightiest structure of them all, soaring two hundred feet towards the sky. From the base it looks like a small, steep hill. It is possible to clamber up, sometimes holding onto tree roots, sometimes assisted by small sections of ladder until reaching the stone steps up to the roof comb.
The view from the top is spectacular, miles in every direction across a jungle canopy draped in swirling mists. Black vultures wheel and soar over the tops of other buildings which rise up out of the ancient city complex. Below, like ants, other tourists climb, pausing both for breath and to photograph and feed a cheeky cousin of the raccoon, named quatromundi by our guide. On our way back he stops to show us the fruit of the breadnut tree, small and green. He peels off the outer pith to expose a nut about the size of a kidney bean. These, he says, were roasted and stored by the ancient Mayans, then pounded up to make a flour for cooking, much more nutritious than wheat or corn. Granaries full of them were uncovered during the archaeological digs.
We finish our tour at the Great Plaza, where Temple I, the Temple of the Grand Jaguar, stands facing Temple II, its twin, 100 yards across the plaza. We arrive there at the approach of a tropical storm. The sky behind the Temple of the Grand Jaguar blackens as a solitary black vulture settles on its top, flapping his ungainly wings. An unearthly stillness fills the air and for a moment we feel the mystic power of this ancient place as time stands still. Then suddenly the magic is broken. The sky is split by jagged lightning forks. Thunder rumbles, echoing and re-echoing around the ruins, and the rains begin as we scurry back to the shelter of our minibus.
We have until mid-afternoon the following day before our onward flight to Guatemala City. In the morning we walk just a few hundred yards to cross the narrow causeway from Santa Elena to Flores, a town of some 2000 inhabitants built on an island at the western end of Lago de Petén Itzá. Women sit at the edge of the lake, pounding their washing on a stone. Nearby a solitary youth has carefully stripped to his underpants to do his washing. As each item is cleaned he wrings it out and puts it back on again. Within half an hour he will be dry. Further down the causeway a young boy sits cross-legged in the water, chasing minnows with his hands, a red plastic bucket beside him, just in case.
We breakfast in the company of a small black puppy in a restaurant overlooking the lake. He is clearly glad of the company and to attract our attention he growls playfully and attacks trouser legs, handbags, shoelaces and anything else that we are careless enough to leave at his level. Before long the meal arrives; scrambled eggs, black bean mush and fried bananas. Yum!
The rest of the morning we browse around the town. I buy a little wooden armadillo for Anna in the giftshop attached to the museum. It is the one on the shelf with a strange almost quizzical expression on its face which sets it apart from its fellows. I’m not your ordinary run-of-the-mill armadillo it seems to say. I’m different. It reminds me of the story of Painted Jaguar and the Beginning of the Armadillos.
‘Can’t curl, but can swim -
Slow-Solid, that’s him!
Curls up, but can’t swim -
Stickly-Prickly, that’s him!’
But the tortoise learns to curl and the hedgehog learns to swim, they share the hedgehog’s prickles and confuse Painted Jaguar most dreadfully.
‘But it isn’t a Hedgehog, and it isn’t a Tortoise. It’s a little bit of both, and I don’t know its proper name,’
‘Nonsense!’ said Mother Jaguar. ‘Everything has its proper name. I should call it “Armadillo” till I found out the real one. And I should leave it alone.’
We go to the post office in the town square to buy stamps and post some cards. It is a wooden desk in a room otherwise full of piles of rock and mosaic from the Tikal ruins. A young girl takes the cards, carefully sticks two huge stamps on each, rummages around in the desk drawer to find a small machine to hand frank them and then tosses the cards into a hessian sack on the floor. What marvels of modern science, we wonder, will speed them on their way from there, across two continents and an ocean?
The view from the town square is stunning, across tiled rooftops to the whitewashed bell-tower of the church. Then to the lake beyond, palm-thatched huts on its shores, fishermen in dug-out canoes silhouetted against the sun and larger passenger boats with white canopies plying their trade from shore to shore, all reflected in stipple and shimmer, sun dance brushstrokes on the water.
We, too, must be on our way. Tourist butterflies in this timeless land.
Most of the ruins there today date from that time. Awe-inspiring temples rise up, between one and two hundred feet from the jungle floor; steep, square structures aligned with passage of the sun and precisely measured to carry the echo of voices and music effortlessly over the space between them. Some effort of the imagination is required to see them as they might have been; painted according to a complex code in which white, yellow, red and black signified north, south, east and west, the four cardinal compass points; reverberating with of the sound of music; alive with the splendour of ceremonial head dress, jaguar and quetzal masks and flowing robes.
Today the jungle has reclaimed them, stripped them back to grey, decked them with vines and creepers and made their crevices home to small exotic birds. Way back on the far side of the complex we reach what is unromantically classified as Temple IV, the mightiest structure of them all, soaring two hundred feet towards the sky. From the base it looks like a small, steep hill. It is possible to clamber up, sometimes holding onto tree roots, sometimes assisted by small sections of ladder until reaching the stone steps up to the roof comb.
The view from the top is spectacular, miles in every direction across a jungle canopy draped in swirling mists. Black vultures wheel and soar over the tops of other buildings which rise up out of the ancient city complex. Below, like ants, other tourists climb, pausing both for breath and to photograph and feed a cheeky cousin of the raccoon, named quatromundi by our guide. On our way back he stops to show us the fruit of the breadnut tree, small and green. He peels off the outer pith to expose a nut about the size of a kidney bean. These, he says, were roasted and stored by the ancient Mayans, then pounded up to make a flour for cooking, much more nutritious than wheat or corn. Granaries full of them were uncovered during the archaeological digs.
We finish our tour at the Great Plaza, where Temple I, the Temple of the Grand Jaguar, stands facing Temple II, its twin, 100 yards across the plaza. We arrive there at the approach of a tropical storm. The sky behind the Temple of the Grand Jaguar blackens as a solitary black vulture settles on its top, flapping his ungainly wings. An unearthly stillness fills the air and for a moment we feel the mystic power of this ancient place as time stands still. Then suddenly the magic is broken. The sky is split by jagged lightning forks. Thunder rumbles, echoing and re-echoing around the ruins, and the rains begin as we scurry back to the shelter of our minibus.
We have until mid-afternoon the following day before our onward flight to Guatemala City. In the morning we walk just a few hundred yards to cross the narrow causeway from Santa Elena to Flores, a town of some 2000 inhabitants built on an island at the western end of Lago de Petén Itzá. Women sit at the edge of the lake, pounding their washing on a stone. Nearby a solitary youth has carefully stripped to his underpants to do his washing. As each item is cleaned he wrings it out and puts it back on again. Within half an hour he will be dry. Further down the causeway a young boy sits cross-legged in the water, chasing minnows with his hands, a red plastic bucket beside him, just in case.
We breakfast in the company of a small black puppy in a restaurant overlooking the lake. He is clearly glad of the company and to attract our attention he growls playfully and attacks trouser legs, handbags, shoelaces and anything else that we are careless enough to leave at his level. Before long the meal arrives; scrambled eggs, black bean mush and fried bananas. Yum!
The rest of the morning we browse around the town. I buy a little wooden armadillo for Anna in the giftshop attached to the museum. It is the one on the shelf with a strange almost quizzical expression on its face which sets it apart from its fellows. I’m not your ordinary run-of-the-mill armadillo it seems to say. I’m different. It reminds me of the story of Painted Jaguar and the Beginning of the Armadillos.
‘Can’t curl, but can swim -
Slow-Solid, that’s him!
Curls up, but can’t swim -
Stickly-Prickly, that’s him!’
But the tortoise learns to curl and the hedgehog learns to swim, they share the hedgehog’s prickles and confuse Painted Jaguar most dreadfully.
‘But it isn’t a Hedgehog, and it isn’t a Tortoise. It’s a little bit of both, and I don’t know its proper name,’
‘Nonsense!’ said Mother Jaguar. ‘Everything has its proper name. I should call it “Armadillo” till I found out the real one. And I should leave it alone.’
We go to the post office in the town square to buy stamps and post some cards. It is a wooden desk in a room otherwise full of piles of rock and mosaic from the Tikal ruins. A young girl takes the cards, carefully sticks two huge stamps on each, rummages around in the desk drawer to find a small machine to hand frank them and then tosses the cards into a hessian sack on the floor. What marvels of modern science, we wonder, will speed them on their way from there, across two continents and an ocean?
The view from the town square is stunning, across tiled rooftops to the whitewashed bell-tower of the church. Then to the lake beyond, palm-thatched huts on its shores, fishermen in dug-out canoes silhouetted against the sun and larger passenger boats with white canopies plying their trade from shore to shore, all reflected in stipple and shimmer, sun dance brushstrokes on the water.
We, too, must be on our way. Tourist butterflies in this timeless land.
 Recognized |
Quotations are from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories
The next stage of our journey takes us to Guatemala City and thence to Antigua, more properly called the most Noble and Loyal City of St James of the Knights of Guatemala, a most remarkable place and one of the highlights of our adventure.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. The next stage of our journey takes us to Guatemala City and thence to Antigua, more properly called the most Noble and Loyal City of St James of the Knights of Guatemala, a most remarkable place and one of the highlights of our adventure.
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