Tlaloctitli is a hidden settlement in the Doraima Highlands, recalled by Space-hand as the place connected to Nobia’s past. Its hospitals lie deep inside a mountain, and the town itself was built using an abandoned mine. The poem’s note gives the name a second geographical and mythological resonance: Tlaloctitli recalls Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god, while the Doraima Highlands are identified with the real Roraima Plateau in the Amazonian jungle, renamed to associate it with Doris.

Setting and construction

Space-hand describes Tlaloctitli as a small, obscure town in the Doraima Highlands, a place that, in the speaker’s account, no one sees. Its seclusion is made concrete by the location of its hospitals: they are set deep inside the mountain, rather than in an openly visible settlement. The image joins the town’s obscurity to its built environment, placing essential institutions within the mountain itself.

The town occupies an old, abandoned mine that had been given over for its construction. Tlaloctitli is therefore presented not as an untouched mountain village but as a settlement made from a disused industrial site. The mine’s earlier purpose is not explained, nor does the passage describe the town’s layout beyond the hospitals’ underground position; what it establishes is a community assembled within a place already hollowed out.

Nobia and the remembered settlement

Tlaloctitli enters the poem through recollection. Space-hand says that, on searching their memories, they think they can trace Nobia back to this town. The phrasing makes the connection an act of reconstruction rather than a fully documented account: the speaker is following a remembered line toward a place, and expresses some uncertainty about the result. Tlaloctitli consequently functions as a point of origin in Nobia’s remembered history, though the evidence here does not describe Nobia’s life there or explain what brought her away.

The recollection becomes more insistent as Space-hand says their thoughts travel increasingly to the locale. There, the Samaritans have bought up everything from collection boxes and settled in. This detail gives the concealed town a history of acquisition and settlement: the Samaritans’ presence is associated with purchases made through those boxes, followed by their establishment in the place. The account does not specify what they bought or the circumstances of their arrival, so the town’s social history remains fragmentary, like the memory through which it is reached.

Name and geographical resonance

The explanatory note connects Tlaloctitli with Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain. It also explains that the Doraima Highlands refer to the real Roraima Plateau in the Amazonian jungle, renamed by Martinson to associate it with Doris. These notes place the imagined town between a mythological name and a transformed real-world landscape; they do not establish that the settlement has any further ritual connection to Tlaloc.

That double reference sharpens the location’s role in the passage. Tlaloctitli is at once a specific remembered town—with hospitals inside a mountain and an abandoned mine repurposed for habitation—and a name whose explanatory setting reaches beyond the immediate recollection to myth and geography. Its obscurity is not resolved by the poem’s brief account: the reader is given a route toward Nobia and a handful of material details, but not a complete map of the place.