Chapter Four: The Village of Metzabok

Chapter Four: The Village of Metzabok

The next morning our group gathered around the water fountain in the courtyard of the Anahuac Hotel. After a satiating breakfast of fried eggs and beans graced with homemade marmalade and hearty fresh baked bread, we rummaged up our backpacks and anxiously waited for Hornsby to appear with our settlement assignments. Milling about the courtyard we took on a travel club appearance, clinging to our Westernized fashionable lifestyle obvious from our sanitized recreational outfitting.

There were three Mexican Indians loitering nearby casually talking among themselves. Other guests of the hotel passed by either on their way to explore the city or tour the artifact museum that Gustav had installed at Anahuac before his passing.

As I sat on the edge of the water fountain’s pool, a little girl that was with one of the men wondered over to me. Her elfin round face outlined by jet-black hair and saucer-like brownish eyes peered at me. Innocently she stood there with an outstretched right hand palm up and an orange card in the left hand signifying that she was deaf.

“She’s a Tzeltal. You see she’s wearing a huilpil,” Helen Wordsworth said, a graduate student in Mesoamerican art from the University of Pennsylvania and member of our expedition team.

Helen had been unusually reserved during our briefing the evening before, consistently shying away from any of our group discussions. Now, she spoke with authoritative enthusiasm as the deaf Tzeltal girl stood before us begging for money.

“If you look closely you can see the Dog’s Paw textile design brocaded into the fabric.”

“What does it mean?” I said as I kneeled down at the girl’s eye level to get a closer look at the colorful huilpil.

“Here’s the Dog Paw.” Helen pointed at the huilpil out lining the geometric design. “The dog takes one soul to the underworld.”

Giving it little thought, I put a few pesos into the Tzeltal girl’s hand and in return took the orange wallet-sized Sign Language card with gestures printed on it in black ink.

“You never know, it might come in handy someday,” Helen said to me.

The little girl darted back out of the courtyard when she saw Hornsby and Sarina making their way down the second story staircase.

“Adios,” I said calling after her. Helen had retreated back into the group, leaving me standing alone. Hornsby called out to me to come join the group that had gathered on the other side of the fountain.

Hornsby briefly introduced us to our Mexican guides who had filed in on Sarina’s beckon. Without ceremony he gave us our assignments. Cassarina and I were partnered and assigned to the Metzabok settlement, the smallest of the three Lacandon relocation zones. Because there were some Lacandones still knowledgeable about botanical medicines in this settlement, Cassarina was given preference as she was collecting samples for pharmacological development back at Oxford.

As much as I wanted to meet the last living t ‘o’ ohil, Chan K’in Viejo, of the Naja settlement, Garthwaite got that assignment. I resigned to being aced out, concluding that Roberts had cultivated enough of K’in Viejo’s knowledge to make Garthwaite’s research redundant.

Chan K'in Viejo 1976

After packing up my gear along with Cassarina’s in our antique 4x4 Land Rover, we left San Cristobal del Casas, not knowing exactly what to expect in the coming months of field research at Metzabok. It wasn’t long till we were being swallowed up in the Chiapas Mountains.

The grandeur of the terrain was breathtaking, until we came upon the remains of forest clear cutting. Sarina’s photographs of the industrial greed for cedar and mahogany trees couldn’t have prepared me for the magnitude of this disastrous logging operation.

It was appalling and disheartening to see the magnitude of corporate greed raping the earth of its natural resources.

To be continued...

Copyright 2005