Belize, near the Guatemalan border, February 2022

On our way to Belize, we heard whispers of a cave. We woke up just after six in the morning, and drove for a few hours. The roads turned to dirt, and we drove past one of the Mennonite farms, passing a few horse-drawn carriages. Their orange trees were diseased, and had to be cut down and replaced with other crops. Eventually, we made our way to the parking lot, where we were outfitted with helmets and lights by our guide, Fernando, leaving behind all of our phones and cameras. The walk through the jungle was mostly flat, save for three river crossings (one of which went up to our necks,) and was dotted by different edible plants and trees. A cacao pod hung over the trail, along with an allspice tree. Fernando showed us wild cilantro and broke open a nut from a type of palm that can be used to make cooking oil. It tasted like a slightly grainy, bitter Coconut.

On the way, Fernando gives us a history lesson about the cave. He tells us what the caves meant to the Mayans, how, a thousand years ago, this was not just a rock tunnel. It was the entrance to the underworld, where all of their gods lived, including the god of rain. It was feared as much as it was revered, and only to be entered by the holy, or those waiting to be sacrificed.

Naturally, with this information, we followed Fernando blindly into the cave. A river runs through the tunnel, so to get through the entrance we had to swim about a hundred feet before getting up onto a ledge. From there, we were half- swimming half-climbing deeper into the cave. Some of the squeezes between the rocks were tight enough that, if I breathed in all the way, I would not fit through. As we got further in, I started to notice the cave formations. There were stalactites that reached down for a meter or more, sections of flowstone, a type of “living” stone formation, that were completely untouched. At one point, a stalactite as wide as my chest had fallen from the ceiling, landed sideways, and now was the ground for a stalagmite to stretch upwards. Throughout the entire cave, several different minerals mixed to create streaks of red, yellow, white, black, and tan.

But this cave was not devoid of life. A scorpion spider crawled on the side of the cave, freshwater crabs were tucked away in cracks in the stone. On the ceiling, bats had been holding on for so long, for so many generations, that their claws and bodily fluids had actually drilled upwards into the stone, sometimes longer than an arms reach. The bats also track seeds in with them, and drop them onto the ledge below their ancestral homes. These seeds, in complete and absolute darkness, do something that nobody would expect them to do: they grow. The blades of grass only live for a few months each, but they are green and very much alive, in a place they have no reason to be.

After making our way half a kilometer into the cave, we pulled ourselves up onto a ledge, through a crack in the wall, and suddenly into a room that could easily fit the entirety of the duplex where my partner and I live. We start seeing shards of pottery, from not just one or two pots, but hundreds of them. Fernando tells us there are more than 1200 pots, which were used for rituals and then shattered afterward. He calls it the dry room because when it was in use it was completely dry, and also the cathedral, for obvious reasons. Things have changed in the past 1000 years, and at some point, water crept its way into the dry room, bringing sediments and minerals that now make the pots appear sunken into a solid stone floor.

Then, as we get further into the dry room, we start seeing the thousand-year-old bodies. 

They, too, are being swallowed into the ground, sometimes face up or face down, the bones knocked around and out of place by a millennium of flowing water. Fernando explains that most of the sacrificial bodies were young, the oldest being teenagers. Most often they were sacrificed to appease the god who could bring rain, and between the years of 800 to 1000 C.E., this branch of the Mayan empire was experiencing relentless periods of drought. Being sacrificed meant that your society would receive rain, and to sweeten the deal, the sacrificed person would get to skip the trials that most people undergo after death. Though, to be fair, you still had to be tortured and killed in a cave, so it’s not a completely free pass.

The further into the cave, the more recent the skeletons. One was almost completely into the ground and covered by a column that formed after the sacrifice, which was about a meter wide and twice as tall as me. (If you are unfamiliar with cave formations, this is an absurdly impressive formation.) As we go deeper into the dry room, the sacrifices are becoming more recent, coming closer and closer to the end of their civilization, as the Mayans became more and more desperate for rain.

It is also worth noting, at this point, that we are not seeing the cave as the Mayans would have. The holy people going into the caves to talk with their gods would not be sober, per se. Typically they would have either eaten mushrooms (psilocybin) or licked a certain toad, the venom of which has DMT, another powerful hallucinogen. This, coupled with the flickering of torchlight, the belief in the underworld, and the sounds from the musical instruments also found in the cave, would give them the ability to communicate with their gods, and seek their approval for the rituals. Even without such assistance, we feel ourselves on the edge of something outside any prior experience.

As we reach the end of the dry room, there is a ladder that leads even further into the cave, through another crack in the wall. Beyond the crack, as we balance our way across the tops of stalagmites, Fernando turns around and tells us to listen. With his knuckle, he raps on one of them, and the sound is somewhere between a ringing bell and a tinkle of glass, completely unexpected from a bulbous cylinder of stone. After we knock on them for a few minutes, wildly amused, Fernando reminds us that we are actually here to see human remains. We continue onwards, to the furthest room that we will go to, also the furthest that the Mayans ever ventured into the cave.

There, on the ground, is a skeleton that has remained untouched for a thousand years. It is the newest skeleton, the last sacrifice before the collapse, before the abandonment of cities and the vanishing of a society numbering hundreds of thousands of people. It is the body of a teenage girl, who, based on her bound skull and a few other factors, is believed to be the daughter of a nobleman, a sacrifice of extremely high importance. Her bones are still arranged as they were at the moment after the sacrifice. She is lying on her back/side/stomach, her left leg is splayed to the side, her right arm outstretched. Her ribs are still there, broken and lying next to her spine.

It dawns on me that this was not just a sacrifice. This skeleton represents the last desperate gasp of a dying empire, a ruler’s last plea to their god for a season of rain to survive, the last unanswered prayer of an entire sophisticated world. A nobleman’s daughter, brought closer to the underworld than anyone had ever gone, her heart ripped out through broken ribs, and still that was not enough.

Since then, a fine layer of calcite has formed over her bones. They sparkle in the beams of our flashlights. Even without the benefit of mushrooms or toads, we are in another realm. Had I had not lived it myself, I would have assumed this was a tall tale spun by a writer with an overactive imagination. We make our way slowly out of the cave, back through the bats, past another large spider, through more tight spaces and flowing water, and eventually again into the light of day. Back at the parking lot, we enjoy a lunch with Fernando, and I talk to him about his own Mayan ancestry. He tells me stories about his grandmother, who told him to stay inside at night, and to never go near caves (we pause to appreciate the irony of his line of work.) His ancestors’ civilization may have disappeared from this region a thousand years ago, but here he is now, telling us how they lived, how they prayed, and how their world collapsed. Sitting here, in an awestruck state while eating chicken and rice (and a really stellar hot sauce), I am thinking about that dying breath of these old cities, and talking with a contemporary Mayan about those legends that have been passed down for

thousands of years, reaching just now to this conversation at the picnic table.

The sacrifice may not have worked as hoped, but Fernando is still here, and the Mayans are still known and revered.

And, to top it all off, it was some really good chicken. 

                                                                  
JUNE HUNTINGTON is an undecided sophomore. They are an Alaska born and based non-binary artist.