Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Incidents of travel (V) We had originally planned to continue on to San Cristóbal de las Casas in the highlands of Chiapas, and then perhaps cross the border into Guatemala, but there were reports of unrest in the vicinity of San Cristóbal (later to become a focal point of the Zapatista uprising) and, in retrospect, travelling to Guatemala, in the midst of guerrilla war and a particularly vicious counterinsurgency campaign, probably wasn't a great idea either. Instead we elected to make for the greater stability of the Yucatán. Our route took us further down the Inter-American highway, out of the mountains, to Tehuantepec. This would have been our closest approach to the Pacific and we may have taken a brief detour to the shore, but I can't remember for sure. We now changed direction and headed due north up highway 185, which spans the narrowest stretch of land between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. In this low-lying gap between mountain ranges there were areas of large-scale American-style agriculture as well as extensive pineapple plantations. Stands along the road offered freshly cut pineapples for sale, but as tempting as this was we held off, reluctant to risk further microbial assaults on our recovering digestive systems. At a place called Minititlán we would have met up with Highway 180, the main road along the Gulf, and from there we headed due east for Villahermosa. We were now in the heart of one of Mexico's major oil-producing regions, and as a result that day's drive was one of the least agreeable we spent in our entire sojourn in the country. Traffic on the road was heavy, there was a sudden downpour, and we were still on the road after dark, something we generally made an effort to avoid. Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco state, was a busy commercial city with little to recommend it to travellers other than some Olmec heads. (In 2007 the city, and much of the surrounding countryside, would be devastated by flooding.) We stayed in a fairly squalid hotel downtown, but had a decent meal (shrimp, for me) in a restaurant somewhere nearby. The next morning we made for the Mayan ruins at Palenque, a couple of hours further east. The town of Palenque itself, which John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood had visited in 1840, I remember as being small and rather drowsy. We ate lunch at a deserted little restaurant on the main square, where much of what was on the menu seemed to be unavailable, but lodged outside of town, on the road to the archaeological site, at the Hotel de las Ruinas, which I understand no longer exists. There was a tiny tree frog in the shower stall, though presumably not the same frog that the writer Mary Morris reporting encountering when she stayed in the same hotel in the 1980s. We overnighted comfortably if not particularly in splendor at the our hotel, drove a mile or so, parked, paid one of the nominal entrance fees typical at archaeological sites across Mexico, and toured the ruins. Stephens and Catherwood, for their part, hiked through the jungle from the village of Palenque and improvised shelter in miserable conditions inside the dilapidated ruins, within the complex of structures known as the Palace. Here's how Stephens described the prospect, and the structure now known as the Temple of the Inscriptions: From the palace no other building is visible. Passing out by what is called the subterraneous passage, you descend the southwest corner of the terrace, and at the foot immediately commence ascending a ruined pyramidal structure, which appears once to have had steps on all its sides. These steps have been thrown down by the trees, and it is necessary to clamber over stones, aiding the feet by clinging to the branches. The ascent is so steep, that if the first man displaces a stone it bounds down the side of the pyramid, and woe to those behind. About half way up, through openings in the trees, is seen the building represented in the engraving opposite. The height of the structure on which it stands is one hundred and ten feet on the slope. The engravings represent the actual condition of the building, surrounded and overgrown by trees, but no description and no drawing can give effect to the moral sublimity of the spectacle.Here is Catherwood's engraving:  And here is how the same building, seen from a different corner, appeared around the time I saw it:  (The image is the cover of Norman F. Carver Jr's fine book of photographs, which is currently unavailable, one hopes only temporarily.) Unknown to Stephens and Catherwood — and unknown to generations of archaeologists working at Palenque before 1952, a concealed staircase inside the Temple of the Inscriptions led down to an interior vault, within which, under a massive carved slab, lay the remains of a ruler of Palenque now known to have been named K'inich Janaab' Pakal. We descended the stairs and examined Pakal's tomb, standing directly underneath the spot where Stephens and Catherwood had rested after struggling to the summit of the ruined temple, in the midst of the remnants of a city that had already been abandoned for a thousand years when they arrived. To the east of the Palace and the Temple of the Inscriptions there is a small stream, whose course, judging from the maps, appears to have shifted somewhat since 1840. On the far side of the stream we climbed to the other notable buildings at Palenque, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Cross, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross, peering at the (to us) inscrutable glyphs and the ancient carvings of deities and kings. There was a small museum on the site, further down the stream, and we took a quick look through this as well. Stephens contemplated buying the ruins and surrounding land, which were held to be of little value and available for a modest sum, but under Mexican law he, as a foreigner, would have been ineligible to make the purchase unless he first married a Mexican woman. He appears to have weighed this option, at least in jest, but in the end he declined and moved on to the Yucatán, as we were now to do as well. February 17, 2008 [ Permalink ]
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