TIKAL, Guatemala — The jungle rises 100 feet into the air, a rainforest of ceibas and mahogany and cedar trees. But the ancient stone pyramids rise even higher.
The Temple of the Jaguar Priest. The Temple of the Two-Headed Serpent. Their flat tops poke through the canopy, into the vast and misty sky. It is a scene so otherworldly that filmmakers used it in a "Star Wars" movie.
This is Tikal, in the tropics of Guatemala. It is one of the largest Mayan ruins in the world and is even more otherworldly in reality than it is on the screen. You can spend several days walking through Tikal — walking where the Maya walked, trying to imagine yourself back in time.
Tikal was a premier trading and ceremonial center during the Classic period of Mayan culture, inhabited as a city from 200 B.C. to A.D. 900. At its peak, it was home to about100,000 people. Out of thousands of structures, about 500 buildings have been excavated and studied, and about 300 have been restored.
When you visit, you will walk in a few square miles, only a small part of the 25 square miles Tikal must have covered. You'll see many green mounds. Unexcavated buildings abound.
You'll see that some of the roads were major avenues, 30 feet across. Since the Maya didn't have wheels, you must imagine the roads without carts, but full of people — peasants, priests, slaves, craftsmen, traders bearing seashells, herders with their animals.
As you walk, you breathe the jungle air, heavy with the scents of growth and decay. You see orchids and philodendron and bromeliads. You hear frogs, toucans, doves and madly squawking parrots.
With luck, you will see the male howler monkeys fighting and screeching in the treetops. Don't be surprised if the females remain unimpressed by the males' display. The females like to doze in the branches while the males spar. (Hint: Never stand directly under a monkey in a tree. Monkeys tend to spray urine when defending their territory.)
Tikal gets more than a million visitors a year, half of them Europeans. While you wander down the trails and across the plazas, you'll hear Italian, French, perhaps Swedish or Norwegian. You may also hear your guide speaking Mayan to one of the other guides.
As it turns out, descendents of the ancient Maya still live in this part of the world and still speak one of several dozen Mayan dialects. Some remember a few ceremonies and farming practices — bits and pieces of the long-ago culture. The national park service allows the Maya to conduct ceremonies at Tikal. So they come, regularly, to pray for rain, to give thanks for the harvest.
Officials from the local provincial government explored Tikal in the mid-1800s, followed closely by the British and then by Harvard University. Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania began excavating in 1956, aided by the Guatemalan government.
This latter partnership is responsible for the restoration of Tikal. Your Guatemalan guides will tell you that the altars of Tikal were never overgrown or in disrepair, because they have been used continuously for nearly 3,000 years.
Your guides will explain that Tikal was a center where ideas as well as goods were traded. The guides will also explain something of how the Maya lived and worshipped.
They'll talk about the 20-year cycles, called katuns. It seems that buildings were built and added on to for a period of 20 years, only to be abandoned as a way to mark time, part of the ritual of moving on to the next katun.
The guides will also talk about the rituals of bloodletting. (Perhaps only the king had to pierce his genitals, perhaps other royals did as well). They'll talk about the ball games in which, it seems, the losers were sometimes put to death.
But if the culture seems raw and rugged in some ways, in other ways it was quite sophisticated. Proudly, the guides describe the precision of the astronomy. They find the Mayan calendar superior to the Roman calendar in that it doesn't need a leap year.
And there's more. In the Tikal national park guidebook, Thor Janson notes, "The foundations of the great Mayan temples were correctly engineered to be tangent to Earth, indicating that the architects were conscious of the planet's spherical surface curvature at a time when European authorities insisted the Earth must be flat."
Though the temples look like they are huge inside, they are not. The stones have been laid in concentrically smaller rectangles. Each temple is built over the burial tomb of a noble person. So while the imposing pyramids might appear to have something to do with government, you will discover that the governing of the city-state, as well as the ceremonies and the buying and selling, took place in the palaces and outside on the plazas.
At several spots around Tikal, you will see stelae, which are rock slabs, dense with carvings. Each stela is a historical marker covered with hieroglyphics about the reign of a particular ruler. Because of the stelae and the hieroglyphics decorating temples and palaces, scholars knew the Maya were literate. Yet for decades, no one could decipher their writings.
Various guides will tell you, sadly, of the destruction of an entire library of Mayan books. All but four books were burned by a Franciscan priest named Diego de Landa. De Landa, who lived from 1524 to 1579, had been sent from Spain to bring Christianity to the Yucatan.
Ironically, even as he set out to destroy the "pagan" culture, de Landa helped to preserve it. When he returned to Spain, near the end of his life, he wrote in great detail about the Mayan culture.
He described the calendar and farming methods. And de Landa also wrote about the Mayan alphabet. He had sat with Maya who could still read the old language, and he had translated some of the hieroglyphics. De Landa didn't understand how the language worked, but he preserved a key, nonetheless.
Several guides on the Mayan sites credit a Siberian-born archaeologist, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, with unlocking the secret of the hieroglyphics. In 1960, she was able to read the stelae and explain to the world that these were histories.
Other archaeologists credit Yuri Knorosov with laying the foundation for her work. In 1952, Knorosov figured out that the Mayan hieroglyphics were made up partly of sounds and partly of ideas. He discovered that some of the 300 symbols were syllables.
From different guides, you can hear different theories on why Mayan civilization declined. Some talk about invasions of Mexicans. Many say the Mayan cities outgrew their resources. There were signs of malnutrition in the skeletons of even the nobility in the later years. In his book, "The Lords of Tikal," University of Pennsylvania's Peter Harrison says that, in the last days, "the suggestion of cannibalism is strong."
But while Guatemalan and Belizean guides blame overpopulation — and guidebook author Janson agrees that resources were being depleted — Janson says overpopulation would have led to a gradual decline in the civilization. Instead, the large Mayan cities were abandoned practically overnight.
So Janson suggests that drought, plague, war or peasant revolt may have ended Tikal. No one claims to know for sure.
So you end your tour of Tikal knowing lots of details. Still, in some essential way, the Mayans' lives remain a mystery.
This is why it is good to save a climb to the top of a temple for the last part of your visit. Sitting atop a massive stone pyramid, looking out over a seemingly endless rainforest, is the best way to revel in mystery.
Only after our group left Tikal, headed back to Belize, did we learn that if we had stayed at one of the hotels at the site, we would have been allowed to wander the grounds at sunrise or sunset. We mourned, realizing the only thing better than seeing it by daylight would be to walk among the ruins of Tikal on the night of a full moon.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com
Sources: "The Lords of Tikal," by Peter D. Harrison, 1999, Thames and Hudson. "The Magnificent Maya," a Time-Life Book, 1993. "Tikal National Park, A Visitor's Guide," by Thor Janson, Editorial Laura Lee, 1966.