Magic Dwarfs

You can't always get the Weather Channel in the jungles of Mexico, but by the time the rain started on September 23, 2002, Dev Stern had been warned.

"It's coming," Miguel Faller told Stern that morning. "Fill up the car, shut off the power, and put away anything that's not nailed down." At 2 p.m., the neighboring hacienda owner called again. "This is it," Faller said. "Take cover."

As Hurricane Isidore battered the Yucatan that night, leveling million-dollar properties and mud-walled villages alike, Stern remained barricaded in a guest room at her luxury hacienda, not yet open for business. For hours, wind-driven 50-foot hardwood trees pounded the property. "I was convinced that we'd lost the main house," says Stern, 49. When she emerged the next morning, she was astonished. "The storm had splintered stone columns," she recalls, "but the $50,000 worth of landscaping we'd just completed and the 18th-century Moorish arch were intact." Two trees that had fallen over the main house and the adjoining building she'd taken shelter in had landed in each other's arms, sparing her life.

As she surveyed the damage, the groundskeeper, Marcelino, came up behind her. "It is Los Aluxes," he said. "They have protected you."

Since she'd arrived in the Yucatan some two years earlier, Stern had heard the magic dwarfs of Mayan folklore blamed for everything from robberies to construction screwups, so she was relieved that they'd finally come around to her side. With her first paying guests coming in a matter of weeks, she was going to need them.

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