Skip to content

Up on the Mountain, Looking for gods

2 March 2011

SAN JORGE, LAKE ATITLAN, GUATEMALA—As you travel the steep road between Solola on the rim of Atilan’s caldera to Panajachel on its shore, you pass above the town of San Jorge. You look down, a thousand feet or so, into the center of the pueblo, over its houses and into the square in front of the Catholic church. We were journeying to San Jorge with the hope of seeing Mayan religious ceremonies. I looked forward to standing in that square in front of the church I had viewed so often from above. The bus climbed the steep road and Daniel, the guide from my Spanish school pointed to a cliff side. “Andres, we are going there.”

 I looked and then saw. There in the side of the mountain, nowhere in view of San Jorge, was the black mouth of a cave. As many times as I had traveled the road I had never before seen the place, bordered by grey stone and then forest.

 We exited the bus where the road descends to San Jorge and that church. I thought we would begin hiking down to it but instead we walked a bit farther down the main road to a steep, smaller road paved with stones. That led us to an even steeper path leading down the cliff side, which ended in front of a narrow ledge and the mouth of the cave. The cave was utterly black with the soot of millenniums of fires. Inside, candles were burning, the ashes of fires still smoked, but no one was there. The cave floor and surrounding area were littered with incense wood, empty liquor and perfume bottles, tinfoil coins and other ephemera of worship. Inside were four blackened crosses of concrete and several altars set flat in the uneven stone of the floor. “It is called Cueva de Los Brujos,” said Daniel, the Cave of the Witch Men.

 The place had a heavy smell of soot, ancient humanity and incense, and seemed to posses an unnatural humid warmth. I felt a sense of fear, perhaps irrational, perhaps not, trepidation to enter a place of beliefs so old and foreign to my own. But enter it I did and photographed it from every angle I could find, my hands and clothes becoming streaked and smudged with the black soot that covered every surface. I stood for a moment outside, strangely out of breath, feeling the cool wind from the lake to my left and the humid breath of the cave on my right.

 From there we hiked back up the steep trail and then along the high edge of San Jorge. Again, all I could see of that unknown Pueblo was a view of the church from above, albeit from a new angle. The trail continued on and I realized we were heading up to another spot I had only seen from the road.

 I remembered years before when Katherine and I had hiked from Xela to Atitlan. On the morning of the third day we descended into the caldera from above the town of San Juan on the other side of the lake. The descent into the caldera began below a minor peak called La Nariz de Maya, The Nose of the Maya, which it indeed resembles. The rest of the group hiked the extra several hundred yards up that peak but my knee had gone wrong and for as much internal shame as I heaped upon myself, it was bad to the point where every step was agony and I had many thousands of steps still to go.

 Kates reported that the peak was a ceremonial spot with evidence of many fires and so, ever after, I have looked to the various high spots that form Atitlan’s uneven rim, suspecting that they held Mayan holy sites. The peak we were hiking to I had seen and wondered about in the last few days, viewing it both from a boat crossing the lake and the bus to Solola.

 Now I found myself there and it was even more spectacular than I could have known from my far off vantage points. The trail ended on a pointed ridgeline that provided a vista of the length and breadth of the lake. The highest point itself was a bare granite shelf that fell away on three sides into the abyss of Atitlan. And these rocks had areas of deep, black soot and the smell of incense clinging to them. The wind swept around us, very nearly cold and so strong that I felt no shame in staying low and crawling when I felt like changing my viewpoint.

 The deep blue lake spread out in front of me. I was as high above it as I had ever been. I turned and below and behind me, standing in front of a rock alcove tucked in the mountainside, was a Mayan priest. He wore the red embroidered shirt and brown kilt of Solola and a bright red, ceremonial scarf wrapped around his head. He stood in front of the old blackened rocks and raised his arms in the universal gesture of a man before the eternal. In the late afternoon sun the heavy white incense smoke rose and swirled around him and the light caught the sharp, copper planes of his handsome, surprisingly young face. Not a boy or an ancient but a man in his prime. He must have sensed my presence for he half-turned, looked up. Our eyes met and I expected disapproval for my intrusion but he smiled with white teeth, nodded, and turned back to his gods.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *
*
*