Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25122
After a long day's joumey through high mountain passes and hair-pin tums I had reached my destination: An absurdist "city" hidden in the jungle of San Luis Potosi, uninhabited but for a profusion of huge concrete flowers, spiraling towers, half-built haciendas and abandoned animal cages. It seemed like lifetimes had passed since I'd left San Miguel de Allende on the east-bound Fecha Amarilla. Sometime during the 10-hour bus ride, my sense of dimensionality had shifted and I passed through the looking glass into the weird, organic world of Las Pozas. Set in the folds of the Sierra Madre Oriental, Las Pozas is the love- labor of Sir Edward James, a British eccentric who spent the last 25 years of his life building a dreamscape into a mountain-side just beyond Xilitla. I'd heard James' architectural folly was spectacular, well worth the Dramamine drive from Queretaro or Tampico, but no one could have prepared me for its (sur)reality. Lichen-covered pavilions rose above the jungle as I approached on foot, and when Rigoberto appeared at the entry, offering to guide me, I declined. The labyrinthine city almost demanded that I lose myself among the giant moss-draped columns, the burdenless flying buttresses, the bridges leading nowhere and the stairwells terminating in mid-air. I wandered aimlessly for half an hour before deciding that this was silly. Clearly I'd do better with a guide on my first day, because even though Las Pozas constructs a pretense of urbanity, it's anything but "civilized." That's the prank it plays on the senses. It's an altered state. I looked around for Rigoberto, the boy who'd become my shadow. Off we went like pilgrims entering a peyote mirage. As we plunged deeper into the maze and further into the day, I began to suspect that time had a different quality here, that even as the sun trekked across the sky, the seconds and minutes moved at their own languid pace in this netherworld outside Xilitla. Named after the cascading pools that cut through the 80-acre estate, Las Pozas is a place where animate and inanimate cohabitate. From among the creeping vines and Gaudiesque structures, I half-expected the Mad Hatter to emerge, scurrying down the paths between orchids and bougainvillaea, passing the House Destined to Be a Cinema and disappearing into the mist above the Stairway Without End. In fact, everything I'd read about Edward James hinted that he was the ultimate Hatter and that Las Pozas was his Wonderland. A self-styled architect and poet, James always was an odd bird. Despite money and a celebrated circle of 69