Stone, Moss, and Vines

Set deep in northern Guatemala’s jungle, Tikal is a gem in the crown that is Central America’s Mayan ruins. With its numerous excavated sites, the complex is a winding affair, worthy of the nine hours we spent roaming and exploring.

Once one of the more important cities of the ancient Mayan world, the now-crumbling walls of Tikal reach back into time, brushing against 400 BCE. It is overwhelming to think about time as being such a vast expanse, to stand next to massive structures, moss-covered tributes to human achievement, and imagine how long they stood silent, waiting to whisper their secrets of another time and place.

Throughout the unearthed complex, many structures still await their exhumation, pyramid-shaped hills that could be nothing but pyramids, temples. Rectangular stones poke through roots and vines here and there, offering but a sample of what the jungle has secreted away.

It is perplexing that creations of such enormity, once abandoned during the Mayan Empire’s decline, could be relegated to relative obscurity. A once-towering city swallowed by fauna, disappearing into the jungle, destined to spend centuries as a thing of myth, of local lore. How do we lose a whole city of such magnitude?

Tikal is at once a feat epitomizing the amazing things of which humans are capable of creating, and an example the incredible force with which nature can swallow those creations whole, bit by bit, until we hardly remember they existed at all.