Previous: Chapter Thirteen: The Pool of Xblanque
The others grew quiet.
Gaby spoke:
“In the mythology of the Maya people, two central figures are the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xblanque. The two become orphaned, and are ill-treated by the grandmother who takes them in, in favor of her own sons. But the twin brothers are crafty. Soon they get the better of their situation. That’s why there are monkeys in the forest today, say the Maya, but that’s another story.
“Hunahpu and Xblanque have many adventures together, most of them quite comical, violent, or both. They face their greatest test against the Lords of Xibalba, the twelve deities who, together, rule Xibalba, the Mayan underworld. Final bosses of the game, if you like.”
“We know this because of the testimony of a book called The Popol Vuh. It was written in Spanish under the editorship of a single Spanish monk who brought back a native Mayan speaker, who knew the stories based on oral tradition.”
They were deep inside Gaby’s story, but suddenly Bender’s eyes flashed hostility. “The Conquistadors burned…”
Gaby nodded. “Almost all of the 175,000 written books of the Maya, consigned to flames purpose lit by the Catholic Church, in fear of a demon haunted world. We’ll never know what the written form of the legend stated, but unlike a pre-literate culture, we have hard evidence from the Spanish themselves that a written tradition existed: they were so proud to have destroyed it.
“In the telling we have, the Xibalbans appear to get the upper hand for a while, and are sure they’ve beaten the Hero Twins.
“The Lords of Xibalba burn the Twins to ashes, grind the ashes to dust, throw the dust into the river. The Twins aren’t daunted. Their bodies are restored by the water, and they return to life, first as catfish, then as young boys, then, in disguise, and under the noses of the Xibalbans, they return to wreak revenge.”
MaryLiz gazed out over the beautiful enclosed gorge, to all appearances untouched by human beings. “Was this place special to the Maya who lived around here? The underground river we hear: did they imagine that it was the river that restored the Hero Twins to life?”
“No, or, if so, it’s not attested. I mean, look at it. It’s a cenote, not a river. And the Maya had a known locale for the entrance to Xibalba, it’s far away, in Guatamala, still bearing its Maya name. Conversely, locally, there are lots of surviving Maya place names for geographic features. Some are known from ethnography dating back centuries, and many others are still used by Maya speakers today, such as by mi familia in the market.
“This place has such a name, a seemingly Classic Maya name. It translates to something like ‘inconveniently deep hole’. Nothing to do with the legend, nor to do with any other local legend. It’s about the most boring and literal name for something so beautiful that you could think of. Imagine Meteor Crater, Arizona with a Hopi name that translated to “Obstacle: Remember to Avoid!”.
“No, the name ‘Pool of Xblanque’ appears to be revisionist and recent. That might be interesting to you, actually.”
Gaby breathed. “It’s been a while since I heard the story, but people my grandparents’ age remeber this place as a tourist trap. There was a brochure my grandparents handed out to tourists at the railway station, for a peso a day. My grandmother showed me one, cheaply laser-copied, yellowed and faded. ‘Take the Hunahpu Railway to the Pool of Xblanque, to see ‘La gente pequeña’’
“That’s who built The Hunahpu Railway, the people that owned this place. They cannibalized the rails from derilict plantation railways, around my great-grandparents’ time. It was all to transport tourists. A dozen old people I know remember it. One was born before the turn of the last century – two of ‘em were in the market last night. Hence our tickets to ride.”
Gaby gathered herself. These strange Rocket People deserved to know. “Everyone in town knows we’re here, and we traveled here with their explicit blessing. By my word, you’re not leaving Merida before we return to the market, so that you can thank them yourselves.”
“Of course, we will.”, declared Feliz. “But ‘La gente pequeña’? The Little People. Is that another name for the Hero Twins?”
Gaby’s head shook once. “No. It’s something else that the old people remember, again from the advertising copy. “See the Little People.” They say there used to be a spyglass, a card activated stereo telescope, installed at the rim of the cenote. You’d pay fifty pesos and look through the spyglass to see la gente pequeña, ‘hopping the islands on the cenote floor!’ It was in the brochure.”
Someone repeated the word. “Hopping.” It was Jo.
Jo turned to Frances. “That’s why we get down there.”
…
Merl had unpacked the drone, and was installing a freshly charged battery.
MaryLiz was digesting Gaby’s tale. “But, if the little people were so well known, a tourist attraction, even, why did people lose interest? Why aren’t there still tramloads of tourists coming out here today?”
Gaby looked genuinely puzzled for a moment. “I never really thought – Oh! But it is protected now, since before I was born. All the private landowners were bought out, some of them forcibly, and displaced. The whole area is a Yucatan state nature preserve. Like your state parks, in the United States. A wilderness reserve. It’s perfectly okay for us to be here, as long as one respects the resource.”
Feliz mused, “So the Little People became a legend. Just a gimmick by some vanished local promoter that no one believed in any more, even those who remembered seeing them as children.”
Jo spoke up. “There’s nothing legendary about them. I want to know if there’s any still down there.”
MaryLiz said, “Merl’s way ahead of all of us.” Indeed, the drone was ready for takeoff, sitting on the flat surface of Merl’s outsized frame pack.
MaryLiz tested the motors of the drone. The tiny robot rose, to hover a meter above the ground.
To Jo, the whine of the drone’s four rotors sounded like Hell’s own mutant barbershop quartet. “Stop stop stop!”, Jo cried, and the drone plopped silently to the ground. “You’ll just scare them off with that racket. It was bad enough back at the Gift when we at least had the noise of the surf to cover it up.”
“Cap, could we land the drone?” said Merl. “Pick a spot between the trees and drop below the fog? Like Venera, on Venus. It won’t make any noise on the ground, if the props aren’t running. Then we just wait and see what happens.”
“Could do,” said MaryLiz. “But it might be a one shot deal. Even if it lands without hitting anything, we don’t know what ground visibility is like at any given spot. And to take off again, even if I set it to retrace its inbound route, the accuracy may not be exact… oh, but the drone has a hazcam. You actually… yeah. Give it a go.”
Bender glanced at the midday sky, and the invisible latticework of GPS satellites beyond. There would be coverage. “Yeah, Merl, do it.”
Jo said, “I wish I’d brought a decent remote wildlife cam. The ones in my pack don’t transmit further than a few hundred meters. If we had a camera with long range radio, we could have the drone drop it off, monitor the stream from up here. And if pequeña is as obsessed with our cameras as their Texan cousins, it would makd perfect bait.”
MaryLiz caught herself stealing a furtive glance at the state of the art camera lashed to Frances’ wrist.
Frances caught Bender’s eyes, too. “Absolutely not. It’s got components from three different continents in it. I printed the housing myself. It cost twice the insurance payout for the stolen NASA cams that I had serial numbers for, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to reject my application to insure this one.”
The sounds of the forest made a beat of awkward silence more bearable.
“I’m getting it back,” said Frances, loosening the lanyard and handing the device to Merl. “Or two more just like it, ballistic express shipment, on the Ranch’s dime.”
Merl attached the end of the camera’s lanyard to the jaws of the drone’s drop solenoid.
MaryLiz offered a wide strip of gauze from the medical kit.
“A drogue chute. Something to keep the camera upright as it’s falling.” Merl tied it to the end of the lanyard just below the solenoid.
Frances said, “The case I designed is watertight, but I wasn’t thinking of impact resistance. I have no idea how it will fare when it lands, even with a bit of drag.”
Jo pulled off one boot and removed its pillow insole. “Impact resistance. Tape it to the bottom of the camera.”
This done, it was time for launch.
MaryLiz piloted the drone past the edge of the cenote and aimed its camera downward, while Frances’ camera dangled a few inches below, facing dead ahead.
When the drone had passed a few meters out over the cenote, Merl turned the craft to the right and began a long, anti-clockwise traverse of the sheer cylindrical wall. Merl tapped a button and the drone began a lidar scan of the cenote walls, and the ground beneath it.
The day was still warming, and a thick bank of fog shrouded the bottom of the cenote. “Can lidar see through this?” Merl asked, from behind VR goggles.
Bender checked the feed. “Yep! I don’t know what miracle wavelength lidar uses, but I’m getting hard readings off the bottom.”
The first pass around the circumference took no more than ten minutes. Once it was complete, Merl shifted the drone to map the giant sinkhole automatically. The drone seemed happy to be liberated from its human controller, and sailed down into the fog. Soon the sound of its rotors was lost among the sounds of the forest.
The band of explorers gathered around a screen as the drone painted in the structure of the Pool of Xblanque, one pass at a time. The cenote was roughly circular, and appeared in outline. The drone was mapping the edge of the sinkhole first, a graceful spiral curling inward, clockwise.
Merl adjusted the software, and the circle became the floor of a cylinder in 3D projection, the mapped surfaces of the cliff walls apparent as streaks of greater and lesser textural density. It was easy to see the layered stratigraphy of these uplifted and ancient thickly bedded coral reefs, older than the dinosaurs and considerably older than the nearby impact event which had more recently killed almost all of them.
What Bender first thought must be lidar noise proved to be the ghostly outlines of tree branches. The floor of the cenote hosted its own forest.
Merl returned the view to top down orthographic projection. The drone had completed a fifth revolution and was beginning a sixth. Jo checked the scale of the emerging map. “The drone’s sending a scan of the floor that’s about 20 meters wide, but it’s set to more deeply overlap segments where the previous pass didn’t get data that it likes. That will happen more in forested areas, because the tree canopy confuses the lidar algorithm. The radius of the cenote is… right at 600 meters. So we have around 30 more orbits, at least, but each one takes less time… We’ll be done with the first survey in an hour and a half.
Merl raised a finger: “The drone’s going to want a fresh battery not long after that. We have three more, all fully charged, but we’ll have to bring it in to change it out before it dies, or show’s over.”
“Very well,” said MaryLiz. “I can set a low battery action. The drone will come back to base on its own when its battery gets low. I’ll watch its charge level just to make sure.”
Jo seemed oblivious to most of what Cap had said.
“Jo, don’t go crosseyed staring at the lidar, it will complete itself. Once it’s done, we’ll have some things to think about.”
“I already have,” said the zoologist.