By morning the rain stopped, but the cloud cover remained. The encampment slowly stirred to life. Horse coughing, babies crying, low sleepy voices, and the fear of finding more who had died through the night greeted the new day. The dawning light illuminated the vivid dreariness of paucity that surrounded me.
I thought Hornsby would have debated Cassarina’s decision to stay with hair-splitting objections. However, Hornsby had become distracted with some startling news. I learned from Cristobal that Hornsby and the Mayan tribal bataab had struck up a conversation of sorts regarding knowledge of a lost Mayan temple.
In the meantime, Cassarina was already off in the jungle collecting medicinal plants to start making a small pharmaceutical laboratory for Dr. St. Germain. Given her absence, I didn’t have a chance to talk further with her about my decision to agree to go ahead without her. Had she already discussed this with Hornsby, I didn’t know.
Hornsby informed me that the bataab confirmed our findings with his corroborative information from the cryptic vault. This remarkable twist of fate was profoundly unbelievable.
“There is a lost Mayan temple near El Destino named Yaxkin.”
It was hardly the place for such exuberance, given the human anguish surrounding us, but the hunter was soon to capture his prize. I couldn’t squelch Hornsby’s excitement even though he was becoming a bit maniacal.
The tribal chief related to Hornsby that when he was a young man, he had climbed up the highest mountain in his region where he overlooked the jungle. Along the horizon he saw a great city with white turrets glittering in the tropical sun. It was here, he said, is Yaxkin, but it has always been considered a forbidden place. He claimed there were messengers that went to and fro from the mysterious temple, but no one had ever gone there because of the warning of death to intruders. The bataab believed they still perform the rites of Quetzalcoatl, keeping alive their ancient faith and power of the Feathered-Serpent.
When I questioned Hornsby about being worthy to enter their territory, without a beat he said we were more than worthy.
“How do you know?” I replied.
“We found the cryptic vault, didn’t we?”
We spent the day burying the dead Maya woman with a small cortege under a mound of limestone rocks. That evening we set about preparing for the next and hopefully the final leg of our expedition. For the most part it was a nice distraction from the sorrowful angst around us. Not that I was uncompassionate.
It was beyond my comprehension at the time to absorb the human tragedy. What was going on with the military and rebel conflict for whatever political reasons, I couldn’t justify. I hadn’t come here to get involved in a civil war, but still it wasn’t my ethic to look the other way.
Upon the face of it, I would have stayed with Cassarina, but I knew Hornsby would have continued on with Cristobal, and that was a flimsy proposition. So, I took it upon myself to be his guardian for Cassarina’s sake and return him safely. She had been candid enough to convince me that I was what she perceived as “a man’s man” and that was inspiring enough. As well, Dr. St. Germain urged us on, relieved that Cassarina would stay on to help her.
“The living must keep going. This is the fact of life, no?” Dr. St. Germain said as she sat among us eating our simple meal of cooked snake, some salad greens washed down with coconut milk that Cristobal and Cassarina had prepared.
“This is our base camp,” Hornsby said devouring cooked snake meat with his fingers. “When we return, we’ll move the refugees down the Rio San Pedro and across the Mexican border at El Ceibo to safety,” he said in optimistic resolve.
We all nodded in agreement, resigned to the difficulty of such an immense task.
I could only hope for such an easy outcome as I found a place to spend the night. Relieved that the rain had stopped, I hoped to get a good night’s sleep. I had expected that being so close to our objective, Yaxkin, the Mayan spirits would visit me in my dreams that night. They didn’t. Instead, Cassarina did.
Cassarina didn’t expect her desperate yearnings for my kisses, my touch, nor to understand the tantalizing passion that developed between us over the past few months. But she surrendered, unexpectedly, having given me no warning other than our previous night’s revealing conversation.
Safe were we, entwined in loving embrace, passionate kisses, under the shelter of night, driven by the inscrutable spirit that bonds for the sake of affection. Aroused, I wanted to make love to her, but she stopped me.
“Jules, save your strength,” she said stroking my face to calm me.
“I want you,” I whispered.
“And I want you, but . . .” she paused, kissing me on the forehead and my lips. “This is not the time or place.”
My heart was torn. I had come to the threshold of that great divine place between lovers and was put at bay to behold but not touch. She was right. I knew it.
“I don’t expect a happy-ever-after ending, Jules,” Cassarina confided before drifting off to sleep.
In the morning the three of us, Cristobal, Hornsby and I, set off under the well wishes of the two doctors. We must had looked like three ragged desperados; bandana’s tied about our heads with unshaven faces, wielding machetes through our belts and me lugging the backpack with the essentials for cooking and spare clothes.
For a moment I turned back to look at Cassarina. She stood there with a coquettish look on her face. She winked at me, and blew me a kiss and using sign language she said to me, “I L-O-V-E Y-0-U.”
In that fleeting second of my life, I was torn to leave her, where before she had been so standoffish in the beginning, I never imagined that I was on an unavoidable success to win her love. It took all my will power not to run back to her. I smiled, acknowledging that I understood her silent message.
“A man’s man . . .” I thought to myself while waving goodbye to my dear companion. “In a few days I’ll return to your embrace.”
Hornsby charted our direction with his army surplus compass while Cristobal and I hacked away at the jungle overgrowth to clear a path. By noon we had made a good distance of several kilometers, as the sun broke through the cloud cover, steaming up the jungle floor. We were in the lake filled Laguna Del Tigre region. Maybe in a few hours we could make our destination, but our malnourished bodies lack stamina. The tropical heat only made it incomprehensibly worse.
Our enthusiasm nourished us more than anything, carrying us along as we threaded our way through the thick bush. Periodically we had to stop and rest to regain our strength. At those times, Hornsby would re-calculate his bearings with a makeshift sextant he had made while we were held up at the tree house. While Cristobal cut down some coconuts, I looked upon Hornsby in a new perspective. Here was the surrogate father of Cassarina, an exiled anthropologist, and a ghost of a chance discoverer of a lost Mayan temple, all of which had come about from the inhospitable regions of existence. The sudden rustling of toucan birds over head diverted my thought.
The noise was distant at first. Then it grew louder. The thundering drumming of helicopter blades slicing the air moved quickly toward our location. The sound ran chills through my body. I couldn’t see through the jungle canopy, but it was recognizable as it articulated a warning that danger was descending upon us. Had a sentry in the treetops spotted us?
“Peligro,” Cristobal said under his breath.
“Danger,” Hornsby repeated.
It was clear the copter was coming directly toward us. The three of us suddenly threw ourselves into a panic to run as best we could through the tangled vines and underbrush. I couldn’t move fast enough. We knew it was futile. As the Huey helicopter came closer, Cristobal made a heroic offering of himself to distract them from Hornsby and me.
He turned and started to run in the opposite direction.
I infuriately objected. “No, no!”
Cristobal energetically waved us to save ourselves. He smiled and then turned back toward the hovering gunship, deliberately waving his arms to attract their attention. I saw it hover for a moment, then bank sideways to bear down on Cristobal, taking the bait. I stood motionless for a second, fearful that we were once again losing a companion to the Guatemalan Civil Patrol incursion.
“Jules, run. There’s nothing you can do. It’s their war.” Hornsby grabbed me by the shoulder.
I recoiled from Hornsby’s grip but he was right. His wisdom always embraced the vaster scheme of things. We had to make haste for cover or risk losing our own lives.
“We . . . will . . . have . . . to . . . move . . . on,” Hornsby said, panting for breath.
Instinctively, I ran behind him. The noise of the helicopter was following Cristobal, as I imagined he was running as hard as he could, hoping to lure the Guatemalan Civil Patrol as far from us as possible and yet find some protection for himself.
“The refugee camp,” I stammered, drench in sweat, gasping for breath. The fear of them being discovered, worse yet, Cassarina, drained me to a pale color.
“Cassarina will take care of them,” Hornsby replied.
The distant sound of staccato machine gun fire cut through the air. I dove frightened onto the ground, digging my face into the rotting humus soil, buying my fear and disdain. I cried. I sobbed. Hornsby pulled on me, yanking me up, trying to make me stand.
“Get a hold of yourself, Jules.” I had wilted in his huge rough hands. My legs were rubber. The thought of Cristobal being killed devastated me.
“He was innocent,” I sobbed.
“And so are we,” Hornsby offered as a nervous condolence.
He dragged me up to my feet. I reluctantly advanced under his prodding trying to quell my hysteria. I was fleeing from something that compromised my confidences in humanity. The truth was a pestilence in the hurried air of those helicopter blades, indiscriminately scattering death in all directions.
It had a fiery sense that assailed one’s courage; the sight of it alone sent my heart pounding with it spewing out a violent wrath from above. I could only imagine what the innocent victims must have felt moments before its fury was unleashed upon them. And for that matter Cristobal. Hornsby forced me ahead of him, prodding me so as I wouldn’t stop.
In an hour the Huey was long gone, the sense of it seemed to have been an apparition, but then there was no Cristobal to prove me wrong. It was strange, but I soon resigned myself to the outcome, having become more accustomed to this tragedy, unlike the time at El Desempeno. Again, I escaped death’s grip as we moved on toward our destination.
A cluster of mountain ranges was off to the west side of us. At times I caught glimpses of the distant peaks of the Sierra Del Norte De Chiapas, making me ache to return to the blissful simplicity of our lives a month before. Since the moment we divined the possible reality of the Soul Chamber, our lives had been cast to a tumultuous fate.
We descended the two thousand meter high montana entering the lowland jungle with its permanent watercourses threading themselves from the Tikal high ground in Peten down into the Tabasco basin of the Yucatan peninsula. Hacking our way through dense jungle and forging rivers and streams, we were now at last a half-day’s travel to our objective.
The pungent fragrant odors of orchids and bromeliads had filled my senses; the plethora of wildlife had enriched my sense of wonderment of this magnificent tropical zone, and the destructiveness of human greed had stained my trust in the integrity of humankind. Not a drop of rain had fallen all day, but the cloud cover was ominous. Hornsby announced in the late afternoon we should make camp.
“From my calculations, we can locate Yaxkin tomorrow,” he said with blazing fiery eyes. “El Destino is seventeen degrees and forty nine minutes north and ninety one and one minute west.”
A camp fire was out of the question, as it could attract military scouts, so Hornsby set about the jungle, hacking up some palm hearts for us to collect water from. In that quiet moment of dusk, as I waited on the professor, I remembered how heroic Hornsby looked to me standing at the podium in the lecture hall that spring day. He cared not for gold or archeological treasures of the world. The significance of his purpose was bringing the Soul Chamber to life.
He unwittingly aroused envy in me. His intelligence rewarded him with an extraordinary convincing character that transformed me on the day I met him to find a purpose to my own life. I never would have suspected the sinister plans of his colleagues to undue him.
What a disobedience to God’s will to make him suffer humiliation at the cost of their ignorance. It was inconceivable to me to have betrayed his intuition as I had watched him foster a courageous spirit under the most fatal circumstances brought on by evil forces, which sparked his own psychic influence to cultivate conquering optimism. This was his glorious patriotism.
“It is possible?” I thought to myself.
Are we that near to what we had set out to do over six months before? Were we in the mist of our exalted treasure that was considered by most a figment of imagination? I wanted to rally with my last honest effort on his behalf, my honored mentor and friend. Every inch we gained and survived in this crusade was worth the risks to find some evolutionary link of harmonic consciousness hidden from our eyes.
Presenting me with some palm hearts and halved coconuts to eat, we sat together unafraid as the sky turned into night.
Hornsby looked thoughtfully across at me, munching.
“We are off the beaten track of civilization. Even the Spaniards that came here were confronted and pushed back to sea from the jungle pestilence. The luxuriant vegetation of these tropical lands seduces us, but the notorious history of misrule and anarchy prevail.”
I knew he was trying to console me about Cristobal.
“It is not so strange that few wonder into these places, having only a machete to carve out a passage. But remember a people destitute of metallic tools built these majestic ruins.” Hornsby said with reassurance, trying to throw off the burden of Cristobal’s violent fate.
The luxury of romancing the Mayan mystery at the university’s library was forgotten. The reality of making this journey outstripped my sensibilities. I had become accustomed to the insects and mosquito bites. All of it was just a pesky nuisance, though my skin was taking the toil of their parasitic ravages. The homeless ghosts of the massacred villagers, Father Hernandez last words, Cassarina’s subtle sighs as I tenderly kissed her, the cherished Lacandones, the dreamtime appearance of Moise, the dying refugees, all those things remembered or cast-out confronted me in this region of the earth as an unbelievable world.
Regardless, I nestled into a comfortable feeling of being in the womb of mother earth. This was God’s creation, I assured myself. From the beginning of time, here was the Garden of Eden. The Biblical story of Genesis, the Quiche Maya Popol Vul or Book of Advice and all the primitive history of humankind wrapped up around me in a terrestrial realm.
What’s more, I never got a chance to turn the pages of The Anahuac Mythology. What secrets did it behold for Father Hernandez that he felt compelled to share had perplexed me. He made no mention of its contents when we talked in the kitchen or did he, indirectly? That was something I resigned myself to never being able to answer.
How was it that we were continuously beset with the difficulties of finding the appropriate solutions to sustaining a peaceful life when we had cultivated such profound wisdom through the ages? Was it an unconquerable devil that truly governs the spirit of the earth just as Quetzalcoatl’s foe conquered him? I wanted to find solace in the stars above me, but the night sky had clouded over with a thick and heavy layer above us. I curled up into a ball leaning against the trunk of a mangrove tree. In no time I dozed off into a deep sleep, but in short time, I was rudely awaken by a frenzied Hornsby.
“I must talk with you Jules,” he said with a desperate tone of voice.
I roused myself awake startled by his urgency. I came face to face with the wild-eyed expression of a man who was obsessed in a sudden frenzy.
“What is it, James,” I said calling him by his first name for the first time since I knew him.
“The spirits cry out to me in my dreams,” Hornsby said, frenzied.
I adjusted myself to scrutinize him, rubbing my eyes.
“Their power is so great . . . like the eye of a hurricane, it whirls within me.”
Seated with an earnest appeal in his voice to gain my attention, I waved him on as an obligation. He composed himself with a sober smile.
“Who can read the story of creation? Neither does it live in a culture’s tradition or is written in history. There is mystery here, hidden by the darkness of ages. We question the past, content to believe that thousands of people have roamed the earth sinking into oblivion with no consequence to our existence. Only a few races have left a trace of their subsistence. We find monuments of ancient skill, doctrine of mythology, intricate sketches and portraits, showing us how the mind must advance, seeking new fields of conquest. If not, our consciousness will be defeated. Our consciousness does not rest until it reaches its gain, its objective point or demonstrates that the quest is hopeless.
“And science, with all its resources is brought to bear in contribution the creation of a new science that is added to human knowledge. But I tell you; while we roll back the voyage of time and learn the condition of primitive man we have yet to triumph in our analysis. Science has enriched our understanding of life to a point. Geology unfolded into paleontology, as impressions in rock revealed fossils. And the science of Human Antiquities laid the foundation for archeology.
“As Columbus perceived the traces of land as yet invisible and had to take the ridicule of his peers to think such things, there are those of us who must break from these academic constraints as seekers of the great questions to the origin and history of our consciousness.
“There was not a great sudden change in the Stone Age, except here among the Mayab Forest. It was as if the darkness of the land was given the light of the Holy Grail. Most likely it was trade between the Mesoamerican’s that expanded their civilizations over time, but something deep in their psyches was awakened from an external force. The myths of the Mayans have since become the inheritance for our modern world to understand, where the mournful ruins stand as testaments to their far-reaching awareness in the barren wilderness of understanding.
“Nations have come and gone, but the Mayan temples still stand as navigational markers, left behind to tell others about the portal, the path, the course. What is lost, the truth, is but a code we haven’t allowed ourselves to perceive.
“The mist of epochs between them and us is so thick, like the dense fog of night that only the rough outlines can be determined. The whole body of the spiritual system is hidden from the bare eye. This cyclic physics of timelessness, we don’t understand as fully as the Mayans. The rotating and counter rotating of electrometric fields about our earth as some kind of stabilizing grid.
“There is a radiant point out there in the cosmos sending a vast energetic message to us. At times I can feel it. And the nature of the Mayan numerical calculations recognizes this fact. To receive this frequency our true natures are archetypal in nature, resonating with cosmos. This all makes for a seemingly endless conundrum of perplexity to our rational science. But it does make sense to me. I just wish I knew more about their language.”
Hornsby, spent and wild-eyed, drifted off, mumbling to himself. He moved a short distance away from me, lost in his frantic thoughts. A man obsessed. I hunched back down to go back to sleep. But the restlessness of the air kept me half awake.
At day break the mournful cries of the howler monkeys caused me to rise and shake my numb limbs about. Hornsby dozed, a slight snore gave me the impression he was deep in his dreams. The pang of hungered made me long for a hot breakfast. Something other than lizards, beetles, snake, foliage and tropical fruits that would get me through the day.
“One can’t muster the strength to face the day on a empty stomach,” I thought to myself.
Taking out the mess kit, I neatly laid out the utensils, cup and plate in the pattern of a formal table setting. I imagined fried eggs; harsh browns, bacon and cut juicy melon in nice neat squares placed for my consumption before me. I took my hot cup of coffee, sipping it while taking in its steamy aroma that filled my nostrils. Then with my Swiss army knife I forked up some hash browns, munching the delicious texture of salt, pepper and oil soaked crispy fries. Oh, yes, and there was a stack of toast and jam to devour as well, slathered in creamy butter. With that I sopped up the runny yoke of an egg cooked sunny side up. As I finished up this delightful meal, Hornsby stirred, awakened from my rummaging.
“Care to join me?” I asked, holding up my cup of imaginary coffee in my hand. Hornsby couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Jules, are you mad?” He quickly sat up.
“Yes, you’re right. I should have waited for you. How impolite of me.”
Hornsby grabbed me by the shoulders violently shaking me.
“Snap out of it, Jules!”
“Ok, ok, James. It’s ok. I’m not mad. I was just . . . ” I paused looking up at him.
He had a terrified look in his face. I had scared the wits out of him, something I thought not possible, realizing how dependent he was on my own sanity. Settling down, he gathered himself while I put the mess kit away.
“For chrissakes, Jules don’t pull a stunt like that again. You know how vulnerable we are right now.”
“It’s ok, James. We best get on with our exploration, don’t you agree?”
Hornsby thoughtfully agreed.
Together we surveyed the map and compass heading. Identifying a decidedly point of reference from the landscape off in the distance the two us set off directly east of El Destino. If the day was to bring about our great discovery, let it be so. I ignored the deadly calm of the air and dark cloud cover that looked like an approaching tempestuous storm.
“Tally ho,” I said to Hornsby with the gusto of a rallying cry.
With that the sky unleashed a thunderous clap. A light rain started to fall. We were blissfully unaware that moving swiftly toward us off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula was Hurricane Brenda.
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