Una madrugada en Tikal, corazón del mundo Maya. Guatemala

We're in the Tikal Jungle. It's almost four in the morning. We venture in with an expert guide, along with three Guatemalans, three Irishmen, and a taciturn American woman who doesn't even say where she's from. The only lights are the flashlights on our cell phones, enough to illuminate a narrow path no more than three meters wide at its widest points. Even if it were daytime, it would be difficult to see the sky because much of the trail is almost completely covered by a tangle of damp leaves, vines, and tree trunks crisscrossing the area. All we hear are footsteps when the ground becomes rocky, and our breathing, labored by the humidity and our lack of training. From the jungle, the response is the chilling howls of monkeys we can't yet see, but which stir the leafy canopy, expressing a certain displeasure at our presence. In some sections, there's a smell of urine, like a skunk, which perhaps indicates that some other animal is stealthily watching us. Saul, the guide, who by this point has become Baloo, Mowgli's guardian bear in Kipling's book, shines his flashlight to one side and shows us a giant tarantula. It would be nice to be like Mowgli, to fight fearlessly against such formidable foes. But no, we must live with this fear, so foreign to fantasy literature, as the price to pay for immersing ourselves in the heart of the historic Mayan world.