There's something strangely sexy about the Mayan site of Yaxchilan, forgetting that when you're there you're dripping with sweat and constantly swatting at mosquitoes.
I blame Lady Xoc.
Shield Jaguar's Queen is depicted in Lintel 24 on her knees before her King, threading a rope spiked with thorns through her tongue in the female version of penis perforation. She captures her blood on a paper offering that will be burned to invoke a crazy serpent vision like the one depicted on Lintel 25. [1]
Lady Xoc’s sultry spirit is all over this place.
The site is considerably more groomed than Piedras Negras, but has none of the tightly trimmed pathways of Palenque. It's somewhat remote and requires that you put in by boat, but still brings in a respectable tourist trade -- enough traffic that when our friend and guide Alfonso set up a picnic for us all and was mashing up a bucket of guacamole to top the banana leaf wrapped tamales that he hauled in from afar, the tide of tourists would stop to ask him ¿cuánto? (Fortunately he didn't relent and we had more than enough to wash down with a cane sugar Coca -- one of the best meals ever.)
At Yaxchilan there's a deep dark labyrinth of passageways that meander through an interlocking series of excavated structures. The ceilings frequently peak in that classic attenuated Mayan triangle, and are studded with a concentration of sleeping bats -- blind sleeping bats, you remind yourself fervently, as you sweep your flashlight over them.
Stepping around the dark corners and up unexpected steps soon you find yourself in a colonnade that spills into a wide open grassy plaza studded with a dance platform and a ball court and an abundance of free standing structures -- many of them with carved lintels, still intact in their door frames, and an occasional stucco.
I’ve never received a satisfactory answer to my question: Why did the Maya exert so much effort into carving a surface that no one saw? Lintels are installed in that place in the door jamb just over head -- to see them at all requires the indignity of cranking your neck back hard; to shoot them requires lying flat on your back in something of a sprawl. I shot almost a dozen lintels on this last trip and each time I felt like perv peeking up a girl’s skirt.
I’ve been told by several scholars that the subjected saw them when they were lying prostrate before the king, but I’m not buying it: prostrate implies nose to the dirt, and lintel requires some serious head twisting to look up and absorb the intricate stories that they tell.
Something else is going on with the lintels, and I’m reminded of the Thai belief that spirits live in door jambs (which is why you never want to step on the wood that frames the bottom of a door in a Thai house) and wonder whether it was thought that something sleeps here too; something that looks after the stories and ensures they’re remembered.
It's a complete bullshit theory, but it's mine.
Stairways vie with lintels for predominance at Yaxchilan. The central feature of the site is a big ass stairway that ascends to remarkable Temple 33 that’s graced with an estella carved from a stalactite.
Arriving, huffing, at the top you realize you still haven't gone far enough -- there are two more acropolis that lie behind a slippery hike through twisted trails, over rock faces and thick roots.
Three of us hiked it together in silence. It was a little like hiking one of the steeper trails at Yosemite, back in the wilderness areas during the early spring when it's misty and wet. But ratch up the heat and humidity by about 95%, and then drop a 3,000 year old structure on the summit. Better yet: drop three structures. And populate them with cryptic carvings.
It was something like that.
And then like jimmies on ice cream the monkeys stopped by -- at least half a dozen howlers with a baby among them, taking their time over lunch, swinging through the trees.
p.s. There was a furry tarantula too, who, near the end of the day as we ascended what would be our last temple steps of the trip, ducked into his hidey-hole just as my foot found its grip on his step, three of his eight legs protruding as he sat perfectly still, pretending to be invisible, waiting for me to move on.
[1] Both lintels -- two of the most extraordinary examples of Mayan art -- now hang in the British Museum.
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