The Eye of Cahal Pech

Cahal Pech is the ancient Maya city on one of the seven hills of San Ignacio, Belize. Dennis Vickers taught at the University of Belize (2003-2005) and visited there often. Presently, he teaches humanities and philosophy at the College of Menominee Nation in Keshena, WI.

Intense volcanic temperatures and pressures forged the Eye of Cahal Pech long before human beings occupied the Western hemisphere. When the first bands of people followed the coast down the narrowing isthmus through the dangerous wetlands and into the mountains that had never before felt the fall of a human foot, the Eye was embedded in the same lava boulder it had ornamented since the end of the third baktun, one thousand generations of human lives earlier. It was set into the outside of the boulder, so its blue-green translucence was visible to anyone who pressed through the jungle, climbed up the steep slope, and pushed aside the dense undergrowth that covered it. Only an occasional iguana, a howler monkey, once or twice a prowling jaguar ever saw the Eye.

The first discovery of the Eye by a human, in the middle of the tenth baktun, paralleled its rediscovery millennia later, fewer than one hundred years before the twelfth baktun would end, and the world with it. In the first discovery, an unworthy man named Chiwo found the buried boulder and the Eye in it, and promptly lost his life defending his new fortune. Nearly a thousand years later another unworthy man rediscovered the Eye, a grave robber named Pedro, searching the ruins of Cahal Pech for relics to sell on the black market. Pedro soon lost his life defending a possession that was never rightfully his. There were numerous parallels regarding the Eye and its double presence in the world, and these were the first two.

The nobles from the city of Cahal Pech sent Chiwo, the first to uncover the Eye, to find a stone suitable for sculpting temple decorations. Walking through the rainforest high up the hillside above the river, he knew from the shape of the irregular surface under his feet that there were stones buried there. He considered moving on, preferring to find stones on the surface that required no digging, but it had been more that one month since he'd returned to Cahal Pech with a load of stones and with every day that passed, his fear grew. If he delayed much longer he would be jailed when he returned, and punished for laziness and lying, both true accusations. He flattened the side of a split-open branch he found nearby, and began digging. When he first saw the Eye emerge from the jungle dirt, he thought he had uncovered a lizard, or an exotic egg, because the blue-green color looked so out-of-place peeking out from under the black dirt.

Light flowed out of the Eye like no stone Chiwo had ever seen before. The blue-green light came from inside the stone, not through it. Chiwo positioned the lava-stone encasing the Eye in the dirt, and smashed a larger stone against it. When he had broken the Eye free from its stone case, he held it up to look through it. What he saw caused him to jerk the stone away from his face. "It's a god's eye," he said. When his breath returned and his heart stopped pounding he looked again, but not so closely this time. "It looks into the ghost world."

Chiwo wrapped the Eye in a large leaf and put it into the pouch he carried on a sling around his neck. Though the sun had set and the complete darkness of a moonless night would come soon, he set off toward Cahal Pech. As he walked, he considered how to negotiate the windfall this blue-green stone presented to his best advantage. "I won't take it to the priests; they'll only keep it for themselves," he said. "I'll hide the stone, and tell them I have it. I'll let them see it when they've given me a house in the center of the city, and all the women I want, and a storehouse of my own, filled with corn and dried fruit, and . . . everything." He tripped on a vine stretching across the path as he walked, but regained his balance and continued ahead. "And servants enough to take care of my house, and my storeroom, and everything else I'll have."

The next afternoon his exhilaration, eagerness, and persistence won him an audience with the priests. They sat in a row in the temple room reserved for subjects to petition for favors. Five temple guards stood behind them with their weapons held across their chests. When Chiwo's turn came, he told the priests he'd found a god's eye in the jungle. "The light shines out of it, bright as the full moon," he said. "When you look into it, you see the world of the spirits who no longer breathe on the earth."

"Bring the stone to us," Chan Balam, chief among the priests, said.

Chiwo laughed. "I will bring the stone to you, of course, but first I must be assured of an appropriate reward."

Chan Balam nodded his head slowly and turned to the first of the temple guards. "Chiwo will lead you to where he has hidden this stone," he said. "He will go straight to it, without diverging from the straight path. He will lead you there in complete silence. If he attempts to turn from a course leading there, or if you have walked until darkness falls and he has produced no stone, or if he says even a single word, you will cut his head off and leave him by the side of the road, his body sitting on his head." He nodded again. "See to it."

Chiwo led the guard directly to where he'd hidden the stone, all the while attempting to convince him that the two of them would win incredible riches if they made a partnership. "We are not priests, you and me," he told the guard. "The priests have all of the wealth and power. We are poor. We are alike; two poor men who must take the opportunities that come their way." Presently they came to the grain storehouse where Chiwo had hidden the stone.

When the temple guard had removed the stone from the leaf Chiwo had wrapped around it, he put it into the pouch slung over his shoulder. Then he picked up his war club, and knocked Chiwo to the ground with a single blow to the back of his head. When he was certain Chiwo was dead, he cut his head off, and left him sitting on the side of the road, as he had been told to do.

The rediscovery of the Eye came one thousand years after Chiwo's discovery, near the end of the twelfth baktun. Two grave robbers, men who normally pursued their shameful profession in Guatemala, came to the ruins of Cahal Pech looking for gems and gold buried with Maya royalty. Their given names were Carlos and Pedro; their family names are unknown. Neither was thirty years old, but Carlos was older and smarter than Pedro. The two men had dug a trench leading up to a buried Mayan temple and were busy working their way down the face of the temple looking for openings leading to the rooms inside.

Early one morning, Pedro discovered that a stone he was working to lift from the floor of the trench was flattened on the side facing up and carved on the side facing down. Carved stones don't excite the grave robbers the way gems and gold do; they are too difficult to sell. Still, finding a carved stone buried in the rubble probably meant they were the first to dig this site, and gold and gems might well be buried farther down. He continued his efforts to extract the stone and resolved to tell Carlos about it as soon as he returned from his visit to town.

When Pedro had removed enough dirt that he could lift one edge of the stone and lean it against the side of the hole he was digging, he jumped back in astonishment. A Maya king was carved into the underside. The fierce looking king held a carved war club in one hand, a shield in the other, and his right eye burned with a green light like there was a hot fire behind it. Pedro had never seen, nor heard of, a gemstone like the Eye of Cahal Pech. For a moment he stood frozen over the stone king, but his greed overcame his apprehension, and he brought the point of his shovel down squarely on the king's cheek. He chipped at the face, again and again, until the carved stone gave up the gem set into it. When it was free he hid it in his pant's pocket and crossed himself, though he knew it was little protection from the gods he was offending.

When Carlos returned from the village, Pedro showed him the stone carved with the image of a king. "Surely there is a tomb below," he said. "Surely it is filled with gems and gold."

Carlos stood over the stone for a long time, thinking. "Why is the face on the statue damaged so?" he asked.

"I don't know," Pedro said. "It was that way when I turned it over."

"Why is the right eye a hollow socket when the left eye is carved into the stone?"

"I don't know," Pedro said. "Maybe there was a gem mounted there, but someone was here before us and took it."

"And reburied the carved stone?"

Pedro looked into the distance at the ruins on the other side of the ball court. "Who can explain what others do?" he said.

"Yes, we are a mystery, aren't we? Every one of us," Carlos said as he reached for the machete hung on his belt.

Pedro had the Eye in his possession for only a few hours, but Carlos held it for even less time. As the two men commented on the inscrutability of our race, a band of local men, who had followed Carlos from the village, assembled on the opposite side of the very temple Carlos and Pedro were defacing. They had machetes in their hands too. They also had conviction in their hearts that it was their lot to protect their ancestors' ruins from men like Carlos and Pedro. They left both grave robbers upside-down in their own trench, a warning to any others who might come to Cahal Pech looking for plunder.

In this way the Eye of Cahal Pech came into the hands of the leader of the village men, Paul Balam, who possessed it for fifty years before throwing it into the river. After that the Eye remained buried in the river bottom until the twelfth baktun ended and the world with it.

The secret of the Eye of Cahal Pech was soon understood by the two men who held it, Paul Balam, and his distant ancestor, Chan Balam. When Chan Balam looked into the Eye, he saw the world from the Eye that Paul Balam held in his hand. When Paul Balam looked into the Eye, he saw Cahal Pech at the time when it was a vital, prosperous city.

Chan Balam possessed the Eye for thirty years; Paul Balam possessed it for fifty. The two men came to know each other well during the time the Eye connected them across the millennium. Though they never spoke to each other, they soon worked out arrangements for sharing. During the mornings Paul would look through the stone and Chan would place it so there was something interesting to see. In the afternoons, Chan would look and Paul would show his world to the blue-green Eye. They couldn't look at the same time, of course, because they would only see each other that way. The times they did this, which were frequent during the first few weeks, both men believed the stone had become a mirror.

Despite being the younger man, Paul was the first to determine what the place he saw through the Eye was, because it was precisely the world where he'd found the Eye, except many years in the past. The pyramid temples he saw in the Eye, which were among the first things Chan showed him, were familiar from the ruins he had seen near his village since he was a boy. The temples in the Eye were whole and clean and undamaged, while the ruins near his village were broken, and buried in dirt, and entwined with jungle growth. Still, it was soon clear to him that they were the same temples.

Chan struggled to understand the world he was seeing. Truths that are most difficult to admit are also most difficult to understand. He thought, at first, that the world inside the Eye was a world of gods, but they were not the gods he knew. In fact, he only saw men and women, never gods. He thought then that the Eye was a magic window to see great distances and that the world he saw in it was a distant world, perhaps one of the cities said to exist in the mountains far to the north. His confusion continued until the day Paul Balam took the Eye back to the ruined temple where the grave robbers had unearthed it. Chan soon recognized the ruined city to be Cahal Pech, his own city, and the ruined temple. Even though he knew from the prophecies, some his own, that his city would one day fall into ruin and his people would fall into doubt, seeing these predicted events cast him into a terrible sadness. The despair stayed with him for ten years. During that time it spread, first to the other priests, then to the nobles, then to the common people. By the time Chan began to accept the future and recover his spirit, the slow deterioration of the city had begun. As citizens lost hope for the future of their city, they also lost hope for their own futures, and their children's.

When Chan was old, sick, and near death, he had the Eye placed in a stand near his bed, so that Paul could be with him when the end came. In this way Paul sat with the old man as he died, as a son should, as if they were in the same room.

When Chan was dead, his daughter, Xquiq, had a likeness of him carved in stone and ordered that the blue-green Eye, which had been her father's most precious possession, be mounted in the eye socket. When the carving was ready, she had it placed high on the side of the temple with a good view of the city below. Immediately beneath the likeness she had the builders make a platform cut into the side of the temple, where she and others might come to stand under her father's eternal gaze. She never looked through the Eye herself.

This placement of the Eye gave Paul Balam exclusive use of it, but left him to watch the ancient city deteriorate from his vantage point high on the side of the temple. Over the next twenty years he spent many hours watching. When the high winds and torrential rains washed out passages in the city, and no one repaired them, he watched. When the weed trees and vines took root in the walls of buildings and the pavement of streets, and no one came to remove them, he watched. When the thugs came to steal and bully and no one stood to stop them, he watched.

When Chan Balam had been dead ten years, his daughter, Xquiq, brought her daughter, Ixcuat, to the temple. Ixcuat carried her child, a baby girl who was sick with fever. She stood on the platform under the carved image of Chan Balam, and held the child up. "Revered Grandfather," she said. "I have always come here with sacrifices. I have never come here to ask your help. Now I have no other place to turn. My daughter is sick and our remedies have no effect for her. She'll die soon unless you help her."

On the other side of the Eye, Paul Balam pressed the Eye to his face so tightly that it left a mark that remained for the rest of his life. His heart went out to the mother. He could see that the baby would soon die. He longed to reach across the time that separated him from the sick child to bring what comfort he could, but he could do nothing. He could only watch and weep.

On the ancient side of the Eye, the women were amazed to see tears emerge from the Eye and flow down the carved face of Chan Balam.

Copyright © Dennis Vickers