This is a true discovery, retold as a tale. DoƱa Rosa and her grandson are imagined, but the hidden staircase, the Maya king and his jade mask are real.
The jungle around Palenque hummed and dripped in the afternoon heat. Howler monkeys called from the treetops. Above the trees, gray and ancient, rose the temples of the old Maya city.
DoƱa Rosa sat on a bench in the shade with her grandson Mateo, who was busy taking pictures of everything with his phone.
"Abuela," he said, pointing at the tallest temple, "what's that one?"
"That," said DoƱa Rosa, "is the Temple of the Inscriptions. And when I was a little girl, younger than you are now, my father helped open the secret inside it."
Mateo lowered his phone. "What secret?"
The Holes in the Floor
"There was a man named Alberto Ruz," his grandmother began. "An archaeologist, very serious, always covered in dust. He was studying the temple at the top of those stairs, and one day he noticed something odd about the floor. One of the big stone slabs had little holes along its edges. Stone plugs, filled in long ago.
"He thought: why would anyone put holes in a floor? Unless... someone wanted to lift it."
Mateo leaned closer.
"So they lifted it. And underneath was a staircase. Going down, down into the heart of the pyramid. But the ancient Maya had filled it completely with rubble and stones, all the way to the bottom, so no one could ever get through."
"So what did they do?"
"They dug," said DoƱa Rosa. "For four years. My father was one of the men carrying the rocks out, basket by basket, in the heat. Every night he came home and told us: still digging. Still nothing. My mother said they were all crazy."
The Door at the Bottom
"Then, one day in the summer of 1952, they reached the bottom. There was a great triangular stone blocking a doorway. They pushed it aside. And Ruz held up his light and looked in."
DoƱa Rosa's eyes shone.
"My father said it was like looking into a dream. A chamber, with walls painted with figures. And in the middle, an enormous stone coffin, its lid carved all over with a man falling, or rising, between the world of the living and the world of the gods.
"When they lifted that heavy lid, they found him. A king. Lying there, covered in jade. Jade beads around his neck. Jade rings on every finger. A piece of jade in his mouth. And over his face, a mask made from hundreds of little pieces of green jade, fitted together like a puzzle, with eyes of shell and stone, looking up at them after more than twelve hundred years."
Mateo's mouth fell open. "Who was he?"
The Boy King
"His name was Pakal. K'inich Janaab' Pakal, the great king of Palenque. He became king when he was just twelve years old, Mateo, about your age. And he ruled for sixty-eight years, longer than almost any king in history. He built most of what you see around you. And he built that temple to be his own tomb."
"Why so much jade?"
"Because to the Maya, jade was more precious than gold. It was the color of growing corn, of water, of life itself. They believed it carried the breath of the soul. They wrapped their king in it so that he would be reborn like the corn god, and live forever."
The Mask That Was Stolen
"And then," DoƱa Rosa added, with a little smile, "there is the part that made your grandfather so angry."
"What part?"
"The mask was taken to the great museum in Mexico City. And on Christmas Eve in 1985, while the guards were celebrating, thieves broke in and stole it, along with many other treasures. The whole country was heartbroken. Your grandfather said it was like someone had stolen Pakal's face."
"Did they get it back?"
"Four years later. The police found the treasures, and the mask came home. You can see it today."
Mateo stood up, phone forgotten. "Abuela, can we go up the temple?"
DoƱa Rosa laughed and took his arm. "Slowly," she said. "Your abuela is not twelve anymore."
Where the Word "Jade" Comes From
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they saw local people using green stones as a remedy for pain in the side. They called it piedra de ijada, "stone of the flank." Over time the name became simply "jade," so the very word we use today was born in the Americas.
The Legend and the Truth
K'inich Janaab' Pakal became ruler of the Maya city of Palenque in 615 AD at the age of twelve, and ruled for 68 years. In 1948, the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier discovered a hidden, rubble-filled staircase beneath the floor of the Temple of the Inscriptions. After four years of digging, his team reached Pakal's tomb in 1952. The king was buried with a magnificent jade mosaic mask and many other jade ornaments.
The mask was stolen from Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology on Christmas Eve 1985, and recovered in 1989. To the Olmec, Maya and Aztec peoples, green jade was more valuable than gold, a symbol of life, water and rebirth.
š” Read more legends and true stories of jade in The Legends of Jade: More Precious Than Gold.
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