Tikal is a Maya city in the rainforest of northern Guatemala whose limestone temples break up through the canopy, the tallest of them sixty-five metres, and there is no river or lake anywhere near it. For four dry months a year the whole city drank what it had saved from the wet ones. When the rains failed for long enough, the place was left to the forest, which has held it since. From the top of Temple IV the forest runs flat to the horizon, broken only where the grey roofcombs of Temples I, II and III push through the green like stone islands. Those far peaks are all temples, and everything between them is still trees. This is the view the first Star Wars film used for the rebel base on its jungle moon. The heart of it on the ground is the Great Plaza, a grassy square where Temple I and Temple II face each other and the terraces of the North Acropolis climb one side. Tikal's kings were crowned and buried here.
The hour to be here is first light, which means you climb while the forest is still dark. The howler monkeys start a roar that rolls across the treetops, mist lifts off the canopy as the sky pales, and the far roofcombs surface one by one. Temple V is the quieter giant, fifty-seven metres up a wooden staircase pinned to the back of the pyramid, and you often get its narrow top ledge to yourself. The forest is as much of the visit as the stone. Spider monkeys cross overhead and ocellated turkeys walk the plazas in colours that look painted. More than four hundred kinds of bird live here, sixty of them arriving from the north each winter. The Great Plaza is not only a ceremonial square. It was graded to shed rain, as every causeway here was, into at least ten clay-sealed tanks, and at the largest the water ran through imported sand and volcanic rock to come out clean. You are standing on the waterworks.