Archaeology > Articles > Secrets of the Lost World

A Guatemalan radio station once ran a brief news report on a team from a certain European museum who were, with full government approval, transporting artefacts from the ancient city of Tikal to the airport in the capital. The announcement excited very little interest in Guatemala City.

But out in the jungle a museum spokesman said later that the ‘confrontation’ - for so the newspapers termed it - was almost eerie. There were no threats, no shouting and apparently no formal organisation. The Indians simply stepped out of the forest and stood together, silently blocking the road. “They were prepared to wait forever,” the spokesman added.

The trucks turned around and lumbered back up the jungle track. Los Indios had calmly but decisively closed the door out of the ancient Mayan capital. In the timeframe of Tikal the whole incident took just a fraction of a heartbeat.

Although the site was originally settled around 400BC the six huge temple pyramids that are the hallmark of Tikal were built about a thousand years later, at the height of the Mayan civilisation.

Since a military expedition under Colonel Modesto Méndez stumbled upon the ruins in 1848 Tikal has attracted ever-increasing numbers of visitors. Today’s ‘explorers’ do not have to suffer the long trek through the feverish jungle; mini-buses now run regularly along the asphalt road from the district capital of Flores, and there are three hotels and a campsite at the ruins. Even the bus journey from Guatemala City - legendary amongst Central American backpackers - can be avoided by taking a flight to Flores. Those travelling in style can then connect with a helicopter straight to the ruins.

Excavation has been going on almost continuously since the 1950s and the jungle has, so far, been coerced into giving up over a hundred of Tikal’s structures. But walk twenty metres in any direction and you enter the gloom of the tropical forest. The buildings lying off to the side of the temple courtyards are still strangled with centuries of rioting vegetation and even a cursory investigation into the forest reveals mounds of half-buried dwellings - ‘hillocks’ that strike you as being obviously out-of-place under the rainforest’s otherwise un-crumpled carpet. It is the brooding nearness of the jungle - far more enduring, far more patient even than the Indians - that gives Tikal a power that even the Great Pyramids of Egypt, as they become an annex of Cairo, may have lost.

Nowadays this area and the incredible store of history it contains is protected by UNESCO and policed by the vigilantes of Tikal National Park Service.

Many of the animals which you are likely to see in the forest were sacred to the ancient Mayans and are depicted in the intricate carvings that seem to adorn every vertical stone surface. It is fitting then that, along with the more stationary treasures of Tikal, this wealth of flora and fauna should benefit from the protection afforded by the area’s National Park status.

It was not thoughts of this kind that occupied me however as, by the light of only the tiniest sliver of moon, I climbed the stone face of the Great Pyramid in the area known today as El Mundo Perdido - The Lost World. I was beginning to appreciate the theory that these temples were once used as sacrificial altars from where victims were hurled directly into the lap of the gods by the high priests. The gods still claim their due; in recent years several visitors have died falling down the bloodthirsty flanks of Tikal’s pyramids.

I had travelled a long way with the intention of spending the night in the Lost World - 15 hours, three-to-a-seat, on a bus from Guatemala City (it’s an experience that you should try . . . once). That ride was followed by a hitched lift in the back of a chicle (raw chewing-gum) tapper’s pickup. All my plans had worked-out, except for one thing . . I had lost my torch.

So, feeling cautiously for each step, I climbed with sloth-like stealth out of the forest canopy and past even the highest branches of the sacred ceiba trees. The Mayans believed that, from root to branch tip, the massive bulk of these trees connected the ‘underworld,’ through infinite layers, with the heavens.

On the pyramid’s flat summit the sky was sprinkled with a more dizzying array of stars than I had ever seen. The Lost World was originally aligned as a celestial observatory and reeling under this glittering blanket, that seemed to be draped purposefully over the Great Pyramid, it was easy to understand the Mayan preoccupation with the cosmos.

I fell asleep some time after the last calls of the birds had been replaced by the buzz of tree frogs and dreamt that I was helping somebody to bump-start a tractor. When I awoke the harsh, roaring choke of a cold engine was still echoing through the last patches of dawn mist.

The call of a howler monkey once heard is never forgotten. To say that they ‘howl’ does not do justice to their unbelievable roar. More reminiscent of a dinosaur than a primate, their call begins with a series of deep, baying coughs that increase in speed and volume until they mingle into one long, thunderous bellow that literally makes the earth tremble.

The hazy dawn had revealed Gran Jaguar (the tallest of Tikal’s pyramids at 44 metres) and its sister temple. They looked hauntingly alien as their vertical altars reared up, out of a world that as far as the eye could see was nothing but greenery.

My drowsy sentiments on ‘the dawn of time’ and ‘lost civilisations’ were quashed by a momentous realisation: I was perched on the very spot from where the rebel fortress in ‘Star Wars’ was filmed.

The howler monkeys’ calls diminished as the sun crested the treeline and squawking clouds of green parrots began to swoop to-and-fro across the plaza below me. A coatimundi (a more elegant relative of the racoon), tail waving high, sauntered along the edge of the lawn. I eased my way back down the stairway for a closer look.

Spider monkeys were swinging through the trees on the border of the scared Northern Acropolis, the heart of the city. Toucans, looking like they were carrying huge bananas, were flapping in pairs across the ball court. Here, a thousand years ago, a distant ancestor of the game of football was played with a heavy ball made of natural rubber. The stakes were high; after the game the losers were sacrificed - although some experts say that this was an honour that went to the winners!

The priests were the real rulers of the Mayan Empire. As their power increased they tempered an authority that few dared to question. The ‘honour of sacrifice’ could be quickly bestowed upon those who did.

It is important to remember that Tikal was far more than merely a religious complex. It has been estimated that during the period of the city’s supremacy (about 700AD) it contained palaces, steam-baths, market places, work-shops and homes for up to 100,000 people - making it one of the great cities of the world. Its inhabitants were occupied in crafts, trading, agriculture and in the policing and administration of a region that at that time was so finely tuned as to be capable of efficiently supporting ten-times the number of people who struggle to carve a living out of it today.

Then, over five hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors, Tikal and with it the whole of the Mayan Empire mysteriously collapsed.

The jungle keeps its secrets as securely as the Indians and in a very short time it had cloaked the 30 square miles of the city to such an extent that it was not ‘re-discovered’ for another thousand years.

The Indians who stopped the museum’s convoy still worship many of the same powers that controlled the inhabitants of Tikal. They still make sacrifices to the Mayan calendar - accurate to seventeen seconds, compared to our own six-hour deficiency.

As the museum employee noted there is all enduring patience in the expression and posture of the indigenous people of Guatemala: an almost disturbing serenity that seems to say ‘time is on our side.’

Mankind may never ‘relearn’ much of the great store of knowledge that disappeared with the Mayan civilisation. However, because they left records (in the form of reliefs and hieroglyphics), in the most complex written language in pre-Spanish Latin America, translation is slowly revealing some of their deep understanding of astronomy, geology, agriculture, mythology and mathematics.

There is hope that, as the jungle is forced back, the naked stone face of Tikal will reveal some of the secrets that remain locked behind the impassive eyes of Los Indios.

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