The telling of tales.

At the behest of a friend, I attended my first-ever storytelling night yesterday evening. My friend is in the choir, which she joined after her husband, a man whom I admired and liked a lot, died. She is a professional storyteller. I think that’s rather cool. One Thursday a month, she leads a group of colleagues at the local Victorian museum (where the musical society I used to belong to performs) who assemble to have a potluck and tell stories to each other. I missed out on the potluck but arrived afterwards to find my friend and two other people already engaged in their art.

The woman was telling the story of the nightingale by H.C.Anderson, a tale I recall reading years ago. She will be delivering it at an ecological conference sometime next week in Montreal and was testing it out here. My friend then told the story of the giant in his garden that she had read just that afternoon in OscarWilde’s collection. The man of the group told an African tale about the origin of monkeys which he will be relating for Black History Month to school children. It was all very lovely.

I had brought my most recent literary attempt with me, not realizing what storytelling was all about, but they encouraged me to read it to them anyway, and I did so. Here it is:

Nohoch Mul

     The guide book did not number the limestone steps, nor would it likely have been able to, considering how many of them were eroded by nature or missing due to vandalism. I did not count them either, more intent on not losing my precarious footing as I climbed, eschewing the stout rope in the middle so that other tourists might take advantage of that one amenity provided. The sign at the base of the pyramid had read “Climb monument at your own risk,” and that is exactly what we were all doing.

     Nohoch Mul, thought to be the tallest Mayan structure in the Yucatan peninsula until the discovery of a taller just recently, is the largest building of the Coba group, measuring an impressive 138 feet in height. Only three sides of it are accessible, the rear being overgrown by the jungle that has overtaken almost all of what was at one time a huge complex of buildings: ceremonial, civic, and domestic.

     Later I learned from the guide book how pottery shards dated the site’s origins from 100 BC to 200 AD. The small settlement situated between two freshwater lagoons grew into an enormous, sprawling complex of villages connected by raised limestone roads called sacbeoob from 250 to 600 AD, reaching its architectural peak at the end of the Mayan Classic period (800-1000 AD). The structures themselves were erected from regularly-faced limestone covered with stucco, adorned with intricate carvings and coloured paint. Inside the buildings, walls were decorated with friezes and frescoes.

     The limestone of the Yucatan is soft and easy to work with, but the same properties that make it an ideal building material also make it subject to erosion. Centuries of weathering have worn away carvings and inscriptions that once recorded historical events, births, deaths, marriages, ascents to power, conquests and significant astronomical events. The rules for the famous ball game, carved into the side of the playing court, are illegible.

     When European explorers rediscovered Coba in the mid-1800’s, they had to hack their way through jungle which had overgrown the once-mighty city. The natural flora consists of ramón, cedar, mahogany, zapote and huano, a palm whose leaves are used for thatch. Making their homes in the herbage could be found deer, badger, armadillo, mountain hog, skunk, snakes and different kinds of birds, including partridge, parrot and wild turkey. As few as 25 years ago there were still jaguar in the jungle. The day that I was there, we espied a couple of turkeys among the trees.

     Eventually I reached the top of Nohoch Mul, a platform upon which stands a small stone building with a vaulted roof, decorated with one of the “descending gods” seen throughout Mayan ruins, and I had an opportunity to turn around and survey the view. I tried to imagine how it would have looked 600 years ago just before the Spanish arrived on America’s shores. Great stone buildings and smaller wooden structures with thatched roofs would have lined great white roads of raised limestone that stretched in some cases for hundreds of miles. There would have been hundreds of people milling about in colourful garments: priests, kings, aristocracy and ordinary citizenry, as well as slaves captured in war.

     I tried to see all this, but sadly, I saw none of it. Looking across from the summit of Nohoch Mul one sees virtually unbroken jungle. There is no evidence of any of the things I hoped to find, only nature taking over what man has abandoned. I could not help but think of the final lines of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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