El Quinto Sol
I pushed back my broad brimmed hat and mopped my face. Then I had to put on some more mosquito repellent. That's the trouble with this part of the Yucatan in summer: sit in the sun and the sweat pours off you and wiping the perspiration wipes off the mosquito repellent at the same time. On the other hand, sit in the shade and the mosquitoes swarm around - big black buggers that sometimes carry malaria in this part of the world.
I sat down on the step and leaned back against the stonework, looking across the closely cropped grass at the Pyramid of the Inscriptions. I'm getting old and much more easily tired than when I was young. I'm medium height and not grossly overweight: a balding, bearded archaeologist with a good degree but a reputation as a maverick, here on a busman's holiday.
I'm getting old, like I said, and I've buggered up my academic reputation long ago by being a bit too blunt in expressing reservations about dearly held mainstream ideas on ancient history. I don't mean that I joined those promoting the idea of Atlantis or anything, but let me give you an example. For a century and a half the conventional wisdom was that America was settled by hunter-gatherers, who crossed the Bering Straight when it was dry land during the ice age. I always thought it was a completely mad idea. Alaska is pretty chilly today. At the height of the ice age, with much lower precipitation levels, it was an ice desert. A dry, cold hell, if that's not a contradiction. The idea that a bunch of nomadic people would just wander a thousand miles or more across that ice desert, and then stroll over a couple of thousand miles of two-mile thick Wisconsin Glacier on the off-chance of finding something better is just plain bonkers - and yet that was the academic wisdom. The generally agreed date was around 12,000 to 14,000 years ago and anything that suggested otherwise was ignored and anyone who suggested otherwise was howled down and excoriated from academic society. Now the diggings at Monte Verde in Chile have been dated to an indisputable 32,000 years ago this same academic consensus is changing and people who used to shout "Clovis man arrived in America 12,000 years ago" are quiet.
Of course, you've only to look at Native Americans to see they did come from South East Asia. A friend of mine: correction, the wife of the son of a friend of mine, is a Quechua Indian from Peru. She went with him to Thailand and the local people were surprised to find that she was a foreigner. The banana is a native of SE Asia as well, and it doesn't have seeds. You have to transplant a whole plant, and a bunch of nomads didn't carry a tropical plant across the Bering Straight in the ice age!
Another problem with archaeologists is that they have their own limitations that they impose on the past. Jane Sellers, who's an archaeo-astronomer remarked in a book that because Egyptologists don't know much about astronomy, they assume the ancient Egyptians didn't either - and that applies to most archaeologists and most ancient peoples. I'm yachtsman. I potter around up and down the coast in an elderly ferro-concrete ketch and I've sailed over open seas in it as well. The boat is in a marina down at Villa Hermosa and I came here by bus. It doesn't seem odd to me that the ancient peoples should sail the Atlantic or Pacific and reach America that way, probably with banana plants. I can just see the settlers missing their bananas and sending a boat home for some plants.
A black cloud had built up quickly and a clap of thunder with a few spots of rain roused me from the steps and I went up the terracing and under cover as the downpour began. Summer is the wet season in Palenque. The rain is warm, but it's like walking fully dressed into a warm shower: a minute or less and you're soaked. I stood and gazed out on the torrent, thinking about the building and about yet another Maverick quirk I have.
I think there are more problems with carbon dating than are usually recognised. You can't date a stone or brick building. You have to find something organic in or around it. Take Lord Pacal's tomb, over there in the Pyramid of the Inscriptions, almost invisible through the torrential downpour. There is no way to date the tomb, but you can date the remains of the man himself. You don't know whether he was buried for 500 years somewhere else before the pyramid was built, and then moved or whether the building had been built a thousand years before he died. Of course, you can tell sometimes. If Westminster Abbey were to be destroyed in an earthquake and several hundred tourists were buried, an archaeologist in the year 3000 could tell when the building was destroyed by dating the remains of the victims, but he'd be 50% out when it came to dating the age of the building itself that way.
And that's another thing. You can tell Westminster Abbey was built as a tomb for famous people because they're buried there, right? Wrong. But archaeologists are inclined to overlook that point. Because there were a few famous bodies in the some of the pyramids of Egypt it doesn't follow that they were built as tombs. There are a lot more bodies buried in Westminster Abbey and that isn't a cemetery! I sound a bit like Graham Hancock or Anthony West, I guess, or somebody even more way out. I'm just old and sour and as sceptical of experts with an axe to grind as I am of weirdos. Mind you, right now I feel sort of weird myself!
Looking across the space towards to row of pyramids, I could just make out through the rain the one with the Temple of the Inscriptions on top. There are two other pyramids just beyond it, but you couldn't see those through the rain. I didn't reckon it could last long like that.
In my backpack there was a bundle of arrows I bought from a stall near the entrance on the way in. The main entrance to the Palenque site has vast array of stalls with Indians selling artefacts as souvenirs. There are serapes made of agave cactus thread - you can use that bloody cactus for anything: make tequila with it and get drunk, make thread for a hammock or a serape and rest, make dye ... useful plant that. There are various cheap clay calendar artefacts and glazed clay masks, also arrows with stone heads, like the ones I have. The stuff is cheap and all of it is contemporary, but a lot of it is made in traditional ways by the descendents of the people who built this place. I had a feeling of dejá vu when I examined the arrows a little while ago. I eased the backpack off my shoulders again and sat down on a stone.
An odd feeling it was, not of having seen them before, though I've seen plenty of arrow heads both 10,000 year old ones and modern ones made by various reservation tribes in the US. You can't really tell a well-made modern one from a well made original you've dug up. No, this was a different feeling, seeing the arrowhead mounted in an arrow. I had the feeling that I was an 'Indian', handling an actual tool that I needed. I put off the feeling as the fancies of an old man who's dabbled in archaeology too long.
There was a crunch of a rock dislodged behind me and I turned to see a scrawny Mayan kid of about ten or twelve jumping down beside me. He was holding little ceramic squares on bits of string, cheap Mayan 'month' symbols that I suppose he was trying to sell to tourists.
He held one out to me.
"Quieres?" he asked, waving it at me. "You like to buy?"
I took it from him and studied it. The colours weren't quite right, but then the ancient Maya had a smaller range of colours than their descendants. I asked him how much
"Quanto es?" I asked.
"Cinco Pesos."
About two for a dollar or for a euro. I'll bet they were more in season. I felt sorry for the kid - I imagine he was having a thin time of it. The tourist season is mostly November to March when it's cooler and drier. In summer it tends to be just mad dogs, Englishmen and offbeat, elderly archaeologists.
I fished in my pockets and drew out a two-dollar piece and held it out to the kid.
"Dos dolares," he said. "Veinte pesos, pero no tengo cambio."
He had no change? Well, maybe he hadn't found many customers this morning. His exchange rate was pretty steep too, because you can get more that ten pesos to the dollar most places. I was feeling generous and I was sorry for the kid. What's more, I wouldn't need the money much longer. I would be returning whence I came and would have no need of it.
"Es igual," I said.
He was grateful and all smiles. He reminded Smoke Monkey of T
hree Rabbit when praised. But who the hell were Smoke Monkey and Three Rabbit?
"Gracias," he said and turned away to look for another sucker.
The strange thing is, the cheap souvenir also had a funny effect on me, same as the arrows. I gazed at it, not really studying it - the colouring was inaccurate anyway - and I 'was' an elderly Maya shaman from two maybe three thousand years ago. Who knows, it may have been more and I may have been one of some predecessor people of the Maya - Olmec, for instance. It occurred to me that I was someone called Smoke Monkey. A gust of wind moved the rain in swirls, like smoke and I could definitely smell the scent of burning copal in the mist and smoke. There didn't seem to be a visible source, but I was haunted by the fragrance of copal incense for several seconds, clear and distinct and unmistakeable.
I looked at the little souvenir pendant again. The Mayan calendar is complicated. In case you don't know how it works, there are two. One is a year of 260 days, made up of 13 months of 20 days, each with a name. Then there is another solar calender, rather like the Egyptian one, of 12 months of 30 days plus five 'unlucky' days that don't belong to any months, making 365, and again, each with a name. The two calendars mesh together and come back to the starting point every 52 years with a big ceremony. Then the Maya adjusted their calendar like we do in leap years. I'm telling you all this because, as Smoke Monkey, I knew all this, every detail, off the top of my head and I could reckon all the dates!
Then there's the method of counting the Maya use: they invented the zero and the concept of place, which is pretty smart, but they counted in twenties. If you've ever tried binary to programme a computer, you'll know it's hard to get your head round anything other than the decimal system we use. When we write, say 14, we mean 1x10 + 4x1 = 14; when the Maya wrote their version of 14 (4 dots over an eye) they meant 1x20 + 4x1 = 24. Well, I found myself thinking in twenties and, most of all, thinking about the 'long count' of thousands of days, multiples of 52 years that enabled the Maya to count backwards and forwards tens of thousands of years.
What Smoke Monkey, what I, was thinking about was the end of the long count cycle. I believed, as Smoke Monkey, that civilisation had been wiped out and the earth almost destroyed at the end of four previous long counts or 'suns'. We are living in the fifth sun - el quinto sol in Spanish - and Smoke Monkey was thinking about what might happen when the fifth sun ended, though he wasn't thinking in Spanish, any more than he was thinking in English. What kind of catastrophe awaited humanity? Almost more to the point, what would cause it?
I sat on a rock ledge, within the pillared entranceway of an imposing, partially ruined structure they call the 'palace', for no particularly good reason except it isn't a pyramid and doesn't seem to be a temple. It might have been a palace for all I know, but it might equally well have been an administrative centre or market place or the ancient Mayan equivalent of a university. There's a group of buildings set around a sort of raised quadrangle. The complex is riddled with passageways and rooms. I heard the sound of boots coming down a passage and looked around.
A fit and fresh-faced young man in his late twenties or early thirties, that might almost have been me forty years ago emerged and stood looking at the rain. He looked me over and grinned.
"American?" he asked with an American accent.
"Canadian," I corrected, "but I live in Spain right now."
He nodded, looked at the rain and sighed.
"Funny how rain seems unfair when you're on holiday," he said. "Even in the wet season."
"I don't think it will last much longer," I said.
"I came right now, this time of year, because it is cheaper in Mexico in the summer. Now I know why it's cheaper! I suppose I ought to look at it as part payment for the holiday," he said.
That was a very philosophical way of looking at it. "I guess," I said.
We sat there in silence looking out at the sheets of rain. I was thinking about our changed view of asteroids and comets.
Two things did it, One of them was the near certainty that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs: There is a sudden cut-off point for dinosaur fossils and between the fossil - no fossils rock there is a world wide, very thin layer of high iridium clay, and iridium is a rare element associated with asteroids and comets. The second thing was that the Shoemaker/Levy9 comet crashed into Jupiter in the 1990s with the entire scientific community watching. Suddenly the planet doesn't seem so safe from collision with things from space any more.
The scientific community has long thought that the slight variation in orbit roughly matching the Milankovitch cycles of increased and decreased solar heat wouldn't be enough to trigger the beginning or end of an ice age. Maintain it, yes: trigger it, no - certainly not to trigger a sudden rise in temperatures and an end within a very short time. How about if the trigger was an asteroid or comet? If it came down on land there would be a violent impact, millions of tons of dust, vast fires, volcanoes and total winter with the sun blotted out for several years. If that coincided with a downturn in the solar cycle it might be enough to initiate an ice age. On the other hand, if the asteroid landed in the sea there would be huge tidal waves of hot salt water. Recent computer simulations by the team who accurately predicted the Shoemaker/Levy cometary impact with Jupiter suggest that the height of the wave when it hit the shore would be dependant on the depth of the ocean at the point of impact. In other words, impact at a spot three miles deep means a tsunami three miles high. That amount of water is going to flood inland and cover a lot of glaciers with hot salt water - and you know what happens when you pour hot salty water on ice? It melts. Maybe that would trigger the sudden end of an ice age.
I reckon an asteroid would do it and we've had two near misses in the last couple of years. An asteroid bigger than the Chicxulub one that destroyed the dinosaurs missed us by 14 hours in the late nineteen nineties and a slightly smaller one came within three hours of a collision in 2002 - and we didn't even know it was there until it had missed us and gone. I think that's how the fifth sun might end!
The rain was easing and my silent young companion stirred himself.
"I think I'll set off to the museum," he said, taking a waterproof cape from his backpack.
I watched him disappear into gradually lifting mist. A slight breath of wind stirred the mists and steaming ground like smoke and I smelt copal again.