This online photo essay accompanies the National Geographic's feature on The Maya: Glory and Ruin―Saga of a civilization in three parts: The rise, the monumental splendor, and the collapse.

What the photographer did was use artificial lighting (and a lot of it) to create the sphinxlike yet jungly images of Maya ruins, which have always lurked at the edge of our imagination.

Still, the online Flash presentation doesn't do justice to the haunted photographs of Tikal et al. that are found in the hardcopy of the magazine. Get a copy of the magazine to see what I mean. Then reflect on whether it's a limitation of Flash or of electronic reproduction that fails to communicate the photos' hardcopy impact.