Dustin Thomason: 12.21

The look on Stanton’s face told her that, in her condition, he didn’t know what to believe. “Where do you want to go, then?” he asked.

“Higher,” she told him. She pointed at the larger of the two mountains. “To look for temples above the trees.”

THE TREE TRUNKS AT THE foot of the mountain were thin and blackened, charred toothpicks stuck into the ground. There’d been a fire, most likely started by lightning. In storm season, small lightning fires were common; the ancients believed they were a sign from the overworld that a patch of land needed time to rejuvenate.

At the edge of the lightning forest, they reached a more verdant part of the slope. Then, from the corner of her eye, Chel saw a cluster of vanilla vines in the distance, about halfway up the mountain. She turned toward the strange but oddly familiar pattern. Vanilla was common throughout Guatemala; it wrapped itself tightly around tree trunks and climbed up to reach the top of the canopy for rain and light. The vines could grow hundreds of feet high.

But these vines stretched only about fifteen feet into the air, as if the tree had been cut off and stripped of its branches. Chel called out for Stanton to wait, but he didn’t hear her. She let him keep going and turned off course. The fifty-plus yards up the slope were interminable, each of her steps more difficult than the last, but she was drawn to the thin, elongated leaves. The dense tangle of vines was looser than what it should have been on a tree—a clue that whatever lay beneath was covered with something other than wood bark.

To the untrained eye it would’ve been impossible to discern, but hundreds of Maya stones had been discovered in the jungle beneath vines like these. Chel’s hands shook—with anticipation or sickness—and she barely had the strength to rip the strands away. But finally she could see down to the core. It was a massive boulder, at least eight feet tall, cut into the shape of an elongated headstone.

“Where’d you go?” Stanton had found his way back to her. He bent down to peer over her shoulder. “What is that?”

“A stela,” Chel said. “The ancients called them tree stones. They used them to record important dates, names of kings and events.”

These stelae sometimes appeared near cities, she explained, but were also built by smaller villages as homages to the gods. The only thing she knew for certain about this one was that no one had seen its surface for a very long time. Age and weather had cracked off one of the corners.

Chel tried to breathe steadily while Stanton cleared away the rest of the vines, revealing a surface covered in eroded etchings and inscriptions. There was a rendering of the maize god in the middle of the stone, while renderings of Itzamnaaj, the supreme Maya deity, adorned the edges.

Then Chel saw three familiar glyphs.

“What does it say?” Stanton asked.

She motioned to the first carving. “ Naqaj xol is Ch’olan for very near. And this one— u’qajibal q’ij —means we are directly west of it.”

He pointed to the last glyph. “What about this?”

“ Akabalam .”

FELLED TREES AND UNDERBRUSH covered every inch of the slope, and each step was an exhausting challenge for Chel. Up and down they traversed the steep incline, searching for a passable path. They stopped every fifty yards so she could rest. The air was unbearably hot and wet, and with each breath she felt like she couldn’t make it any farther. But with Stanton’s help she pressed forward, pushing on through another stretch of forest.

Strangely, the pitch of the mountainside flattened out as they headed farther west, giving Chel’s legs a short break and allowing her to continue on. After two miles, it no longer felt like a mountain at all. They were still high above sea level, about halfway up to the peak, but the western face had eased into a massive plateau, flat as any plain. Kanuataba meant the terraced city, but nowhere in Paktul’s story had he written about agricultural terracing. Maybe instead, Chel thought, the city got its name from this ledge that a river cut into the mountain millions of years ago—a natural terrace that eluded discovery after her ancestors abandoned it.

Minutes later, they found more reason to hope.

Hundreds of ceiba trees, sacred to the Maya, stood in the distance. The trunks had thorns, and the branches were covered with grasses and moss, phosphorescent green.

Kanuataba was once home to the most majestic collection of ceiba trees, the great path to the underworld, in all of the highlands. The ceiba once grew denser than anywhere in the world, blessed by the gods, their trunks nearly touching. Now there are fewer than a dozen still standing in all of Kanuataba!

They continued through the dense area of holy trees that had now returned to the jungle. The ceibas stretched to the heavens, reaching toward the overworld, and Chel could see outlines of gods’ faces in the leaves: Ahau Chamahez, god of medicine; Ah Peku, god of thunder; Kinich Ahau, god of the sun, all beckoning her forward.

“Are you okay?”

Stanton was paces ahead, calling back at her. Could he see what she now saw in the leaf patterns above them? Could he hear the call of the gods as she did?

Chel blinked, attempting to see ahead with clear eyes. Trying to form the words to answer him. She stepped toward him, and a break in the ceibas caught her eye. Between the trunks was a sliver of stone.

“ There ,” she whispered.

They walked a quarter mile to the base of an ancient pyramid and stood together in stunned silence. Mist bathed the structure’s top reaches. Trees and shrubs and flowers sprouted in all directions, obscuring every corner. More trees had grown up the stairs, to the top; one façade was so dense with flora, it could have been mistaken for a natural slope. Only at the summit could they see limestone, where three adjacent openings were formed by columns in the shape of elongated birds.

“Incredible,” Stanton said. “This is it?”

Chel nodded. Broken shards of stones transformed in her mind into angular steps. Slaves and corvée laborers appeared, carrying boulders on their backs. At the base, she saw tattoo artists and piercers, spicemakers trading for chert. The dull and decrepit limestone was, for Chel, now painted with a rainbow of color: yellows and pinks and purples and greens.

The birthplace of her people, in all its glory.

THEY CONTINUED ACROSS THE MOUNTAINTOP, MOVING SLOWLY, searching for other signs of the lost city through the overgrowth. The stela and small pyramid were signposts that they had reached the outer limits of the metropolis, but they still had to find the city’s center.

Stanton carefully led them over shrubs and massive tree roots extending in all directions, hacking away with his machete in one hand, and gripping Chel’s with the other. He tried to keep track of what plants he was cutting through—pink orchids and liana and strangler vines and others—in case they turned out to be relevant.

He also listened closely as they walked. Wolves, foxes, even jaguars could be in the area. Stanton had been on safari once after medical school, and that was about as close to dangerous animals as he ever wanted to get. He was very glad that he could hear only birds and bats in the distance.

They passed stelae and small one-level limestone buildings wrapped from base to top in foliage and small trees. Chel pointed out areas where servants to the nobles likely lived on the edge of the city, and what was once a small ball court where the ancients practiced their strange hybrid of volleyball and basketball. Stanton could easily have missed these overgrown landmarks.