MikePadgett.com

Tikal

— Passing nearby in 1525, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés never spotted the silent buildings of the great city state Tikal, already hidden for centuries by thick jungle.”

On this side of the Mopan river is Benque, Belize. On the far side is Melchor de Mencos, Guatemala. The air is full of last night’s rain and sickening diesel fumes. We’re at the border checkpoint, a confusing mess of trucks, money changers, uniformed men with pump action shotguns and a lot of blank staring people hanging about.

J and I emerge from the border house with passports stamped and we get into a dusty car with Guatemalan plates, driven by a heavy-set, silent type who only later reveals that he has in fact a handsome command of English.

They’re building a new bridge into Melchor de Mencos but it’s not finished, so we take on the narrow, older crossing instead. We’re stuck in traffic trying to cross the bridge and the crowd is pressing in. Eventually, after a stop at a gas station in which everyone is smoking, we clear town on a highway punctuated by intermittent rough sections.

After about an hour of broad, deforested landscapes and sleeping dogs and poor shacks and rich churches, we approach the village of Ixlu (“Lady Catfish”) near the banks of Lake Petén. Ixlu has all the usual suspects – a couple of tiendas named after women, a little bar, a colourful graveyard and lots of washing lines – but it also has our guide Luis.

Luis introduces himself and then translates a few newspaper articles for us. He’s a fast-talking septuagenarian who starts out like a club comedian but turns out to be a Mayan mystic.

This is no schtick: Luis is a timekeeper. He’s here to describe the events of the world. This is his birth role. His birthday is the same as mine. He brushes away the coincidence. To Mayans there is no such thing. Instead he stops dead and fixes me with a serious look. He tells me that it means I’m also a timekeeper. Luis stops dead again and fixes us both with a serious look. He says we have a long hike today. This staccato is something he will do throughout our visit to Tikal. It gives a rhythm to everything. He’s keeping time.

Luis has been doing his job as a timekeeper, this same job, four times a week for over fourteen years. Tikal is one of his best friends.

That best friend is much older of course. It was founded around the fourth century BC and came to prominence in the Classic period. Unlike nearby Caracol, Tikal has been fully mapped and its true extent is known: an area of 16km² containing 3,000 buildings and home to around 90,000 inhabitants, though some believe the city state could have fed almost half a million.

Tikal’s history is exemplary of Yucatec Mayan history. An agrarian society was in evidence around 1000BC which grew to prominence during the course of the early centuries AD.

Conflict and alliance with other city states followed and then a strong, probably ruling connection with Teotihuacán in modern day Mexico.

Tikal’s zenith began in the late 4th century AD and lasted almost two hundred years, during which time its influence spread widely throughout the Yucatán Peninsula and encompassed several client settlements.

In common with most Mayan city states however, by the 9th century Tikal had become unable to cope with the demands of such a large population and intense regional competition for resources and it entered a period of irreversible decline.

Luis is busy. He is calling to birds and monkeys. He is climbing the ruins via all the small paths he knows. He explains the ball court system to J. He points out the architects’ signatures in the stonework. He warns a tourist off the ramparts of a fragile building.

Luis says that all religions are valid. He says they all converge like tributaries on the same great river of life and death. He says that it is useless to fight over this religion or that: all religions are merely mathematical and they all contain the hidden, codified messages of the universe.

Luis talks about ley lines, sutras, I-Ching, Stonehenge and Jesus Christ walking on water. He has us standing in temple doorways, closing our eyes, humming, feeling the energies of the place.

Luis describes an infinite cycle of waves – the biorhythms of the individual and the attack and decay, the ebb and flow of the world.

Luis says that humans alternate in their collective awareness and proximity to the creator force. The capacity for enlightenment versus the capacity for obfuscation. And the world alternates simultaneously, between stress and balance. These concepts are universal, not simply Mayan.

Luis says that in 2012, the end of one of these great cycles will come to pass. This is not the end of the world, says Luis. It is the end of a world.

Balance must be restored. Humans must rediscover their proximity to the creator force.