Maya Blue

Book excerpt: Gavin Corti, an Anglo-Canadian age 35, returns for a week’s stay in Belize, where fi fteen years earlier he served in the British Army. There he meets Celia DeGroot, 25, a ballroom dance instructor from South Africa with a keen interest in the ancient Mayan civilization and in search of “Maya Blue”: the lost pigment sacred to the ancients and used in their ritual human sacrifi ces. What follows is the story of an extended journey by these two travelers through the rain forests of Belize and Guatemala, during which their lives are gradually transformed, though in different ways, by their contact with the ancient Maya world.