One morning, a Mennonite farmer in the Cayo district of western Belize got up like he always did to feed his chickens and milk his cows. Later in the day, like the unmechanized Maya who lived here some 1,200 years ago, he worked up a pretty good sweat tending his winter crops. At the end of his hard day’s work, he headed in for dinner before shuffling off to bed, where he was quickly transported to Mennonite dreamland.
Suddenly, sometime before midnight, the farmer was roused from his slumber by a commotion outside. It seems a Maya-antiquities looter had tumbled into an unexplored cave near his village—the looter’s frightened friend was begging for help. So the farmer and a few of his fellow Mennonites rushed to the scene via horse and buggy, where they lowered the farmer by rope 30 or more feet into the inky darkness. There, he found the unfortunate opportunist, whose numerous injuries included the loss of several teeth, which were dislodged by the impact of his jaw upon the cave’s limestone floor. As he gathered up the bloodied criminal, the farmer noticed human skulls leering in the darkness, skeletal hands groping at the dank air, femurs scattered about. When he finally made it back to the surface and deposited the hapless thief into his buggy before taking him to the nearest hospital, the farmer named this place “Mitnacht Schreknis Heel,” which is Plautdietsch—the Dutch-German dialect of Belizean Mennonites—for “Midnight Terror Cave.”
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