A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg Read Free Page B

croaks.
    The ceiling of my room was wire mesh. Ten feet abovethat was sloping, thatched roof. Air circulated nicely, but you could hear people in other rooms as if they were standing next to you, and a man in the adjacent room seemed to be lifting weights. There was the sound of heavy exertion—
mmm-phuph, mmm-phuph
—followed by several quick breaths—
whee-who, whee-who
.
    A young American woman was speaking to the man. “So they’re ruined. A pair of jogging shoes. Big deal, thirty bucks. Jeeze. Please, Larry, don’t do this to yourself. We can get the camera reconditioned. Jeeze. We have eight more days, and it just can’t keep raining like this. Really.”
    Clearly, Larry was not lifting weights. He was suffering a common sort of allergic reaction to jungle travel. “Larry,” the woman said, “now you just stop it. I think the Mayan ruins are beautiful, even in the rain. So it got a little muddy, and there were a few mosquitos, and we had some bad luck. So what? Larry, you’re thirty-two years old. Will you please stop crying?”
    I had just spent a couple of weeks at the more remote ruins, stumbling around in the same rain and mud. All archaeological evidence suggests that the Mayans, in what we now think of as their classic period, were the most advanced people of pre-Columbian America. They developed accurate calendars and hieroglyphic writing; they built massive stone cities and ceremonial pyramids. About 900 A.D. , the race fell into an inexplicable decline. There are any number of theories about what happened: famine, flood, disease, revolt, invasion. My own idea is patently incorrect and stubbornly wrongheaded, but I cling to it because it terrifies me. I like to think that the jungle simply swallowed up the culture.
    El Peten has not always been heavily forested. Analysis of windblown pollen that was recovered from a long core drilled into the bottom of a centrally located lake shows that, in about 2000 B.C. , El Peten was a land of broad savannas. The dominance of jungle over grassland began early in the classic period. Archaeologists believe that in the post-classic period, a poorer sort of folk moved into the temples and lived there until the jungle engulfed the buildings. Perhaps,as the jungle advanced, they prayed to the carved stone images of their ancestors.
    “It was clearing up when we came in,” the woman in the next room said.
    “We waded in,” Larry moaned.
    “And there’s probably a beautiful sunset going on right now.” I heard the sound of drapes being opened, and I looked out my own window. Rain was falling in sheets. It was the same leaden color as the lake. A huge waterfowl drifted by, and, directly under my neighbors’ window, it said “
Gawaahhqk
.” There was silence in the room, then Larry began lifting his weights again, much faster this time.
    J oseph Conrad, in his brilliant evocations of the jungles of Africa and the Far East, used and perhaps overused the word
impenetrable
. In truth, those jungles, and the lowland jungles of Central and South America, only seem impenetrable from a road or river or trail or clearing. In those places where sunlight is allowed to reach the ground, a tangled wall erupts out of the earth, a dense green wall that protects the jungle from civilization and can easily be seen as a warning.
    In the forest proper, under the endless, broad-leaved canopy, direct rays of the sun seldom reach the earth. What light there is seems tired, heavy, turgid—a flaccid twilight. The floor between the tree trunks is largely bare. But the jungle supports an abundance of life. The majority of invertebrate organisms in the Amazon basin have yet to be named, and generations’ worth of botanical research has yet to be done. Above, arboreal frogs with adhesive pads on their feet creep over the dripping leaves. Hordes of bats pollinate the colorful flowers sprouting on tree trunks rather than attempt the tangle of greenery. Aquatic flatworms live in the