The North Acropolis by day is a maze of tunnels that go nowhere and crumbling rooms and enormous masks under sunshades of palm fronds. Rikki and I had explored it earlier. Five hundred years of building, some of it ritually “terminated,” as Rikki called it, by deliberately filling in the structures with rubble or through a ceremony that involved smashing pots and burning incense. “Because they had to contain the power,” he said, “and redirect it into the new temples. There’ve been all kinds of things found under the North Acropolis. It goes back a long way—the Mayas lived here starting about 800 B.C., and they used to dump all their trash here and bury their dead.”
Jan, ignoring his son’s lecture, trained his flashlight on the outer wall of the complex, and I found myself staring into the face of an enormous monster, one of the stucco masks protected by a palm frond shelter that we had seen earlier in the day. Then he pointed the light to the right of the mask and down. We went carefully over broken blocks, around a couple of sharp corners, and down again, and finally came upon the opening of a passageway less than a meter wide, hidden by a clumsy screen of more palm fronds, which Jan lifted aside. One by one, we entered.
It wasn’t too bad, as passageways go. Narrow, but the ceiling was plenty high, the floor was clear, and there were no major twists or turns. After a while we came to a dead end. While I was looking around to see what happened next, Rikki vanished. One moment he was there, and the next he was gone, though his pack was lying on the floor in front of me.
“Jan?”
“Put your equipment down. We will have to come back for it,” he said, moving to the left into what looked like the juncture of two blank walls but was not. The edges of the limestone blocks that formed the corner were slightly ajar, leaving just enough room for a man’s body to slip through. Inside the new, much smaller passageway, Rikki was crouched, waiting for us. The light played over the tiny corridor, slanting downward and covered with jagged rock chips, and which from this angle looked impassable. Jan said, “It gets better after thirty yards or so.” Thirty yards. It didn’t look like we could get thirty feet, especially if we were carrying the packs. But Jan was already pushing ahead, scrambling over broken chunks of cut stone and shining his light backward so we could see.
It was like being in a cave. The air was perfectly still except for the rock dust we were stirring up, and it had a dead, unhealthy quality to it. Even víboras, I thought, would not be brave enough to live this far in. So I put them out of my mind as I crawled on all fours over the broken stones. And then there was the silence, which, without our grunting and breathing, would have been absolute. Once again, we were entering Xibalba, realm of the dead.
I’d been in old jungle temples before, with Robert in Thailand. But that was a wetter, hotter jungle, and the vines had woven their way into every crack, and with the vines came the forest creatures. Those temples were like decaying trees. As they crumbled, they fed new life. And in the midst of the decay were incense pots, still smoking, and bits of food left in sacrifice, and scraps of bright cloth tied to twigs, so you knew nothing had been truly finished in these places and the cycle was still going on.
This was different. The full weight of the pyramid sat directly above the four-foot ceiling. And we were crawling deeper and deeper, on a long descent, into the center of it. Suddenly, though I was not afraid, I did not want to go on. I inched along a few more feet, fighting the urge to stop, wiggle around, and make my way back up to the mask that guarded the entrance of this little hellhole. Jan, however, was moving steadily forward, his light bobbing ahead and behind him, and Rikki was breathing hard behind me. This was crazy; we didn’t even have the cameras. Someone was going to have to run back and get them after we got where we were going. But at last Jan stopped and waited till I had come up almost to his back, with Rikki on my tail, before he silently pointed the light forward.
At first, all I could see was another apparent dead end. A three-and-a-half-foot block sat directly in front of us, sealing off the way. Jan edged up to it and shouldered his way into the corner, again to the left, and the light was suddenly gone. “In here,” he called back, and his voice sounded odd, as though he were speaking into a conch shell. A thin wedge of light appeared on the floor in front of the block, and I crawled toward it and squeezed through, with little bits of rock rattling down around me and my braid getting caught on the edge of the slab. The stones were cold. Jan had the light trained through the crack for Rikki, so wherever we were was not yet visible, but I could sense we were in a bigger space. I could stand up, for one thing, and Jan, beside me, was standing at his full height too. For some no doubt deeply psychological reason, it was easier to breathe.
After we were all inside, Jan snapped off the light for a moment, and we stood there close together in the thickest darkness I’ve ever experienced. No sound, no light, no up or down. If there were eyes that could pierce the blackness, then we were at their mercy, because we were helpless as cave fish. I briefly wondered if death might be like a cave. My greater impulse, however, was to not think at all but find the nearest human being, which is what I did. As it turned out, I had snuggled up to Jan, who almost dropped the flashlight in his effort to get away.
“Look,” he said, sounding flustered, and clicked on the light. In less than three seconds, he’d managed to put half the chamber between us. I gave a mental shrug. He was either a lot more married than he looked, or there was something a wee bit off here. I’d met guys like him before. They were only dangerous if you were the kind of woman who engaged in a lot of self-doubt.
We were in some kind of vault, not large but much roomier than the passage. The walls, white stucco, were covered in glyphs painted in black, some of them as large as a man’s head. One group of them, in long vertical rows, looked calligraphic, as though they had been done by a professional; others were more like children’s drawings—simple, animal-like shapes with teddy bear ears and large noses. The number and complexity of the professional-looking glyphs meant that someone had spent a long time decorating this little chamber cut deep into the bedrock below the pyramid. My guess was that this was not art for art’s sake.
“Who was buried here?” I asked.
“A king and two sacrifice victims,” said Jan as he ran the light over the amateur side of the wall. He still sounded a little stiff, but that was his problem, not mine.
One by one, the simple shapes with their rounded ears and goggly eyes came into view. I saw that some of them had little arms, turned up at the ends where hands should be. “Did the Mayas have a thing about sacrificing kids?” I asked.
“These sacrifices were adolescents, maybe sixteen or so.”
“That means kids.”
He shrugged. I looked over at his son, who was studying one of the vertical lines of the glyphs, and remembered the way the sunlight had caught the edge of his ear on top of Temple IV. “His age,” I added, nodding toward Rikki.
Jan looked at his son, then at me. “So what is your point?” he said bluntly.
This time it was my turn to back off. Why was I even bringing this stuff up? It was not like I hadn’t seen much worse. I’d been in hospital camps in Darfur where the kids who were still alive looked like they were made out of pencils. I’d been in Iraq after the Kurdish genocide. So where did I get off begrudging Jan his two teenaged sacrifice victims? “Nothing,” I said. “What do you want me to shoot in here?”
He studied me for another long moment and I realized that I’d not yet seen him smile. He was a genuinely somber man, but I was actually starting to get used to him. You could count on him. Always preoccupied, unless you deliberately woke him up, as I had without meaning to when I leaned into him in the dark. He didn’t chat for the sake of chatting, or tell stories about his own exploits around the campfire at night, a habit endemic among the crowd I usually ran with. He didn’t joke. And most of