Quirigua, what land of superlatives! Here sprout nine stelae of unequalled size and artistry. These “banner stones”, as the Maya named them, are monuments to the great figures and events of Maya history. Most stelae are large “tombstones”, standing just over head high, with a flat, relief carved portrait of a king. At Quirigua, the kings are sculpted in 3 D, and some stand more than 25 feet high!
Rimming these impressive sculpted figures are glyphs, and in typical Quirigua style, the glyphs are not just beautifully carved, but are particularly ornate, making them the most arcane and sophisticated writing in the history of the world! Long a mystery, most glyphs can now be read, and their deciphering is one of the great intellectual achievements of the last twenty-five years.
This glyph decorates Stela C, which equates the doings of its maker with those of former kings and with mythological events. While comparatively simple, for us it was quite apropos. The glyph names a location at Quirigua. It reads “tzunun”, the onomatopoeic Maya word for hummingbird. While Quirigua, “Hummingbird Place”, was not particularly busy for us, it was certainly brimming with birdsong. The trees dripped with the liquid whistles of clay colored robins. Blue gray tanager chicks peeped from their nest in the eaves of a monument’s shelter. Euphonias, tiny birds richly colored in black and gold, piped in leafy branches. But most distinctive were the hoarse croaks of motmots. According to paradigm, which states that the finer the bird, the more commonplace its song, this motmot must be splendid indeed. And once sighted, the motmot met every expectation! Gloriously colored and patterned, the motmot has brows of brilliant turquoise, with rusty wings and a tourmaline belly. Moreover, its long tail has bare shafts that end in a racket tip.
The broad Rio Dulce was once a great trade route for the ancient Maya. It slices a circuitous canyon from Lake Izabal to the sea. Avoiding jungle, traders followed rivers and coastlines in dugout canoes, some of which were reported to be more than a hundred feet long! We too used the river to penetrate, if only a bit, the Guatemalan rainforest. From Zodiacs we gazed up at limestone walls towering hundreds of feet over the water. The sides of the canyon are mostly tree clad, and we boated beneath overhanging branches festooned with lianas, epiphytic ferns, and purple flowered orchids. And the Maya are still here. We cruised past thatched buildings looking much like those of the people who built Quirigua. And dugout canoes, though less grand that those of yore, are still practical craft. We saw many of them, paddled by lean young men, wiry grannies, and little kids.
Northern Central America is a land filled with natural and cultural history. The beauty of the two, intertwining like characters in a Mayan glyph, is perhaps unmatched anywhere in the world. Our day was filled with the richness of both.
