Page 143 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Central America: the civilization of Ancient Mexico did not emerge
without external influence, and it did not emerge as a result of influence
from the Old World; instead certain cultures in the Old World and in the
New World may both have received a legacy of influence and ideas from a
third party at some exceedingly remote date.

Villahermosa to Oaxaca

Before leaving Villahermosa I visited CICOM, the Centre for Investigation
of the Cultures of the Olmecs and Maya. I wanted to find out from the
scholars there whether there were any other significant Olmec sites in the
region. To my surprise, they suggested that I should look farther afield.
At Monte Alban, in Oaxaca province hundreds of kilometres to the
southwest, archaeologists had apparently unearthed ‘Olmecoid’ artefacts
and a number of reliefs thought to represent the Olmecs themselves.
Santha and I had intended to drive straight on from Villahermosa into
the Yucatan Peninsula, which lay north-east. The journey to Monte Alban
would involve a huge detour, but we decided to make it, in the hope that
it might shed further light on the Olmecs. Besides, it promised to be a
spectacular drive over immense mountains and into the heart of the
hidden valley where the city of Oaxaca lies.
We drove almost due west past the lost site of La Venta, past
Coatzecoalcos once again, and on past Sayula and Loma Bonita to the
road-junction town of Tuxtepec. In so doing, by degrees we left behind
countryside scarred and blackened by the oil industry, crossed long
gentle hillsides carpeted in lush green grass, and ran between fields ripe
with crops.
At Tuxtepec, where the sierras really began, we turned sharply south
following Highway 175 to Oaxaca. On the map it looked barely half the
distance that we had driven from Villahermosa. The road, however,
proved to be a complicated, nerve-racking, muscle-wrenching, apparently
endless zig-zag of hairpin bends—narrow, winding and precipitous—
which went up into the clouds like a stairway to heaven. It took us
through many different layers of alpine vegetation, each occupying a
specialized climatological niche, until it brought us out above the clouds
in a place where familiar plants flourished in giant forms, like John
Wyndham’s triffids, creating a surreal and alien landscape. It took twelve
hours to drive the 700 kilometres from Villahermosa to Oaxaca. By the
time the journey was over, my hands were blistered from gripping the
steering-wheel too tight for too long around too many hairpin bends. My
eyes were blurred and I kept having mental retrospectives of the
vertiginous chasms we had skirted on Highway 175, in the mountains,
where the triffids grew.
The city of Oaxaca is famous for magic mushrooms, marijuana and D.H.
Lawrence (who wrote and set part of his novel The Plumed Serpent here in

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