Ekʼ Balam

Start with the ground under your feet. It is pale limestone, worn smooth in places and rough in others, and it holds the heat of the Yucatán sun. Around you the forest is low and dense. Birds call from the scrub. The air smells of dry leaves and warm stone. Somewhere ahead, above the tree line, a long grey hill of cut stone rises from the green. That hill is not a hill at all. It is a building.

Welcome to Ekʼ Balam, an ancient Maya city in the northern Yucatán, in the municipality of Temozón, not far from the colonial town of Valladolid. The name comes from Yucatec Maya, the language still spoken in villages all around you today. Balam means jaguar. Ekʼ can mean black, or it can mean star. So the city is the Black Jaguar, or the Star Jaguar. Both readings are common, and nobody needs to choose just one.

As you walk in, notice the low lines of stone that circle the centre of the site. These are the remains of walls. Ekʼ Balam had defensive walls around its core, in more than one ring. That is unusual for a Maya city in this region. Archaeologists still discuss how much these walls served war, and how much they marked a boundary between the sacred centre and the world outside. Either way, the people here clearly wanted a line between inside and out.

The main gateway you pass through is a stone arch. Maya builders did not use the true rounded arch of the Romans. They used what is called a corbel arch. Each layer of stone sticks out a little further than the one below, until the two sides almost meet at the top. A single flat stone closes the gap. Look up as you pass beneath it. The shape is tall and narrow, like the inside of a peaked roof.

From the arch, white roads once ran out across the countryside. The Maya called them sacbeob, which means white roads. They were raised causeways, built of stone and finished with pale plaster that would have shone in the sun. Several of these roads lead out from Ekʼ Balam. They connected the city to its neighbours and to its farmland. Today most of them sit quietly under the forest, but their lines can still be traced.

Inside the walls, the plazas open up. There is a ball court here, with two sloping walls facing each other across a narrow alley. The Maya ball game was played with a heavy rubber ball, and players struck it with their hips rather than their hands. The game was sport, but it was also ritual. It carried ideas about the sky, the underworld, and the movement of the sun. Stand in the alley for a moment and imagine the noise of a crowd.

Nearby is a building with a rounded shape, often called the Oval Palace. Round and oval forms are rare in Maya architecture, which mostly prefers sharp corners and straight terraces. Its exact purpose is still uncertain. Some researchers connect it to observing the sky. Others see it as a place of ceremony. It is a good reminder that this city did not simply copy its neighbours. It had its own ideas.

And now, the great Acropolis. It fills the north side of the main plaza, and it is enormous — a long, terraced mass of stone, rising level after level. It is among the largest structures in the whole Yucatán. From a distance it looks like one building. Up close, it is many rooms, stairways, and platforms layered together over generations. Each ruler added to it. Each phase covered the last.

That habit of covering is the reason for the first real surprise here. Partway up the Acropolis, under a protective thatched roof, is one of the best-preserved stucco facades in the Maya world. Stucco is a kind of lime plaster that can be shaped like clay. Long ago, the people of Ekʼ Balam carefully buried this facade under new stone. They sealed it in. Because of that burial, the delicate sculpture survived for well over a thousand years, until archaeologists uncovered it in the late twentieth century.

What they found was extraordinary. The whole doorway is shaped as a giant open mouth — the jaws of a great creature, with fangs and teeth framing the entrance. To the Maya, a doorway like this was a passage into the underworld or into a sacred mountain. Around the mouth sit human figures in stucco. Some of them have wings. Visitors often call them angels. They are not angels, of course. They are Maya figures, probably ancestors or high-ranking people, dressed in elaborate costumes.

This chamber held a royal tomb. It belonged to a ruler whose name is usually written as Ukit Kan Lekʼ Tokʼ. He ruled during the Late Classic period, around the eighth century, when Ekʼ Balam was at its most powerful. Painted texts and carved inscriptions found here mention him, and they suggest he was seen as the founding figure of the city's great age. His tomb was rich with offerings. The facade you see was, in a sense, his monument.

Here is a second detail most people miss. Look closely at the stucco figures and you will see how fine the modelling is — the folds of a belt, the fingers of a hand, the feathers of a headdress. Small traces of colour survive in places. Once, all of this was painted. Try to imagine the whole Acropolis not grey, but bright, with red and other strong colours standing out against white plaster in the hard tropical light.

When you reach a high point, turn around. The view opens across the flat Yucatán, a green carpet of forest running to the horizon. There are no mountains here and almost no rivers on the surface. Water lives underground, in sinkholes called cenotes. There is a cenote close to this site, and many visitors cool off there after the climb. It explains why people settled here at all. Water decided everything.

Before you leave, pause in the main plaza. Listen. The forest sounds have not changed much in a thousand years — the birds, the insects, the wind in dry leaves. The language of the builders is still spoken in the villages nearby. As you walk back through the corbel arch, look once more at the long grey shape of the Acropolis behind you. Under its stone, the jaguar's mouth is still open. It has waited a very long time.