After docking, Dominguez paid off a harbormaster, then told the man they needed a van or SUV. Half an hour later, they had an old silver jeep for twenty-five hundred dollars. With the gear transferred, Dominguez waved goodbye.
At Mazatlan International, men with machine guns manned the entrance. People inside eyed Stanton and Chel warily. This was a major hub, and unlike at the port, the sight of Stanton’s gringo face clearly unnerved some of the travelers here. At the private air terminal, he and Chel got the bad news: All charter planes were booked, ferrying Mexico’s wealthy farther from the epidemic. Complicating matters, they needed a plane large enough to carry the jeep they’d just procured.
After half an hour of fruitless efforts, Chel overheard two diminutive, twenty-something Maya men having a conversation in Ch’orti’, a branch of Mayan spoken in southern Guatemala and northern Honduras. Chel didn’t speak the modern dialect, but it was a close descendant of ancient Mayan, and from the content of the conversation, it sounded like the guy doing most of the talking was some kind of freight pilot.
“
Ancient Mayan could be spoken with Chel’s fluency by fewer than a dozen people in the world—all scholars —and the pilot, who introduced himself as Uranam, had probably never heard anyone speaking it outside the few words his own daykeeper knew. But he understood exactly what she was saying.
“How do you know the ancient tongue?” he asked, staring as if she were a ghost.
“I am descended of a royal scribe,” Chel said, her voice commanding. “And he has told me in a dream that if we do not reach El Peten, the fourth race of man will be wiped from the earth.”
Several phone calls later, their new friend had procured a decommissioned U.S. Navy plane in from Guadalajara to take them south.
Two days after leaving L.A., they were headed into the jungle.
12.19.19.17.18
DECEMBER 19, 2012
THIRTY-ONE
THE MAYA HIGHLANDS ARE ANCHORED NORTH TO SOUTH BY A SPINE of volcanoes that have been active for millions of years. Early highlanders worshipped the volcanoes, but their powerful eruptions, which could swallow an entire tribe at once, eventually drove the Maya south to the Land of the Trees— as they called it in Qu’iche—
Four hours into the flight, with the C-2 Greyhound flying at less than two thousand feet, Stanton and Chel looked down at the green canopy that gave the country its name . Uranam, the pilot, was using a radar system to search for the proper coordinates, but from the window all they could see were forested hills in all directions. The colors of the foliage darkened as they circled the perimeter of the area, and Chel worried they might not find Kiaqix before nightfall.
If her assumptions were correct, Kanuataba had to be somewhere between sixty and a hundred miles from her village, at a bearing of 230 to 235 degrees southwest. Volcy had found the city in three days’ walk, so the total range couldn’t be greater than about three hundred square miles. They’d scour every inch.
“Are we expecting to see macaws?” Stanton called above the roar of the engine.
“Only in the migration season,” she told him, adjusting her eye shield. “The village is a point on the migratory path, and in the fall there are thousands, but by now they’ve moved on.” She continued her search for the cypress-covered hills that would signal they were near the village landing strip. Before they could find Kanuataba, they had to find Kiaqix.
“Hold on!” Uranam yelled out.
Every time they made the transition from the mountains to the valleys and back again, the plane bucked up and down, and just then the port-side wing caught a current and was kicked upward, jostling the entire aircraft. For a minute it felt as if the plane might snap in two.
When it righted itself, Chel saw the ground below. They flew over alternating patches of thick forest and cleared farmlands, where North Americans’ appetite for corn and beef had stripped the earth.
A minute later, she saw the massive cypress-covered mountain abutting the valley. Here, fifty generations of her ancestors had lived, worshipped, and raised families. She pointed Stanton toward the valley her father had given his life for.
“There.”
THE RAINY SEASON HAD made the earth soft, but there were half a dozen mahogany and cedar trunks and large branches blown over in the path of Kiaqix’s landing strip. The plane’s wheels barely cleared them. Final slivers of daylight were leaving the forest, making the landing even more treacherous. It looked as if no one had landed here in months.
On her last trip to Kiaqix, hundreds of villagers came to the airstrip to herald the return of Alvar Manu’s daughter, the great scholar. There’d been a dozen round-faced children holding incense and candles. Now she had to remind herself that today no one knew they were coming.
The plane rolled to a stop.
Uranam hurriedly jumped out and threw open the cargo doors at the back. The crushing heat of the jungle poured in immediately.
They put the biohazard suits, tents, prion samples, metal cages, test tubes, and other glass into the jeep, lowered the lift, and Stanton drove into the mud. When they were ready to make the five-mile drive to Kiaqix proper, Chel rolled down the window to let in some air.
“You’ll be here?” she confirmed with Uranam. “We’ll be back in twenty-four hours.”
Fear crawled across the pilot’s face. “No,” he said, backing toward the plane. “I’m not staying.”
“He agreed to stay,” Stanton said after Chel translated. “He has to.”
“I don’t know what this is about,” Uranam said. “But I don’t want to find out.”
He pointed above the forest. Chel turned to see thick wisps of smoke trailing into the sky, almost as if there was a factory deep in the jungle.
“They’re just clearing for next year’s harvest,” Chel explained, first to Uranam, then to Stanton. “That’s all it is.”
Uranam looked like a man with his mind made up as he climbed back into the cockpit. “No. This is something else,” he said, eyes fixed on the smoke. “From the gods.”
Within a minute, he was firing up the engine.
After the plane took off into the night, Stanton tried to reassure Chel. When they found what they’d come for, he insisted, he would find a way to get someone to pick them up.
But Chel knew it would be impossible to get another plane back in here anytime soon, and she was afraid that, if the weather turned, they might not be able to get out for weeks. Then she turned to look again at the black trails of smoke, and fear gripped her throat. Whatever superstitions drove the pilot away, he was right about one thing: No one would be burning fields this late in the rainy season.
SO THEY STARTED DOWN the road to Kiaqix with no idea of how they’d ever get back. The jeep had a full tank of gas, but Chel knew there had to be a hundred miles at least between them and the nearest Esso station. And, in this part of the Peten, roads were mostly just lines on the map, as hillside erosion and mudslides rendered
