The Snake

by J A Kellman

  He hadn’t said anything about his wheelchair, so when the small party of academics rounded the end of the front desk, Ochoa was stunned. He’d known the group was comprised of retired scholars, but the frail man in the wheelchair with a red and purple blanket over his knees and two older women carrying bulging backpacks as they pushed his chair destroyed Ochoa’s careful plans.

  How the hell are we going to get from the hotel to Tikal? Ochoa thought. How was Velasco going to stand up to the heat, the rough ride over grass, the hours of sun and humidity? And how were the women going to hold up hauling backpacks and pushing Velasco? Or, if he were the one shoving the chair, how was he going to give a tour, answer questions, think, while wrestling the thing over rough ground? He was in shape, but dealing with Luis and his equipment would be miserable. He’d had a wheelchair visitor in the past—a young man with upper arms like hams and a huge companion who could propel him over the worst terrain. That situation worked. But this was different. The professor was in no state to help with the process, or endure the jolting over an archaeological site for hours on end. The women were in no shape to play mule, either. He needed to find an alternative to the chair. Fast.

  “My name’s Ochoa, Miguel Ochoa,” Ochoa said as he rose from his chair. “I’m your guide in Tikal. I’ve read your request and have a general idea of why you’re here, but we need to consider transportation before we begin our tour.” Brushing his silver streaked hair from his forehead, Ochoa plunged on. “I have concerns about the wheelchair. The terrain is rough. Even though it’s covered with grass, it isn’t lawn. One of the guides has a pony and a special saddle. He’s gentle. Kids play with him all the time, and the saddle was made for people with disabilities. If you’re okay with riding, Professor, I’ll ask if we can borrow him during your visit.”

  Luis nodded. “I should have said something before we came; I didn’t think. But I’ve been worrying about mobility since we left home. A pony can’t be worse than my chair. I’m afraid none of us is going to live till the end of the week if we have to struggle with it in the heat.”

  Ochoa activated his radio. “Jaime. Miguel…Fine. You? I need to borrow Poncho for a couple of days. Professor Velasco is in a wheelchair. He isn’t going to be able to use it on site. We’re at the hotel. Could you have someone bring Poncho with his adaptive saddle? Good. How long will that take? Half hour? Fine. Believe me, we aren’t going anywhere.” Ochoa clipped his radio back on his belt. “Jamie got that saddle and pony when his daughter wanted to ride. She was born with cerebral palsy, and Poncho and the saddle made a world of difference for her. Poncho has come in handy with other people over the years, too.”

  While we waited for the pony, Luis shared our story with Miguel—Ruston’s life in Big Grove, the pile of images of the stele, Polop’s disappearance, Luis’s mounting sense that something was enormously wrong. He didn’t mention the vulture pectoral.

  “We’re all interested in related things—the library, the museum, the stele, the place where Ruston died. We’d known Ruston for years. His death was a shock. Seeing the place where he died might help us lay it to rest,” Zoila said.

  “We can go to Temple Four first, visit the spot where I found Ruston. After that we can explore the most recent discovery in the park—a second stele behind Temple Four near where Ruston found the first one. Then we’ll stop for lunch. You can spend the afternoon in the museum and library, if that suits you. It would give you time to do some research and see some of Tikal’s other treasures. Make sense?” Ochoa looked at us each in turn.

  “A second stele! I can’t believe you found another one so soon,” Luis said. “I can’t wait to see how it compares with the first.”

  Ochoa grunted. “It’s in one piece, too. That’s the most amazing part. At the bottom, where the other stele is broken, there’s a vulture hovering in a cloud of incense over a seated lord—presumably K’in A’jaw, the lord mentioned on the first stele.”

  “A vulture with a lord!” I said. “Amazing!”

  Half an hour later, Jaime’s nephew appeared at the edge of the porch with a tiny pony. “This is Poncho,” the boy said, patting the pony’s neck. The pony snorted. A bay with dark mane and tail and huge brown eyes, Poncho had a saddle which looked like a chair with arms and a seatbelt, and the air of an animal that knew his business.

  “We better get started,” Ochoa said after we all patted the pony’s neck, “before it’s too hot.” As the nephew held the lead, we lifted Luis onto Poncho’s back. It was surprisingly easy once we got his leg over the saddle. “Is that okay?” Ochoa asked, tightening the seatbelt, strapping the walker behind the saddle. Nodding, Luis settled in. Giving the pony a final pat, the boy, fifty quetzals richer, headed to the museum with the rattling, bucking chair.

  Ochoa took the pony’s lead and, with Poncho walking sedately behind, started west toward the main plaza and Temple I and II. Temple IV lay beyond, through the dark passage between the gray bulk of Temple II and the 230-foot wall of the Terrace with the North Acropolis behind it. Zoila and I trailed.

  I’d forgotten the size of the structures and the vastness of Tikal. Its central area is staggering—sprawling, incomprehensible, alien, the scale of buildings daunting. The temple stairs were meant for giants—the steps reach one’s knees, their precipitous angle make climbing difficult. What would it have been like to be a Mayan priest, or worse, a captive struggling from step to step in the jungle sun?

  Tikal is ancient. By 600 BCE it had begun to rise from the jungle; by 200 CE it had grown to a city of twenty thousand; between 250 CE and 800 CE, it may have had as many as eighty-thousand inhabitants. It was a trading hub, a ritual and administrative center, a place of palaces and temples, and beyond the edge of the city, thatched houses and farm fields. It had been beautiful, too, bright with fresh plaster and paint on every surface, temple facades rich with multicolored reliefs of gods and animals. Pierced roof combs, many-hued tributes to gods or rulers, crowned the temples and towered over the plazas and ballcourts. Roads and causeways covered with lime plaster led into the jungle toward distant temples and far off communities. It had been intended to overwhelm when it was built. It still did, even as the jungle took it over and most of its buildings crumbled, disappearing under the encroaching vegetation.

  “We’ll pass Temple Three on the Tozzer Causeway,” Ochoa said over his shoulder, pulling me out of my musings. “Next will be the Bat Palace, then Temple Four. Everything we want to explore is behind, or beyond Temple IV in the undergrowth.”

  Poncho snorted, swished his tail at bothersome flies.

  “This isn’t bad,” Luis said, patting Poncho on the neck. “I always wanted to be a charro when I was a kid. My friends thought I was nuts. A Mayan charro.”

  Poncho snorted again.

  “I’d love a picture of this,” Zoila said. “Luis, Poncho, Miguel, the two of us sweating behind. Research at its most stimulating.”

  The Tozzer Causeway became Maudslay Causeway in front of Temple IV and headed northeast. We turned south, skirting the bulk of Temple IV to reach the tangle of plants and trees beyond.

  “Temple Four is probably the largest aboriginal structure in the New World,” Ochoa said. “Like the rest of Tikal, its two-hundred-twelve-foot height was meant to overpower, to make clear the importance of Yi’kin Chan K’awiil, the twenty-seventh king of Tikal who commissioned it.”

  “No doubt as to the status of this guy,” Luis said as we rounded the pyramid’s southeast corner.

  “None,” Ochoa said. “It’s taller than any other structure, except maybe the Temple of the Sun in Teotihuacan. No way could anything else measure up.”

  The undergrowth behind the temple still showed the effects of the murder investigation. Even the postholes that marked the corners of the rack were there, though nothing of the structure remained. Ochoa described his discovery from his first bewildered encounter with the cloud of flies, the growing investigation that spread from Tikal personnel to the embassy, to the
governmental agencies that followed; and the unaccounted-for time in Ruston’s life between the airport and his death months later.

  “Nothing more has come to light since then. Nothing. It’s as if he’d been kidnapped by aliens,” Ochoa said. We peered at the postholes in silence. What was there to say?

  Ochoa led us further into the brush behind Temple IV, using his machete to widen the narrow trail for Poncho. “Next the steles,” he said over his shoulder.

  After an hour of shoving through tangled brush and vines and tripping over the broken stumps of small trees, a hundred yards ahead, barely visible in the dense undergrowth, two blue plastic tarps covered the steles and their surrounding areas. We had been stumbling over rubble ever since we left Temple IV, and I was eager to reach our goal. I was running with sweat, and my bug repellent was giving out. Insects formed a thick ball around my head, waiting for the last bit of spray to wash off with perspiration. To add to my misery, I’d fallen over a stump, and my shin was bleeding. I’d also begun to imagine a fer-de-lance under every stone.

  When we finally pushed into the little clearing around the first stele, Ochoa pulled back the plastic covering. It was more astonishing than I’d imagined and smaller, too, the tiny blocky form surprising in the world of soaring temples, sprawling platforms, and imposing monuments. The second stele, a hundred yards on and similarly covered with plastic, was even more amazing. Even though the markers were earlier than anything else in Tikal, their imagery was recognizably Mayan. It was K’in A’jaw, according to Ruston’s research: his soft, rounded form, familiar garments, and carefully detailed hands and feet made that clear.

  The stele showed K’in A’jaw peering intently into a cloud of billowing incense rising from a low bowl at his feet. He appeared to be listening to a vulture, an ancestor perhaps, that loomed over him out of the smoke. Its large, round eyes peered at the mesmerized lord; its long-pointed beak reached its chest. The bird itself was simple, unmarked except for deep incisions marking the edges of its folded wings. I pulled my drawing of the pectoral out of my bag and carefully held it next to the carving on the stele.

  “They’re similar,” I said, as the long face of the bird stared at K’in A’jaw across the surface of the stone. “What did the vulture mean besides water and transformation?”

  “Bountiful crops, moisture, all the necessary outcomes for a lord who was supposed to provide agrarian success,” Ochoa said, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “Water was always an issue in Tikal. It’s sitting on a ridge of limestone. Water sinks right in. At the beginning, it had one or two small natural springs. There aren’t any rivers or lakes, but the springs were enough for a small group of people. As the city grew, plastered plazas and buildings covered the recharge area, and the springs began to fail. Then the people collected runoff, built reservoirs, and later constructed an enormous dam.

  “Water is still a problem in the Petén.”

  “Sky, rain, vulture, lord, crops,” Luis said. “They’re all tied together.”

  “But why a vulture?” I asked.

  “Mayan farmers practiced slash and burn agriculture—they still burn fields to clear them,” Luis said, patting Poncho’s neck absentmindedly. “After the fire, vultures circle the fields to collect dead animals. It looks like they’re guarding the crops and transforming the animals’ deaths into agricultural offerings; and they were associated with the sun since they soar into the light and disappear.

  “Think of how powerful they are: they transform death into sacrifice, oversee crops, consort with the sun; not only that, they’re messengers. My grandfather used to say that if someone dreamed of vultures, the rainy season was coming. Since the lord was in charge of agriculture and rain, everything fits together—the bird, successful agriculture, the lord. It makes sense he would use a vulture as a personal symbol.” Ochoa tucked the plastic around the steles.

  “The return trip won’t be as hard as it was getting here. We made a good trail coming in. Do you think you can hold together till lunch, then make it to the museum and library?”

  “I can’t wait to stop moving,” Luis said. “I’m bug bit and hot and the saddle’s starting to chafe.”

  Zoila and I nodded. I hoped Ochoa was right about the way back being easier. Getting to the stele had been a small-scale horror show. Ochoa turned Poncho in the direction we’d come. The little horse picked up his pace. I wasn’t the only one eager to get the hell out of the jungle.

  A trace of wood smoke from the southeast followed us through the undergrowth. None of us paid attention.

  ~ * ~

  Just as the library closed at five o’clock, the boy led Poncho to the front porch. Using the top step as a mounting block, Zoila and I got Luis into the saddle without much trouble. We were getting the hang of lifting, and Luis had figured out what he could do to help.

  “I’m beginning to enjoy Poncho,” Luis said on the way back to the hotel “When we get back to Big Grove, I may take up riding. We’ll have to get an adaptive saddle, of course, and a horse. What do you think?”

  Zoila snorted. “We can discuss mounts and gear later. Right now, I want a shower, clean clothes, and a glass of wine. How about meeting at six-thirty in the bar?”

  “Good plan,” I said as I headed for the stairs. I couldn’t wait for a shower. I felt like I was wearing a rubber sheet.

  Later, a plate of tapas in the center of the table, drinks in hand, we agreed the hike had been a tramp through hell, or Xibalba, as Luis calls it.

  “It could have been worse, though. Think of Ochoa,” I said. “He was the one widening the path. It had to be a nightmare swinging that machete all the way in.”

  By the time Luis had a second beer and Zoila and I were on our second glass of wine, we were ready to discuss what we had found in the library.

  Zoila went first. “I spent the afternoon reading articles about Tikal and Takalik Abaj, the pre-Columbian city near the Pacific coast. It is interesting how much alike they were. They began about the same time, and both lasted over a thousand years; they were located on ridges in tropical forests with high rainfall, but water was an issue for various reasons; and each had steadily growing populations.

  “Takalik Abaj had a lot going for it—rivers on either side of the ridge, lush tropical forest filled with resources, including the city’s main export cacao—and it was on the commercial routes between Mexico and the Guatemalan Highlands.”

  Zoila thoughtfully tapped the side of her wine glass for a moment. “Their main problem was erosion. The city sits on granite. Water couldn’t sink in. When it rained, it eroded the temples, ballcourts, plazas, everything. So, they built a drainage system—stone canals to move the water away from building and subterranean channels to carry water to residential areas. They even built a sauna.

  “Tikal had its own problems. It was perched on a ridge as well, but it was surrounded by lowland, swampy jungle with no consistently available surface water. They had plenty of rain, but the limestone soaked it up like a sponge. As Ochoa told us, there’d been a couple of springs on the site in the early days, but once the city grew, the springs practically dried up.” She nibbled a tapa. “The city was desperate for water—for drinking, households, crops, everything. The only available water was runoff from the plazas and other plastered surfaces, so they built catchment basins, reservoirs, channels, filtering systems, even a coffer dam.” Zoila paused again, taking a sip of wine before continuing.

  “Hydraulic engineering made life possible in the Petén for a city as big as Tikal with its growing population. It made it feasible for it to develop into a major trade center on the east-west trade route that went all the way to Teotihuacan in Mexico.”

  “What you found makes me wonder,” I said, putting down my glass. “Even though the cities were in distant parts of Guatemala, they existed at the same time, and their problems were is some ways similar—growing populations, water issues, the need to develop hydraulic systems.”

  “Well?” Luis as
ked, biting into a tiny bean-laden tortilla.

  Not one to believe in mere coincidence, I continued with my list of considerations. “I mean, could there have been contact between them as early as seven hundred BCE? They both grew to be influential cities at their height, both had hydraulic issues, both used vulture imagery, and the clincher is the vulture pectoral on Ruston’s desk is similar to K’in A’jaw’s pectoral, and a Vulture Lord appears in the incense smoke on those new stele, too. There has to be a connection.”

  Luis was quiet for a minute. “I’ve wondered about the possibility of a link myself. There is something else that suggests connections between them. About the time of the Grandfather Vulture in Takalik Abaj, there seems to have been a shift from Olmec to Mayan style in that city—in sculpture, ceramics, imagery—as if Mayan influence had begun to affect artists. It’s as if when the Vulture King came to power, things began to change. It wasn’t the result of an alien population taking over. There’s no sign of that. It was subtler…Olmec and Mayan characteristics began to appear side by side at the same time, as if the two different groups of people were working in close proximity to one another.”

  “So, this is what I think we’ve got,” I said, “Tell me if I’m wrong. Vultures in both places, concerns about water, and Takalik Abaj, a crossroads in a trade network that ran all the way from Mexico, through the Highlands, then to the Petén. So, let’s say a Mayan group goes from Tikal to Takalik Abaj for some reason—trade arrangements, political matters, curiosity.

  “A prince, let’s say K’in A’jaw, the guy on the steles, goes along as an envoy. That would be natural, a young lord taking part in Tikal’s business, learning the ropes of negotiation, of lordship, that would explain the image on the stele. He meets the K’utz Chman, Grandfather Vulture. They exchange gifts. K’in A’jaw is feted, toured through Takalik Abaj territory, and impressed by what he sees—the developing municipal water channels, the sauna, the astronomically oriented temples, the Olmec sculpture, and most of all, the lord’s oldest daughter. He stays for months.” I looked at Luis. He nodded in encouragement, and motioned for me to continue with his good hand.