Series 2, Episode II

Last night, Grandma told a really good bedtime story, all about all the trolls and monsters who lived in a very hot jungle in far away Central America, a long time ago. And about the dens they made for themselves; dens which some people call pyramids. And if we are going to be particular, it all happened at a place called Yaxchilan, on a spectacular bend in the Usumacinta River, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, a long way across the sea.

The view from the nearest road, a little to the west

One of the dens

The first lintel

The second lintel

One of the things that the trolls did when it was raining, was to carve pictures on the stone lintels above the doors to their dens. Which took rather a long time as the stone was quite hard and they didn't have any proper chisels, like the ones that Grandpa keeps in his special red box in the garage. But when they were finished, they looked very well, or at least they would have done when they were new. And some people think that the richer and more important trolls used to paint their carvings in very bright colours.

Polly's den

So the next day, while Grandpa was messing about with his bread yet again - batch 561 - Polly and her friends thought that they would build a den out of the bricks which he had left on the back patio, behind the garage. With the result snapped above. With the only thing wrong being the brick next to Yuri on the right, which had not been placed to span the two bricks underneath, in the way of the brick next to Pedro on the left.

Following the tradition established at Series 1, Episode XI (see reference 1), Baby Bear was still in isolation, so he was given a very small room, all by himself, at the bottom of the den. He was not best pleased about this, but Polly said that if was good he would be allowed upstairs in the afternoon.

The only other thing wrong was that the lintel of their den was too high up and they couldn't reach it to draw their carving, not even with the longest pieces of coloured chalk which they had taken from the back of the garage. So they just had to pretend about that. Maybe next time they will remember to draw their carving before they put the lintel up.

When Grandpa saw what they had been up to, he started to tell them a story about how when he was young, he and his friends used to play castles in the piles of bricks which had been left along the other end of his road, the estate on which he lived only being half built at the time. Lots of bricks got broken and Bob the Builder got in a terrible temper about it. There was even the occasional melt down. But it was jolly good fun in between times. Unfortunately, he went on a bit, and after a while Polly and her friends sneaked inside for lunch. Grandpa was so engrossed in his story that he didn't even notice. Later he fell asleep again.

It is to be hoped that he woke up in time to take his precious bread out of the oven.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/series-2-episode-1.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/series-1-episode-xi.html.

Reference 3: Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 2: Yaxchilan - Ian Graham - 1979. Peabody Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts. The source for the two lintel carvings.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaxchilan. The source for the picture of the den.

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