break and allowing her to continue on. After two miles, it no longer felt like a mountain at all. They were still high above sea level, about halfway up to the peak, but the western face had eased into a massive plateau, flat as any plain. Kanuataba meant the terraced city, but nowhere in Paktul’s story had he written about agricultural terracing. Maybe instead, Chel thought, the city got its name from this ledge that a river cut into the mountain millions of years ago—a natural terrace that eluded discovery after her ancestors abandoned it.
Minutes later, they found more reason to hope.
Hundreds of ceiba trees, sacred to the Maya, stood in the distance. The trunks had thorns, and the branches were covered with grasses and moss, phosphorescent green.
Kanuataba was once home to the most majestic collection of ceiba trees, the great path to the underworld, in all of the highlands. The ceiba once grew denser than anywhere in the world, blessed by the gods, their trunks nearly touching. Now there are fewer than a dozen still standing in all of Kanuataba!
They continued through the dense area of holy trees that had now returned to the jungle. The ceibas stretched to the heavens, reaching toward the overworld, and Chel could see outlines of gods’ faces in the leaves: Ahau Chamahez, god of medicine; Ah Peku, god of thunder; Kinich Ahau, god of the sun, all beckoning her forward.
“Are you okay?”
Stanton was paces ahead, calling back at her. Could he see what she now saw in the leaf patterns above them? Could he hear the call of the gods as she did?
Chel blinked, attempting to see ahead with clear eyes. Trying to form the words to answer him. She stepped toward him, and a break in the ceibas caught her eye. Between the trunks was a sliver of stone.
“
They walked a quarter mile to the base of an ancient pyramid and stood together in stunned silence. Mist bathed the structure’s top reaches. Trees and shrubs and flowers sprouted in all directions, obscuring every corner. More trees had grown up the stairs, to the top; one facade was so dense with flora, it could have been mistaken for a natural slope. Only at the summit could they see limestone, where three adjacent openings were formed by columns in the shape of elongated birds.
“Incredible,” Stanton said. “This is it?”
Chel nodded. Broken shards of stones transformed in her mind into angular steps. Slaves and corvee laborers appeared, carrying boulders on their backs. At the base, she saw tattoo artists and piercers, spicemakers trading for chert. The dull and decrepit limestone was, for Chel, now painted with a rainbow of color: yellows and pinks and purples and greens.
The birthplace of her people, in all its glory.
THIRTY-FIVE
THEY CONTINUED ACROSS THE MOUNTAINTOP, MOVING SLOWLY, searching for other signs of the lost city through the overgrowth. The stela and small pyramid were signposts that they had reached the outer limits of the metropolis, but they still had to find the city’s center.
Stanton carefully led them over shrubs and massive tree roots extending in all directions, hacking away with his machete in one hand, and gripping Chel’s with the other. He tried to keep track of what plants he was cutting through—pink orchids and liana and strangler vines and others—in case they turned out to be relevant.
He also listened closely as they walked. Wolves, foxes, even jaguars could be in the area. Stanton had been on safari once after medical school, and that was about as close to dangerous animals as he ever wanted to get. He was very glad that he could hear only birds and bats in the distance.
They passed stelae and small one-level limestone buildings wrapped from base to top in foliage and small trees. Chel pointed out areas where servants to the nobles likely lived on the edge of the city, and what was once a small ball court where the ancients practiced their strange hybrid of volleyball and basketball. Stanton could easily have missed these overgrown landmarks.
He was trying to keep his eyes on her as much as possible. She seemed stable, but it was hard to know to what extent her symptoms could be exacerbated or accelerated by an arduous hike through the jungle in hundred- ten-degree heat. She would have been better off back in Kiaqix under Initia’s care. But he knew she was right that he never would have found the city without her.
Now they had to zero in on the king’s entombment temple, the last structure built in Kanuataba before its collapse. Paktul had described the construction as a haphazard project, rushed to completion and built with inadequate resources. Excavating a temple would ordinarily require serious equipment, but Volcy and his partner had been able to do it with pickaxes. So it was likely shoddily built or left unfinished.
The foundation will be laid in twenty days, less than a thousand paces from the palace. The viewing tower shall be built to face the highest point of the procession of the sun and will create a great holy triangle with the palace and the twin pyramid of red.
“To the ancients, a holy triangle was a right triangle,” Chel explained. “They were considered mystical.” There were many examples of the Maya using 3-4-5 right triangles in the layouts of their cities, construction of individual buildings, and even religious practices. The most notable use of them in urban planning was at Tikal, where a series of integral right triangles was centered on the southern acropolis. “Jaguar Imix wanted his tomb in a triangle with one of the temples and the palace. The twin temples should be easiest to find first.”
“So we’re looking for the
“It won’t actually be red. Red is the symbol of east.”
“So we’re looking for the one that is farther east?”
“The one that
The closer one got to a central acropolis, Chel told him, the larger the structures became, so she knew they were getting warmer. Stanton’s arms were exhausted from cutting through brush. The machete felt like its weight had multiplied, and its blade had dulled. Even small branches took too much effort to clear. Sweat poured into his eyes.
Then, twenty minutes later, they came upon a colonnade of pillars. They had been nearly covered with moss, and birds’ nests sat atop at least half, but they were still standing, taller than the stela, twelve of them in a square. Whatever original patio joined them had been buried beneath the underbrush long ago, but immediately Chel knew: They were exactly as Chiam had described them.
Her uncle made it here after all.
“Then we have to be close, don’t we?” Stanton asked.
”This was a meeting place for upper classes,” Chel explained. “It wouldn’t have been far from the palace.”
“Do we keep going in the same direction?”
But she wasn’t listening. Stanton followed her gaze. Ahead of them, the sun’s last rays poked through the leaf canopy and struck white stone. Chel let go of his gloved hand and set off almost blithely, paying little attention to the countless obstacles in her path.
“Wait!” Stanton called out. But she didn’t respond.
He hurried after her. Before he could catch up, something flew into his mask, nearly knocking him over. Stanton swatted at it uselessly with his flashlight, until it flapped off behind him. He watched it go—a bat, beginning its nightly hunt. When he turned back toward Chel, the last light of day was gone. The stone that had caught her eye only a moment before had disappeared into the darkness.
It wasn’t until he’d closed the gap between them that he finally saw what she’d found. She was standing at the base of what had once been stairs, long crumbled away after a thousand years. Stanton’s eyes traced the sloping overgrowth that climbed upward from the ground. It was a temple that dwarfed everything else.
“Don’t take off like that again,” he said. “I’m not gonna lose you out here.”
