Anne & I take the road to Tenejapa around sunset. Dramatic little forested mountains tightly interlocked. At a rise–wind forcing a black mist across the weathered, brush-covered summit–near a small settlement–three high slender crosses black against darkening sky. The Maya lift crosses wherever a gate or aperture leads down to the underworld–sacred sites–a cave, a spring, certain hilltops with unique vegetation. Soil turns with some curious mineral complex. The crosses were here when Christians arrived in clanking armor. Peter Warshall's remark, that geologists and Indians agree on the power spots–

    A wrinkle in earth's old layer
    subterranean twist to the limestone
      if you've got eyes you can see it
    here by the road

Sixty years ago Graham Greene passed over this ridge on muleback–anarchist Catholic he noted–

      "The ground sloped up again to where a grove
    of tall black crosses stood at all angles
    like windblown trees against the blackened sky"

      "The great crosses leaned there in their black
    and windy solitude, safe from the pistoleros
    and the politicians..."

Among the crosses long upright pineboughs, feathery & skeletal with a violet cast of sky behind them. Asymmetrical & impenetrable. A dog barks from a hut.

Everyone's a pistolero.