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 heaves 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.

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