The Falling Woman

Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler

There are no rivers on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The land is flat and dry and dusty. The soil is only a few feet deep, a thin layer of arable land over a shelf of hard limestone. The jungle that covers the land is made up of thin-leafed trees and thorny bushes that turn yellow in the long summer.

There are no rivers, but there is water hidden deep beneath the limestone. Here and there, the stone has cracked and cool water from beneath the earth has reached the surface and formed a pool.

The Maya called such pools ts’not – an abrupt, angular sort of a word. The Spanish conquerors who came to the Yucatán softened the word. Cenotes, they called these ancient wells. Whatever the name, the water is cold; the pools are deep.

Hidden beneath the water are fragments of the old Mayan civilization: broken pieces of pottery, figurines, jade ornaments, and bits of bone – sometimes human bone. In the mythos of the Maya, the cenotes were places of power belonging to the Chaacob, the gods who come from the world’s four corners to bring the rain.

Dzibilchaltún, the oldest city on the Yucatán peninsula, was built around a cenote known as Xlacah. By Mayan reckoning, people settled in this place in the ninth katun. By the Christian calendar, that is about one thousand years before the death of Christ. But Christian reckoning seems out of place here. Despite the efforts of Spanish friars, Christianity sits very lightly on the land.

The ruins of Dzibilchaltún cover over twenty square miles. Only the central area has been mapped. One structure, a box-shaped building on a high platform, has been rebuilt. Archaeologists call this building the Temple of the Seven Dolls because seven doll-sized ceramic figures were found buried in its floor. Archaeologists do not know what the ancient Maya called the building, nor what the Maya did in this temple.

The Temple of the Seven Dolls offers the best view of the surrounding area – a monotonous expanse of thirsty trees and scrubby bushes. Near the Temple of the Seven Dolls, the jungle has been cleared away, and mounds of rock rise from the flat land. Fragments of walls and sections of white limestone causeways are barely visible through the grass and soil. The view would be bleak were it not for the enormous sky, an unbroken expanse of relentless blue.

Do not look for revelations in the ancient ruins. You will find here only what you bring: bits of memory, wisps of the past as thin as clouds in the summer, fragments of stone that are carved with symbols that sometimes almost make sense.