But an attempt to find an illustrator fizzled and Laughlin's project languished. One day in 1987, however, while reading the Washington Post's book section, Laughlin came across the wood-block illustrations of Naul Ojeda, an Uruguayan artist living in Washington, D.C. Here was a man for the metaphors. Though Ojeda readily agreed to make some initial drawings, the project again faltered when a New York publisher coolly dismissed the pair's proposal: "'People will have as much interest in this as in a picture of a sheep,'" Laughlin remembers him saying. "That was the end of it."

Until the summer of 2001. Why die without it? Laughlin asked himself. "Do it!" Several months later, Ojeda delivered a finished set of illustrations. During a December visit to San Cristobal, Laughlin and Past wrestled the book into preliminary shape.

Eventually, the friar's dictionary was shelved in the bishop's library in San Cristobal de las Casas, the colonial capital of Chiapas. But in 1914, the Mexican revolutionary army of Gen. Venustiano Carranza used the library as a stable, and its books and manuscripts, tossed out the window by hostile soldiers, became fodder for hungry horses. Miraculously, however, Bishop Francisco Orozco y Jimenez had ordered a copy of the dictionary made and delivered to the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia, Historia y Etnologia in Mexico City. From there, it made its way through the hands of several American book collectors and, finally, into a vault at Princeton.

When he delved into the dictionary, Laughlin, like the friar centuries earlier, encountered a poetic wonderland where such everyday phrases as "you console me" and "I am upset" have evocative parallels in Tzotzil: "you shape my heart" and "my heart shakes." Laughlin imagined a book-a Mayan love story of sorts-composed of those metaphoric images. "They seemed so basic and so universal," he says.

Then, suddenly, there was jarring news: Ojeda had lung cancer. By June 2002, he was gone.

But the book was finished. Past's papermaking cooperative in San Cristobal printed and bound 1,000 copies, 500 English-Tzotzil versions and 500 in Spanish and Tzotzil.

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