Chapter One: Mayab Forest
“Hurry . . . Jules!”
“Hurry . . . Jules!”
I desperately cut my way through the dark-green jungle undergrowth with a machete to reach anthropology professor James Hornsby. A merciless demonical wind battered the rainforest canopy above me. A bolt of lightning flashed above me striking the top of a tree bursting into a ball of fiery sparks. Smoldering branches rained down upon me. An instantaneous clap of thunder slapped up against my eardrums. The deafening explosion rattled every nerve in my body.
Then the thick low cover of dark clouds unleashed a torrential down pour that turned the rotting vegetation beneath my feet into slippery mud-sucking gunk. I choked to catch my breath in the blinding deluge upon Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Only month’s earlier, former Cambridge University anthropologist James Hornsby and I set out in search for a lost temple of the Mayan civilization in the southern Mexico region called Chiapas. He was now calling to me above the howling winds in enthusiastic valor. I was desperate to reach him, but with each agonizing foothold on the steep slope, I slipped on the jungle mud falling face first into the slippery mire.
I lay there exhausted wondering if getting back up was worth the effort. My shirt and shorts were all but shredded rags draped over my bony skin. My flesh was scabbed from insect bites and lacerated by the prickly thorns of the underbrush. Worse yet, the skin on my feet had turned yellowish-green from jungle rot. The ragging storm just added to my pitiful misery.
“Cauac,” I thought to myself. “The Mayan god of rain was my tormentor now.”
I reached out to grab some dangling vines in an effort to pull myself up the steep hillside, but my numb fingers slipped away. Resolute, I clung to what little life was pumping through my veins. The feeling of utter vulnerability to the forces of this savage wilderness overwhelmed my senses. I choked on my fears of an inevitable death, the final reckoning for disturbing the graves of its Mayan ancestors.
Our search for the existence of a Holy Grail-type artifact rumored to exist from Mayan’s mythology took Hornsby and me into the inhospitable jungle of the Mayab Forest where no indigenous would have ventured. Along the way, we had avoided the sinister military ambushes on the Guatemalan and Mexican border, survived the pestilence of the jungle’s hostile environment, and lived off the land on a diet of palm trunks, tarpon and snook fish, grub-worms, snakes, lizards and beetles or whatever else we deemed edible to keep from starving.
“Esta tempo . . . Yaxkin.” Hornsby flung out the words echoing above me in boisterous jubilation between gusts of howling wind.
I surmised that this man could muster such vain enthusiasm under these harsh conditions because his ancestry’s bloodline was more primordial than mine. Hornsby’s force of character contained an infinite source of indestructible vitality that pulsed through his blood. Moreover, Hornsby had no patience with feebleness.
“Pain is inefficiency,” Hornsby scolded me with brute frankness weeks earlier. The incident flashed across my mind, but quickly diminished when I recalled that our discovery of an ancient subterranean cryptic vault had inspired us with an iridescent ray of optimism to keep on looking for this location, the lost ruin called Yaxkin.
Hornsby pushed on with a vision that at times was as despairing and sometimes frantic. Steaming in perspiration, his tall thick figure would forge on with eyeballs glistening in a fiery sharp sparkle, shouting out a tenacious natural cadence. But the rest of the members of the expedition had long since abandoned us. They either fell victim to jungle illness or growing concerned for their safety from politically motivated anti-communist campaigns enforced by roaming military death squads upon the indigenous communities.
That is, all except for a medical intern from Oxford University, Dr. Cassarina Deakin. She stayed on enduring the journey’s hardships with Hornsby and I. Haunted by her own sizzling feelings about the outcome of the expedition, the doctor made best to keep our spirits up, and at times leaned on us for her own emotional stability.
Cassarina was waiting for us at a nomadic indigenous refugee camp we came upon a few days before near the Rio San Pedro. She had remained behind to assist a French doctor with ailing and starving refugees instead of accompanying Hornsby and I on the last leg of our journey. As I endured Hornsby’s stormy countenance and the tropical deluge, my only motivation by now was to make it back alive was to return to Cassarina.
“Jules! Get your bloody ass up here,” Hornsby cried out.
As much as I knew that I needed to respond to Hornsby’s beckoned call, I found a deserved respite lying in a muck hole on the jungle-shrouded slop of the Yaxkin temple and thought of Cassarina’s words.
“No one had respected the depth or contemplated the mystery of this ancient sophisticated civilization until Dr. James Hornsby came along,” Cassarina told me while she nursed me back to health from a severe bout of malaria a month ago.
“Dr. Hornsby is destined to find the answer, enough so that the obstacles we encountered won’t deter Hornsby. Come hell or high water he would seek his fruits from laborious research into deciphering the Mayan codices,” she added as a sentimental whim.
The warm gaze of her rich green eyes was the best tonic I had ever ingested, if not the touch of her silky soft skin as I lay feverish in a hammock.
“And the cyclic numerical matrix of the Mayan “day keepers” almanac known as the ch’olk’ ij in the northern Guatemalan language, tonalpohauli in Mexica or more commonly referred to in the literal transliteration of Yucatec as Tzolk’in, the count of days,” I had added deliriously, burning with fever.
Cassarina reached over to stroke my face with a consoling touch.
“Don’t let your mind be swarming. You’ve been through enough.”
A bolt of lightning and a crack of thunder slapped me back to my bleak situation. What an idiot I was to be lying in that jungle muck groping for some validation of some hair brained thousands of years old Maya myth. I was caught in the torments of life, absorbed in the distant view of it all through an occidental perspective, attempting to prove credibility that only threw me further into a vacuum of a spitefulness that sicken me.
I taunted myself in a contrived consolation that neither was I a hero or worthy man that could become anything. Given my condition, to live any longer, I thought, would have been morally vulgar. But perhaps, it is because when one is on the edge of utter hopelessness, the earnest intensity pushes us into a surreal enjoyment. If I can revenge myself, then I can stand up for myself.
In that moment, I felt the liveliest gratitude awaken in me from the sheer slog, disillusion and exasperation of my plight. To relinquish this unrest in my heart, I would write with both hands at once, if necessary, about the prophetic significance of the Mayan cyclic almanac; the haab or xiuhpohualli twenty-emblem hieroglyphs that rotated as a mechanized wheel to the Tzolk’in and the Mayan Long Count. I would write about it all.
The Mayans had inextricably woven together these three cyclic systems into a matrix that allowed them to perform modern day mathematical calculations, moreover the evolution of human conscience. The pivotal point of discovery was an analysis by Roso de Luna in 1911, deducted from the Cortes codex permutations present in a cyclic-arithmetical progression by constant difference in a close cycle.
The PreClassic civilization of Mesoamerica had developed matrix calculus several millennia before the Western world. The oldest known calendrical signs were inscribed at Monte Alban, Oaxaca, Mexico between five hundred to two hundred fifty B.C. If one could imagine, the Mayan had already set up the baseline mathematical formula to discover the parameters and variables of any terrestrial or cosmic phenomenon. And this raised the issue promptly enough in a direction that we had not yet calculated. The reality of these facts made Western mathematical science look like a stray dog sniffing at its tail.
Hornsby made a leap from the prevailing theory of the Maya’s demise as a barbaric culture. He constructed from the data that the Maya’s predecessor were navigators of the galaxies, maintaining that there existed a missing link. Enlightened, he published an academic paper based upon his own intuitive belief that this missing link was buried in the Mayab Forest that shaped the origin and evolution of human consciousness as a portal between the earth and the universe.
His interpretations made for a startling revelation --the Maya knew that the cosmic cycles directly affected human evolution. His peers discounted him as making outrageous claims. However, against the odds of the murmuring stir of adversarial voices, here we were on the verge of resolute discovery deep in the Mayab Forest.
“Straight away, Jules,” Hornsby hollered.
“I’m coming,” I yelled back over the hurricane wind, doubting that he heard me.
Unable to get my body to respond I resigned myself to continued with my introspection of how I had gotten myself in such a desperate situation.
The majority of anthropologists of the day held onto the belief that the Mayan despotic rulers were overthrown by a slave revolt after their natural resources had become exhausted. The conflict climaxed into total anarchy and eventual end. Was it their prejudice or condescending impatience in not wanting to wrestle with the mystery of the Maya civilization’s true reality that caused his critics to reject Hornsby theory? Hornsby wholeheartedly argued that the very essence of consciousness was in direct relationship with a universal code both mathematically and astronomically interpreted by the Mayan.
Even though he was expulsed by the disbelief of his peers, they quailed before him. Hornsby had the power to sustain his means from the faculty of his adversaries as if their indifference provided him some divine empowerment. Yet, Hornsby had to land his theory with factual evidence. And for me, who was equally invested in this expedition’s success, an inconclusive outcome would be a disgraceful failure. I had been willing to rest such importance on the tutelage of one individual. I did not want to have believed in vain.
Hornsby called out to me again, yelling impatiently “temple” in Spanish. The invading overgrown roots of a bulky mangrove tree protruded like tentacles from the ground, embracing me. I sat there shivering and hungry, staring vacantly out at the jungle. The whole of the ordeal was welling up indifferences that fragmented my conscience.
The price I had paid for my thirst to be quenched by some great truth anchored in the Mayan legend was reaching its limit. I wanted my just reward or enough was enough. I started to believe that Hornsby’s adversaries were right. This was nature’s deliberate torture, a sacrifice of my soul to pass into a long painful understanding whose truth could be more of a burden then freedom.
“This must prove to be what we’re looking for,” I muttered under my breath, determined to see it through. It was Hornsby’s unconquerable will power that seized me with an untamable passion and made that word “pain” erased from my mind.
Rising back to my feet I took a whack with the glistening steel blade machete at the over growth, venting my revenge at the boiling tempest all about me. The pestilence of the jungle, the fatigue from living in the steamy tropical heat, and witnessing the atrocities of the infamous death squads crawled beneath my flesh. Undoubtedly, Hornsby had become marooned by his private delusions. If so, I was close behind. Or was this our sanity and the world we had left was insane?
When another bolt of lightning streaked across the sky and deafening thunder slapped my eardrums, I imagine myself a corpse. Here lies the skeleton of my bones buried under epochs of time to be found some day by archeologists who would prove I was an inferior species during the past millennium age. A fitting end to mingle my remains with the fragmentized detritus traces of past eras that have vanished off the face of the earth.
“Menhir,” Hornsby shouted again above the howling hurricane wind.
I took a deep breath and resumed my climb clenching tangled vines with numb fingers. My legs trembled. I felt light headed from near-starvation. Worse yet, my soul shuddered. This intolerable man that was beckoning me with utter impatience was over thirty years my senior.
Yet, he had more dynamism than a hundred stampeding horses. A stout Australian who could adapt so easily to these stifling conditions, Hornsby demonstrated with each step forward into the unknown that he could exceed the same hearty stamina of those Spanish conquistadors who suffered in these tropics over five hundred years ago. He was so obsessed to find the grail of his quest that at times I asked myself if I was being lead by an incarnation of Cortez himself.
Buried in his conviction was a subtle urgency of discovering a necessary truth that would redeem him. Enough was the potent essence surging through the underlying command in Hornsby’s vigor that it penetrated my heart, enslaving me of its desires. I could not deny that the journey was involuntary, but forced by an intangible power pulling me out of a deprived life.
Hornsby knew how to clearly combined his conscious and subconscious thinking, willfully, into a second sight. I could see it in his squinted up eyes and knitted eyebrows, silently asking something of the primitive world.
“When will you learn to respond to the law of nature?” Hornsby tersely whispered in a deep sigh to me the night before. It was one of his acutely conscious moments that slapped me across the face like an insult.
I had no answer for him, only to look about me in the starlight darkness for a clue, an omen, a nudge toward an answer in an infinite galaxy of explanations. This was his same preference of means that guided him and whom luck always followed because he never took time to doubt his choices on the way toward manifesting his rumination. And that realization awakened my soul as my life was left dangling in the turbulent hungry beast of a tropical hurricane.
“We must be on the right track,” I thought to myself. “We have to be on the right path.”
“Jules, the Soul Chamber,” Hornsby cried out.
Copyright 2005
