14 Misc Laff: The Square Hills of Quintana Roo
- Jon Nelson
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993
MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes
The Square Hills of Quintana Roo is a fragment consisting of a single chapter, along with a body of working notes, marginalia, planning material, and a clipping. It is a typical Lafferty raw draft, full of caret insertions, strikethroughs, pasted-over notes, and variant passages, the residue of a story still being hammered into shape, though the first chapter itself is typed. From Lafferty’s notes, one learns that he intended the piece as the opening of a novel rather than a short story, and the file includes facts about the region.
The surviving chapter begins in medias res at Chetumal, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. An airman named Juan Petirrojo lands an overloaded plane and seeks out a man named Barnard Oregon, whom he had met briefly the previous week at Orlando Setopierras’s bar in Quiriguá, Guatemala. The airman is a wonderfully colorful character, given to the sort of outbursts one associates with Lafferty characters. At various points, he exclaims:
“Oh, by the square hills of Quintana Roo!”
“Oh, by the compass-rose of Gyroscopius himself!”
“Oh, by the rank-water Fountain of Oganta!”
The last will make a Lafferty a reader’s ears perk up. How does the airman Petirrojo know about the Organta of “Frog on the Mountain” and “In Outraged Stone”? We never find out. But we do learn that Petirrojo carries what he calls “lively pieces” in his cargo, passengers or beings who have apparently already disembarked without being seen.
Suddenly, the men find themselves running, pursued by something. Bernard Orlando doesn’t Jin’s why he running. We never learn what chases them, but they flee through the jungle to Godolphin’s Keep, an old morada that has been leased, and barricade themselves inside. The pursuit is marked throughout by the uncanny materiality of stone: stone feet pounding hard on the jungle floor behind them, a stone fist blooding Petirrojo’s mouth, and what sounds like a stone rifle bullet striking the portal they enter in the keep wall.
It didn’t sound like human feet on the broken-stone, humus-muffled, scratch-jungle floor. It hadn’t the resonance of flesh. It was the sound of stone feet pounding.
The novel fragment breaks off just after the two men wedge-lock the door.
The working notes show something of the larger architecture toward which Lafferty at the time was building. The Maya ruins are not ruins at all, but gateways. He says they lead to things “like prairie-dog towns,” to a subterranean civilization, so Square Hills of Quintana Roo woukd have been his lost-civilization novel.
What else might that have looked like? According to the notes, the stone carvings are not representations of human faces. They are nonhuman people who happen to appear as porous stone. The “artificially deformed heads” of Maya archaeology are not artificial at all. Lafferty writes,
Artificially deformed heads bedamned. Those are not artificially deformed heads. They are their own undeformed heads.
The whole hidden world is concealed by ground-based devices that deflect aircraft and by artificial storms deployed as cover. The character names are bilingual jokes that double as what would probably have been thematic keys: Petirrojo is Spanish for "robin" (John Robin), and Setopierras is seto piedras (stone fence). An interesting what-if, this South American adventure fiction with a high-concept speculative premise. It would have been fun.
