EXPLORING THE PLACE OF FRIGHT

National Geographic Adventure July/August, 2001
Story by David Roberts

On his expeditions deep into the ancient sacred caverns of the Belize jungle, pioneering cave archaeologist Jaime Awe probes the nightmarish secrets of the Maya underworld.

It was early March, the middle of Belize's dry season, yet our faces streamed with sweat in the 95F degrees jungle humidity. After a two-mile hike, we arrived at the cave. We strapped on our helmets, cinched down our dry bags, flipped on our headlamps, and started across the pool just inside the cavern's hourglass-shaped mouth.

There was just one problem: I have never learned to swim- and the water here reached depths of 15 feet. Bound inside a puffy life jacket, I tentatively worked my way into the water, then flailed across and seized the shore on the other side. Tiny fish nibbled my calves, and dark shapes flitted overhead; vampire bats.

Discarding the cumbersome life jacket, I stepped back into the now waist-deep stream, following close behind Jaime Awe (AH-way), who is Belize's foremost archaeologist and who knows these caves better than anyone alive. Just behind us were photographer Stephen Alvarez and his assistant, Alan Cressler-expert cavers both. We shuffled forward until we came to what cavers call "breakdown"- a talus pile of collapsed boulders, here half-submerged in the wall-to-wall stream. I made my way over this chaos gingerly: The grotto was filled with limestone fins and prongs so sharp that a slip or fall might gash you to the bone.

Half an hour in, ducking to sidle through an unlikely slot, then stumbling shoulder deep against the current, I realized that, alone, I would now have been completely lost. We came to a boulder that looked like any of several dozen we had already passed. I would have plunged on upstream, but Awe said, "No, up here." He climbed the back of the boulder, stepped high onto a jutting shelf, and scrambled up a steep slope into the darkness. As we followed, the sound of the river faded below. Gradually, the slope eased and the passage opened around us. At last we reached a broad terrace where rimstone dams sectioned off dry pools. The chamber lay 700 yards from the entrance- not far, if you were walking along a sidewalk, but a considerable journey inside a cave.

As my headlight swept the space, I caught my breath. In 14 years of exploring prehistoric Anasazi sites in the American Southwest, hundreds of days of poking through canyons and across plateaus, I have come upon exactly six intact or nearly intact ceramic vessels. Now, all around me, ranging in size from a drinking mug to a vase big enough to hold a small tree-everywhere I looked- were pots, dozens of them.

As I stood gaping at the extraordinary assortment of ancient vessels, Alvarez wandered deeper into the cave. Soon it was his turn to let out an involuntary curse of astonishment.

My eyes followed the beam of his headlamp. In the middle of the chamber lay an upright human skull, the eye sockets empty, the jaw still grinning in its rictus of death. The top of the forehead had a flattened, almost simian look about it. Each of the four incisors in the upper jaw had been filed into a tripartite fang.

On our trek to Awe's field camp the previous day. I had discovered that it's not just Awe's path-breaking theories or his unusual realm of archeology that sets him apart from his more conventional colleagues.

We were no more than a hundred yards from the trailhead, and already we were bathed in sweat. Cicadas drowned the forest with their metallic whine. Suddenly, as we approached our first ford of Roaring Creek, Awe flung his pack to the ground. I glance over just as he launched in to a headlong sprint, which culminated in a yawp-"I was born for this!"-and a belly flop into the river.

The plunge and the cry, I soon learned, were spontaneously concocted by Awe one hangover stricken morning some five years ago. They have since become an initiation rite for all new visitors to the field camp of Awe's Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project (BVAR)-the official title of his pioneering investigations deep in the Maya world, both above and below the ground. Warming to the oddball ways of our leader (and seeing no real alternative), Alvarez, Cressler and I dutifully followed Awe's lead: sprint, yawp, plunge.

If I was born for this, that birth happened just a few years ago, when, in the inland jungle of Guatemala's Peten, I tagged along with a Vanderbilt University team that was excavating royal burials. As I hiked toward the site of Dos Pilas, I passed by the mouth of a cave yawning in the gloom. "Just last week," the archeologist at my side told me, "we found a whole trove of pots in there."

In that instant, I was seized with the insatiable itch of the explorer. The cities of the prehistoric Maya-one of the greatest and yet most enigmatic civilizations ever to emerge in the Americas- have been probed and pondered for more than a century. But the underworld, so important to the ancients, was only now beginning to be rediscovered by modern investigators. Here, I realized-in the cave systems that riddle the Central American rain forest-lay the new frontier of Maya studies.

Scholars trace the origins of the Maya back to more than 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. By 1,000 BC, the Maya were raising corn, making pottery, and living in small villages. Their heyday came between AD 250 and 900, a span known to archaeologists as the Classic period. During those centuries, the Maya realm extended from Tabasco in present-day Mexico, throughout the Yucatan Peninsula, south across Guatemala and Belize, and into the western edges of Honduras and El Salvador. The peak population has been estimated at eight to ten million. During the Classic period, the Maya built the most magnificent cities in pre-Columbian America, civic centers such as Tikal, Copan, and Palenque. In Belize, their greatest towns were Caracol, Lamanai, Altun Ha, and Xunantunich. Here, soaring temple-pyramids bordered spacious plazas complete with ball courts. The whole city, oriented to the four cardinal directions, imposed a rigorous quadrilateral order upon the chaos of the lowland jungle.

By the Classic period, the Maya had invented an astonishingly sophisticated calendar. They made astronomical observations that revealed those of their Arab and Asian contemporaries. And they perfected the most complex writing system ever developed in the Americas, an immensely nuanced script of hieroglyphs that are partly alphabetic, partly phonetic, and partly logographic. In front of their temples, they erected stelae, stone slabs as tall as 12 feet and carved with elaborate depictions of rulers and gods and hieroglyphic texts.

Unable to read the hieroglyphics, scholars had developed by the 1970's an idealized concept of Maya civilization; a peaceful culture of pyramid-building philosopher-priests who spent their days contemplating the mysteries of time and the cosmos.

During the past 20 years, though, the language of the Maya glyphs has been almost completely deciphered, and the picture those texts reveal utterly upends the conventional one. The carved stelae erected before the temple-pyramids boast of the invincibility of elite rulers, of the torture and sacrifice of enemy lords, of great battles waged against other cities. In the words of the distinguished Yale archeologist Michael Coe, "The Maya were obsessed with war."

And the underworld played a crucial role in the Maya conception of the universe. Myths and epics that survived the Spanish conquest of the Maya paint a vivid picture of this perilous, nine-tiered place. Into the underworld the Hero Twins, (deities in the age before human beings were created), descended to face a series of ordeals that ultimately made the world safe for humans--defeating such lords as Jaundice Master, Pus Master and Skull Scepter, evading traps laid in Dark House, Razor House, Jaguar House, and Bat House, which was full of "monstrous beasts, their snouts like knives." Each night, the setting sun was transformed into a jaguar god, which had to traverse the underworld, with all its dangers, before being reborn at dawn as the sun god. The dead dwelled there and had to pass through the nine levels before their souls could escape to heaven. The underworld was called Xibalba- The Place of Fright.

The Maya believed that caves were the portals to Xibalba. This was borne out by finds of spectacular artifacts in the Yucatan Peninsula at Loltun cave and Balankanche cave by early modern archaeologists. Yet on the whole. Maya cave research was neglected throughout the 20th century.

Enter Jaime Awe. As a boy growing up in San Ignacio, a midsize village in western Belize, he was well acquainted with things Maya. The small, partly excavated site of Cahal Pech frowns the town's main hill, and only six miles to the southwest loom the austere, jungle-swathed ruins of Xunantunich. Awe's family picnicked at Rio Frio, a huge two-mouthed cavern some 600 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 80 feet tall at its apex , through which the cold river of that name flows. On other forays up the streams south of San Ignacio, Awe discovered his own caves, noticing the potsherds scattered just inside their entrances.

"When I was nine," he says, " I used to go out looking for mounds behind my parent's house. I'd collect potsherds, take them home, and square them of with my knife. Then I'd glue them together and make forts, put plastic toy soldiers on them, and blow the whole thing up with fireworks. I was a demented child!"

In college, this childhood fascination (demented or not) was rekindled by the teachings of an anthropology professor, whose faith in Awe's instincts helped him land the post of assistant commissioner in the government's Department of Archaeology. Ultimately, he went to Trent University in Ontario to get his BA and MA, then to the University of London for his doctorate, becoming the first native Belizean to get a Ph.D. in archaeology.

In the late 1970's, just become Awe left Belize for school, a small cadre of die-hard cavers, mostly British and Canadian, led by an obsessed geomorphologist named Tom Miller, began to discover the country's caving potential. For these devotees, pushing new underground passages was an end in itself; the Maya artifacts they stumbled upon were of secondary interest. Word of their finds, however, got back to archaeologists. When Awe returned to Belize in the early 1990's, he decided to fully explore the caves. What he found there overwhelmed him.

A shallow pool of calcite had cemented the skull to the floor of the cave. Nearby lay a disembodied leg bone. "Flooding over the centuries separated the bones," said Awe. "But this is not a burial; there are no grave goods associated with it."

As I knelt to get a better look, Awe explained the flattened forehead. "It's called a tabular oblique," he said. "His head would have been bound with boards for the first year of his life."

"Why?" I asked.

"Beautification. Same as the teeth."

During the past five field season's Awe's teams have spent a total of 15 months working, often for 12-hour days, in this cave system, which is called Actun Tunichil Muknal- the Cave of the Stone Sepulcher. He has examined virtually every artifact and bone here. He knew exactly what we were looking at. "This is a human sacrifice," he said.

"How would he have been killed?" Cressler asked. "We can't tell from the skull alone. Usually they sacrificed someone by holding him down, spread-eagled, and cutting out the heart. Or by decapitation. But he might also have been disemboweled while still alive."

In the ninth century, some terrible catastrophe struck the Maya world. The people built no new major temples after AD 830; the last date inscribed on the Maya calendar corresponded to AD 889. By the first decade of the tenth century, Tikal, Caracol, and other great cities were essentially abandoned. Mayanist Robert Sharer, of the University of Pennsylvania, has called the collapse "one of the most profound cultural failures in human history." Most scholars believe that some sort of environmental crisis-most likely drought and deforestation- intersected with overpopulation and internecine warfare to lay waste a mighty civilization.

Now, as we pondered the grisly scene before us, Awe suggested a connection to the collapse of the Maya. "I'm almost certain," he said, "that the man was sacrificed to Chac, the god of rain. When this cave was being used for rituals, a severe drought gripped the countryside. Years may have gone by without a drop of rain. People were starving. This sacrifice would have represented the people's ultimate petition to Chac, to relent and restore them to the glory their forefathers had known."

At most Maya field schools, the local workers eat in separate messes from the gringo researchers. This is not Jaime Awe's style. That night, ten of us sat together around the campfire and shared a single meal; a gargantuan chile with tortillas, cooked by Awe himself.

The camp is set in a spacious clearing under the forest canopy, where workers have built four large wooden champas with thatched roofs and open sides. One serves as the commissary, complete with earthen stove. Low benches have been cobbled around the campfire hollow. Despite the heat and the bugs, we lingered around the campfire, drinking rum punch. At Awe's side sat his field director and girlfriend, Carolyn Audet, a 23-year-old anthropology student set to start grad school at Vanderbilt in the fall. Athletic and assured, she had a smile that (to paraphrase Marlowe) could burn the topless towers of Xunantunich. Awe himself is 46, trim, and clearly in good shape. His round face, crowned with black, curly hair, never showed a wrinkle of skepticism or doubt.

The couple met at Awe's summer field school in 1998-"and my life hasn't been the same since," he told me on the hike in. She was a volunteer on the project, an ambitious Princeton student seeking field experience between her sophomore and junior years. Now, while Awe dives through Tunichil Muknal and other caves, Audet works on aboveground excavations at Lamanai and Cahal Pech. Beside the campfire the two held hands like teenagers.

The night was even buggier than the day. Audet spotted a sizable scorpion that had crawled over to investigate the fire; Pete Zubrzycki, a British Army veteran turned volunteer archaeologist, promptly extinguished it with a boot heel. Cressler picked up a roach the size of a mouse, which he tuned over curiously in his hands, then released. On an errand to my tent, I caught a steely point of light in my headlamp beam. It turned out to be the eye of a hairy black tarantula loitering near the tent door.

There are good reasons why caves in the Maya world have until now been so little studied. Most archaeologists lack the athleticism and the nerve to venture into even easy caves, let alone carry out intensive fieldwork within them. The dangers of caving are manifold: falling on the jagged karst, getting lost in labyrinthine passages, drowning in flooded caverns. And insidious diseases lurk in the stygian depths. While working in a cave two years ago, Audet contracted histoplasmosis, a kind of fungal pneumonia caused by spores from bat feces. "You get a terrible fever," she told me. "It feels like somebody's squeezing your lungs." Histoplasmosis is treatable, though the cure is almost as bad as the malady. Chagas' disease is not. Awe laconically described its course to me. "You get it from the assassin beetle, which lives in dry caves. When it pricks you, it secretes an anesthetic fluid; you don't know you're being bitten. It's a slow, debilitating illness that attacks the heart. It's fatal. Some people think Charles Darwin died of it."

Awe calls himself a speleoarchaeologist, one of only four cave specialists in the world of Maya studies. As such, he is a man on a mission. As he told me, "Even the people who studied caves like Balakanche in the 1960's spent only two or three days in them. If I worked a surface site and wrote a report after two or three days, my colleagues would laugh at me. What I'm fighting for is cave archaeology as intensive as surface archaeology. We can't wrap up Tunichil Muknal in a week."

Yet Awe's mission faces twin dilemmas. Belize's economy is fragile at best; the average Belizean household takes in only $218 a month. Though the country exports sugar, timber, fruit, fish--and drugs--tourism looms as its potential make-or-break industry. So far the action centers on the Cayes, where divers and sunbathers hang out. But the government, mindful of the drawing power of archaeological sites such as Chichen Itza in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala, has launched a campaign to promote its own Maya sites- with Jaime Awe in charge of the archaeological niceties. At the same time as our visit to the caves, Awe was supervising full-blown restorations (explicitly to make the sites tourist-friendly) at Cahal Pech, Caracol, Xunantunich, Lamanai, Altun Ha, and El Pilar. Yet in a cave such as Tunichil Muknal, can archaeology and tourism coexist? Even more troublesome is the threat posed by professional looters- who, thanks to the work of pioneers such as Awe, are getting wind of a whole new host of sites from which to pilfer pre-Columbian treasures.

If cave research is the new frontier of Maya studies, the great question is just what did these gateways to Xibalba meant to the ancients. Twenty years ago, most archaeologists had a pat, simplistic explanation: The pots had been carried underground to collect zuhuy ha, "virgin water"- water dripping from stalactites, pure because it had never touched the ground-for use in ceremonies. Because of the work of Awe and a handful of others, we know now that caves served a far more complex and profound role in the culture of the Classic period Maya.

One of Awe's key hypotheses has to do with what he calls "sacred geography." On Roaring Creek a couple of days after our arrival, he demonstrated this notion with vivid specificity.

Less than a half mile upstream from Tunichil Muknal, on the same side of the valley, lies Actun Uayazba Kab--Handprint Cave. As we scrambled up a slope toward it, we caught occasional distant glimpses of its opening-twin apertures, gaping darkly above a protruding horizontal shelf.

Despite the proximity of Handprint and the Cave of the Stone Sepulcher, they seem to have served utterly different functions. At the mouth of Handprint, Awe's teams excavated a series of human burials: not sacrifices, but orderly inhumations, complete with grave goods. Within the grotto, artifacts dating from the time of Christ all the way through AD 900 were found, including a number of pots.

Two of these, massive white ollas the size of small trash barrels, rest on a ledge 50 feet above the cave mouth, atop an unrelentingly overhanging wall. Invisible from the ground, they were discovered by a climber on Awe's team who rappelled form the cliff above the cave. Now Alvarez, Cressler, and I took turns performing the same rappel. Twenty feet below the lip of the overhang, as we twirled in space a good 30 feet out from the ledge, we won our hard-earned view of these hidden vessels. To place them in their precarious niche, the Maya must have used native trees to build a 50-foot ladder arching from the ground over the void.

The most extraordinary discoveries in Handprint Cave, however, were not artifacts but art. At the mouth, the ancient carved foot-and-toe trails in the bedrock, as well as petroglyphs of footprints, all five toes carefully delineated. They also worked the corners of the protruding stone to etch three-dimensional masks or faces, visages that look like grinning skulls. Awe thinks these might be further representations of Chac, the rain god. The piece de resistance of the cave lies in complete darkness, inside a small chamber reached only by a tight crawl. There on the wall stand four negative handprints, formed by placing a palm against the stone, then spitting a macerated paint forcefully against the surface leaving a spattered outline of a spread-fingered hand. These were the first cave handprints found in Belize.

As Awe's headlamp beam played over these mute reminders of human presence, he mused, "Is this the testimony of a visit to a sacred place? Or the mark of having completed a rite of passage?"

For all the richness of the artifacts in Tunichil Muknal (Awe's teams have catalogued a mind-boggling total of 1,400 objects in the cave), there is not a squiggle of paint or single etching on its walls. A few hundred yards upstream, rock art seems to be the main purpose of Handprint Cave.

Later that day, Pete Zubrzycki led me along a faint trail directly across the Roaring Creek Valley, slashing away the last few months' underbrush with his machete as he walked. We waded the stream, then soon came to another stream, then soon to another cave, called Actun Nak Beh- the Cave at the End of the Road. Relatively shallow, it had been looted before the archaeologists discovered it. From the cave mouth, however, a causeway-an arrow-straight "road," some seven feet wide, elevated two feet by piling up innumerable stones-led into the heart of the jungle.

It was not until 1997 that Cameron Griffith, a member of Awe's team, went off route on his hike to Tunichil Muknal and blundered down this causeway to find a fairly major Classic Maya village in the center of the valley. It was choked with vegetation but sported lofty temple pyramids a plaza and at least one ball court. Cahal Uitz Na (Place of the Mountain House) as Awe named the site, lies at the triangular center of the three surrounding caves.

The village has yet to be fully excavated, but once more the looters had gotten here first. After leading me on a tour of the site, Zubrzycki parked me at its pivot point. Here the vandals had gouged a deep hole in the center of the ruin. They had chosen the spot because six stelae stood or lay nearby. These, the looters had cast aside as of no value compared with the treasure they hoped to find under the stones.

One of the stelae lying among the weeds had a ghoulish face carved on it: a half-circle hood for a head, two round holes for eyes, a mouth down-turned in agony or fear. "Remember that first view of Handprint?" Zubrzycki asked. Of course I did: The cave entrance-its two holes, its horizontal shelf-looked remarkably like the face on the stela. Today, thanks to the encroaching jungle, none of the three caves can be seen from Uitz Na. But during the Classic period, with the valley deforested, all three would have been in plain sight. The carved stela might well have stood upright facing the cave entrance it mimicked and paid homage to.

Later Awe put the whole complex in perspective. "Downstream, Roaring Creek flows through a beautiful, broad valley," he said. "Only here does the valley constrict to a mere 700 yards wide. The ancient Maya often called a city 'the navel of the earth'. I think Uitz Na was purposely located where it is because of the caves-not the other way around. The caves were always there. Uitz Na would have stood at the heart of the sacred geography defined by these portals to Xibalba."

With a little oversimplification, the importance of cave research to understanding the Classic Maya can be summed up in a psychological metaphor. The great cities, such as Tikal and Copan, with their monumental art, their stelae boasting of might and conquest, express the conscious, external Maya world. The caves represent everything that is murky, haunted, internal, unconscious. In these strange galleries, an air of secrecy, of the forbidden, prevails. Jaime Awe and his few colleagues in the world of speleoarchaeology have become the psychoanalyst of Maya thought.

Everywhere we walked in Tunichil Muknal, we came across pots. (The count of vessels inside the cave exceeds 200.) It took Awe's team three field seasons to map every artifact exactly where it lay, yet even now, in his fifth year in the cave, Awe kept peering into crannies for artifacts he might have overlooked.

Traditional archeologists would have removed virtually all the artifacts they found in such a cave, for archival conservation. In the case of Tunichil Muknal, this would have meant transporting them to a storage chamber (nicknamed "the Vault") in the capital, Belmopan, where the good would have been available to researchers but not to the public. (Belize still lacks a national museum of archeology.) Awe chose instead to leave almost everything where he found it. "If I had removed the objects," he told me, "the scars would have been horrendous. I would have never wanted to go back. I couldn't have felt good about myself."

Of course, Awe's decision to leave almost all of the artifacts where they were found ratchets up the risks of opening the caves to tourism-a process that was begun at Tunichil Muknal three years ago. The day after we hiked up Roaring Creek, in fact, a troop of 17 teenagers from Milton Academy in Massachusetts worked their way through the cavern, swimming and wading through the very pool that I'd flailed through a few days earlier. Awe's solution to the tourism dilemma at the Cave of the Stone Sepulcher is to admit only guides he has personally trained in archaeology. Tourists are not allowed to touch anything; in the main chamber they have to walk barefoot or in stocking feet; and they are steered clear of the more vulnerable precincts.

"But all it takes," I complained on evening around the fire, "is someone trailing behind the group to slip an artifact into his pocket, and it's gone forever. I think you ought to gate the cave."

"Che Chem Ha was gated," Awe said, "and it didn't stop the looters."

Actun Che Chem Ha (Cave of the Poisonwood Water) was stumbled upon one day in 1989, when William Moralez, the son of a farm owner southwest of San Ignacio, followed his dog through the underbrush as it chased a rodent. He came to a hole in the ground barely a foot long by a foot wide, with a steady breeze blowing out of it. Still chasing his dog, Moralez squeezed through the aperture and made the discovery of a lifetime.

In one archaeological respect, Latin American countries are way ahead of the United States. If a farmer in Kentucky finds Indian artifacts in a cave on his land, he can do whatever he wants with the material, including selling it in a yard sale. In Belize (as in other Central American countries), pre-Columbian finds on private land are at the disposition of the government. In the case of Che Chem Ha, the cave was opened to the public, but only on tours guided by members of the Moralez family. The cavern has transformed the family's existence from subsistence farmers to managers of a low key but internationally known resort, with a modest restaurant and bungalows for overnight stays.

Unlike Tunichil Muknal, Che Chem Ha is dry and easy to access. Along the entrance passage, shelves some 20 feet above the floor are crowded with giant ollas. No human remains were found in the cave. In the farthest chamber, an arching cavern, a ring of stones surrounds an uncarved but upright stela.

Awe trained William Moralez to interpret the cave he had discovered, and a padlocked iron gate was installed across the cave's tiny entrance. But two years ago, Awe informed me, thieves sneaked onto the Moralez property, smashed the padlock, and made off with nine or ten polychrome vessels; big pots on which designs had been painted in black on an orange slip- the treasures of Che Chem Ha, in terms of the black market. No one has yet caught the thieves.

With his congenital optimism, Awe believes that the system he has set up at Tunichil Muknal- a steady stream of tour groups led by trained, trusted guides- is a better prophylactic against looting than a locked gate. "If a potential looter sees a gate," as he put it, "he'll think 'Wow, there must be some good sh** in there.' The locals around Roaring Creek think we must have taken all the good stuff out of Tunichil Muknal. Otherwise why would we keep going in and out?"

As we worked our way deeper into the cave system at Tunichil Muknal, Awe's overarching theory, (that what we saw in the cavern's main chamber represents a desperate effort by late Classic Maya to appeal to Chac and other agricultural gods), was steadily corroborated by the artifacts we encountered in those deep corridors, (which are off-limits to tourists); a stone bench, or "altar," bearing some eight or nine pots left exactly where they must have been broken at the end of some ceremony; a fragile filament of burnt pine torch lying among potsherds. In Awe's view, the Maya plumbed deeper and deeper into caves because their petitions to Chac in cave entrances had failed to work any change.

Yet it wasn't the logic of the place- its ritual clarity-but rather it's sheer strangeness that struck me over and over the longer we stayed underground. The most beautiful pots often lay in the most hidden places. One sat upside down at the bottom of a shaft only a small child could have slithered into, yet from a different angle, it appeared at the end of another horizontal shaft, as if in a display window. Another vessel could be reached only by a twisting crawl, yet there it perched, as bright orange as the day it had been painted, girdled by an exquisite band of some 80-100 thumbnail impressions. Three granite ax heads rested in obscure niches, their blades so highly polished that it seems doubtful they were ever used to chop trees. A huge metate- a grinding basin, also made of granite- sat in another niche, one corner smashed, apparently to retire it from worldly use.

Awe showed us an inverted pot with three of it four tiny feet intact. Within each foot was a handful of beads that would have rattled when the pot was moved. Awe had found the fourth foot a considerable distance from the others, surrounded by no other cultural remains. "They did that just to mess with the archaeologists," he said. Taken as a whole, this unrivaled ceremonial chamber deep beneath the surface of the Earth seemed to brim with some dark, somber purpose. But what exactly had been going on here, not even Awe could confidently say.

We climbed a slope and turned a corner. Awe pointed toward the ground ahead. I momentarily stopped breathing; there in a hollow as neatly formed as a small coffin, lay the collapsed skeleton of an infant. "We can't tell the sex," said Awe. "The child was between nine months and a year old. The skull may have been smashed, or it could have simply imploded, since infants' skulls are so soft."

Approaching the spot, Alvarez groaned almost inaudibly and abruptly turned away. Awe went on, "As late as 1680 the Spanish chronicles record the sacrifice of infants in caves during times of extreme tribulation. Children are by definition zuhuy -virginal, pure. I can imagine them laying the child here alive to die. Its cries would have been heard rising up to implore Chac."

At the extreme upper end of the main chamber, we climbed a ladder that solved 15 feet of vertical wall. (on the first modern ascent, Awe had made a brave climb to reach the ledge above.) Then we walked 30 yards down a passage that seemed to go nowhere. All of a sudden Awe's headlamp shined on the tableau he had brought us here to see.

I had seen skeletons in the American Southwest, in Egypt, in caves full of the disordered dead in Mali. I had seen skeletons and mummies in museums and archives around the world. In a refrigerated chamber in Austria, I had seen the exquisitely preserved corpse of the Copper Age mummy called the Iceman, found high in the Italian Alps in 1991. But no prehistoric human remains that I had ever seen struck me with the force of this single intact skeleton.

Known in the dry taxonomy of Awe's report as Skeleton Number 13 (out of 14 sacrificial victims found in Tunichil Muknal), this was a woman of about 20. She lay spread-eagled on her back, her left leg bent out at an awkward angle, her right arm thrown above her head, as if in salutation or protest. Half imbedded in the floor of the ledge, detached by millimeters from the palms and soles, lay the individual digits of her fingers and toes. Her pelvis protruded upward like the twin horns on a saddle.

No flood here had dis-articulated these bones, but slow seepage over the centuries had crusted the entire skeleton but for the very top of the forehead with a fuzzy layer of brown calcite, which added a jolt of the grotesque to the scene. Its full horror, however, seemed focused in the skull, propped like a head on a pillow. The eye-sockets were empty holes staring at eternity. The jaw gaped open as if in a scream. The teeth were furred with calcite.

For the moment, none of us could speak a word. Perhaps the woman had died in this very posture, as men held her down and a priest cut out her heart. Perhaps that open mouth had indeed frozen her dying cry, but just as likely the skull preserved forever the transport of her sacrificial rapture.

Whatever the reason for her death, it was in vain. The gods ignored the people's petition. Something-most likely drought and famine- drove the Maya from their homeland, and the countryside reverted to jungle. Tunichil Muknal became a forgotten place, not to be rediscovered for more than ten centuries, along with the collective nightmare that was Xibalba.

ADVENTURE GUIDE Belize Caving

Getting there: Virtually all flights to Belize land at Belize city, which is serviced by both American and Continental Airlines. The best way to get around is to rent a car at the airport -- preferably four-wheel drive, though the available vehicles then to be decrepit and expensive (between $60 and $80 a day.)

Archaeological Sites: The partially excavated ruins of Altun Ha and Xunantunich are easily accessible to visitors. More difficult to reach but every bit as powerful are the great sites of Caracol and Lamanai. For local guides who lead tours of Tunichil Muknal and other Maya caves, one of the best operators is Pacz Tours (501.16.9159); a day trip runs about $115 per person. Package tours in which cave visits form part of a Belize itinerary are offered by Island Expeditions Co. (800-667-1630 www.islandexpeditions.com)

Lodging: The base for Maya explorations is San Ignacio, and appealing town in the country's western hills. We stayed at the Cahal Pech Village ($55; 501-92.3740), which has modest rooms and an attractive roofed terrace that catches the hilltop breezes. The San Ignacio Resort Hotel ($125; 501.92.2134) is the fanciest hotel in town. Eva's Restaurant (501.92.2267), downtown, is the rendezvous spot for adventurers of all sorts; it's a good place to check out the trip operators that advertise on its walls and a pleasant venue for an afternoon beer. (Belikin, the local brewery, makes a well-crafted European-style lager.)

Resources: The best general introduction to the ancient Maya is Michael Coe's The Maya (6th edition, Thames & Hudson, $19). The official Web site of Jaime Awe's Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project (BVAR) is www.bvar.org.

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