The Gentleman Friend had taken Monday off so we went off to Cacaxtla, where there is a pyramid with its murals still in situ. It was very empty: a single small contingent of school children ahead of us and a small family behind us. The air was very hazy; one could barely tell the land from the air, it was all the same searing colour. It felt like being inside an egg, with the only thing piercing the shell a single tall obelisk-shaped building, black obsidian, an office block or something. Quite apocalyptic feeling.
The site was empty as I said, and very hot. Fortunately the pyramid itself is under a huge metal shelter which protects the precious murals from the elements, so it was shaded and airy on top. It was a structure piled upon structures, as usual very hard to make sense of, though there was occasional decent signage in English. The murals were some of them fragmentary but very vivid: river scenes, battles and executions, jaguar and eagle priests, holy beings with the tail of a scorpion. A bird cote for collecting parakeet feathers which looked like quite a miserable place if one is a bird. I tried to imagine being a small child running around in the plazas and rooms with these painted walls, and then centuries later coming to see them in ruins, with people shuffling past over boardwalks, and failed. Perhaps because, as one of the later signs informed me, this was a male space, one for warriors. The women’s space was the nearby pyramid of Xochitecatl, which was open to the surrounding population. Usually there is a 2km walkway to the pyramid but it was was closed for maintenance and the only way to get there was to drive or to take a collectivo to the nearest town and then another collectivo onwards to another nearest town and then to walk, so we elected not to bother, not least as I was not feeling too strong.