As we topped the rise and looked down we saw a startlingly unexpected thing, something displaced from pre-Conquista Mexico, a thing more belonging to the architecture of Tenochtitlán: an Aztec portal into the earth.
What. Is. That?!?, I thought, my mind reeling.
The sun maybe gave us about 15 minutes of light left, and we shuffled circuitously around and down, but then we couldn't locate what we'd seen, somehow finding ourselves in a different pit, as though the mountain itself had folded its atemporal secret up into an extra-spacial pocket to hide it away from us that day. The light guttered out over the mountain, and we decided to come back another time.
Digital homework that night confirmed that the two distinct hollows were quarries and, much later, earmarked for a mountain architectural housing enclave proposal that never got off the ground (which by today would be worth quite the fat stack of cash in the comparatively gentrified Menlo Park/Sentinal Peak area). Now, these two pit-like arenas seemed to be this weird no man's land, the lower North hollow strewn with large rubbish, mattresses, blankets, empty food tins, snack bags, and other signs of regular vagrant occupation, while the upper South hollow shows signs of Thunderdome-like motocross activity, bike treads & donut circles a testament to something larger going on, maybe a local chapter of The Lost Boys daring each other to feel alive again during their long nights of immortality between victims, along with the mysterious Mesoamerican doorway in the northeast wall.
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| [Of course I read this as a kid.] |
What took us so long to follow up on the weirdness we'd seen those couple years ago, I'm not quite sure (well, actually my Map of Midgard project), but last weekend was when we finally decided to get to the bottom of this strangeness. We'd texted this girl to come with us because who wouldn't want to join Team Handsome at the MSA Annex for slightly overpriced Japanese food served out of a reclaimed train car as a possible last meal, followed by a possibly fatal foray into the unknown depths of the earth? But she proved unresponsive (she's a pretty busy bee, really [though we'd later learn that she didn't actually understand our super-daring but obtusely-worded invitation -- I totally blame my dog's lax editing skills]). And she might've just held us back, or been the restrictive voice of reason and tried to talk us out of it, so maybe that was for the best. Her loss anyhow during a life-less-lived in her journal version of the afternoon because there was no way she or anyone else was doing something so fearlessly bold as we: Buddy & I would return rich with treasure, or crowned with the glory of experience, or be too dead to care, having fought & bit our way into Valhalla together instead!
Armed with my 68-pound American Bully, a cruelly edged tactical flashlight, and an oversized griptape wrapped meat tenderizer I usually keep in the car "just in case", we sallied forth like the true duo of adventurers we are. And again, even approaching the area from the east, nonchalant & uncaringly passing the "no trespassing/24-hour camera surveillance" signs on the way towards that foothill, we still got directionally confused and ended up meandering through the lower northern quarry first anyhow where a young but crazy looking woman stood in a strange pose at the rim, while a half-seen male chopped at a thick palo verde and its undergrowth with a machete, probably making evening shelter for them both. Or maybe a hiding spot for her soon to be dead body. Keeping a watchful eye on each one of them, we came up and out over another lip of the south pit to get our bearings.
Going up another grade, we noticed light dirtbike tracks going forward, and given that's something we'd spotted before, we followed them into the upper southern quarry. And there the doorway that evaded us so long ago appeared:
Like a brightly coloured flower meant to lure insects into a carnivorous mouth of no return, there it was, this thing that defied belonging, or at the very least implied possible Central to North American merchant trade stops half a millennium ago. As we got closer, we saw no ancient pigments but modern spraypaint, yet to select this motif as opposed to the usual artless tags or bubble letters or profanities was still startling. And there was the roundstone:
This sinister Aztec-styled roundstone with a dismembered woman on it is based on an actual archaeological find, the Great Coyolxauhqui Stone, excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, which was the ground zero for major Aztec sacrifices. The mythology goes thusly: Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, rallies 400 of her star brothers to kill their shamefully now-pregnant by unknown means mother, but one of the stars warns the unborn child beforehand. When they show up for the matricide, the unborn child springs to his mother's defense from the womb, the fully grown & armed war god Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli butchers his siblings, grabs his now decapitated sister's head, and tosses it into the sky where it becomes the moon.
There quite possibly were ceremonial re-enactments of this myth at the temple, complete with human sacrifices to show the bloody triumph of the newborn war god. And the duplicate of this roundstone in front of this portal at a site out of anyone's direct view makes one wonder if it's employed in similar surviving or revived religious circumstances. (Wait ... were the hacking bladed man & posturing woman in the other hollow a priest & priestess of Huitzilopochtli?)
Looking closely at the roundstone, I spotted no blood, nor did Buddy take an interest in the stone, and he probably would've smelled any sanguinary traces which I might not have been able to see, given his 5 million more olfactory receptors at work, plus his bloody martial past as a would-be fighting dog by his first owner. The stone turned out to be a steel banded round of concrete, like a still connected springform cake pan.
And then we finally approached the portal:
I turned on the flashlight, took a firm hold of my hammer, and went inside. The truth of all my above anticipation is that my imagination is usually far more baroque that what I tend to encounter. There was a single room with rough irregular raw black rock walls, a pair of "Dress Code" clothing store stickers on the inside of each doorpost, and the unfortunately common unreadable urban bubble tag at the rear of the room.
Not wanting to give up in the face of general appearances, for twenty minutes I pulled & prodded at black rocks in the walls, gazed hard to see if light or vision made it through the cracks, looked for a secret switch to activate the counterweight inside the rock wall to swing open the secret door, or a pressure plate step to plunge us through a chute into a party of kobolds to fight.
Barring a chthonic encounter, I then took a long second examination of the room for the treasure I'd hoped for. Peering down, a single Lincoln head penny awaited my scooping it up. I figured one copper piece from our adventure beats none, so I took it home to the silver piggy bank retirement horde.
Having gone, I now know what's there. Yet this experience raises some questions.
So our great underworld adventure wasn't there on that day ... but then, if you think about it, blasting out one little 6' x 6' room on the other side of an actual door frame someone bothered installing and decorating in naïve Mexica-revival ... it's alot of trouble to go through, right? For what or whom? Deal is, seeing the site, it feels like a front door, a sort of hideous welcome mat. Maybe through some metaphysical peephole they saw me fearlessly armed with meat mallet and the bully dog and weren't going to open, no sir, no how, that Buddy & I were more trouble than we were worth, that we would've taken the dwarven gold, or charmed away their dark elven princesses, or made off with a priceless magic item that they couldn't afford to lose under any circumstances.
So yes, there's still something suspect about that tucked away portal and the possibilities it implies in tandem with the other underground legends regarding subterranean networks under Tucson. Maybe next weekend we'll find a way in. Stay tuned.
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.
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