After that One and Seven Hunahpu left, guided down the road by the messengers.
And then they descended the road to Xibalba, going down over the edge of a steep slope, and they descended until they came to the mouth where the canyons change, the ones named Rustling Canyon, Gurgling Canyon. They passed through there, then they passed through scorpionScorpion Rapids. They passed through countless scorpions but they were not stung.
And then they came to the Crossroads, but here they were defeated at the Crossroads:
Red Road was one and Black Road another.
White Road was one and Yellow Road another.
There were four roads, and Black Road spoke:
"I am the one you are taking. I am the lord's road," said the road. And they were defeated there: this was the Road of Xibalba.
Crossroads Cahib xalcat be, "four junction roads"; xalcat refers to any joining or forking of roads, and cahib makes this junction a "crossroads." There are two lists of the names of the four roads that lead away from this junction. The earlier list has Red, Black, White, and Yellow roads (p.111); it seems consonant (in terms of both sequence and colors) with the lowland Maya color-directional scheme, in which red is east, black west, white north, and yellow south. The later list has Black, White, Red, and Green roads (p. 134); this may be a separate scheme for which the Milky Way (rather than the sun's path) is the key. In the P.V. the Black Road is also the Road of Xibalba, which corresponds to the cleft in the Milky Way. Whenever the cleft is visible, the opposite end of the Milky Way is undivided where it intersects the horizon; the undivided part is called White Road (see below), which could explain why Black and White (rather than Red and Black) are paired in the later list of roads. Since characters corresponding to Venus (One and Seven Hunahpu and later Hunahpu and Xbalanque) travel a path that intersects the Black Road, the Crossroads would seem to be the point at which the cleft is crossed by the zodiac. Note that both the Milky Way and the zodiac shift positions with respect to the horizon; we are not dealing so much with a system of cardinal points fixed to the terrestrial plain as with a complex system of navigation."
"In the lowland Maya color scheme, green did not correspond to any of the four directions, but to the center, a sort of fifth direction. The Green Road of the P.V. may be a paradoxical fifth road, synthesizing the other four roads or passing vertically through the spot where they cross.