1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [154]
All at once we came upon Calakmul. The city proper, built on a low ridge, had once housed as many as fifty thousand people and sprawled across an area as big as twenty-five square miles. (The city-state’s total population may have been 575,000.) The downtown area alone had six thousand masonry structures: homes, temples, palaces, and granaries, even an eighteen-foot-high defensive wall. Scattered through the neighborhoods was a network of reservoirs, many apparently stocked with fish. Thousands of acres of farmland extended beyond. Little of this was known then—I am quoting from later reports—and none of it was visible from the plane. From our vantage the only visual testament to Calakmul’s past majesty was its two great central pyramids, each wrapped to the shoulders in vegetation.
Peter asked the pilot to fly low circles around the pyramids while he put together the perfect match of light, lens, angle, and shutter speed. He swapped lenses and cameras and window views in a dozen different combinations. At a certain point, he asked, peering through the shutter, “¿Cuánta gasolina tenemos?” How much gas do we have?
The pilot squinted at the fuel gauge: three-quarters full. A puzzled look spread over his face. I leaned over to watch as he tapped the gauge’s foggy plastic cover with his forefinger. The needle plunged almost to empty—it had been pinned.
Peter put down his cameras.
Eventually the blood returned to our heads, permitting cerebration. We had to decide whether to take the shortest path to the airport, straight across the forest, or turn to the north and then fly east along Highway 186, which we could try to land on if we ran out of gas. The trade-off was that the highway route was so much longer that choosing it would greatly increase our chances of a forced touchdown. Soon we realized the decision boiled down to one question: How scary was the prospect of landing in the forest?
I recall looking down at the trees. They had engulfed the great buildings and were slowly ripping apart the soft limestone with their roots. Circling above the city, I had thought, Nobody will ever find out anything about this place. The forest is too overpowering. Calakmul’s inhabitants had cut a little divot into its flanks for their city, but now the vegetation, massive and indifferent, was smothering every trace of their existence. From the plane the trees seemed to march to the horizon without interruption.
We flew over the highway. I tried not to stare at the fuel gauge. Still, I couldn’t help noticing as, one after another, warning lights blinked on. The plane had so little gas that the engine quit a moment after our wheels hit the tarmac. When we rolled silently to a stop, the pilot leapt out and kissed the ground. I sat back and regarded Chetumal with new affection.
In the mid-1990s the Mexican government paved a road to the site, which is now the center of the 1.7-million-acre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Aerial views of the ruins are now spectacular; archaeologists have cleared most of the central city. Along the way, contrary to my initial impression, they have managed to learn a great deal about Calakmul, the landscape it occupied, and the collapse that led to the forest’s return. To begin with, they deciphered Calakmul’s proper name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake. Impressively, they learned it from the best possible source, the ancient Maya themselves.
Maya scribes wrote in codices made of folded fig-bark paper or deerskin. Unfortunately for posterity, the Spaniards destroyed all but four of these books. The rest of what remains are texts on monuments, murals, and pottery—about fifteen thousand samples of writing, according to one estimate. Piecing together events from these sources is like trying to understand the U.S. Civil War from the plaques on park statues: possible, but tricky. Combining literal interpretation with an understanding of context, epigraphers (decipherers of ancient writing) have