Temple of the Inscriptions

by Humphrey Price

Table of Contents

Prologue

I was startled to see my younger brother today. It was a close call and totally unexpected. I was at the San Francisco airport, coming back from Seattle, and he was in a crush of passengers disembarking a flight from Texas. Luckily, I spotted him before he saw me. I flinched, turned away and slipped behind a knot of people. I made furtive glimpses back and was sure he had not noticed me.

As he walked past, I continued to cast sidelong glances in fascination at this family member I had not seen in several years and then only surreptitiously. He had noticeably aged. It was almost like looking in a mirror and seeing how I would appear when I got older.

My brother, Tom Richards, had not seen me for decades, but I was worried that he would instantly recognize me. After all, I still look just as he would remember me. He thought I had gone missing with a traveling companion all those years ago in Mexico. And I had.

Chapter 1: Palenque

My 1968 white VW Beetle was knocking on the Pemex gasoline as we turned off the main highway, such as it was, and took the even more distressed road into Palenque in Yucatan, Mexico. Tall sweltering jungle rose like an impenetrable wall on both sides of the road. It was 40° C in the tropical September sun.

Karyn Lee was lounging in the passenger side with the seat partially reclined and her bare feet up on the dash, sipping ice cold Dr. Pepper from a thick glass bottle. A stream of air from the vent window was aimed at her face, blowing her long flowing black hair into billowing kinetic sheets. Her eyes were hidden behind reflective Ray Bans, but her lazy smile exuded an expression of relaxed contentment.

Karyn was an astronomy major at the University of Texas and had been my traveling companion these last two weeks on an aggressive itinerary to drive the Gulf coast the entire length of Mexico and visit as many Mayan ruins as possible. I was a Nuclear Engineering graduate student at Texas A&M and had met Karyn while she was irradiating meteorite samples at our research reactor.

Neither of us were football fans, and we were not enamored with the legendary rivalry between the two schools. We also had a mutual interest in fencing, not the kind that cattle ranchers use but the mock swordplay kind. This had drawn us together as friends, and she agreed to join me on this great adventure I had planned for the final month of summer.

Her nickname for me was Señor Frog, which she pronounced “seen yore frog” because of how I looked when I wore my scuba equipment. My nickname for her was Space Girl because of her interest in planetary astronomy. Besides being very smart, witty, and friendly, she was a trim, athletic, and deliciously full-figured Asian beauty. She made it clear from the beginning that this was strictly a platonic venture, and she was true to her word.

As we continued on the bumpy road, swerving to avoid the largest potholes, bits and pieces of Palenque started to appear: sheds with corrugated roofs, small houses, and a pharmacy. Karyn cocked her head and hoisted herself upright. “Señor Frog, hielo, hielo!”

I looked where she was pointing and turned into a rippled dirt parking lot next to a cinder block building with the Spanish word for ice, HIELO, painted on the side in big block letters. We had a large ice chest with food and Dr. Pepper in the back seat, and we had learned to never pass up an opportunity to replenish it with more hielo.

I got out and stretched after three hours of solid driving. Karyn was ahead of me and pulled open a squeaky, heavy wooden screen door to enter the store. I followed her inside to see clean wood shelves populated with fresh tropical fruit.

Calling me by my real name, she said, “Hey, Scott, these bananas look great, let’s get a bunch.”

I went over to look at the baskets of produce where she was rummaging.

An older-looking Mexican woman managing the store walked over to see if these two gringo tourists needed assistance. She greeted us in Spanish, and we responded with limited tourist Spanish, honed by our two weeks in-country.

Her eyes were drawn to Karyn’s rustic pendant that hung from a silver chain and nestled in the V of her two-button-undone blue denim work shirt with rolled up sleeves. The pendant was a half-inch chunk of iron that had been polished to a smooth shiny luster. The store lady pointed at it and said stuff in Spanish we could not understand.

Karyn held it out and said, “Lo siento, que no comprendo. It’s a meteorite from Meteor Crater, Arizona.”

The woman reached out with tentative fingers then gingerly held it for inspection as her eyes grew wide. “¡Madre de Diós!” she whispered.

Karyn softly replied, “Hey, I’m nobody’s mommy.”

“At least not that you know of, Space Girl,” I said.

She gave me a wry look. “Yeah, right. An advantage of being a girl, Señor Frog, is that if you have kids, at least you know about it.”

The old woman had not taken her eyes off the pendant, which she still held in her hand. In a far-away sounding voice, she mumbled something in Spanish that sounded like “The Traveler” to me.

I thought this was getting a bit strange, so I interrupted her with, “Queremos comprar hielo y plátanos, por favor.” This broke her trance, and she released the meteoritic jewelry. She looked up at Karyn, gave a fleeting smile, and then went to get a block of ice.

“That was weird,” Karyn remarked.

We got our ice and bananas, took turns using a restroom facility the old woman graciously offered, and then we were back on the road looking for a hotel.

“I sure do miss toilet seats,” Karyn said. “I think I’ve seen one toilet seat in the last week.”

It didn’t take long to scope out downtown Palenque and find clean yet cheap accommodations. We went through our daily routine of checking in to a hotel in a new town. It was always the same. I’d tell the clerk, “Queremos un cuarto con dos camas.”

He’d give Karyn the once over and ask, “¿Es su esposa?”

I would reply, “No, es mi amiga,” to which he would give me a smile and a sly wink. I found this recurring daily interchange to be really uncomfortable, but Karyn found it highly amusing.

Karyn was delighted to discover that our room had facilities that included an actual toilet seat. We left the items in our room that hopefully nobody would want to steal and then set out to see the Palenque ruins before they closed up for the day.

The dirt parking lot was surprisingly empty with almost no autos and just a couple of tour busses. As we negotiated our way on foot to the entrance gate, we ran the gauntlet of half a dozen locals hawking curios and artworks that depicted the image of the purported ancient Mayan astronaut engraved on the 1,300-year old sarcophagus cover that had been excavated deep inside the pyramid known as the Temple of the Inscriptions.

One vendor offered a legal-sized parchment paper with a beautifully colored and highly detailed rendering of the engraving. I could not resist purchasing it for the haggled price of 75 pesos. I rolled it up and put it in my backpack.

Space Girl of course wanted to see the ruins of the ancient astronomical observatory first, so we did. It was amazing, although not quite as spectacular as the one at Chitzen Itza. I finally tore her away from the observatory to hustle over to the pyramid.

Proceed to Chapter 2...

Copyright © 2023 by Humphrey Price