The morning brought bad news. I called home for Eid and learnt that a relative is very unwell, so that my father had to fly suddenly to Karachi. Very troubling indeed.
KP had Eid yesterday, after multiple reports of a moon sighting, despite the astronomical evidence that only 0.2% of the moon would have been visible for some minimal length of time. The rest of the country rolled its eyes at the governing party’s home province not keeping to the government line and then someone realised that this meant that KP had only had 28 days of Ramzan instead of 29/30. Never fear, said the chief minister valiantly, all of KP will keep a make-up fast later in the year. Ridiculous.
At 9 our taxi arrived to take us out for the day. We drove out from Oaxaca through countless agave fields and mezcal producers, many with horses working mills – not perhaps pre-Hispanic, what with the horse being an Old World import, but surprising nonetheless. I suppose the electricity supply is not very reliable. The hills outside Oaxaca alternated between arid and green as we went in and out of rain shadows. First we stopped at the world’s widest tree, which we confirmed was indeed very wide, and surprisingly healthy for its girth and age.
Then we went on to Hierve el Agua, a fairly high up cliff-edge where lime water boils out of the ground, fizzing and bubbling, and then runs down narrow channels that seem drawn by a pin to fill pools at the cliff edge, with hard, soapy ripples at the edges. The water then flows down, leaving petrifying limestone formations, a stone waterfall.
We descended from the hills (only about 2000 metres, we later found, though it felt higher up) and had lunch at an inferior place in Mitla. Then we went on to the archaeological site there, one that succeeded Monte Alban in importance. There is no pyramid here and it’s less monumental, but the buildings are covered in the geometric patterns that one sees being used by Zapotec artists today. These are the surviving buildings: the remnants of those destroyed by the Spanish (who saw it as a sort of Vatican, its priest a sort of pope, and translated the name to mean ‘hell’) were used to build a monumental church that towers over the remains.
A couple of tombs are open to the public and we crawled inside. They were not massively interesting, but it is always exciting to venture into the earth nearly on one’s hands and knees, and undoubtedly we emerged reborn, though it didn’t feel like it.
The stones felt precarious overhead, immediately making me think of earthquakes, and reminding me of Monte Alban where I had wandered through the plazas thinking that this was a rather good place to be in an earthquake as even if the structures collapsed they were unlikely to crush one if one wasn’t actually on them. Then I thought how awful and awe-inspiring it would be if an earthquake happened right now and I was witness to the final destruction of Monte Alban. And just then, right in front of me, a massive stone came bouncing down the stepped side of a pyramid, crashing down, and rolling across the plaza till it came to a stop. This made me jump and also realise that actually I wasn’t as safe as I thought, if boulders might roll around like ball bearings, and then I looked up to see a sheepish restorer looking glumly after the boulder he would have to carry up again.
One of the surviving buildings had been rebuilt (I think), so you could go inside the dark narrow windowless rooms set around a courtyard – not unlike the old houses in Oaxaca, I must say. As we left a tour group arrived and a woman asked, ‘Is this where the rich people lived?’ The guide replied, ‘No, I think we would say, this where the powerful people lived.’ And the woman said, startled, ‘So they were not the same people?’
The next and final stop was Yagul. We almost didn’t go as it was late in a hot afternoon, but were glad we did. We had the entire site to ourselves aside from the taxi driver and the ticket collector, both of whom were happy to stay in a shady spot at the entrance. This is located in a really beautiful spot, a city folded over hills, with views over the valleys on every side. The best views are from what is called the acropolis and the fort, which we climbed up to in search of what an information board tantalisingly described as a bath overlooking the valley. Unfortunately we couldn’t find it, it was all very overgrown. In some ways this was the most atmospheric of the sites, perhaps because it wasn’t as geometrical as the other major city ruins, it felt like a place people actually might have lived, and one could imagine the terraced fields and common folk all around, even see a corner where a stall might be set up or a soldier squat to rest in the shade. I wonder, though, what these places were like. I know the priests and nobles lived here, but did women? Would there have been children running around? Market stalls?