Cabrakan Who Moves the Mountains

Where Zipacná builds mountains, Cabrakan shakes them down.

He stamps his feet and the mountains tremble. He claps his hands and peaks collapse. He is the earthquake given a body and a personality — a boastful one, as in his father Seven Macaw and his brother Zipacná, a pride that is the defining characteristic of the family. I am the overturner of mountains, Cabrakan says. My work is all the mountains, great and small.

This is true, in a way. The mountains that fall are his work. The landslides and the tremors and the moments when the earth simply disagrees with its own previous arrangements — these are Cabrakan’s performances, his demonstrations of ability, his way of saying look at me.

The Hero Twins find him and they do not attack him.

They are still relatively young in this part of the Popol Vuh — this episode comes before their descent to Xibalbá, before the long sequence of houses and ball games that will be their real education. They are clever but not yet fully formed. They use what they have: flattery and food.

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Show us, the twins say when they find Cabrakan. Show us what you do.

Cabrakan is immediately interested. He loves an audience. He demonstrates: he stamps and a small mountain trembles. He demonstrates again: he stamps harder and a larger peak shudders. He is happy to demonstrate indefinitely, because what he is demonstrating is real ability and the demonstration of real ability, when you are as proud as Cabrakan, never gets old.

While he performs, the twins catch a bird.

They rub the bird with white earth — a particular kind of white clay, chalk-like earth, toxic in quantity. They cook the bird over a fire with the white earth worked into its flesh. The aroma is extraordinary; the bird smells exactly as it should smell, better even than it should, because the earth has done something to the cooking that makes the outside perfect.

They offer it to Cabrakan as a gift.

He eats it without suspicion. Why would he suspect? He is the mover of mountains. What small trickery of two young men could affect him? He eats the bird, the whole bird, and then he stamps his foot for more demonstrations.

Something has changed.

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The white earth works slowly.

Cabrakan stamps and the mountains do not tremble the way they should. He stamps again, harder. Nothing. His feet feel wrong — not absent, not painful, just removed somehow from the connection they usually have with the earth, the channel through which his force travels down into the ground and makes it shake. He stamps and stamps and the ground is quiet.

The twins have tied his hands. The Popol Vuh says he was bound and buried — put into the earth, the way the mountains he felled were put into the earth, reversed, inverted, sent down where he sent everything else. He is buried.

This is the second of the two sons of Seven Macaw to be defeated.

The Popol Vuh notes, in one of its characteristic moments of cosmic accounting, that the task was assigned to the twins by the Heart of Sky before any of it happened. The false lords — Seven Macaw with his silver eyes, Zipacná with his mountain-making, Cabrakan with his mountain-breaking — are the same kind of pride at three different scales: the claim to be more than you are, the claim to make what you did not make, the claim to unmake what you have no right to unmake.

All three are cleared from the world before the true sun rises.

The mountains of the Maya highlands stand where they stand now because the force that moved them has been buried inside them. You can feel Cabrakan’s frustration sometimes, when the earth shakes and the peaks tremble — but he does not break them. The white-earth bird sits in his stomach, and his feet have lost their particular relationship with the ground, and the mountains endure.

The twins walked away from the buried place without looking back.

They had other things to do.