Tikal
Jungle. What comes to mind when you think of . . . jungle?

If you are like me your mind has now taken you to the Amazonian Rain Forest or perhaps to the great jungle of Central Africa first introduced to your imagination by Tarzan the Ape Man. But it so happens that there is a perfectly good, and very large, jungle a little closer to home. No Amazon or Congo or other great river drains this jungle, though its vegetation carpets many thousands of square miles — the entire Yucatan Peninsula, most of Guatemala, and parts of neighboring Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Wild critters prowl through its profusion of trees, bushes, and vines, and swing through its branches. Coati mundis, jaguars, howler monkeys, spider monkeys. Hundreds of bird species per square mile flash overhead and fill the air with squawks and chirps and whistles. The other day we witnessed the most beautiful bird of my lifetime — a white hawk tilting and circling against a backdrop of mountains and sky. Lizards that go on four legs and two. Boa constrictors. Just on the property of our Belizian lodge nine species of poisonous snakes slither and strike, including the fer-de-lance, a pit viper whose venom can cost you a leg or a life. The only predator of the fer-de-lance is the Goliath Spider. Imagine that!

If you walk over to the side of the path and extend your arm, your hand entirely disappears. That’s how thick the vegetation is. Ceiba trees. Mahogany trees. Strangling vines that twine up any convenient trunk. Orchids. Air plants. Leaves of every conceivable size and shape and hue of green. And here’s the thing. The leaves die off, release, and rain down unendingly. The forest floor is ankle deep in duff wherever you look. Beneath the duff, last year’s mulch. Beneath the mulch, millennia worth of soil.

For several of those millennia before 900 A.D., the Mayans ruled this vast territory, cleared its jungle for agriculture, connected their population centers with elevated highways, and erected temples as tall as skyscrapers at their principal sites, Tikal among them. The archaeologists scratch their heads about what triggered the collapse of this ancient civilization some thousand years ago — a civilization that mastered astronomy, mathematics (including the discovery of zero), written communication, irrigation, and warfare. A prolonged drought? Military catastrophe? Peasant revolt? No one knows why, but we do know that the Mayan civilization suddenly vanished, its peoples retreated into subsistence living in mountain enclaves, and its architectural wonders surrendered to the jungle.

But for the Wrigley family of Chicago, Tikal might still slumber beneath the jungle that engulfed it entirely. Well, nearly entirely. When the world’s appetite for chewing gum exploded in the early years of the 20th Century, the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company sent its chicleros deeper and deeper into the jungle, searching for ever more chicle trees from whose sap every Chiclet was made until they concocted an artificial, and cheaper, substitute.

Somehow chiclero reports of dressed stone walls peeking out of the undergrowth reached the Department of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 1950s and 60s the government of Guatemala funded teams of Ivy League professors and graduate students who trekked into this remote corner of northeast Guatemala to peel away centuries of jungle growth.

We ambled through the result the other day, and marveled. A city. In the middle of nowhere. At its apogee when Jesus wandered the hills of Galilee. And then gone. Nearly forever.