That tear was teardrop shaped.

It was the perfect tear for Nicholas.

He said, “Get this creature out of my shot.”

The number of steps up the pyramid in Chichén Itzá is three hundred and sixty-five. It is also the number down. I know this because Nicholas told me while we were descending. Nicholas took each step slowly, sitting briefly on each one before pushing off with his hands, lowering himself to the next.

He looked down with each push on the grade of the descent. He recited what he knew, things that came to mind, as if he believed, or wanted to believe, that random facts could get him to the ground.

All the way down, he recited. Most of what I know about Chichén Itzá is what I remember my brother telling me, while I came down, on foot, beside him. I have no idea if what he said is true.

I stayed with him step by step, because he asked me to.

Nicholas told me that the builders of the pyramid had known their calendar to be inexact. He told me that Mayan calculations of the sun had differed from ours by seventeen seconds per year. He told me that the pyramid, the one we were descending, had been built up from the base of a pyramid built before. The inner pyramid had been discovered, Nicholas said, during excavation of the pyramid that could be seen. A temple was found, and because the inner pyramid had been covered for centuries, the treasures of its temple were intact.

Halfway down, Nicholas mentioned other ruins on the site and said that structures within structures were everywhere around us. Chichén Itzá had been built, he said, upon a conquered site, by conquerers who had themselves been conquered in another place. They had lost their city, and when they set about to duplicate, in a new place, the city they had lost, they built outward from the mass of the structures they had conquered.

The inner pyramid contained, my brother said, evidence of customs not known about before. Pieces of jade, he told me, were placed on the tongues of the dead. It had been believed, he said, that jade in the mouth assured food after life.

When we were near the bottom of the pyramid, near the ground, Nicholas told me that in funerary ceremonies, objects of sacrifice were painted red. It was a color, Nicholas explained, close to cinnabar or even sang de boeuf, and when the tomb was sealed its doors were also sealed in that red.

When we reached the ground, I was thinking about the calendar. I was wondering about the seventeen seconds and whether the Mayan year had been longer by that much, or shorter, than the year that we now take to be true.

This was the question that I asked my brother on the ground.

Nicholas looked up at the pyramid.

“Honey,” he said, “are you sure you got that creature out?”