Caracol is a Maya city in the forest of western Belize, the largest in the country, and in 562 it beat Tikal. At its height it held more than a hundred thousand people. The plazas and courtyards have been cleared and the jungle keeps the rest, with carved stelae still naming the kings who ruled here. Caana, the Sky Palace, is the tallest thing ever built in Belize, and its steep stone stairs take you about 43 metres up off the plaza. There is almost no shade once you are up there, and the canopy runs unbroken to the horizon. Before dawn the black howler monkeys start up, a roar you feel in the chest rather than hear, rolling through the empty plazas and out into the pines.
Those pines are the other half of the day. The road in climbs through the Mountain Pine Ridge, a cool highland that smells more like a temperate forest than a tropical one. The trees are there because of the rock: coarse granite, among the oldest in Central America, which weathers into thin acidic soil that the surrounding broadleaf forest cannot get a hold in. They are also young. A bark beetle went through in the early 2000s and killed most of the mature pines, so the ones you drive through now are much the same height. Where the rivers cross the granite, Big Rock falls spills over a ledge into a pool deep enough to swim in, cold even at midday because the water comes straight off the highland. At the other end of the day the cats come out. Ocelots and jaguars hunt the Chiquibul, the largest protected forest in Belize, and cross the tracks between the pines and the broadleaf in the last light. Caracol's victory was a star war, a campaign timed to the movements of Venus, and it was measured afterwards in silence. For about 130 years Tikal carved no dated monument at all, the longest gap in its history, while Caracol went on putting up stones about the win.