Nearly a millennium later, a Spanish priest named Father Ordonez y Aguilar followed native hunters to the ruins of a city on a hill overlooking the broad coastal plain of what was then Guatemala. Father Aguilar later wrote a book about Palenque claiming it was the capitol of a lost Atlantean civilization. Based on little more than a hunch, the priest's theory established a precedent that lasts until this day: People will believe what they want to believe about Palenque.

The ancient city of Palenque and the nearby town of the same name now reside in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. Modern Palenque is a small town of maybe 7,000 arrayed in blocks of brightly painted stucco and cinder block around a town square, or zocalo. Before the ruins were partially cleared for tourists in the early 1980s, Palenque was a sleepy market town for the surrounding ranches. Campesinos still come in from the hills on Saturday nights to listen to the marimba bands in the zocalo, or have a few beers at the local grange hall, but the primary industry now is tourist farming.

The sons and daughters of the farmers drive the taxis and tend the hotels that keep the tourist trade growing. Visitors walking along Avenida Juarez from the bus station to the square will find banks, hotels, gift shops, mango vendors, pizzerias, taquerias, shoe stores, hammock salesmen and a small army of raven-haired Mayan women selling everything from T-shirts and woven bracelets to Subcommandante Marcos dolls. The fact that the tiny ceramic likenesses of the leader of the Zapatistas retail for only five pesos each (about 50 cents at current exchange rates) seems to bode ill for the revolution, until you consider the heavily armed presence of federal soldiers in the region, which suggests that the Mexican government believes the Zapatistas are still a credible threat.

A few miles from the sun-dazed bustle of town, along the road to the ruins, are a string of campgrounds hidden in the shade of the forest canopy. I rented a hut at one of the campgrounds and hung my mosquito net from the thatched roof over the bed. The next day I went to the airport to meet my friend Harry Zernike. I was early and sought shelter from the sun in the airport's terminal building. Actually, it was the only building at the Palenque airport, except for the sandbagged soldiers' barracks across the tarmac.

I settled in beneath the wide portico of the terminal/bar/taxi- stand with a cold beer and a copy of The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene's epic complaint about Mexico. In the spring of 1938 Greene accepted a commission from a Catholic newspaper to investigate religious persecution in Mexico. He hated almost everything about the country and, in a manner peculiar to out-of-sorts Englishmen, Greene was endlessly inventive in describing each new affront.

Sixty years ago travel was more difficult and Greene could only reach Palenque on the back of a mule. The author arrived butt-sore and sunstroked. Greene recalled his first night in Palenque this way: "I felt sick, but I was too tired to go outside and vomit. The hammocks creaked and something fluttered in the roof and a child wailed. There was no ventilation at all." When Greene did finally see the great Mayan temples -- then almost completely obscured by vegetation -- he was not impressed. "I knew what they could do with their temples," he wrote.

Harry's plane, a pleasingly fat twin turboprop Fokker, touched down smoothly and taxied to a stop not far from where I sat. A half-dozen sandal-shod tourists disembarked, toting backpacks and shoulder bags and a few rolling suitcases. Harry was conspicuous for his lack of luggage. He carried a black bag in one hand and a camera in the other.

Harry is a man of few words. The enigmatic quality that has served him so well with women also makes him a good traveler -- Harry never complains. That evening after dinner we stopped at John's champa for a few beers. John was an expatriate American who had been living in Mexico for years; the champa was a large thatch hut without walls that served as an ad hoc bar for the campground. With a trio of 40-watt light bulbs, a refrigerator, free-range chickens, a mismatched set of patio furniture and a constantly changing international clientele of travelers, John's was a convivial place to get drunk and talk.

The talk that evening was about the Vernal Equinox two days off. Like San Francisco and Stonehenge, Palenque is a loci of planetary power on the New Age map. Perhaps because of the Maya's advanced understanding of astronomy, celestial events such as the equinox were deemed especially portentous at this site. In any event, the hotels in town were full and the campground was at capacity.

Although we had arrived in the dry season, the rain that began at dawn continued into the morning. We had planned to walk to the ruins that day. Instead Harry and I sat in John's champa, nursing our hangovers with Coca-Cola and listening to the din of raindrops crashing through the forest canopy. John sat nearby with a cup of coffee and his account book spread on a wooden bench.

John was complaining about the Krishnas and all the other visitors who had come looking for spiritual transcendence. "They're waiting for the mother ship," John said, "to come and take them away. And, you know what? It would be alright with me if it did."

When the rain let up, we set off. With us were Peeter and Diana, a Dutch/German couple we had met the night before, and Sandy. Sandy was a woman from Southern California who had arrived that morning on the overnight bus from Cancun. We left the campground and walked through a cow paddock and then along a newly paved two-lane road. At a museum run by INHA, the Mexican archeological and historic institute, we stopped to buy tickets to the ruins. The tickets cost 16 pesos, or a little less than $2 each. Just beyond the museum, we turned off the road to follow a path through the forest.

The footpath traced the course of a stream up a hillside. The jungle was dense and the steps cut into the slope were broken in places by the roots of mammoth fig trees. The first ruins we came upon were small. They could have been the remnants of a stable or mill built in the last century, except for the lichen that covered the stones and the peculiar mortar that held them together. Peeter knelt to scrape some of the moss from a foundation wall with his fingernail. "These stones," he said, turning to look at me, "are very old."

Further uphill we passed the crumbled foundations of other small buildings and then the trail widened as it crested a broad plateau. We had entered a glade hacked from the jungle. Through the trees we could see a massive earthen terrace on our left; to the right an expanse of limestone steps capped by a colonnade; directly in front of us a white ziggurat stood at the edge of a green field.

The others walked ahead, but I hung back. The wind rustled the leaves overhead, a cool mist brushed my skin and, in the distance, I could hear the leonine roar of howler monkeys. I felt something like the wild surmise I had seen in Peeter's eyes, as if I were peering through a rip in the fabric of time.