Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  “I am strongly of the opinion that there is at this place much to reward the future traveler,” wrote Stephens, who had no idea just how prescient he would turn out to be. Later archaeological digs would turn up two ball courts, a great number of monuments and sculptures, and a wealth of glyphs. These have allowed scholars to piece together the city’s history and relations with its neighbors, which Toniná subjugated with ruthless proficiency. Among the monuments found were figures sculpted in the round, a rarity among the Maya. Toniná was one of the final classic Maya city-states to fall and the site contains a monument on which is recorded the last known “long count” date, correlated to A.D. 909, which marks the end of the Classic Maya period.15

  As they headed north toward Palenque in the morning, Stephens looked off wistfully to the east. He was told there were other stone remains lying half-buried in the almost impenetrable lowland jungles beyond Toniná. As archaeologists would later discover, Toniná (and Palenque) lay along the western edge of the Classic Maya heartland while Copán lay at the eastern edge. But in Stephens’s time the thick jungle in between still hid the remains of a great number of spectacular Maya cities—Piedras Negras, Bonampak, Yaxchilan, Dos Pilas, and beyond them, the “New York City of the Maya,” Tikal, with its skyscraping pyramids.

  Stephens was focused, however, on getting his ragtag expedition quickly and safely to Palenque. The rains of the past two nights had filled them with “a sort of terror.” It did not help that he had brought with him Captain Dupaix’s account of his 1808 journey. Dupaix had warned:

  The journey is very fatiguing. The roads, if they can be so called, are only narrow and difficult paths, which wind across mountains and precipices, and which it is necessary to follow sometimes on mules, sometimes on foot, sometimes on the shoulders of Indians, and sometimes in hammocks. In some places it was necessary to pass on bridges, or, rather, trunks of trees badly secured, and over lands covered with wood, deserted and dispeopled, excepting a very few villages and huts. We had with us thirty or forty vigorous Indians to carry our luggage and hammocks.16

  Little had changed in the intervening thirty years. Palenque was forty miles away in a direct line on the map, but the path snaked up and down, more than doubling the distance. Although Dupaix’s expedition had taken eight days, Stephens and company would make it in five, but with no less toil and agony. They were apprehensive as well about the local natives, given what they were told of their wild nature. Dupaix had made the journey with a troop of dragoons. Pawling’s two extra pistols and double-barreled gun were more welcome than ever.

  In the end, the terrain was so severe that a relay of four different sets of Indians with fresh legs from intervening villages was needed to haul the expedition’s baggage. On the third day, the heat was crushing and the path went straight up and down over one mountain ridge after another. The trail headed straight down at an angle too dangerous to ride. When they started their ascent on the other side, riding was again out of the question. Encumbered with swords, pistols, and spurs, Stephens and the others led their mules up paths so steep they had to stop and sit down every few minutes to catch their breath. Finally they reached the top, mounted, but rode only a hundred yards before they had to descend again. “The descent was steeper than the ascent,” he said. “It was harder work to resist than to give way. Our mules came tumbling after us; and after a most rapid, hot, and fatiguing descent, we reached a stream covered with leaves and insects. It was the hottest day we had experienced in the country.” The intense heat had left the foliage withered and desiccated.

  The next day, they were informed, would be worse. By now they were stripped of swords, spurs, and pistols, down to their shirts and pants “as near the condition of the Indians as we could.” Stephens was suffering violent headaches from the heat. Though it was customary for travelers in the region to be borne over the roughest terrain in armchairs strapped to the back of the carriers, Stephens wrote of his “repugnance to this mode of conveyance.” But on the fourth day, his head splitting with pain, Stephens was ready to order up an armchair, repugnant or not, when they hit a particularly steep ascent. He climbed aboard the chair, which was strapped to the back of a thin Indian no more than five feet, seven inches tall. “Not to increase the labor of carrying me,” he wrote, “I sat as still as possible.” But he faced backward and could not keep from twisting around to see where they were headed. As they approached the edge of a precipice that dropped down more than a thousand feet, Stephens wanted to dismount but could not make himself understood by the Indians. The carrier shook as he carefully put one foot ahead of the other along the edge.

  I rose and fell with every breath, felt his body trembling under me, and his knees seemed giving way. The precipice was awful, and the slightest irregular movement on my part might bring us both down together. To my extreme relief, the path turned away; but I had hardly congratulated myself upon my escape before he descended a few steps. This was much worse than ascending; if he fell, nothing would keep me from going over his head; but I remained till he put me down of his own accord.

  After hours of climbing, they finally made it to a hut where they hoped to stop for the night. But there was no water, and they were forced to push on. They continued the climb, reached the top, and started another horrible descent. Then a powerful wind swept over them, breaking off dried leaves and branches, and dark clouds dropped down over the mountain. They were desperate to get to the bottom before the storm broke. “Fortunately for the reader, this was our last mountain; it was the worst mountain I ever encountered in that or any other country, and, under our apprehension of the storm, I will venture to say that no travelers ever descended in less time.”

  They reached the plain, crossed a river, and arrived at an empty rancho. The storm now broke behind them on the mountain, but they were dry and safe in the small clearing. The rancho was no more than a thatched hut open on four sides. They had begun preparing a fire for dinner when all of a sudden they were assailed by a swarm of mosquitoes. They could barely eat, despite their ravenous appetites. They lit other fires and smoked tobacco to keep the mosquitoes at bay. In the darkness they discovered they were also surrounded by giant fireflies, which, unlike those back home that flashed intermittently, kept a constant light. They seemed like “shooting stars,” Stephens wrote.

  The travelers lay on the ground that night fully clothed against the mosquitoes. Pawling tried to rig cloth over his head but found he could not breathe in the heat. He went to lie on the banks of the river, where the Indians also rested. But at midnight, amid thunder and lightning, the rains poured down and everyone sought shelter under the thatched roof of the rancho. The sound of hands slapping mosquitoes punctuated the night. No one slept. Finally, before daylight Stephens walked down to the river and submerged himself along the shallow shoreline. “It was the first comfortable moment I had had. My heated body became cooled, and I lay till daylight.” As day dawned, the mosquitoes, engorged, departed. But everyone was more exhausted than when they had arrived. And somehow in the restless night, Catherwood had lost his emerald ring, an object he greatly prized for sentimental reasons.

  They mounted for the last day’s journey. The trail was level but went through deep tropical forest. By midday, they reached a separate path that veered off through the jungle in a direction they believed led directly to the ruins of Palenque. It might be their best opportunity to sneak into the site. But they could not be certain and were unable to communicate with the Indian carriers. And at this point they had decided they were in much too “shattered” a state to take up immediate residence in the ruins. They would stay on the main path and take their chances in the town of Santo Domingo de Palenque, where they hoped to rest and stock up on provisions before continuing on to the ruins. They came out of the forest onto a broad plain and saw cattle grazing. It seemed almost a dream, the grass fresh from the first rains, a huge tree standing alone before them covered in yellow flowers. Stephens looked back at the dark peaks behind
him. They had escaped the mountains and rain forests and unbaptized Indians. They had survived somehow and he knew that nothing now could keep them from the object of their desire—Palenque.

  13

  Palenque

  More than twelve feet of rain fall every year on Palenque. The soil is fertile, the tropic sun fierce, and layer upon layer of irrepressible vegetation fight continually to bury the once-great city of the Maya. Deep within the blue-green shadows of the trees, laced with more than fifty streams and springs, the foliage battles for every speck of sunlight. The cackle of birds and drone of insects cut the wet air. Vapors drift like ghosts over the jumble of stones. Cortés and his army, during their horrifying march to Honduras in 1524, passed within twenty or thirty miles of the buried city, known in ancient times as Lakamha, or “Big Water,” and they never heard a word of its existence. It still lay unearthed and forgotten 260 years later—as it had for nearly a millennium—when the president of the Royal Audiencia in Guatemala City ordered an inquiry into reports by local priests that there were “stone houses” in the forest.1 Sent to investigate, the alcalde of nearby Santo Domingo de Palenque, José Antonio Calderón, slashed his way through the jungle in 1784 and spent three days at the ruins before being driven off by the rain. He reported that he found more than two hundred structures, including what he thought were some eighteen stone palaces. And the remains of Palenque officially entered the history books.

  Calderón’s report created a sensation within the Guatemalan court—and raised a number of questions. Could there be something new and different about these remains, as distinguished from the monuments erected by the Toltecs, Aztecs, and Incas, which were well known from the early days of the Conquest? And might these ruins answer the centuries-old question about the origin of the earliest inhabitants of the Americas and where they had come from? José Estacheria, the president of the Audiencia, decided to send his architect to investigate. When the commissioner returned, he confirmed much of what Calderón had found. Wondrous and strange, Palenque was emerging from the mists hundreds of years after the Conquest, plus an unknown number of centuries after its abandonment, and was about to earn a special place in the history of exploration. However, these first reports and later accounts that would eventually secure its fame were still decades from reaching the public.

  Temples at Palenque. (Carlsen)

  News of the discovery made its way across the Atlantic to Spain through the secretive colonial bureaucracy, and orders for a comprehensive survey and excavation came back directly from the royal court in Madrid.2 King Carlos III had shown great interest in antiquities; as ruler of Naples, he had sponsored the first excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.3 A Spanish artillery captain named Antonio del Río was selected for the job in Guatemala City and arrived at Palenque through a heavy fog in May 1787, accompanied by an artist named Ignacio Almendáriz.4 When they finally stumbled upon the stone buildings under the mass of foliage and creepers, Del Río understood immediately the immense effort it would take to clear the area. He returned from Palenque village a week later with seventy-nine Indians armed with axes and within two weeks the vegetation around the most intact group of ruins had been chopped down and burned. Finally they could breathe healthy air, Del Río wrote. Next they attacked the trees and foliage covering the tops of the structures and invading their inner recesses. Then, with the blunt force worthy of an artilleryman, Del Río began excavation.5 It was as if a bomb had been set off in the middle of the site.

  “Ultimately,” he wrote, “there remained neither a window nor a doorway blocked up; a partition that was not thrown down, nor a room, corridor, court, tower, nor subterranean passage in which excavations were not effected from two to three yards in depth.” With sight lines opened, Almendáriz went to work and produced twenty-six sheets of drawings, some providing the first reasonably accurate albeit cartoonish depictions of the figures and hieroglyphs that were carved into Palenque’s walls or molded onto the structures in plaster.6 He displayed considerable artistic license, however, simplifying the floor plans and stucco ornamentation.

  Del Río, meanwhile, made a thorough examination of the central ruins. He took measurements, chipped off some hieroglyphs and parts of stucco figures, and collected flints, “earthen jars,” and crystal objects, all sent back to Spain for further investigation. He included an elaborately sculpted leg from a stone table.

  The extraordinary art at Palenque, however, either failed to impress him or his descriptive powers abandoned him, for his report ended up as flat and lifeless as it was brief, running less than a dozen pages. The no-nonsense artillery officer chose, instead, to rely heavily on numbered references to Almendáriz’s drawings, in the hope, apparently, that the images would best convey what they had found. He formed an opinion, however, about the origin of the buried city. And like many who would follow him, Walker and Caddy included, he was trapped within the only frame of reference he knew—the classical. He wrote that the sculpted forms bore strong Roman and Greek influences:

  For in their fabulous superstitions, we seem to view the idolatry of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, and other primitive nations most strongly portrayed. On this account it may reasonably be conjectured, that some one of these nations pursued their conquests even to this country, where it is probable they only remained long enough to enable the Indian tribes to imitate their ideas, and adopt, in a rude and awkward manner, such arts as their invaders thought fit to inculcate.7

  In the end, however, little came of Del Río and Almendáriz’ work. It ended up unpublished, collecting dust in the archives of Guatemala and Spain, one more of Spanish America’s secrets kept from the outside world.

  It took twenty years before the next major expedition, this one under King Carlos IV. Retired captain Dupaix had a special interest in pre-Columbian sites and under a commission from the viceroy of New Spain traveled in 1808 to Toniná and Palenque. He was accompanied by a detachment of dragoons and José Luciano Castañeda, a drawing master from Mexico City. In the end, however, Castañeda’s drawings and Dupaix’s commentaries met the same fate as Del Río’s report—they too were buried in the archives. These would lie forgotten in Mexico City during the next thirteen years of political upheaval, which resulted in Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821.

  Castañeda, though more talented than Almendáriz, also had difficulty reproducing accurately much of what he had seen in Palenque. Dupaix, however, proved a careful observer, the first to make the break between what he had seen at the ruins and what he knew of classical Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art and architecture. In language far more imaginative than Del Río’s, he proposed that Palenque was built by a people, he wrote, “endowed with their own genius, their own force of imagination, and that progressed over the course of centuries.” He was not willing, however, to go so far as to attribute the palaces and temples to the indigenous tribes of Mexico and Central America, but instead to a race long since vanished: the people of legendary Atlantis.8

  The palace at Palenque and its interior courtyard. (Carlsen).

  Therefore, well into the 1800s the first discovered traces of the extraordinary glyphs, art, and architecture of the Maya civilization were known only to a small group of individuals associated with the royal Spanish court.9 After the wars of independence from Spain, however, the ground shifted. Del Río’s report was pulled from the archives by an English doctor living in Guatemala, brought to London, and published in 1822.10 Next, Dupaix’s account of his 1808 expedition was discovered in Mexico City and included in a folio published in 1831 by an eccentric Irishman named Edward King, otherwise known as Lord Kingsborough.11

  Kingsborough was a wealthy young aristocrat from Cork who had become obsessed with Mexican and American antiquities. Before he died at the age of forty-two, he devoted his entire fortune to the publication of nine huge illustrated folios, one of which included Dupaix’s and Castañeda’s work.12 The folios were filled with stunning hand-colored Mexican picture writi
ng, and glyphs mostly copied from bark paper Maya “codices” or books, found and sent home to Europe by Spanish conquistadors and explorers. He was convinced that the codices and the stone remains turning up in Central America and Mexico were the work of the “lost tribes of Israel.”13 Sadly, his publications bankrupted him, and he died of typhus in a debtor’s prison in Dublin in 1837, two years before he was to inherit his father’s rich estate.14

  Kingsborough’s volumes, Mexican Antiquities, along with the reports by Del Río and Dupaix, reignited the intellectual debate and deepened the mystery that Europeans—and later, Americans—had grappled with ever since Columbus returned from his first voyage to America.15 The discovery of inhabitants on the American continents, some living in relatively advanced societies, baffled Western intellectuals and religious scholars—and threatened the biblical order of the world. Where did these natives come from, how old were their cities, and how did they fit into the long-accepted Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Old and New Testament narrative? Did these Indians populate the Americas before Noah and the great flood or sometime afterward? Encouraged by Dupaix’s report and the paper codices of Maya hieroglyphs, Kingsborough’s volumes included texts with speculative answers to these questions, linking the “lost tribes” with Mexico for example. Meanwhile, the French were not to be outdone. A publication in Paris in 1834, Antiquités Mexicaines, was also filled with scholarly tracts about the similarities between the Mexican ruins and those of Egypt, India, and other Old World civilizations.16