Aztec Rage (37 page)

He was one hundred percent Spanish and would fight the French. I noted that he had stopped talking about Napoleon as someone he admired and now referred to the emperor's armies as “invaders.” Still weak from his bouts with fever, I insisted he ride a mule. Faithful servant that I was, I walked beside him, occasionally stepping in the droppings left by the mules ahead.

At night, mosquitoes so plagued us that we sewed our sheets into a bag and slept inside the bag, hot and sweating as if from a raging fever. Tiny black fleas swarmed my pants bottoms whenever I took a step. Worse than fleas and mosquitoes were the blood-sucking ticks, called garrapatas, that attacked us from the bushes and vegetation.

Added to the horrors of the insect kingdom were armies of ferocious black ants that had a bite to equal beestings and large, lethal-looking, hairy black spiders that crossed one's path looking very much like a walking hand. If the insects didn't get you, there were snakes that brought death in a heartbeat with a single bite.

I must admit the evening fireflies were beautiful. Never had I seen ones to match those legendary luminaries we encountered en route to Palenque and now in the Yucatán. Shooting down dark corridors, they were a dazzling spectacle. Carlos claimed one could read a book by the light of three or four of them, and I believed him.

The first stop we made was the ruin called Labna. The most prominent structure at this ancient site was an overgrown pyramidal forty-five-foot-high mound. We climbed the pyramid, clinging to vines and branches, until we reached a narrow pinnacle. An imposing structure twenty paces in width and ten front to back surmounted the pyramid. Partially in ruins now, one section had collapsed, but three doorways and two large chambers remained inside.

What was most curious about the temple on the crest were the stone carvings of skulls. I didn't know the answers to the scholar's questions about the name of the people who built the city, but there was one thing I knew about their character: “Their religion seethed with violence and death. Why else would they have carved death heads on their temple?”

“Skulls and skeletons play a role in the artwork of many Christian churches, too.”

I guess that is why I called him the scholar. He had an answer for everything, even the mysteries of the ages.

Forty paces from the pyramidal structure was an impressive building with an arched entrance. The structure, which Carlos simply named the Gateway at Labna, was of such artistic merit, it could have served as a cathedral entrance.

“Amazing,” Carlos said, as we stood back and gazed at the impressive stone edifices. “This kingdom of snakes and spiders was once a proud city, as were many like it in this region. But we face the same puzzle we did when we stood before the pyramids at Teotihuacán: Who built it? Here we are, in the middle of what was once a city, a community built by an intelligent and talented race, and not one word about it appears on the pages of history!” He was so excited, he almost jumped off the ground. “Think of it, this place will be known for eternity by what I write about it in the encyclopedia! I will mention your name, amigo, as one of the first explorers of the site.”

Wouldn't the viceroy's constables love that.

We camped in the midst of the ancient ruins but couldn't get any indio to enter the ruins at night, much less camp beside us.

“Ghosts,” their headman told us, “spirits of the long-dead dwell here. The stone places are their homes. They don't come out in the daylight, but at night they seek those who trespass on their domain. We hear their music. I once sneaked up to see why the music was playing and saw warriors of the long-dead dancing.”

The truth was the indios knew little about the past except a few stories passed along around the fire at night. This became evident when an indio clearing brush saw the stone features of an ancient god and began striking it with his ax.

Carlos stopped him and demanded an explanation. The man said that he was told by his priest that the ancient figures all represented evil and he was to smash them.

Carlos walked away, shaking his head. “Don't they understand they are destroying history?”

We spent two days exploring Labna before moving on to large caves the indios called demon caves.

Using lamps burning with tree pitch, we descended into the caves through a rift in the ground. I had been in caves before on hunting trips but nothing like what I beheld while descending to the demon's lair. A couple hundred feet below the surface, we came to eerie formations and fantastic shapes, cones resembling huge icicles hanging from the ceiling and erupting from the floor. Carlos called them stalactites and stalagmites, “from a Greek word for ‘dripping,'” the scholar said, deposits of dripping minerals.

The cones and other fantastic shapes seemed to take life as the flickering light from our fiery torches struck the strange formations.

Carlos and the other expedition members made much fuss over the beauty of the caverns, but I found them haunting and was relieved when I again saw the light of day.

I came out of the caves chilled despite the hot-wet jungle air. The eerie caves reminded me of the Aztec hell I had nightmared about so many times. Perhaps the Aztec gods were trying to tell me something.

FIFTY

C
ARLOS TOLD ME
more of the grisly history of the early Spanish in the Yucatán region as we moved across the peninsula. “Columbus never set foot on the dirt of the American continent, his movements were restricted to the islands of the Caribbean. The Yucatán Peninsula itself was discovered around 1508 by Juan Díaz de Solís and Vincent Yáñez Pinzón. Pinzón had commanded the
Niña
for Columbus in the original discovery of the New World. Solís and Pinzón sailed along the coast of the Yucatán and down to the area of Central America in search of a passage to the Spice Islands. Fortunately for Pinzón, he and Solís disagreed, and Pinzón returned to Spain. Solís went ashore while exploring a river region of South America. Charrua Indians attacked and captured him and his men, eating them one by one in plain view of the other sailors. Only one man escaped to tell the tale.”

Ay! What thoughts went on inside the heads of the sailors as they watched their shipmates being cut up, cooked, and eaten . . .
knowing their turn was coming?
More important, what was the character of the one man who escaped to tell the tale?

“After the defeat of Montezuma, the crown gave one of Cortés's captains, Don Francisco Montejo a royal commission to conquer the people of the ‘islands' of Yucatán and Cozumel. Montejo was soon to find that the Yucatán indios were the most fierce and warlike in all of New Spain. Everywhere he went, he encountered resistance. Foolishly, he sent one of his captains, Dávila, to Chichén Itzá, from which Dávila ultimately retreated with many casualties. After more years of fighting—and losing—by 1535, the indios had driven the Spanish out of the Yucatán.

“Around 1542, sixteen years after Montejo first received the royal license to conquer the Yucatán and twenty-one years after the fall of Montezuma, the Spanish had subdued enough of the region to occupy with some confidence the areas around Campeche and Mérida.”

We left Mayapán and began a trek through the tropical forest to the city Carlos most desired to see: Chichén Itzá.

Carlos educated me about the city as we traveled. “Chichén Itzá is a large site, I'm told,” he said. As we walked, he pushed a serpent tick off his pant leg. “As we have seen, the Yucatán possesses little water. Violent deluges frequently fall during the rainy season, but the peninsula's terrain doesn't hold water. The only year-round water source for much of the region are cenotes, sinkholes in limestone formations. Chichén Itzá was built on the site of two such water sources. And those sinkholes gave the city its name:
chi
, which means ‘mouth' and
chen
, which means ‘wells.'
Itza
refers to the tribe that lived there.”

“So, the name means ‘the people at the mouth of the wells,'” I said.

“No one knows for certain how long the city had been inhabited, but we estimate it was founded over a thousand years ago, about the time barbaric hordes were overrunning the last tattered remnants of the Roman Empire and Mohammed's armies were conquering North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. By the time we conquered the region, most of the major cities had been abandoned and people were living in smaller communities. Once again, we don't know the reason for the inhabitants' flight.”

Nothing had prepared me for the wonders of the ancient city called Chichén Itzá. The ruins covered more than a square league, and the vegetation that hid much of the other sites had been cleared from magnificent edifices in the heart of the ruins.

“Strange,” Carlos said. “Someone has gone through the great effort of clearing El Castillo and other structures of growth.”

The city was a feast for our eyes, with amazing structures, including an observatory for studying the night sky. I was once again struck by the power and glory of an ancient civilization that could build such monuments, and, as Carlos pointed out, they did so without metal tools for carving and beasts of burden and wheeled carts for hauling.

We stood in an incredible sports arena, a place for playing a ball game Carlos called
pok-ta-pok
. The arena was over two hundred paces long and about a hundred wide.

“Pok-ta-pok was even more dangerous than bullfighting,” I said, pointing out a sculpted relief on the wall that showed the victor of a game holding the severed head of a loser.

The name for the Chichén Itzá pyramid, El Castillo, didn't originate from the indios but from the Spaniards who found the structure to have a castlelike appearance.

I found the naked stone edifices as strange and eerie as the dark, twisted formations in the caverns we had explored. Picking our way through
brush and vines to see previous structures had distracted me from the magnificence of the sites, but with the center of an ancient city laid out before us, its grandeur left me thunderstruck. How could the indios, whom I had always thought of as common savages, have built this magnificent city that lay before my eyes?

The Castillo pyramid, Carlos said, was about eighty feet high. “Ninety-one stairs at each of its four sides and another step on the top platform, for a total of 365. That this equals the number of days in the solar year, the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun, was no accident. Mayan astronomers of that period were more advanced than their European counterparts. See that elegant building over there? It's called the Observatory, and it may be where sky watchers gazed at the heavens and made their calculations.”

He pointed at the carving of a plumed serpent at the top of the pyramid. “Quetzalcóatl, the god called the feathered serpent, was known to the Mayas as Kukulcán. During the spring and autumnal equinoxes, shadows cast by the setting sun give the appearance of a snake slithering down the Castillo's steps. It's said to be an eerie sight.”

We paused by a cenote among the ruins. More a sunken lake than a well, it was oblong, over 150 paces in length and a bit less than that in width. The sides were 60 feet high from water level to the ground surface we stood upon.

“The cult of the Cenote,” Carlos said.

“Señor?”

“Just as other indio nations believed the gods had to be fed blood to appease them, the Mayans also practiced human sacrifice. Tying their victims up, they threw them into this cenote as well as others in the Yucatán. They had priests, called chacs, who held onto the arms and legs of the sacrificial victims. A moment ago we passed a life-size stone figure of a man lying on his back with his head up and his hands holding a bowl, the god named Chac Mool. Human hearts were deposited in his bowl after they were ripped out of the victim's chest.”

Carlos said the Romans, Huns, and other European tribes, crusaders, perpetrators of the Inquisition, infidels of Mohammed, and Mongol hordes all had violent pasts. What was it in mankind that sought satisfaction in bloody slaughter?