T A B L E+T A L K What do you read when you travel? Swap favorite tomes for the road in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my! By Don George Some questions about the year in travel (12/24/97) Christmas in Syria By Louis CasaBianca Christmas in Syria: The tale of an unexpected gift (12/23/97) Passages By David Downie "Enchanted Liguria" Mondo pesto: Liguria's green cuisine (12/22/97) Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Chicken soup with matzo balls for the soul (12/19/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		M A Y A N +D R E A M I N G ++|+P A G E+2+O F +3 At the center of Chichén Itzá is a pyramid, nearly 10 stories in height, known as El Castillo or the Pyramid of Kukulcán. Built more than 1,000 years ago, El Castillo is a masterwork of astronomical encoding on a monumental scale, an interlocking arithmetical puzzle, eternal testament to the Maya's obsession with time and their mastery over its measurement and symbolism (the steps of its four huge staircases, for instance, total 365). The Pyramid of Kukulcán has been described as "a solid clock," a precision chronometer with only one moving part -- the universe that revolves around it. The Maya, as one character commented to me at Cobá, "were stone freaks for time." They believed in the wheel of time, the wheel that takes all things away and then -- dreamlike -- brings them back around, then takes them away and so on. But they had little time for vague speculations. Indeed, the Maya projected events to specific days over 2,000 years from now. As Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller write in their superb book "The Blood of Kings," the Maya "perceived this creation to have a minimum cycle of slightly under 142 nonillion years." No wonder their cities endure a thousand years after they were last inhabited -- the cats were way deep into long-term planning. They were keeping their eye on a ball that was bouncing across the centuries. They also must have been immune to vertigo, as the staircases up the pyramids are dauntingly steep and the steps themselves are quite shallow. At Uxmal I watched a girl scamper up one side of the pyramid-like House of the Magician, turn around and shriek to her boyfriend as she looked back down the severe staircase, "I can't even see the steps!" As it turned out, her problems had just begun. Within minutes, high wind and a driving rain forced her to seek refuge inside the small temple atop the structure. The doorway, appropriately enough, is a carving of the monstrous face of Chac, the rain god. The last time I saw her she was walking into his mouth. She may be there still. Nevertheless, people of all ages trot up and down with abandon. I might have joined them if the ambulance parked nearby, and my own acute sense of mortality, hadn't squelched the joy of adventure. Instead, I went back to my hotel for a swim and a few bottles of Leon Negra, a voluptuous dark beer made in Merida. At all three of the sites, my lodgings were the Villas Arqueologicas built by the Mexican government and now owned and operated by Club Med. They are the French resort company's best-kept secret. The Villas -- there are six in Mexico, all located adjacent to major archeological sites -- bear little similarity to other Club Med properties (mercifully, some would say). The usual routine of unrelenting fun 'n' activities has been replaced with a soothing, understated atmosphere, a lush garden, a small pool and a comfortable, well-stocked bar filled with old photos of Gens. Zapata and Villa and their ilk. The overall effect is that of an oasis, an outpost, where one expects to see Sydney Greenstreet wandering the airy corridors in a sweat-stained white linen suit, drunkenly debating philosophy with the hyacinth macaw on his shoulder. At the Villas one starts to fantasize about holing up as an expat. Why not spend whatever years remain sitting around in tropical torpor with an impossibly brilliant lost city humming away nearby, while you're beating out an endless, labyrinthine novel, running a home for wayward dogs and, perhaps, taking in the occasional nubile and willing archeology student who listens with rapt fascination to all of your half-witted theories, half-funny jokes and half-hearted come-ons as if they'd never been spoken before? It wouldn't be heaven, but it might be a reasonable facsimile. South of Merida, the road from Chichén Itzá to Uxmal gradually rises through the Puuc region, an area of low, scrub brush-covered hills interrupted by the occasional village. Dogs are more abundant than usual. I even saw a Dalmatian, a rarity in Yucatan. The only other one I encountered was in Valladolid, a colonial city between Cobá and Chichén Itzá. After performing a bloodletting worthy of a Mayan ritual by stubbing my big toe on the steps of the cathedral and lopping off a callous the size of a veal chop (an act that fascinated the angel-faced little girls who were trying to sell me embroidered hankies), I hobbled a block and a half east to the Church of San Roque. It's a small cathedral lacking any ornamentation, altar or pews. At one end of the chapel sits a large piano covered (at least when I was there) with a gray quilt. At the other end, leaning against the wall, rests an amateurish but utterly winning portrait of Jesus wearing red Mary Janes and standing next to a seated Dalmatian with a blissful smirk on its face. Jesus, on the other hand, looks like he's fed up with posing for portraits. He did it for the dog, right? Because he knows that being a dog in Mexico is a tough gig at best. Most of them look like skeletons shrink-wrapped in dog hide and apart from the odd Dalmatian they're all variations on a single breed. There's the Shorthaired Rock Dodger, its close cousin, the Mange-ravaged Mud Wallower, and a cross between the two affectionately known as the Bony-butted Taco Snatcher. And they've all got a trace of Suicidal Road Snoozer in them. You can hardly blame them. Their lot is such a grim one that a certain ambivalence toward staying alive is understandable. It's a comfort to know that Jesus loves them. An hour out of Merida, reaching the top of a hill during a pounding downpour, I was met with two startling visions almost simultaneously. First, the dirty blond stone buildings of Uxmal appeared through billowing veils of rain that made them look like they were hovering over the green mounds where they've rested for 10 centuries or so. From a distance, they were as beautiful and austere as warehouses on the moon. But what I saw at the roadside was even more arresting. Two men emerged from the forest wearing multi-tiered metal bird cages on their heads. The cages were bright red. One man carried a long pole with a net on the end. It was a scene Marcel Duchamp might have cooked up, but easier to explain than his efforts. As the bartender at the Uxmal Villa Arqueologicas later told me, they were out to catch wild birds, which they sell in Merida as pets. Prosaic as the explanation may have been, the sight of two men adorned with bird cage hats stayed with me like a jolting image from a dream. But then the Yucatan is the sort of place where one comes across dreamlike images on a regular basis. Perhaps that's why some believe that the dream -- the dream of time and the wheel that brings everything back -- is the key to understanding what made and unmade the Maya. A more pragmatic theory than you might first assume, the idea is well described in a fine, peculiar little book called "The Mexican Dream, or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations" by French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio. Le Clézio calls the Maya "one of the last of the magical civilizations" and the interruption he refers to in the title is Hernan Cortés. The downfall of the Maya (and the Aztec, et al.), Le Clézio writes, can be seen as the star-crossed intersection of two dreams -- the Spanish dream of gold, which the Maya called takin (excrement of the sun), and the Indian's dream legend of the bearded men guided by Kukulcán/Quetzalcoatl who would come to rule them again as they had in the past. The collision of those dreams, as everyone knows, had particularly unfortunate repercussions for the Maya and the rest of the indigenous population of Mexico, which numbered 30 million when Cortés arrived in 1519 and less than 3 million a half century later. But it's only part of the story. For reasons not altogether clear, Mayan civilization had started to fade centuries before Cortés arrived. Yet who's to say if, left to their own devices, the Maya and others might have dreamed their civilization right back to its peak, or beyond. After all, the perpetual wheel of time, dreaming, visions, ritual were their currency and Mayan culture was centered around them, much as ours is centered around our currency. The dream, whether waking or sleeping, was a literal reality. That, of course, is silly talk these days. Now, when we speak of visionaries we're usually referring to a CEO at a software company or the corporate high priest behind a media conglomerate. But what was real to the Maya was something quite different, so different, perhaps, that we can't even discuss it for fear of being thought foolish. At the least it's tough to write about -- though Le Clézio does an admirable job. In the techno-centric, shadowless, jaded and ironical times in which we live, getting across the notion that previous civilizations may have existed in a reality fundamentally different from our own puts one at risk of being cast out with the woo-woos and the feather-headed. Yet leading Mayanists, including the justly renowned Linda Schele, believe that appreciating the Maya and the world they inhabited may be dependent on grasping just such a notion. N E X T+P A G E+| The House of the Magic Dwarf