And he produced a clear crystal, indubitably one of Master Xibalba's and he peered closely into each of my eyes, then sat back and said flatly, "Young Ek Muyal, there is nothing afflicting your eyes."

"Nothing?" I exclaimed. I wondered if, after all, Ah Chel was as much a pretender as Maash. Between my teeth I said, "There is nothing wrong except that I can see with clarity no farther than the reach of my arm. You call that nothing?"

"I mean there is no disease or disturbance of your vision which I or anyone can treat."

I swore one of Blood Glutton's imprecations, and I hoped it made the great god Huitzilopóchtli wince in his private parts. Ah Chel gestured for me to hear him out.

"You see things blurred because of the shape of your eyes, and they were born to be that way. An uncommonly shaped eyeball distorts vision in the same way as this uncommonly shaped piece of quartz. Hold this crystal between your eye and a flower, and you see the flower plain. But hold the crystal between your eye and a distant garden, and that garden is just a blur of colors."

I said miserably, "There is no medicine, no surgery...?"

"I am sorry to say there is not. If you had the blinding disease caused by the black fly, yes, I might wash that away with medications. If you were afflicted with what we call the white veil, yes, I could cut that out and give you better vision, though not perfect. But there is no operation which can make the eyeball smaller, not without destroying it entirely. We will never know a remedy for your condition, any more than any man will ever know the secret place where the aged alligators go to die."

Even more miserably, I mumbled, "Then I must live all the rest of my life in a fog, squinting like a mole?"

"Well," he said, sounding not very sympathetic to my self-pity, "you can also live the rest of your life thanking the gods that you are not utterly blinded by the veil or the fly or something else. You will see many who are." He paused, then said pointedly, "They will never see you."

I was so cast down by the physician's verdict that I passed the remainder of our time in Tamoan Chan in rather a glum humor, and I fear I was not very good company for my partners. When a guide from the Pokomam tribe of the far eastern jungle took us to see the marvelous lakes of Tziskao there, I looked at them as coldly as if the Maya rain god Chak had created them to affront me personally. Those are some sixty bodies of water, ranging from small ponds to estimable lakes in size, and they have no connecting straits between them, and they have no visible inlet streams, yet they never diminish in the dry season or overflow in the wet. But the really noteworthy thing about them is that no two of all those lakes are of the same color.

From the high ground where we stood overlooking six or seven of the waters, our guide pointed and said proudly, "Behold, young traveler Ek Muyal! That one is dark green-blue, that one is the color of turquoise, that one is as bright green as an emerald, that one is dull green like jadestone, that one is the pale blue of the winter sky...."

I grumbled, "They might be as red as blood, for all I could tell." And that of course was simply not true. The truth was that I was seeing everything and everybody through the dark of my own despondency.

For a brief while, I courted optimism by trying some experiments with Master Xibalba's burning crystal I carried. I already knew that it was of use for seeing close things even closer and clearer, so I endeavored to make it help me see far things as well. I tried holding it close to my eye while I looked at a tree, then holding it at arm's length, then holding it at varying distances between. No use. When aimed at objects more than a hand span beyond it, the quartz only made them more indistinct than my unaided eye did, and the experiments only made me more depressed.

Even when dealing with the Maya buyers of our trade goods, I was sour and sullen, but fortunately there was enough demand for our wares that my unwinning demeanor was tolerated. I brusquely refused the offers of pelts of jaguar and ocelot and other animals, the feathers of macaw and toucan and other birds. What I wanted was gold dust or metal currency, but such things were not much circulated in those uncivilized lands. So I let it be known that I would trade our goods—the fabrics and garments, the jewelry and trinkets, the manufactured medicines and cosmetics—only for the plumes of the quetzal tototl.

In theory, any fowler who acquired those leg-long, emerald-green feathers was obliged, on pain of death, to present them immediately to his tribal chief, who would use them either for personal adornment or as currency in his dealing with other chiefs of the Maya and the more powerful rulers of other nations. But in practice, as I hardly need say, the fowlers gave their chiefs only a share of those rarest of feathers, and kept the rest for their own enrichment. Since I positively refused to trade for anything but the quetzal tototl plumes, the customers had to go off to do hasty trades among their fellows... and quetzal tototl plumes I got.

As we gradually dispensed with our goods, I sold off the slaves who had carried them. In that land of the lazy, not even the nobles had much work to which to put slaves, still less could afford to own them. But every tribal chief was eager to boast a superiority over rival chiefs, and a holding of slaves—though they might be only a drain on his treasury and his larder—constituted a legitimate boast. So, for good gold dust, I sold ours variously and impartially to the chiefs of the Tzotxil, the Quiche, and the Tzeltal, two slaves apiece, and only the remaining two accompanied our return to the Chiapa country. One carried the large but unweighty bale of feathers, the other's load consisted of those few trade items we had not yet disposed of.

As he had promised, the artisan Xibalba had his finished crystals waiting for me when we got back to Chiapan—in all, a hundred twenty and seven of them, of varied sizes—and, thanks to my sale of the slaves, I was able to pay him in pure gold-dust currency, as I had promised. While he carefully wrapped each crystal separately in cotton, then bundled them all together in cloth to make a tidy package, I said to him, by way of the interpreter:

"Master Xibalba, these crystals make a looked-at object look bigger. Have you ever contrived a kind of crystal that would make objects appear smaller?"

"Oh, yes," he said, smiling. "Even my greatest-grandfather probably tried his hand at fashioning other things than burning crystals. We all have. I do myself, just for amusement."

I told him how limited was my vision, and added, "A Maya doctor told me that my eyes behave as if I am always looking through one of the enlarging quartzes. I wondered, if I could find such a thing as a reducing crystal, and if I looked through it..."

He regarded me with interest, and rubbed his chin, and said, "Hm," and went through the back of his workshop to his house. He returned with a wooden tray of shallow compartments, each holding a crystal. They were of all different shapes; some were even miniature pyramids.

"I keep these only for curiosities," said the artisan. "They are of no practical use, but some have amusing properties. This one, for instance." He lifted out a short bar of three flat sides. "It is not quartz, but a transparent kind of limestone. And I do not grind this stone; it cleaves naturally in flat planes. Hold it yonder, in the sun, and see the light it throws on your hand."

I did, half expecting to flinch from a burn. Instead I exclaimed, "The mist of water jewels!" The sunlight passing through the crystal to my hand was transformed; it was a colored band, ranging from dark red at one extreme, through yellow and green and blue, to the deepest purple; it was a tiny simulacrum of the colored bow one sees in the sky after a rain. "But you are not looking for playthings," said the man. "Here." And he gave me a crystal of which both surfaces were concave; that is to say, it was like two dishes with their bottoms cemented together.