Most of these Links are Coming Soon!

“Neighbors of Antiquity”    Journal Eclipse Mexico 1991    Journal Guatemala 1993
Slides of Pre-Columbian Cultures    Inca Dove     Maya Tarot Reading
“Chronology of Pre-Columbian Cultures”   “The Mayas”
“Reflections on Pre-Columbian Culture and Religion”   

Pictures Guatemala     Pictures Mexico    Pictures Solar Eclipse, Galapagos

Synopsis of Guardian of the Maya Tree

A woman curator travels to Central America to retrace her grandfather’s anthropological work and look for clues to an ancient Maya codex.  Hillary meets an art dealer, who is also an international artifact thief.  He lures Muriel from the scientific world of astro-archaeology into the frightening depths of Maya spiritualism.  In her mind, Hillary becomes Guardian of the Maya Tree.  This novel is a combination of my interests in Pre-Columbian culture and spirituality and ancient astronomy.

Chapter One:  The Gallo's Call

Gallo has called five times.  She awakes.  The sun peers over the town, flickering through the barred opening, inside her small damp cell.  Somehow, she has managed to sleep a few hours.

The petite woman of 30, sits on the steel cot.  She stretches, yawns and rubs her stiff shoulders, warming them from the cold.  Her high cheek bones and broad nose could betray her as native Maya, but her pale skin and deep green eyes claim her as Gringa, from El Norte.

She leans over the cot to mark the sod floor.  How much longer will they hold her?  She doesn't know.  The future does not concern her now.  She thinks only of the marks carved on the floor. 

Gallo's call returns, echoing against the stone walls.  There is no other sound except a dripping faucet, nearby inside the jailhouse of Antigua, Guatemala.  

She is soiled, musty, unable to clean and wash her clothing, a gray sweater torn and bloodied from her struggle on the pyramid with Frank, the man who had made her heart soar.  She feared he had lost part of his soul, that day, because of his fall down the steps.

Lice already nest in her black tangled, shoulder length hair.  Her muscles ache from the long trek into the mountains, though that was a week ago.  Her wounds will not quickly heal.  Not in such a place as they imprison her now. 

Firecrackers snap in rapid succession, as they do several times every day, at all hours -- to mark a festival, a religious holiday, or someone's birthday.  

She hears a distant sound.  People are dragging boxes, setting up the market.  She is tired but can never sleep past Gallo's fifth call.  And today she must begin to write. 

She thinks about the orphan boy, Paublo.  During her last visit to Antigua, she had been good to him.  She gave him money and candy when he approached her on the streets.  The day after they put her in jail, he found her.  He called, “Gringa,” from the barred window.  They had been happy to find each other.

Late last night, through the bars of the window, Paublo handed her a notepad, along with a mango, carrot and cucumber.  He also brought her a pen stolen from a careless tourist.  

The fruit is old, bruised, but good and she eats it unwashed, unpeeled.  A week ago she never would have been so careless. Now she is grateful for such food.  Once a day they bring her cold rice and pureed black beans with tiny black bugs.  Once a day they bring her an earthen pot of agua which she drinks hastily to soothe her powerful thirst. 

For the past two days, the guards have not bothered her much.  She doesn't know when they will take her away.  

The federales have grown angry at her refusal to speak and they know she speaks Spanish.  But she's kept quiet since leaving the pyramid. 

Perhaps they will forget about me, she thinks while sitting back on the cot and leaning against the cold wall.  That would be good, she thinks.  I have no family to miss me.  No friends, any more, to miss. No Lover.  No Frank.

The dog returns to her mind, her Nawal.  She has not seen him since leaving Frank on top of the long pyramid.  He was dead, that was true.  Had her Nawal fulfilled its mission and returned to its world?  

She bit into the mango.  Its sweet juice reminds her of a time when she had plenty.  Knew plenty.  Now she has nothing.  Not even the diaries.  Or the codex.  She has only the torn clothes she wears, the paper, pen, and the mandated secret she must keep.

An hour, maybe two have passed.  She listens to voices echo through the chambers -- laughter, even in this dismal place. 

The old woman will not bring water until mid- morning, a few hours away.  It is her fifth mark on the floor.   Gallo no longer calls.  Now, she knows, she must begin to write.

“The Ancients have written my destiny, leaving me with no escape.  Soon they will come for me so I must record the lost secret of the last galactic sacrifice.” 

She stands and paces the cell -- three steps, then turn.  Her legs feel numb, three steps then turn, three steps, turn.  She shoos away flies then rubs her tender shoulders.  

Now she returns to her task.  She picks up the pen and writes, “I am the Guardian of the Sacred Maya Tree.  Not by my own design but by the will of Ometeotl, God who is woman and man, evil and good.  Everything and Not a thing.  I am guardian of an ancient secret, one that the wise dared not tell the uninitiated.  I am guardian of the Maya Tree and by the end of my discourse, after the secret is told, I seal my fate, the fate of all humanity.  But I am sorry...” 

She paused.  Her every word bore meaning and could never be retracted.  Everything she thought and did was sacred, now that she was Guardian.  

"I WANT TO DIE!” she boldly wrote.  The words eased her painful struggle to escape a burden thrust upon her, by the Ancients Ones. 

Footsteps echo down the corridor.  She pauses, fearing she must quickly hide the paper and pen.  No one has ever come to her cell this early.  

The steps stop at a neighboring cell where the familiar voices of two men scoff in anger.

She waits.  A distant perro barks then yaps.  The streets have filled with traffic.  Exhaust enters the cell window, along with the noise and clatter of a busy street.  

The angry voices stop and the footsteps depart.  A message has been delivered.  A guard bribed by someone on the outside.  There is no one waiting for Hillary, except the orphan boy.  She is alone.  No family to help her.  There is no one but the Guardian, that she is.

Maybe Paulo will come soon with water and bread stolen from the vendors.  He is a clever boy and she would protect him, if she could.  But the boy's fate is sealed, as is hers.  She cannot change the design of Ometotl -- the Ancient One.

She returns to her paper, unable to think of what to write.  There is so much to tell and she may have no time.  

"Think.  Quickly,” she whispers, closing her eyes, wanting her story entirely told, wanting to quickly end her burden. 

"My name is Hillary Jacobs, 30.  The rest is not so important.  Except, I am a scientist... an astro-archaeologist of Pre-Columbian Meso- America.”  

She sighs at her words, nearly cries.  She loved her profession.  Loved the research, the discoveries, the clues to a Astronomical Conundrum.  But that was all over now.  Behind her.  And she could not think about her past, for her secret concerned only the future. 

"My confession begins with the great Solar Eclipse in 2006.  I was a recent graduate from the University of Arizona.  The AAAS provided me with a grant in order to continue my doctrinal work.... I was,” she speaks aloud, then stops herself.  In pause, she listens for any sound.  The jail is silent.  The noise comes from the streets, outside.

"I was piecing it all together,” she continues, “Maya coordinances with the astronomy of the Southwest Indians.  I had just finished my dissertation and was embarking on important clues..."  

"But this is not important.  It was the diary of my great-grandfather, Bradly Brunhaus that changed my life.  Bradly's life created my life's work, my fate.  His wife:  my great grandmother, Poli, was a Maya woman from Toto Santos, a village high in the mountains of Guatemala.  His his diaries only briefly mention his wife.  He mostly describes the ruins of Agua Blanca, where the last codex was written and lost for centuries."  

The pain returns to her stomach.  She holds it, hoping it will pass.  It grows too intense, as if the cause of her burden.  Perhaps she was dying now and her efforts were futile.  Still, she has no choice but to try.  To try and change that which was already written.

The gata meows.  She never sees the cat and wonders if it lives inside the prison walls.  Most likely, she thinks, it is my Nawal too, like the gallo and the dog and maybe even Paublo, the orphan boy.

The pain subsides and the gato is silent.  She listens to voices and traffic from the street.  The faucet continues to drip.  

She rereads her words.  

“Ah yes,” she whispers.  “The diaries.... The secret of Bradly's ruins, discovered a decade before the first World War.  He explored the region for twenty years when he finally found what he'd always been after.  Something we're all after.  Something magnificent -- that's what he wrote in his own diary.  'Something I can claim for myself,' he wrote.  The gods had led him to Agua Blanca just as I have been led.” 

Gato's meow returns, louder, over the street sound.  A screech.  

Why can't she understand the message?  Time?  It is different for her now.  Perhaps she understood before, but now she awaits to remember.

"Shortly after his great discovery,” she writes, “Bradly fell ill with malaria.  He had tremors and sweats worse than ever before.  So he returned to the village to fetch his son, my grandfather Joseph, who was a baby then, and he made it back to Philadelphia where he died in a hospital.  

Joseph went to my great great aunt Miriam.  I think she loved him as her own son because she couldn't have children.  Although, she may never have accepted his Maya blood.  All her prayers and religious purifications could never take that away from Julio.  She called him Joseph, after her husband who died in the war.  I never learned why Bradly left his Maya wife in Todo Santos.  He ended his diary before he left Guatemala and never said anything about Poli to anyone.  Maybe he was too ashamed.  Maybe he had no choice.”

Her stomach growls with hunger.  Soon the old woman will bring water and pan dulce.  Stale, of course, but enough to stop the hunger, for a while.  

With her hands she brushes back her oily hair.  She will use the water today to clean, after drinking a swallow.  She knows that under the dirt and grime, her face is as pale.  She hasn't see the sun for a long time, it being the rainy season of May. 

Paublo insisted she looked muy bonita, but she knows better.  She could feel her eyes and normally thin face swollen.  Her eyes are puffy and red. 

Gata meows.  Perhaps, she thinks, my time is near.  Perhaps, gata is Nawal. 

The old woman has not arrived, so she continues.

"I have always been scholarly.  I sought knowledge above motherhood.  My mother always supported me in school.  So did Daddy, though not as much as mother.  I think she secretly hated her Indian blood, though I'm not sure why.  Society made her feel guilty.  Her religion was a laden of guilt.  

But Joseph her father was a good man.  He provided well for grandmother and their children, until the day he died at eighty.  He was a business man, retail, and from what I remember him as a gentleman with a broad nose and dark complexion.  He kept to the orthodoxy Miriam had taught.  I know I loved him." 

"He never talked about Bradly, his father, only about Miriam and about being a good Jew so God would protect and watch over me, his granddaughter.  He knew I was destined to hold the secret from the Ancients.  Though he never let on.  He was either ashamed of the secret, or a master at keeping it hid.” 

"He must have known I was to become the Guardian, though.  My mother didn't, I'm sure.  She was too religious, perhaps too petty, unlike me.  Perhaps this is why I was chosen.  I know my parents worried about me because I was never interested in schoolyard games.  I would rather read books, many many books...."

"My biggest disappointment in childhood was that I was forbidden to touch the Torah, during my Bavmitsva.  I could never understand this.  Mother said girls were forbidden to touch the holy book, to keep order in God's house.  I could never believe this.  Somehow I knew that someday I would become the holder of a sacred book -- the Last Codex of the Ancient Ones.  My grandfather knew this too, I'm sure.”

She stands and paces the cell once again, thinking aloud, “Of course, mother knew."  Hillary stopped silent, remembering her mother's reaction to the doctorial dissertation.  Her mother seemed disturbed, shocked even, though Hillary could never figure out why.  Until now. 

Of course, her mother knew.  Maybe she had always known that the Ancients would chose her only child to become the Guardian.  

I was never ashamed of the truth, she thinks, only made to feel guilty of my own blood, by my own blood.  I love my work.  I wanted to understand the science of my ancestors, the Ancient Astronomers.  

Now I wonder if father, who had always been supportive, even knew of my mother's heritage.  She probably never told him.  There may have been a lie in my family.  I'll never know now.  They're all dead now.  All of them.  Including Frank.

She returns to the cot, rubs her arms, and writes, “Frank changed the course of my life.  But he was only an agent.  Great Nawal of the East."

She hears the steps of the old woman approach and quickly hides her pen and paper under the cot.  She will think about Frank after she drinks and cleans herself with the tee-shirt under her gray tattered sweater.

© 2000 by Teresa Allen. All Rights Reserved.

My Other Web Sites:

www.yachthouse.com    www.arastar.org    www.tarot-insight.com    www.ecotravel.net    www.world-products.com

Web site design & hosting by www.arastar.org
E-mail:  teresa@yachthouse.com

(last edit:  12-22-00:  Merry 2001 Holiday Season!)