The Temple and the Mirror — Jason Ingam
In the photograph, the lights are warmer than he remembers. Dr. Elias stands on a stage in
a crisp linen suit, hair combed and shining, his hands extended to an audience captured mid-
applause. Behind him, a slide projects a clay figurine he unearthed from a highland burial
mound, its carved eyes oval and astonished, as if beholding its first light in centuries. The camera
has caught Elias at the crest of a smile, the shape of joy as definite as the chevron of a bird in
flight. He is thirty-five in the picture, shoulders square, a gentleman of science whose findings
braided old worlds to new. Scholars flew across oceans to hear him speak. Journalists stuffed his
mailbox. He believed then that what he touched would endure. He keeps the photo in a desk
drawer now, beneath a tangle of maps, unpaid bills, and a metal flask that tastes like a lie every
time it kisses his breath. He looks at it before he leaves for the Yucatán, and he tells himself, not
for the first time, that a last great discovery is still waiting, as real and bright as the lights in that
auditorium. He will feel them on his skin again.
The jungle receives him with heat as heavy as a hand on the back of his neck. In recent
years, new roads have carved slivers through old green, bringing trucks and rumors deeper than
before. The village where he hires two porters rings with cicadas. Hammocks swing beneath
palm leaves. A boy in a faded football shirt points toward the interior, toward where the land lifts
into stony humps under the trees. Elias nods and travels beneath the lattice of branches and
strangler figs, the air alive with wingbeats and the sawed-wood scream of parrots. Vines tie
themselves into grammar over the path. The ground sweats. A lizard dashes across a puddle as if
stitched to the surface by an invisible thread. They pass stone skulls of ruins peeking from the
leaf mold, the forests’ slow teeth. Elias’s jacket, battered, and heat-sour, sticks to his wrists when
he wipes his brow. One of the porters grabs Elias’ attention, squinting toward a tangle of trees where
the light seems to waver. He points at the ground, where the soil has a false crust. Elias recognizes
the sinkhole’s delicate rim and steps wide, heart ticking. He thanks the man. Later he will not remember
the man’s name; he is already thinking about the temple.
News had reached him like a rumor that refused to stay untrue: a collapsed wall revealed
a narrow corridor. It opened to a series of rooms a farmer’s son found while chasing a spider
monkey. No one official had mapped it yet. The place had waited, as places do, beneath leaves
and time, improvising a new face for the curious to find. By late afternoon, they reached the first
stone: a stair rising from the earth in a tired angle, moss caught like a shawl around its shoulders.
The stairs lead to a squat pyramid, no more than a humped hill to a casual look, but Elias sees
through the disguise. He kneels and brushes away damp earth. Glyphs emerge, spirals and faces,
knots of language. He does not translate the warnings carved near the base; he thinks of them as
directions. In the night, mosquitoes braid themselves into music around his propped-up tent.
Elias reclines on his rolled jacket, his flask a cool geometry in his palm. He stares up at the
canvas, breathing out the seconds, and he lets the old stage lights touch him again. Fame makes a
circle, he thinks, it will come back around if he keeps walking. He sees the article headlines as if
already printed, the measured equivalence of his name with the word discovery. He does not
sleep well.
At dawn, he works the stone threshold loose. The air that greets him is damp and stale,
with a mineral sweetness, like the inside of a mouth too long closed. He lights his lamp and
walks downward as if entering an argument and not wanting to lose. Narrow walls gather his
shoulders. Insects skitter away from the light. He counts twenty-five steps, then the long low
passage opens into a chamber where the ceiling is a coffer of fitted blocks and the walls wear
murals like old cloth: kings in feathered headdresses, attendants holding plates bright with
offerings, a serpent devouring its own length, patient as time. He pauses, a scholar’s reflex
beating through the fog of hunger. The paint, though smoked for centuries, still hums with color.
His hand rises but does not touch. The figures lift their gold mirrors, offering their gleam to no
one. He sees, briefly, the auditorium lights in their polished faces. The mirrors are only paintings,
but they flash in his mind. He steps closer, as if nearer will make him permanent. The floor
clicks. He freezes. A grit of stone slides somewhere overhead in the dark bones of the structure.
A grain falls on his cheek: a single speck, a point of punctuation. He holds his breath and then,
because nothing else moves, he keeps going. In the second chamber, the air tastes more tiring.
Steles rise like narrow tombstones from the floor; each carved with glyphs that have held their
shape through humidity and neglect. At their feet, someone has arranged a line of stones like a
boundary. Elias steps over. He does not see the hairline crack that runs from the lintel to the
corner like a vein surfacing beneath old skin. He does not feel the floor’s imperceptible sag under
his weight. He is doing the thing his life has taught him to do, advance. He moves like a short
prayer, focused, repeated. He catalogs, sketches, notes with the quick cramped handwriting that
once impressed committee chairs. He sees the pattern of rooms, the logic of gates, how chambers
mirror one another like thoughts across a mind. He is so close, he tells himself.
By the third chamber, the walls have taken on a curve, their stones subtly bowed as if
they were leaning toward where he is going. A narrow bridge of flagstones carries a shallow
trench that once might have bled water from one side to the other. Elias tests the stones with his
weight. The second flexes. The third holds. He crosses. The beam of his lamp runs a tremulous
strip over carvings of hands, each palm uplifted, each stylized eye in the center staring back like
a hundred coins. He does not register that the mortar between stones has powdered. He does not
notice the ceiling’s hesitating breath. He tells himself not to think about the other archaeologist
whose name now fills the journals. He thinks about him anyway: younger, hungrier in the way of
men who have not yet eaten everything they wanted. He hates the man for a moment, vividly,
then folds the hate into his steps like another reason to keep moving. In the fourth chamber, time
stands so still it seems merely stored. The walls shutter inward, the room narrow as a throat, and
stone shelves carry offerings sealed in clay, miniature animals with ears sharpened into attention,
vessels painted with bands of black that still whisper a wet shine. He finds a small mask inlaid
with green stones and onyx; it weighs less than he expects. He touches the cheek with the back
of his finger. He feels the old heat of the craftsman’s hand as if time is something that lingers, not
departs. A tremor runs underfoot; it is almost rhythmic. He thinks of the crowd in the auditorium
stamping in applause, he smiles. The corridor jolts once, small, and indecisive. Elias stares at the
ceiling. A hairline crack catches his eye a brief silver, then gone. He swallows. “Just hold,” he
says to the stone, to the air, to the version of himself he is still following. The final corridor
slopes upward, then descends again, as if remembering and forgetting its purpose. The air thins.
His lamp breath flutters. And then the sanctum opens. Gold glows even in the meager light, not
as a shout but as a certainty. Here are mirrors ringed in jade, their surfaces obscured by centuries
of dust, yet still loud with promise. Here there are bracelets coiled like sleeping snakes. Here are
plates incised with feasts you can nearly smell. Here are masks full of the geometry of faces,
cheeks, brows, lines where mouths once pretended at speech. A stone in the center of the room
serves as an altar or table, and on it sits an object that is both unremarkable and perfect: a small
disc, its surface smooth, a thin band of glyphs running the circumference like teeth around a
patient mouth. Elias steps closer, and the room tilts fractionally and rights itself. He does not feel
it; his eyes are busy with calculations: how to lift, how to wrap, how to wedge in a rucksack
without breaking, how many days until the first telegram can be sent, which journal will have the
courtesy of pleading. He sets down his lamp and reaches. His hands are not as steady as they
once were. The left knocks the lamp, which totters, flares, and rights. Shadows tilt over the walls,
and for an instant the painted figures lift their mirrors, and in those mirrors, in that stray sliding
light, he sees the auditorium again, the brightness, the faces turned toward him like open flowers,
the applause gathering in the roots of his teeth. It is all inside the gold. It is all for the taking. His
fingers close around the disc. The temple speaks. Not loudly, there is no fine theatricality in its
voice. It speaks the way sleep speaks when you wake too fast, the way joints speak when you lift
too much. A crack threads across the ceiling with the soft insistence of water slicing a riverbank.
The shelves quiver. The offerings shift with the whisper of cloth. Elias stands very still and hears
a sound he cannot name; the sound of history deciding to move. He yanks the disc free.
Everything answers. The ceiling exhales dust in a steady, choking veil. A block slips, then settles,
then slips again, impatient. Elias shoves the disc into his jacket. He swings the rucksack onto his
shoulders with a strength he should not have. He remembers the corridor’s slope, the bridge of
loose stones, the line of offerings. He remembers nothing but the way out. He runs. In the fifth
chamber the air is syrup, the dust catching light in swarming divisions. The carved hands on the
walls seem to reach; he knows they do not, cannot, and still, he flinches like a man ducking a
thrown bottle. A block drops behind him with a grunt of stone on stone, closing his imprint his
foot has just left. He jumps the shallow trench and the third flagstone, trembling before, gulps
and drops away. He does not look down. He has learned that looking down is a delay, and delays
are punishments in the making. He keeps moving. His shoulder catches a shelf’s edge, and a clay
vessel tips, spins, and shatters with a keen, short cry. Black-painted fragments fan across the
floor like scattered letters. He feels the sound like blame. He does not stop. Guilt is a slow
animal; the building slaughter heavers too fast behind him. By the time he reaches the second
chamber, the ceiling has lowered by inches he did not possess before. Stones peck his hair. The
mural kings’ faces crack like old plates. He wants to think this is only the skin of the place
changing and not its heart, but the corridor ahead cinches to a throat and he knows the temple is
not giving up a relic without asking a price. He shoves through the first chamber, and the world
leans. The stairs upward take on the angle of a crooked question. His foot skids, scrapes, and
finds purchase. He climbs as if the verb to climb were the only one left in his language. He feels
light collapse into a smaller and smaller brightness at the mouth of the passage, the day
narrowing into something he has to deserve. The outside hits him like surf. Heat, sky, the wild
orchestra of insects. He falls forward, palms to earth, coughing the temple out of his lungs.
Behind him the corridor groans and drops a stone the size of a man. He rolls away from the dust
cloud’s reaching hand, strangles back to his feet, and lurches into the tree shade, where he kneels
and retches the color of old copper. Silence stitches itself as the stones settle. Leaves clap
together. Somewhere a howler monkey howls like a door being pulled from its hinges. Elias sits
with his back against a root, chest heaving, the disc hot as a fever at his ribs. His porters are
gone. Their hammocks tilt in the wind as if holding a presence just departed. On the ground, a
single pack has been abandoned inside, two bottles of water and a note composed in the elegant
economy of an absence. His hands shake hard enough to rattle his teeth. When he can, he stands
and walks back to where the temple mouth used to be. There is no mouth, only a cave-in of sharp
angles and dust, a pile of rubble that looks like a city map if you squint: streets that lead
nowhere, squares clogged with rock. He stares. The disc presses his jacket outward, a second
heart beating too close to the surface. “What have I done,” he says, or hears, or thinks in a voice
that remembers being grand. He pulls the disc free. In daylight its glyphs seem smaller, their
patience a scold. A hairline fracture cuts across its face, not enough to break it, only to mark it as
“handled.” He rubs the crack with his thumb. The gold accepts the gesture like a blank page
receiving a name. The jungle breathes, and its breath is not forgiveness. Ants investigate his
boots. The humid air soaks his shirt until he feels he is wearing another man’s sweat. He
imagines the temple inside the rock, rooms like lungs evacuated of all air, offerings broken to
syllables too small to sound. He imagines the walls that waited in their stillness for him to
choose, and the choosing. He thinks of the auditorium again because habit is as deep as any ruin.
He imagines mounting that stage with this disc, his arms lifted to applause. He imagines the
lights turning the gold into daylight within daylight, everyone new again, his name restored to
the weather it once made. And he sees the other picture, the only one that will not print, the
moment the ceiling gave, the moment objects that had learned to live forever learned otherwise,
the sound of a vessel’s plaintive cry as it broke. He closes his eyes, and the taste of dust and
metal thickens at the back of his tongue. Fame had always been a mirror, and he had spent his
life polishing it, looking for himself in its bright distortion. Here, in this heat, before this wound
of stone, he understands that mirrors are hungry things. They want faces. They want to be looked
into until they become the only horizon. He had fed the mirror everything he had, and in return it
had shown him a man worth clapping for, even when the man was only a silhouette of a man
with his hands full of broken gold. He looks down at the disc. The crack catches light like a river
at dusk. He thinks of returning it. He imagines clawing at the rubble with his fingers until his
nails blush and lift. He understands the foolishness of the image, that what is undone can seldom
be remade in the time you have left.