looked to me like strength, working furiously to make my tata’s legendary toughness my own.
As for Stefan, I thought about him almost every day for months and months, and then, finally, hardly at all. As though he’d died and been buried after a big Croatian funeral Mass—the kind of no-holds-barred ethnic mourning-fest St. Silvan’s had refused to put on for Djed—and now it was time to get over it.
Chapter Four
Jan and Rikki and I were headed for the North Acropolis. I wasn’t wild about hiking in the jungle at night. You never know what’s prowling behind you, and it’s easy to get disoriented by the intensity of the blackness. Sounds are distorted and you’re always brushing up against something you don’t want to touch. However, we really didn’t have far to go—while it was still twilight, we’d hauled the equipment up our private trail as close as we could get while steering clear of tourists—so after dark, when the last voices faded away down the long trail that led to the park entrance, we were within a quarter mile of the Great Plaza. “There will be guards,” Jan said over his shoulder. “So don’t jump out of your skin when one comes up behind us.”
A few minutes later I was glad for the warning, for a hand suddenly came out of nowhere and touched my arm. I didn’t scream, but I did turn and raise my knee, and whoever it was took a step back. “Buenas noches,” said Jan invisibly.
“Ah, señor,” said someone off to my left. Apparently, we were surrounded. “Lo siento—we could not see you well in the dark.”
“No hay problema.”
“Y quién es esa señora?”
“My photographer.”
“Ah.” The owner of the hand stepped forward again. “Do you need guides?”
“Gracias,” said Jan, “pero no.”
“Muy bien. Entonces buena suerte, señor. Que le vaya bien.”
I was embarrassed at the way my heart was slamming around. I hadn’t heard a single footfall—nothing. They’d surrounded us like a pack of ghosts, and then vanished just as silently. I thought of the Chiapan rebels Stefan talked about in his letters to Jonah, not to mention the ones I’d photographed in Nicaragua and El Salvador the last time I was in Central America.
Jan said, “Are you all right?”
“Si.” It came out more gruffly than intended, but I’d found over the years that the minute you started admitting to men that you were a little shaken up, they went into their hero mode and forced you to consult them about every step you took thereafter.
Just then a roaring began almost directly overhead, and it took every ounce of grit I had not to hit the deck and cover my head. Because of course it was howler monkeys, not jaguars at all, and the funniest thing you can do in the Guatemalan jungle is fall for their mimicry. I wasn’t up for being the butt of anybody’s joke. The roaring went on for minutes, then died away. We stood there in silence in the pitch black. Then Jan moved off and I hurried to catch up.
In ten minutes we broke out from under the canopy to the open grass of the Great Plaza, and suddenly the darkness lightened a bit because we were under the stars instead of the ceiba trees. Jan snapped off his flashlight. The pyramids, enormous black mountains, rose up against the faint glow of the star-spattered sky, and behind them was the black wall of the jungle. Frogs throbbed like drums; a maddened cicada went on and on, but otherwise it was quiet. Rikki and I came to a dead halt, and Jan stopped too and stepped back toward us but did not speak. Gradually, the jungle, which had hushed at our passing, began to tune.
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,
