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I spent a day at Tikal once. I went inside some of the pyramids. I was nearly dead of the heat, not knowing at the time that I couldn't handle it because of my thyroid, just needing insanely more water than most people do to get through it, but managing to cover it all anyway, by dint of sheer will, an alarming incarnation of audible breathing the whole way, rescued by Germans who were a good deal more practical and intelligent than your basic American clueless person. I did not feel any humming from deep antiquity. Not a jot of it. Which surprised me, because I am extremely sensitive to that sort of thing. I chalked it up to the heat stroke, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that the animals were sticking near me all day. There were a pair of guacamayo birds, about four feet long from head to tail, each, who seemed to be everywhere I was. A toucan flew over me whilst I was splayed out on a slab of ancient stone so closely he might've been planning to land on me. The monkeys in the canopy were always directly over my head. I walked right up to a coatimundi, and I mean RIGHT up to him, stopped to speak with him for a moment before he went back to grubbing around after whatever he was grubbing around after and I went back to trudging my noisy—I have likened this to the sound of fornication in the bushes—way to yet another pyramid. It occurs to me that this is the point, that I got Tikal's point but was too wrapped up with my problem staying upright to suss it on the moment.
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