Palenque
The road crawls over the rainforest, then turns back on itself, heading for the hills. A waterfall can be heard, but not seen. The road climbs to a clearing and reveals its astonishing treasure: Mexico’s lost city of Palenque. Palenque seems too real to be real. The stranglehold of the jungle is pushed back, and massive stone pyramids sit like chuckling sphinxes. First occupied in 100 BC, the city grew in power for 1,000 years and then vanished with the sudden collapse of the Maya. What happened to them? No one knows, and the stones are staying silent. Not long after the Maya’s mysterious destruction, the jungle reclaimed the land it had loaned them, swallowing the city whole. The ruins slept through the rise and fall of the Aztecs and the conquest of the Spaniards, awakening in 1746, when Mayan hunters guided a curious priest to it. Once again, the jungle was pushed back. The furnace heat of the rainforest is like nothing else. The air is too hot to breath, and damp with humidity. On the field before the temples, a workman pushes a lawnmower a few feet, then slinks back into the shade for a long nap. Later, he returns to his task and cuts another dozen inches before calling it a day. I don’t blame him. On unsteady feet, I walk past the Templo de las Inscriptions, with its inscrutable writings, on to the giant palace, where labyrinthine tunnels run under a mighty tower. It is thought this was home to the ruler of Palenque, and that he and his chosen priests ascended the tower to watch the sun fall directly on the Templo de las Inscriptions during the winter solstice. On the far side of the clearing rises the Templo del Sol. Scrambling up its stairs, one understands why the Mayans thought the sun was a god – and why rumours persist that the architects behind the monument drew their inspiration from magic mushrooms. On top, the lizards and I hide in the scraps of shade. The sun squats above us. I wonder what prayer would turn the heat down. Beyond the clearing, a path leads back into the jungle. It becomes apparent the rainforest still holds most of Palenque: stone buildings hide in the trees and are easily confused for natural rock outcrops. A waterfall tumbles through the woods. Massive trees strapped with vines shoot up into the canopy, alive with monkey chatter. The way down is littered with half-buried houses that said farewell to their final occupants a millennia ago. A rickety bridge crosses the river at the foot of the waterfall. Here, the rumble of the water over rocks, the rustling of the leaves and the noise of animals are so loud it is a kind of silence. I stumble out Palenque’s back door. It closes up behind me, turning me out on to the road. *** Away from the machinery of civilization and our Emerald Cities, the scope of life is revealed. Here, humans are not creators, but creatures, struggling for life with everything else in this vast, uncaring jungle.
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The jungle pulls back to let the road pass, just as a thousand years before it gave the Mayans room to build a world amid its dense vegetation. Butterflies cloud the humid air while monkeys scream from treetops and toucans swoop through the sweltering sky.