WINTER SOLSTICE, 2011 – The darkness enveloped us like a warm blanket as we walked carefully toward the center of the ancient ruins of Izapa. We carried a flashlight but did not turn it on, believing our eyes would adjust to the dark. With no warning, from the direction where I thought the royal throne should be, light shot into our eyes, blinding us to a halt.

"Make some moves with the flashlight," Robert said. Someone must have arrived before us. "Turn the thing off and on a couple of times, so they don't think we're sneaking up on them."

Our daughter quickly did so, and the other light fell away. We waved our arms in the air, but it was too dark to see if there was a response. I had not expected company. Izapa is off the beaten path even for Maya trail travelers, on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and Mexico come together. It's not Palenque with its grand temples, or the intimate painted walls of Bonampak. I hoped the light hadn't come from a drug trafficker. Maybe an early-rising farmer.

The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen in Antigua, Guatemala. Braids of thick plaster twisted gracefully around chipped columns, dripping after the downpour that signaled the end of the canicula. Those golden weeks of sun and hummingbirds in the midst of the rainy season were over.

Of tens of thousands of yearly visitors to Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, few realize that the late author Gore Vidal lived here during the impressionable first years of his writing career. I lived around the corner from his old house for eleven years, and happened to be visiting a friend in Antigua when news came of the author's death on July 31. I felt moved to walk over to the old neighborhood through town, alert to "that sharp smell" that Vidal once wrote was the scent of "most Latin towns: green papaya, dust, damp stone and plaster, and something else, unidentifiable, yet insistent, ubiquitous, death sweet.

In 1946, the author, then just twenty-one, took $3000 from the payment for his first novel, Williwaw, and bought a crumbling 16thcentury convent next to the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen.

In such corners of Antigua, a town of some 45,000 about an hour from Guatemala City, amid fine homes, galleries and a popular central parque, ruins from five centuries of earthquakes remain in place, reminders of history and natural forces that are inescapable.