Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road by Peart Neil

Author:Peart, Neil [Peart, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2002-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

In Palenque I seemed to be “Mr. Out-of-Season” again, for I sat alone at the resort bar (“enduring — or ignoring — Christmas music”), and at dinner the tables were empty but for a couple of American families. I had been in Mexico long enough to be able to order my meals in Spanish, at least, which I tried to do as a matter of principle, and that day I noted my favorite word-of-the-day, mantequilla (butter), and remarked that at first I thought their butter was “flavored,” with herbs or something, but then decided that no, it was simply a little rancid.

That night I started The Orchard Keeper, by Cormac McCarthy, and noted that it was, “typically beautiful but grim, McCarthy’s own special oxymoronic style. Written in ’65 or so; his first?”

The rain tapered off in the morning, and I rode up to the ruins and spent a few hours exploring the huge complex of pyramids, the tumbled stones which had been partly reassembled once they had been cut out of the surrounding jungle, so dense and green. I remembered reading Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads, about his travels in Mexico in the late ’30s, where he had described visiting these ruins when they were just overgrown mounds, and it was easy to see that if they were neglected again they would soon be absorbed by that prolific, relentless tropical growth.

On a gloomy, overcast day, only a few groups of Mexican students wandered through the wet grass between the temples. “Far from crowded,” I noted, “except with ghosts.” Flocks of melodious blackbirds flew overhead, and another bird that at first I took for an African hornbill, because of its shape and rhythm of flight, but finally identified from my Birds of Mexico as a toucan. In the nearby woods I also spotted a yellow-billed cacique, which the book described as “elusive.”

I climbed the 69 steep, narrow steps of the largest pyramid, the Templo de Los Inscriptiones, and then followed the claustrophobic passageway that led down inside it to the crypt. A triangular stone door and huge carved slab surrounded the small room where the sarcophagus had been, though it and all the other recovered treasures were in the museum in Mexico City — except for a jewelled death mask, which had been stolen in 1985 and never recovered. “Yet another ghost story,” I noted, and was also intrigued by the tale associated with a smaller temple, the Pyramide del Conde, named for an eccentric German, Count Walbeck, who had lived inside the pyramid for two years in the 1800s, with a companion who was only described as “his lady friend.” I tried to imagine how they would have lived there, buying food from nearby villages and collecting rainwater, though at the time I never thought to wonder why.

The next morning, I made my way to the border, then across to Belize and the seaside village of Corozal. Tony’s Inn and Resort was a small hotel right on the shore of

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