FOOTNOTES:
[5] A Central News telegram recently published in the London papers read as follows: "A surprise attack by a band of Maya Indians was made on Mexican troops encamped in their district. A sharp fight ensued, and as the Indians were superior in numbers, great difficulty was experienced in driving them off. A Mexican lieutenant and eight men were killed."
[CHAPTER X]
IN SEARCH OF THE MAYAN MECCA
The island of Cozumel lies twelve miles from the easternmost shore of Yucatan in the Caribbean Sea between 20° and 21° north lat. and 86° and 87° west long. Its name in Mayan means "Isle of Swallows," in allusion, tradition relates, to a Mayan deity Tel Cuzaan (the swallow-legged) who was here chiefly worshipped. But the history of the island contradicts this tradition, for Tel Cuzaan appears to have been quite a minor god in the Mayan Olympus; while a religious importance, exceeding that of any other spot in the Mayan countries of Central America, seems to have attached to this island.
According to the earliest Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest it was Isla Sagrada, the Sacred Isle of the Mayan race. To it four centuries back the tribes from the mainland of Yucatan, from Tabasco and Chiapas, from Guatemala and what is today British Honduras, made yearly pilgrimage. In its centre rose—say the Spanish annalists of the sixteenth century—a grand temple, the Mecca of the Mayan race. Towards Cozumel we had always eagerly looked because of this undoubted ancient sanctity, and because we hoped that deep in her impenetrable forests, this Holy of Holies might still exist. Cortes, in 1519 (Bernal Dias is the chronicler), destroyed a towered temple, and threw down the idols; but it is more than likely that this was not Mecca, for the Spanish account does not admit of doubt that the shrines so destroyed stood upon the beach, and there is some evidence for our belief that the Mayan Mecca was in the heart of the island. Moreover our hopes of a "find" were strengthened by the knowledge that the Spaniards never thoroughly explored the island; that to this day it has never been explored. Four centuries back it was practically what it is now—one vast dense virgin forest, through the gloomy tangle of which even Indians could scarce find their way.
On our return to Isla de Mujeres from our explorations of Cancun and the adjoining coast, misfortune overtook one of us in the shape of a sharp attack of malaria, doubtless contracted as a result of our combats with mosquitoes in Cancun. Mujeres was about the most unfortunate place in the world for such an illness, as it was absolutely barren of all fruits or fresh food, and our dietary consisted of tea, biscuits, and rice. But we had to make the best of a week or more's delay, till the fever abated, when, giving up all idea of covering the fifty-four miles of open sea, which lay between us and Cozumel, in the small open boat we had so far used, we hired a 25-ton schooner for the voyage. The hold of this vessel was fitted up with a bed for the invalid, and early one morning we made a start.
The communication between these islands of the Caribbean Sea is very erratic. A regular postal system does not exist, and any passing boat is pressed into the service of the Post Office and made to carry any letters or papers which may be waiting delivery. On our voyage from Holboch we had been raised to the dignity of mail-carriers; and now we learnt that our little schooner was to be coolly used as a general passenger boat. For when we got on board we found in addition to our crew that the Jefe had calmly saddled us with four passengers in addition to the mails. But if he had tried to make an excursion steamer of us, we really should not have objected, for it was such an intense relief to see the last of Mujeres. Our enforced sojourn there had been a real martyrdom. Napoleon at Elba was really not in it with us. Perched up on our rocky-terraced hut with a westward view of the coast around El Meco, we had been literally like rats in a trap; no books, no papers, nothing to see, nowhere to go; sand and fan-palms, rocks and more sand. The Israelites never longed for the Promised Land, for the Canaan of milk and honey fame, as we had for Cozumel and our escape from the Isle of Women. Thus when we found that only four Yucatecans were to be made happy by getting something for nothing (the Ultima Thule of all the devout of their race), viz.: a passage at our expense—our only feeling was really one of wonder at the Jefe's moderation.
With a fair wind Cozumel can be reached in twelve hours from Mujeres; but the trade winds hereabouts seem to drop as the sun gets high, and midday saw us lying idly by, our sails flapping gently as the boom swung backwards and forwards in time with the rocking of the vessel on the long, slow underswell which was scarcely noticeable on the almost oily-still surface of the water. The blistering heat was so intense that it seemed to draw from the water a mist-like steaming vapour. For hours we lay
"As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."
But with the afternoon, sure enough, there came a gentle gusty breeze, rising from nowhere. The brown sails for a moment belly out like well-filled corn-sacks. The boom swings over with a creaking, jerky, grating noise. The dark, clear, oily blue water breaks up into little gentle ripples at our bow, and we are once more moving. As darkness falls and the clear azure of the sea turns to a leaden grey, we run past Cancun, this time to seaward, at five or six knots. But it is dawn before we see the coast of Cozumel, which is what sailors call "raw" and is not one to be approached at night time if it can be avoided. So we stand off until the morning; for if one cannot describe the island's shore as one "whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tide," it is true enough that that "foot" is fearsomely shod with coral. As you make your way into the little natural bay and peer down through fathoms of water clear as crystal, you see those ghastly spikes, those evil-looking spires and towers, rising from the bottom, their blackness in the clear water suggestive of their murderous meaning for mariners. As we anchor some five hundred yards from the shore the little island town of San Miguel rings the bay. A few palm-thatched huts, a wooden store, an open space, a custom house with a flagstaff, a few small boat-shelters of palm-leaves to save boats from cracking in the sun, and a jetty, three feet wide, running out into water waist-deep. Northward a grove of palm trees; southward stretches, as far as the eye can see, the rocky coral beach.
At the end of the eighteenth century Cozumel, desolate, uninhabited, was the headquarters of the pirate Molas, terror of the Carib Sea; and its rock-and reef-bound coast, broken here and there by tiny land-locked inlets, the water at the entrances discoloured by the sunken corals, looked the ideal shelter for a pirate horde. We were not long in starting for the rocky bay of San Miguel in the crazy dugout which served as longboat for our schooner. A quarter of a mile lay between us and the shore: and it looked certain we should be swamped, for, with two Indians, our packing-cases and guns made a top-heavy cargo. But these islanders are born sailors, and the way they manœuvred us over the swell towards the small landing-stage was extraordinary. As we neared the beach the swell broke up into rollers, and once or twice it was nearly all up with us. A shark, grasping the situation, swam in after us, showing his ugly eyes above the green water; but he lost his breakfast.
Cozumel is a veritable Garden of the Hesperides—an Eden without the serpent, for curiously enough the snakes, so plentiful on the mainland and on the other islands, have died off here. It has a beauty quite of its own; not the bewilderingly sweet, exotic charm, the impatient luxuriance, of the damp-hot Antilles. Rather are you impressed with the serenity of Nature, her queenly quietude. A great peace lies on the forest, and on the sunkissed paths which girdle the island's coastline. Sixty years back, when the American traveller Stephens landed, the island was uninhabited. Now there are but two villages, San Miguel and, ten miles southward, El Cedral; and only around these and along the western coast is the land cultivated. There gardens and ranches are rich with oranges and limes, pineapples and sugar-cane, bananas and banana-apples, grape-fruit and the delicious soapy-fleshed guanabana, with groves of cocoanut palms, with figs, with the white starry flowers of tobacco, with the fluffy bursting pods of cotton, and vari-coloured spicebushes. If Cozumel could be cleared in all her fifty miles length and fifteen breadth, what a garden of the gods she would become!
To bargain well one must be a good actor. We were eager to unearth some of the treasures of the island, and eager to find some one whose services as guide in our search would be worth hiring. Avarice is the besetting sin of all Yucatecans, and we knew that if we were to get any native help at anything like reasonable rates we must pretend an indifference which we did not feel. The Yucatecans do not understand archæology; they think it a cloak for less innocent treasure-hunting. Molas was not the only pirate in the eighteenth century who resorted to Cozumel, and there is no doubt that many a goodly pile of doubloons, of silver ingots, and perchance bags of Brazilian diamonds, are buried on its shores. Some few years back a band of enterprising Americans did actually unearth such a treasure, enclosed in an iron-bound box, and buried in the woods surrounding an ideally piratical cove half-way between San Miguel and El Cedral. Thus suspicion attached to us at once, and nothing we could say would persuade the islanders that a couple of apparently sane men would take the trouble to hire schooners and make long journeys for the sole purpose of measuring old stone walls and digging up beads and broken potsherds. We met this mistrust by hiring a hut and settling down to quiet housekeeping and a survey of the island's coast, confident that we should hear something sooner or later as to the existence of the traditional temple we were seeking.
We did not have to wait long. The Yucatecan will do anything for money, and the report that we were ruin-hunters soon brought to our hut Yucatecans "on the make." There were not many whose tales were worth hearing. Nobody knew anything definite; perhaps half a dozen of the inhabitants had crossed to the eastern coast. Finally we did unearth an old ranchero who was said to have declared that, when a lad out hunting in the forest, he and his brother had come across a temple on a pyramid approached by steps, and decorated with blue and red wall paintings. We expected the holiest of Mayan shrines to be thus simple, and unadorned with carvings or figures. Was this Mecca? It was fortunate for us that the old fellow was away on his ranchito near El Cedral, for in our first excitement at getting what looked like a corroboration of our belief that the Mayan Mecca actually still exists, we might have shown such eagerness as would have sent up his price to a truly tropical figure. As it was we greeted the informant with a carefully simulated indifference, and promised that when we were over at El Cedral we would look Don Luis up and hear the story from his own lips. Meanwhile we had ample work before us in first examining the immediate neighbourhood of San Miguel and then making a tour of the island coastline.
Of the buildings which were found around San Miguel by the Spaniards under Grijalva in 1518, not one stone remains on another. The itinerary kept by Grijalva runs: "On the 4th of March we saw upon a promontory a white house.... It was in the form of a small tower, and appeared to be eight palms in length and the height of a man. The fleet came to anchor about six miles from the coast.... The next morning we set sail to reconnoitre a cape which we saw at a distance, and which the pilot told us was the island of Yucatan. Between it and the point of Cucuniel we found a gulf into which we entered, and came near the shore of Cuzamil, which we coasted. Besides the tower which we had seen we discovered fourteen others of the same form." The Spaniards landed 100 armed men, and came to the chief tower, where they found no one. "The ascent to this tower was by eighteen steps; the base was very massive, 180 feet in circumference. At the top rose a small tower of the height of two men placed one above the other. Within were figures, bones, and idols which they adored.... The village was paved with concave stone. The streets, elevated at the sides, descended, inclining towards the middle, which was paved with large stones. The houses are constructed of stone from the foundation to half the height of the wall and covered with straw. To judge by the edifices and houses these Indians appear to be very ingenious."
Of these temples not a trace now remains around San Miguel save at the north end, where a path through a plantation of cocoanuts leads to such a scene of vandalism as might be calculated to rouse the indignation of even the Conservator of Monuments, if he remained awake long enough to reach the spot. Here what had obviously been a minor temple has been broken up and converted into a quarry. Heaps of stones, broken past recognition, lie in a confused heap with smashed Indian pottery. The largest stones have been carted into the village, and formed a pathetic hotch-potch in a garden close to our hut. One of these was a remarkable carving representing a figure of a god seated cross-legged, in true Buddhist attitude, in a niche.
Stephens in 1842 merely landed in the bay of San Miguel, and made no attempt at any survey of the island, and states its length quite incorrectly as thirty miles. Cozumel is roughly rhomboidal in shape, and from its extreme north-east to its extreme south-west is as near as can be fifty-four miles. Its breadth varies, but on an average is about fifteen miles. At each corner of the island there are ruins, those on the northeast being the best preserved. The group consists of two buildings still intact, one practically on the beach and the second a few yards in the bush. They are but small, and might easily answer Grijalva's description, being simply one-storeyed, unornamented with hieroglyphics or figures. These ruined structures at each corner of the island certainly suggest that in the years long past the coasts were sacred and all landing was challenged.
At El Cedral we were told that there were ruins intact, and we made arrangements at once to ride over there. The road is just the winding coast-path which girdles the island. At no part more than a yard or two wide, it leads at first over the flattened ledges of coral which divide the beach from the woods. Then as the woods thicken to the water edge, you ride through tunnels of greenery, where the road traverses the wooded bases of the triangles of coral which at intervals jut out from the shore like the spikes on a dog's collar, to emerge again on to level stretches of golden sand, the palms bending rustlingly over its glittering surface. Here and there, where the coral promontories lay close together, were quiet bays, the trees growing far out on the little capes making horseshoe-shaped green frames for the sapphire-blue water lying almost pond-like in its stillness.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty of this sunny ocean-path, playing, in its long arbours of woodland, hide-and-seek with the sun and the sea. The long stretches of sand are everywhere rich with perhaps the most beautiful shell in the world, that giant gasteropod technically called Strombus but commonly known as fountain-shell. It is the largest gasteropod known,—the shell sometimes weighing four or five pounds,—and the much expanded outer lip, which earns it the popular nickname of "wing-shell," is coloured the richest rose pink, shading off towards the inner curve of the shell into an exquisite and delicate salmon tint. These shells are so lovely that it is hard to believe their inhabitants feed on dead and decaying animal matter. On this Cozumel shore they are not numbered by twos or threes or half dozens, but are literally scattered in myriad profusion. The natives break up the shells with machetes and eat the fish. In the little coral coves it is nothing unusual to see the whole surface of the rocks littered with this wonderful rose-pink debris.
Don Luis Villanueva, whose name had been mentioned to us in reference to his alleged discovery of a temple in the bush, owns the little rancho of San Francisco, some six miles north of El Cedral. We arrived there about midday, very hot and very hungry. Don Luis proved to be a wiry little sallow-faced man, small-featured, with keen small eyes, short grizzled hair, drooping straggly moustache, and one long tuft of grey growing from the extreme end of his chin like the beard of a billygoat. His farmhouse was simplicity itself, formed of wood-stake palisading thatched with palm-leaves. Within, the only furniture were string hammocks, two or three low raw-hide-seated stools, a trestle-like table formed of unhewn poles bound together, raft fashion, with lianas, supported on four small unbarked tree trunks. The floor was just the natural earth, and in one corner of the hut a fire burnt. Every Yucatecan builds his fire on the floor inside his house in this way, with no arrangements for chimney, and the wonder is the huts are not oftener burnt down.
In the further corner were piled bales of tobacco-leaf and sacks of rough cotton. From the rafters hung open baskets filled with tortillas, green and red peppers, onions and fruits, and here and there hung a bunch of bananas ripening. Don Luis is a widower and his housekeeping was done by his daughter, a pretty brown-skinned girl of about twenty, whose single thin garment of cotton only accentuated the plump attractiveness of her figure. As all Yucatecan women always are, she was at the metate or tortilla-tray when we entered, but left her work and came forward prettily to greet us. The other inhabitants of the hut were Don Luis's two grandsons, healthy, black-eyed, intelligent-looking little rascals, and a host of terribly emaciated dogs and puppies, melancholy half-fed brindled cats, so thin that they looked as if they had not got a purr in them, and the inevitable chickens and pigs.
After we had had some food, Don Luis saddled his horse and led the way through the woods to El Cedral. He made a picturesque figure ahead of us, the quaint little wiry brown-legged form in its loose cottons and big soup-plate straw hat, his bare feet deep in the Mexican stirrups, his right hand eternally swinging the loose end of the lassoo rope fastened on the saddlebows. Yucatecan horses are good goers, but they want understanding. It's a case of spare the rope and spoil the horse. Every Yucatecan rider swings his lassoo rope the whole time. The horse does not want to be beaten; it's enough that he sees the rope going round, and then he keeps going. We reached the village while the sun was still blazing high. A cluster of palm-thatched huts grouped round a square of wiry grass—these Yucatecan hamlets are as like as peas in a pod. The male villagers streamed out to welcome us with a cordiality which was quite overwhelming. We really thought that at last we had found the exception which proved the rule of Yucatecan avarice and inhospitality. El Cedral received us with open arms. El Cedral walked behind us in its fifties, applauding our attempts at Spanish civilities, laughing when we laughed, grave when we were grave. El Cedral begged us to stay with it; indeed would take no refusal. El Cedral insisted that to us should be paid the meed of honour due to such distinguished visitors, namely that our hammocks should be slung for the night in the Casa Municipal, the village town hall; a distinction much as if London's Lord Mayor gave you leave to sling your hammocks in the Guildhall between Gog and Magog. And El Cedral developed an inordinate interest in procuring for supper just what might tickle our palates. But we were doomed to disillusionment.
First, we started to inspect the ruins. They were singularly disappointing. The chief one was a two-roomed house standing on a mound some 20 feet square. There were no statues, no bas-reliefs, no hieroglyphics. It was desolate enough, but it had had, we learnt, its modern uses; for five years back when a terrible hurricane had swept the island the whole village had been blown away, and this Indian ruin was for days the only shelter of the disconsolate villagers. Next, an almost violent discussion occurred among our score or so of self-appointed guides. It seemed on the point of developing into civil war, when we luckily gathered that our old friends the garrapatas were the cause of all the trouble. The villagers wanted to show us another ruin, but they were so distressed at the thought that we should get covered with the insects in our walk thither. It took some minutes to persuade them that we were quite accustomed to this etcetera of travel in their country, and then, with half a dozen men and boys whipping with twigs the bushes on each side, and sweeping the path before us, we made our way through the bush to a fine arched doorway hopelessly overgrown. Another such had stood some yards away, relics evidently of a once considerable building. There was nothing much worth seeing now, but we concealed our disappointment as well as we could, for the El Cedralites were really so friendly that we were ashamed to let them think that we viewed our journey as a fiasco. As we returned into the village a little lad, after a shy consultation with his father, sidled up to one of us and picked a garrapatas off our shoulder, blushing at his boldness.
We supped in an Indian hut, and then in the moonlight sat out on the village green, talking astronomy, of all things. Despite linguistic disabilities, we prevailed upon the Yucatecan villagers to believe that the glorious moonlight was borrowed. But the children did not care about solar or lunar problems, and they romped round us with the dogs, tumbling over one another in the ecstasy of their play, content that they were young and happy, and that chubby brown legs were made to run with. It was quite Arcadian—this little village, with the homely lights streaming out from the white-faced huts, the merry laughter of the youngsters, the caressing warmth of the night air, and the blackness of the rustling trees flashing into a myriad ever-shifting points of light as the fireflies flew from bough to bough. We slept well in the town hall, the village clock of large American make, brightest jewel in the municipal crown, ticking in homely fashion behind us. But with the dawn we were disillusioned as to the hospitality of Arcady, for we found we had to "foot" quite a large bill for our entertainment. This is really one of the most difficult problems in Yucatan. You never know whether you are a paying guest or not. The head of a village orders your meals, accompanies you to them, and sees that you lack for nothing. You naturally regard him as your host; but if he is a Yucatecan this is the last thing he intends. The difficulty lies in the fact that the true Spaniard is hospitable, and would never forgive the insult of money offered for a meal, and you never quite feel safe in assuming that the half-bred don expects you to pay. He may just have Spanish blood enough to resent the offer of money.
Our ride back to San Miguel was uneventful. Before leaving Don Luis we cross-examined him as to the ruin he had seen forty years back, and arranged that he should come on in a day or two to help in the search. He described it as being approached by some fifteen steps, about a foot wide each; as having two doors, ceiling of stone, floor of cement or stone; no seats or ornaments within, no figures, carvings or hieroglyphics, but the inner walls painted in blue scrollwork. From the eastern doorway he remembered seeing the sea plainly over many miles of woodland. As we were dismounting outside our headquarters at San Miguel a terrific to-do occurred in the village street. There were cries of "El toro! el toro!" and the women rushed out from the huts to gather the children together and take them into shelter. We thought at least a wild bull had come down from the woods and was disembowelling the Jefe. A minute more and, to our surprise, there came round the corner an undersized black steer, one man in front hauling on a rope round its horns, and another behind with a long pole. It was just such a youthful bullock as an English country lout would have spanked out of his way in the farmyard. Gallant Yucatecans!
We spent the next few days arranging our plan of campaign for the search for Mecca. It was quite astonishing how little anybody knew of the topography of the island. They were all content to live on year after year and never venture more than three or four miles into the forest. Don Luis knew more than any one, and, having stumbled, quite by accident in pursuit of a pig, over a remarkable ruin, he had been content to let forty years pass without attempting to revisit the spot. Roughly Cozumel is divided into three half circles; a belt, on the west coast, of cultivated ground; an inner belt, but a few miles wide, of woodland in which cattle roam, more or less intersected by Indian trails; and then the forest. In the work before us horses were no good; every foot of ground must be won from the relentless vegetation by axe and machete. We arranged that Don Luis and his four sons should hunt Mecca on his clue. Avarice is the besetting sin of all Yucatecans, so we agreed to pay him a daily wage, and tempted him into assiduity by the promise of a large lump sum if he found the temple. It was worth anything to us if we succeeded; but we did not let the shrewd-eyed knave know that. Our own search party consisted of our two selves and an excellent Indian, whose knowledge of the forest seemed "extensive and peculiar." We drew a map of the island, marking a "probable area" whereabouts tradition suggested Mecca lay, and then we plunged, compass in hand, into the bowels of Cozumel.
We steered first to the east coast. An Indian trail leads thither to where, some few miles from the beach, is a spring of fresh water and the relics of an Indian town. Attracted by the water supply, an attempt had been made in recent years to clear the ground there. But vegetation in Cozumel is luxuriant, and the space cleared one season is by the next four feet high in undergrowth. This well was known as San Benito. We rechristened it San Mosquito, for the fury of the Cancun insects paled before the winged inhabitants of this spot which we chose for our headquarters for the next three weeks.
The man of science will tell you that there are two types of mosquitoes. There is the one which, out of the pure high spirits generated by getting at you, stands on its head and waves its hind legs in the air before it samples your gore. This is the Anopheles, which "travels in" malaria and elephantiasis. And then there is the more sedate self-controlled type which keeps, one might say, an even keel on alighting. This is the Culex, which makes a "special line" in yellow fever. We should like to venture on an entirely new and strictly psychological division of these midget fiends, and class them as "the Dervish mosquito" and "the philosopher mosquito."
When one gets several thousand miles away from mosquitoes, it is quite curious how sympathetically one can reflect upon the disappointment their life must often be to them. Their life is very brief—a week or so; and their normal diet is insipid in the extreme—a drop or two of the juice or moisture of fruit. Now a mosquito yearns for blood as an old maid does after a husband, and for Nature to condemn it to a week or two of life sustained on the moisture of plants is like feeding a lion on bread and milk. One's sympathies are all with the mosquito so far. There is no hell like unsatisfied longings; and if one good long drink of blood means one more mosquito happy, only a churl would grudge it. What one does feel that one has a right to demand is that mosquitoes should study to have "a good bedside manner." This is just what they lack. One would find it hard to forgive a dentist who, forceps in hand, danced a wild cancan before you as you writhed in anticipation in his chair. Yet this, in effect, is just what the Dervish mosquito does. It comes at you with the speed of a rocket, with the whizz and whirr of a racing motor. It hurls itself at you with the rage and energy of a fanatic. It bustles and flusters you, when it really ought to soothe you by its gentle approach, so that your better nature might get the mastery and incline you to say "drink, pretty creature, drink." This is all very shortsighted of the mosquito. One feels as did the French general at Balaclava, as he watched the charge of the Light Brigade, that "it is magnificent but it is not—'cricket.'"
But the mosquito cannot help all this. It is a sublime enthusiast. It chucks good manners and caution to the wind. Think of its damp and dreary past, its blighted life in a dank forest, nourished on the moisture of plants! And then, like a bolt from the blue, comes a human being! Along the serried ranks of mosquitoes the signal runs, "Blood!" The mosquitoes "see blood." They are metamorphosed into fanatics as wholehearted as the Dervishes who, spear in hand, see the joys of Paradise and its black-eyed houris before them. If a mosquito was not a fanatic, it would not make such a noise. A fanatic always dies shrieking. There is nothing which prevents the Dervish-mosquito from alighting quietly and getting to work long before you knew it was there. The philosopher-mosquito does. It lights on you with such elastic tread that the most sensitive skin would not feel it; and then it gets to work with the cold, calm, cynical assurance of a practised dissector. But this has its drawbacks too. The philosopher-mosquito is in danger by reason of its own absorption. Concentrated upon its long drink, it gets killed in a humiliating way, like a man on whom a five-ton chunk of stone falls from a steam crane while he has his nose in a can of beer. The Dervish-mosquito, on the other hand, falls fighting, brandishing its spear, its wild battle-cry on its lips. One cannot help admiring the Dervish-mosquito the most.
There were two or three old palm-thatched huts at San Benito, and we slung our hammocks in the best-preserved one. If we lived a century we should never forget our nights there. It is ridiculous to call them nights. They were not nights at all; they were orgies of blood and death. The mosquitoes flew at us, shrieking like rockets; and we hammered them to death on one cheek or wiped them off from the other. The persistence of those insects was truly appalling. We tried everything. We had heard that if you let mosquitoes alone they are content with one bite. Either there is nothing in this theory or the insects of San Benito were the exceptions which proved the rule. With a patience worthy of a racked Galileo we lay quite still and invited them to become "free fooders." We prayed them to "bid us good-bye and go." But they would not go. They found parting such sweet sorrow. Never did Mary Jane's young man linger with such persistence in the hall over his adieus as did those insects. They were not content with "one stroke and divide." They flew off to the woods—at least a few of them did—and brought a lot more. From free fooders they turned into whole-hoggers. They had no gratitude, these winged gluttons. They were overdoing it. It was not really kind, we felt, to encourage them in thus laying up the seeds of disease for their old age. So we "called time" and started on new tactics.
We had no nets; but we covered ourselves up with our blankets, and for a few pleasant moments we cynically enjoyed listening to the shrieks of the Dervishes as they threw themselves upon the wool. Then there was a lull and silence; and after a time, as it was stifling hot, we had to put our heads out to breathe, and then ... oh, Lord! then we realised the persistence of the mosquito. It is the "bitter beast, which bides its time and bites." It did bide its time. It mounted guard like a policeman on point duty, and when we appeared it seemed to shriek, "Now I've got you!" as it hurled itself forward. The reckless courage of those insects simply compelled admiration. They did not care about death, they did not care how heavy your hand was, they did not care if in their eagerness they got inside your hammock and you rolled on them. They only wanted blood; your blood, and they died happy, drinking it. Death was sweet to them if they could reach you. Like the bees of whom Virgil sings, "Animasque in vulnere ponunt," they joyfully left their lives in the wound. We blasphemed so shockingly that we lost all respect for each other. As the tropic night wore on our language wore out. We racked our memories for the foulest words, the most blood-curdling oaths we had ever heard, until at last we reached such a point of desperation that we felt like leaping from our hammocks, firing a feu-de-douleur from all six chambers of our revolvers, and then committing suicide by hurling ourselves down the well. Seriously though, during all the days we spent at San Benito we never got a good night's rest; and with the dreary diet of tortillas, rice, and eggs, one has to be a very enthusiastic ruin-hunter not to get thoroughly sick of the work.
To those who ramble at will through the sun-lit forests of England, France, or the Tyrol, who know no other, no real conception of the task before us is possible. Byron in Childe Harold sings: "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods." Aye, and there is a terror—not the terror of hunger or of cold, not the terror of thirst or death, but a terror which strikes you dumb, which makes you cringe before the awful majesty of Nature. As we broke into the dread stillness of those woods through which no white foot had ever passed, there came upon us an inexpressible dread, not of physical dangers, for there were none; of something, we knew not what, as of haunted men. As we hacked our way foot by foot, a darkness not of night but of a dim, shadowy world, peopled by the fantastic shapes of trees, which had tortured each other into twist and gnarl in their fight for light, came on us. Work! Heavens, how we worked! It was our only refuge from the dread. We worked like the proverbial niggers; and the sweat poured down our faces, dribbled into eyes and ears, marked great stains on our khaki, and moistened the handles of our axes till it was hard to hold them firm. Outside a myriad birds chorused in the blaze of sunshine we had left. From bush to bush the glorious cardinal bird, red from beak-point to tail-feathers, flashed its miracle of colour; green parrots circled and screamed; red-headed woodpeckers beat their insistent beats on the hollowed tree-trunk; the tchels, plump bodies electric blue, heads and wings ebon, clustered in chattering groups amid the sugar-cane; and humming-birds of purple, green, and russet, winged lightning flight around the blossoms. Within for us was stillness—the majestic, awful stillness of God's woodland. No creature moved, no sound broke the silence, no ray of sunlight filtered in upon us through the black canopy of leaf. Only—weirdest of all—day after day there fluttered round us wherever we went a butterfly, a monster of exquisite blue, five inches at least from wing-point to wing-point, dancing in the gloom from tree-trunk to tree-trunk like some mascot. It pleased us to imagine that it was the same butterfly, that it was a mascot dancing before us to show us the way to Mecca. It was a pleasant conceit, but it led to nothing. The butterfly had not any right to be out of the sun in a pitch-black wood; and for us at least he never "cut any ice." He simply fluttered round us and did no good, for as far as Mecca was concerned our almost savage efforts to find it were abortive.
For weeks we searched. Our only way of retracing our path was to notch the trees as we cut. Night by night we crept, wearied and blistered and torn, out of the forest. Day by day we started again cutting and recutting, crossing and recrossing, east to west, north to south, at every half-mile sending the Indian up some tree to spy the land. Meanwhile, our little friend Don Luis and his four sons had joined in the chase, and they worked hard too. They came over to San Benito with a pony loaded with tortillas, and encamped in the other hut, whence at dawn they started each day with a dozen dogs to ransack that part of the forest where Don Luis declared the temple was. But, expert woodmen as they were, it was all no good.
FIRST GROUP: COZUMEL RUINS.
Some five years back a terrific hurricane swept over Cozumel, and this, Don Luis declared, had changed the whole face of the forest. He found himself a very tyro at woodmanship in this great black eight-hundred-square-mile patch of woodland, its undergrowth fenced and littered with the trunks of fallen trees, now veritable snares for the unwary, buried in dense shrub. Don Luis richly earned his daily pay. He did not care about temples, but he did care immensely about the lump sum which, as the carrots in front of the donkey, we had dangled in front of his Yucatecan avarice. We would have trebled that sum if he could have succeeded; though we did not tell him so, when, with almost tears in his cunning eyes, he formally confessed failure, because to have told him so might have really driven him to suicide.
He had hunted in a set area, and we had wandered at will over the forest in all directions and explored Cozumel as it had never been explored before. Thus it would have been a marvel if we had not found something. We did. We found a ruined city lying at equal distance from San Miguel and San Benito towards the northern end of the island. The ruins were in two groups about three-quarters of a mile apart, and suggestive of a once quite considerable town. The first group consisted of two buildings standing a few yards apart on small terraces about 8 feet high and facing south-east. Both two-roomed, they each measured 40 feet by 27, a small platform extending towards the south-east making each terrace a solid block of 40 feet square. On the outside they are both unornamented, but the inside walls of the one on the north-east are ornamented from the floor to where the roof commences with that curious decoration which is met with again and again in so many Mayan buildings—the red hand. It was the best preserved of this kind of decoration we had seen in the islands or on the mainland, and by the curious formation of some of the marks it is certain that they were not, as is supposed, impressions made by dipping the hand in colour or in blood and then stamping it on the wall. They seem rather to have been made with a straight five-toothed instrument like a painter's graining-comb. Around this whole colouring was a scrollwork pattern of the same tint, giving it the appearance of a frame.
Fifty yards in front of these two buildings stood a third facing west and measuring 80 feet by 30 and consisting of a small one-roomed house and a pillared temple, the roofs of which had both fallen. Here, as at Cancun, we were struck by the prevalence of the rounded pillars.
SECOND GROUP: COZUMEL RUINS.
Half-way between the first and the second ruins were the remains of two more buildings, but these were so shattered as to defy any attempts at a suggestion of what they had been like. At the back of the first set, standing isolated in the bush, was a remarkable monolithic rounded pillar close on 9 feet high.
The second group of ruins stands away some three-quarters of a mile through the woods to the westward. We were attracted thither by the appearance of a gigantic clump of trees towering up above the others as if marking the spot of some ancient mounds. On arrival there we found that it did not consist of one mound but three, all joining at their base and of rough unhewn stone. They averaged about 40 feet in height. On the ground-level at the side of them stood a small one-roomed house, probably the home of a priest or custodian whose duty was to watch over these pyramids. These mounds were remarkable not only by the fact of their queer juxtaposition but for the fact that on careful examination we found no trace of a building of any sort upon the top of them. That they were artificial there can be no shadow of doubt. That they were look-outs like the mounds examined by us on the coast is impossible, for in the heart of the island they could have served no such purpose. What we would suggest is that Cozumel formed at one time a Mayan Valhalla where, by reason of the intense sanctity of the soil, the bodies of the greatest caciques and the most revered of priests were brought from the mainland to be buried in the sacred isle. Thus these three mounds we believe to be simply sepulchral, the excavation of which—a gigantic task—would probably prove of the greatest interest. We had heard a rumour of the existence in the northern woods of a large stone and cemented dome-shaped building, doorless and sealed all round. We tried to find this but failed. This, too, was probably a tomb.
About a hundred yards to the north-east of this trio of mounds stood a castillo on a pyramid, the two-roomed building on the top being reached by a stairway on the south-west. The temple was unadorned by any paintings, ornaments or hieroglyphics, but was remarkable for the extraordinary smallness of the apertures which apparently served for doorways. The ground-plans of this ruined city which are reproduced will give some idea of its size.
Again and again in the woods we encountered the remnants of what appeared to be a series of concentric walls. They were certainly artificial, and their building must have entailed immense labour, for the stones were often very large. These wall fragments resemble nothing so much as a breastwork or hastily improvised fortification. We have two theories about them. Either the island was originally very carefully apportioned and the Holy of Holies was surrounded by a series of complete walls, at distances from one another of about a mile and a half, which served as a series of milestones for the pilgrims making their way to the shrine from all the coasts of the island; or, on the first alarm of the Spanish invasion, stone fortifications were roughly improvised around Mecca so that, if the foreigner ventured into the forests, each wall could be defended, thus delaying, if not actually preventing, his reaching the temple. The first theory gains a certain support from the fact that in some places we found suggestions of a small ruined house attached to the wall, which might have been a kind of tollhouse where the pilgrims paid a tribute to the Mayan hierarchy for permission to pass.
The little finds we made in the shape of stone axes, pottery, beads, and so on, were no solace to us for our disappointment. We had sought Mecca in vain. We had spared neither money nor energy; and we had just this comfort, that we had done more in the exploration of the island than anybody before us. Still it was as beaten men that we returned after our mosquito-ridden semi-starvation sojourn in the forest to San Miguel. There the carnival was at its height. Little the Yucatecans recked of ruined temples and Mayan problems. It was enough for them that the sun shone, that they had habanero and anise to drink, and that there were girls to dance with and make love to. Tin-tray music and a charivari of drum and horn fought for mastery over wild whistlings and cat-callings and the "loud laugh which spoke the vacant mind." The few horses of the island had been requisitioned to carry ludicrously drunk Yucatecans in paper caps and masks up and down the beach and round the plaza. Those who could not ride found satisfaction sufficient for their senseless mirth in running behind and shouting. We were hungry to escape from this very unsatisfying gaiety, and we wanted to cross to the mainland where, exactly opposite Cozumel, lie the ruins of Tuloom. But this proved absolutely impracticable. As we have said in the previous chapter, the Indians are encamped there, and, thanks to the brutal treatment they have received, they shoot white men at sight. No boatman could be found to cross to the shore, even though we offered such record prices as a hundred dollars for the ten miles. We had sent a message down to Ascension Bay to General Bravo telling him of our wish to land on the coast hereabouts, and asking for the escort which had been promised us by the officials in Mexico City. The General's answer was a polite shuffle. He did not want us to visit his headquarters, and he knew that if he gave us an escort not a man of it would survive to return to Ascension Bay. He delayed answering our letter until he felt certain that our patience was exhausted, and that we should have started on our return journey for the north coast. As a matter of fact his letter followed us to Merida, and was such a tissue of prevarication as proved how anxiously he guards the secrets of his ineffective campaigning.
In truth, his position was a difficult one, for the dangers to which we asked permission to expose ourselves and demanded that he should expose his escort are very real indeed. An attempt to explore this portion of the eastern littoral would be about as safe as jumping in front of an express train travelling at sixty miles an hour. Should an enthusiastic archæologist endeavour to traverse the country, there is little uncertainty as to what would be his fate. Committed to impenetrable forests, trackless, waterless save for pools in the limestone rock, hidden under matted leaves and undergrowth, defying better eyes than his to find, he would stumble on, tripped up by lianas, wounded by thorns, through an arboreal darkness and thickness too complete for his eyes to see ten yards. But every inch of his halting progress would be watched. Not for a moment would he escape the eyes of his enemies. The end would soon come; it might be in days; it probably would be only hours. Most likely while, wearied out, he rested on a fallen tree-trunk (for centuries of Spanish bigotry and cruelty and the mercilessness of latter-day Mexicans have robbed the Indian of all claims to be called "noble savage"; to-day he is no sportsman, but shoots his game sitting), a shot, fired twenty-five feet from him in the bush, would be the last sound he would ever hear. His body, rifled, perchance mutilated, would be left to rot where it lay—food for the myriad cleanly ants and earth-beetles which swarm the matted, tangled bed of a tropical forest.
[CHAPTER XI]
ON THE SOUTHERN SIERRAS
Carriage exercise in Yucatan is no joke. It is not the gentle fiction, the make-believe of exertion played at by indolent women and invalids, to which we are accustomed. The doctor who ordered it would lie under the grave suspicion of being in league with the local undertaker. The invalid who took it would need nothing further save a shelter in the nearest cemetery. The most inveterate Oliver Twist would not "ask for more." It is all the fault of the roads and natural selection. The roads are unspeakable, and they have evolved an unspeakable vehicle. None but a carriage which has lost all respect for itself and its passengers could survive an hour on a Yucatecan road. The Yucatecan road is not meant for carriages. It is meant for chamois goats and those black ants which have plenty of time on their hands, and consider that the only way round a blade of grass is to climb up one side and down the other.
Time is really what you want on a Yucatecan road. You have got to take it quietly and pick your way. But this is not the programme of the Yucatecan carriage. It is always in a hurry. It is a hurry-skurrying, give-you-no-time-for-repentance desperado of a conveyance. It takes you in and does for you. It blacks your eyes, breaks your ribs, bruises you. It gives you "bloody noses and cracked crowns." It does not care. It has nothing to lose. It is made of huge wheels, stout poles and rough cord, with a rabbit-hutch on top swinging on the cords. You go inside the rabbit-hutch and you try to stop inside. The carriage tries to get you out. That's the game. You can play it as long as you like, as long as you have a bone unbroken or a breath in your body. The carriage does not mind. It is always there, and the rocks in the roads are always there; and the two-inch long thorns on the hedges are always there to scratch your eyes out. So that all day long you can play at carriage exercise in Yucatan until you are reduced to a bruised and bleeding mass.
This demon vehicle is called a volan coche (flying coach). It is quite indigenous and home-grown. It is not even known in Mexico, where the roads are bad but have not reached that pitch of villainy to which the Yucatecan roads have attained. It is drawn by three mules abreast, the centre one in the shafts. When they come to a very large boulder and the wheels stick, they pull, pull all they know, and very slowly the wheel of the volan climbs that boulder, reaches the summit, tips you to an angle of forty-five degrees on the non-boulder side, and then comes down with a sickening thud over the precipice edge of the boulder and, if you are not careful, shoots you through the rabbit-hutch side. Nobody need suffer from liver in Yucatan. A little carriage exercise, and the most rebellious liver which ever made a hell on earth for a mortal would "come to heel."
We tried volan riding. We had to. On our return to the mainland there was no other way for us to cross the country except by buying fresh horses. Our volan was a nice volan as volans go. It had a mattress in it; a tempting-looking soft mattress which persuaded you that, once inside the rabbit-hutch, you would really be quite comfortable. But alas! it was a delusion and a snare. That mattress was in league with the volan. It was the piece of toasted cheese in the volan mousetrap. You could not lie on that mattress, or squat on it, or kneel on it, or sit cross-legged on it, or indeed sit anyhow on it. You had to tie yourself up like those rubbery contortionists at the music halls, and you had to hold on to the iron stanchions which support the rabbit-hutch roof or you would not have had a whole rib left.
In our "Little Ease" we started from Tizimin on our return journey to Merida by a western road which traversed a portion of civilised Yucatan new to us. This is the Espita district. Espita is a prosperous little town, the centre of a quite considerable tobacco industry. Thence we entered once more the henequen country, steering for the village of Xuilub (pronounced Schweeloo), where the women came to the hut-doors dressed, or rather undressed, as we had seen them nowhere else. Nothing on but a short kilt from waist to knee. It was a long ride, and it is sad to think that we swore the whole way. Fortunately the Yucatecan driver suffered no moral damage. He did not understand a syllable of our blasphemy. He probably thought we were talking about ruins, and that archæologists were habitually excitable and shouted and screamed when they talked about ruins. It is a melancholy fact that we really did not care about ruins any longer. We were far too absorbed in our attempts to stop inside the rabbit-hutch and in our collation of all the swear-words we could remember. Finally we did arrive at Merida very tired, very dusty, and in stained khaki suits which we felt to be a positive disgrace in that spick-and-span town. We were veritable Rip Van Winkles. We had been away from Merida close on four months. During that time no letter or paper had been able to reach us. It was quite a queer feeling, and there was news in plenty—some of it, alas! sad enough—awaiting us in the foot-deep pile of letters which our good friend Señor Primitivo Molina of the Banco Yucateco handed us.
We had accomplished our purpose, that of exploring the hitherto unmapped and untraversed north-eastern portions of Yucatan and her eastern islands. Negative results are very often quite as valuable as positive results. As we shall later show, a great deal hangs, as far as our explanations of the origin of the Mayan civilisation are concerned, upon the question, until now undecided but raised by Stephens more than sixty years ago, of how high a degree of perfection the buildings in North-East Yucatan had attained. Our tour has satisfied us that we have once and for all an answer to that question. Our results are negative. We have proved that students of the Mayan problem need waste no time in expeditions to the north-east. Ruins there are, without doubt, which time and the denseness of the vegetation prevented us from discovering; but those ruins, if found and carefully studied, would not add an iota of value to the mass of evidence for and against the theories which have been advanced in explanation of the Mayan problem. For the future, work must be concentrated, if it is to be of any value, upon the extreme southern districts of Yucatan and the Guatemalan border. The troubled state of that country, the hostility of the tribes which range it, its physical difficulties, must for some years to come render investigations extremely hazardous and unsatisfactory. But when eventually the districts south of Lake Peten are opened to archæology, immense progress may be expected. Under the ægis of Mexico the opening up of this country cannot, we venture to believe, ever become an accomplished fact. But when the relations between the governing class and the Indian tribes have assumed that fitting aspect of benevolence and mutual good-feeling which they will assume so soon as Central America forms a portion of the United States, the whole of that archæologically rich district will yield up its secrets—probably to American students, who are already showing that they grasp the importance of Southern Yucatan.
We had always intended, if time permitted, to travel to the south of Merida and view for ourselves the wonderful group of ruins of which the chief are Uxmal, Labna, Kabah, and Sayil. Thus, after a day or two's rest and before we threw off our uniform of khaki and returned to the normal collar-and-tie state of civilisation, we started out for Ticul. This is the most important town on the southern branch of Yucatan's railways. In the very heart of cultivated Southern Yucatan, it lies under the northern slope of that chain of limestone hills or sierras which runs across Yucatan from Maxcanu in the north-west to Tekax in the south-east. Some ten miles after leaving the southern suburbs of Merida is the pueblo of Acanceh, near which are the remains of an Indian city. Here an elaborately carved wall has been discovered.
Then the railway passes through the desolate plains of Mayapan. For some miles vegetation is sparse or nonexistent, and as far as the eye can see is a desert of grey stone, here and there broken by small treeless hillocks, the obvious sites of Indian buildings. If tradition is to be credited, the city of Mayapan was the most important of all the Indian cities at or about the middle of the fifteenth century, and its overthrowal by a confederation of caciques (about 1462) forms the most important certain fact of Mayan history in the century immediately preceding the Spanish invasion. Professor Eduard Seler has laboured to show that the name "Mayapan" is Mexican, though he is obliged to confess that "pan" in Maya means flag or standard. But he puts aside this very simple etymology, and wants to find a purely Mexican origin for the word he translates "among the Mayas." This is hair-splitting. Mayapan was the "flag" city, the chief city of the Mayans, just as the flagship of a fleet is its chief vessel; and it seems to us that the name itself affords the fullest proof that Mayapan was what tradition declares it to have been, the headquarters of the predominant cacique at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. Stephens, who made a fairly careful survey of the ruins in 1842, discovered a mound 60 feet high and 100 feet square at the base. Four staircases, each 25 feet wide, ascended to an esplanade within 6 feet of the top. This esplanade was 6 feet wide, and on each side a smaller staircase led to the top. The summit was a plain stone platform 15 feet square. There were no signs of building on it. Stephens somewhat rashly assumes that this was its normal condition. It is far more probable that there was a building on the top, precisely like that of the castillo at Chichen; and either by the Mayans themselves at the destruction of the city or by the Spaniards, it was thrown down. The latter are the most likely offenders. Mayapan is but ten leagues south of Merida, and the fact that around the base of the mound Stephens found mutilated stone figures of men and animals with diabolically distorted faces, obviously idols, suggests that Catholic vandals had been at work.
Beyond the plain of Mayapan the rail runs through a rich henequen country, the towns and villages of which are connected by good roads—for Yucatan—and ringed with neat gardens of orange, lemon, and banana trees. Here and there at the wayside stations tiny sets of metals, on which stand small open tramcars of green, yellow, and red painted slatted wood—each drawn by a mule—branch off to haciendas of which the white walls and lofty arched gateways, flanked with substantial stone pillars, suggest the entry to a Spanish abbey grounds rather than to a money-making house and factory. The approach of the hot season and the fact that we are travelling practically due south are evidenced by the far larger number of naked children seen, and at one hut-door a little maid of seven or eight stands quietly, as naked as she was born, to watch the train's progress. The men, too, who work in the gardens or drive the henequen wagons wear nothing but the breech-cloth and soup-plate straw hats.
Ticul, which we reach in about three hours, is architecturally as uninteresting as are all these Yucatecan towns. It has an air of considerable prosperity, the majority of the houses being of stone, the flat-faced, flat-roofed type which is so monotonous in Spanish America. Its centre is a great plaza, a rambling square of grass, one side of which is occupied by the church and monastery. The church is a fine one as far as size goes, and is in good preservation. It is connected with the monastery by a corridor from which opens that portion of the latter which is now used as the padre's house. It is quite possible to believe the reports that reached us of this ecclesiastic's prosperity, for his residence approached nearer than anything we had seen in the country to the comfort and substantial neatness of an English rectory. Stephens described the monastery as "grand." We were disappointed. A rambling square of stucco, terraced and arcaded round three sides and approached from the street by a narrow flight of a dozen steps, the building, even in the added dignity of its ruined condition, is nothing but a plastered monstrosity, as typical of the execrable architectural taste of the Franciscans as of the ugliness and arrogance of their religion.
The inhospitality of these Yucatecan towns to the "stranger that is within their gates" really beggars expression. We knew nobody at Ticul, but we wanted shelter for the night and food, and the possibility of arranging for the hire of horses for the morrow. But the Yucatecan does not care what you want. His one idea is what money have you got which he can wrest from you. That is what he wants. If you look dusty and travel-worn, he concludes that you will not be a good payer, and any inchoate interest which the arrival of a foreigner-fly in the immediate neighbourhood of his web may have aroused dies down, and the Yucatecan spider returns to his hammock. Thus it was that we found ourselves as the night fell wandering through the streets of Ticul, almost as mendicants, begging for bread from door to door. Nobody was going to take the bother to prepare a meal for a fair price or to give shelter for the night to two foreign madmen who were demented enough to be interested in "old walls" and obstinate enough not to wish to be "plucked." Finally a Yucatecan woman, with an almost intolerable condescension, agreed to supply our humble wants. We were dead-beat, and our wanderings among the hospitable Indians had somewhat lulled us into forgetfulness of the golden rule that in Yucatan you must bargain with every robber before you enter his cave. We did indeed ask how much the supper would cost; but the woman's reply, that prices at Ticul were not exorbitant like those at Merida, was given with such artless guile that we dropped the subject. When the meal came, it was ill-made coffee, a worse-cooked omelette, a chicken stew and rice, and the price demanded was about that of a first-class dinner at a London restaurant. But we had had enough of this sort of thing, and had not spent so long in the country without having reached that point of exasperation at which the long-suffering worm found his proverbial patience exhausted. So we placed a half of the price demanded on the table, and giving our hostess to understand that this was equivalent to the price in Merida, shook the dust of her inhospitable dwelling off our feet.
Riding horses proved, curiously enough, unprocurable, and we had had more than enough of volans, so we determined to make a walking tour of our exploration of the Southern Sierras. Ticul is a town of gardens, and it would be difficult to imagine anything fairer than our tramp the next morning through its long straggling suburbs of neat mestizo huts, each framed deep in its setting of the rich green of orange tree, palm and laurel, interspersed with the red of roses, with the scarlet trumpet-shaped tulipan blossom, and the purples, pinks, and whites of the climbing convolvuluses. The road we followed was the main road to Peto, broad enough and dusty enough to deserve the title "highroad," and rock-strewn enough to be thoroughly Yucatecan. But the country had altered. We were in a very different Yucatan from that through which for months past we had travelled. Here was no dead level of dense forest-land where views were at a premium, but a wooded undulating country over which you could see for miles as you slowly climbed towards the range of limestone bluffs shining white in the sun, each tufted with clumps of trees, the landscape looking for all the world like a piece of Aberdeenshire. On each side the road ran roughly built grey stone walls, and you felt that you had only to peer over these to see a frothing brown stream leaping down over the boulders. But there the delusion stopped, for the Southern Sierras of Yucatan are as deadly dry as the northern plains of the Peninsula; and though the climb was perhaps not more than six or seven hundred feet, the blaze of the sun made the white dust of the road almost intolerable. Our walk lay for twelve long miles to the village of Tabi, where we had been told that food would be procurable. Having started our walk on the not very generous diet of black coffee and tortillas, we were desperately hungry by the time we saw signs of the village ahead of us. But our hunger was nothing in comparison with our thirst. It was a five-dollar one, and a jaded toper living a dipsomaniacal city life would have probably made us a "sporting offer" of three times that amount for it.
Our bodily needs led to a most characteristic exhibition of the vivid contrast between the Indian and Yucatecan natures. At the very first hut in the village we sent our Indian servant to ask for what we needed most—water. A gentle-looking Indian mother, two or three brown toddlers hanging on to her huipil, came to the door, and then smilingly disappeared, to reappear in a second with water in a calabash, the dried rind of a large gourd which throughout Yucatan is used by the Indians as water-dipper and drinking-cup. Had it been that "draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth" of which John Keats so eloquently sings, the clear, cool limestone water "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim" in that earthy-smelling gourd could not have tasted more like nectar. We must have almost drunk away the good wife's day's supply, for the gourd held close on a pint, and we each drank three, and our servant drank two. Yet when we offered a few centavos in return for our splendid drink, the Indian woman shook her head and would not take them. We insisted, but she was obdurate until we suggested that at least she would let us give them to the black-eyed chiquitos who peeped shyly at us from behind the shelter of her cotton robe.
From her hut we walked on to the village store, the usual filthy earth-floored warehouse; its stained wooden counter crowded with habanero and anise bottles; its roof garlanded with strings of onions, green and red peppers, and tortillas; its floors littered with sacks of maize, rice, pepper, and black beans. Here presided a fat Yucatecan, who to our inquiries as to whether he could prepare us a meal made the reply which with a maddening reiteration one hears all over Yucatan: "No hay; no hay" ("There is not"). But we were too hungry to take "no" for an answer, and we urged that surely he could cook us some eggs, make coffee, and boil us some rice. At first he demurred even to this, but we injudiciously showed such eagerness that he presently did retire into the inner shop, whence, after a consultation with a woman, he emerged to tell us that eggs, rice, and coffee could be served. The man looked such a blackguard that we thought it only wise to ask what the price of this sumptuous meal would be. To this question at first he would give no answer. At last, with a surly shrug of his shoulders, he said, "Quien sabe?" ("Who knows?")
"Who knows?" indeed! Who does not know what eggs, rice, and coffee will cost? The impertinent frankness of the rascal's intentions was too much for us. If he could have only got us to have eaten the food, he meant to charge us about five times its value. With a curse at the limitless dishonesty of Yucatecans, we left his filthy store, preferring hunger to such a host. We walked fifty yards down the village, and then, as we came to a likely looking Indian hut, we knocked at the door and asked the woman, who came from the washing-tray to answer us, whether she could give us any food. With a gentle apologetic smile she said she had very little, but we were welcome to all that. She invited us in, gave us the seats of honour in the hammocks. In a minute or two a pot of coffee was steaming on the embers, she had made up the fire, had sent a child out to the garden where the hens were to find an egg or two, and with rice and tortillas served us a meal which, to our sharpened appetites, was as tasty as a Guildhall banquet. When we had done and were leaving, with many a shy smile and gesture of distaste for charging anything, she asked ... twenty-five centavos—sixpence!
Here you have in epitome the Indian and the Yucatecan. The Indian woman at the beginning of the village, who had toiled at dawn to bring from the village well her household's daily supply of drinking-water, glad to give all we asked for nothing. In the centre of the village the great coarse, unwieldy Yucatecan shopman, the "snubnosed rogue" whose dirty, mean mind was centred upon the wretched gains of his cheating life. And then this kindly Indian hostess who gave us her all and asked but a pittance in return for the clearing of her larders. Savages and slaves! If we wrote ten thousand words they would surely not be so convincing as this eloquent incident at Tabi.
From Tabi the distance to the ruins of Labna is some twelve miles. At Tabi you have reached the top of the first range of those sierras which command the vast valley lands around Ticul, stretching northward toward Merida. The road leads for the first few miles between luxuriant hedges to the hacienda of San Francisco (where we stayed the night); and thence it plunges into a really beautiful wooded, hilly country, the thick foliage climbing up the sides of the bluffs which range each side of the roadway, rearing their bare limestone crowns above the trees. It is a forest world, very different from the desolate and dark woods of the north-east, and as the underwood crackles beneath our feet, deer break away from the coverts at the roadsides and bound up the wooded slopes. At the seventh mile from the hacienda a ruin shows on a hill to the right. It looks worth a climb, and with axe and machete we make our way to it. It had been a two-storeyed building, but the upper portion was in hopeless ruin. The lower storey consisted of six rooms entered by six doorways, the front ornamented by a now much broken row of pilasters half rounded, their attachment to the building being on the flat side. Above these was a second row of smaller pilasters about a foot long, and above them a coping as edging for the platform, once smooth stone, now hopeless earth-tangle and débris, upon which the upper building stood. Between the third and fourth doorway a flying arch still supported the remnants of a staircase some 10 feet wide which led up to the upper building.
Two miles further on through the woodland and the country opens out on the right into a large clearing locked in on all sides by high limestone hills, just the ideal site for the fine city Labna must have been. The ruins form a scene of complete but grand desolation. The north side of what was once the great city square, now a tangle of jungle undergrowth, is occupied by the ruins of a superb palace. Standing on a terrace 400 feet long and 150 feet deep, the building is of such a bizarre shape that it looks as if its builders had been playing a gigantic game of dominoes with stone and mortar. Beginning at the eastern end of the building, for about 200 feet it faces south. At this point the front turns at right angles and runs back some 90 to 100 feet, facing west. Another angle is formed here, the building once more facing south for some 200 feet, almost at the end of which a narrow block projects in a line with the first corner turning, forming a three-sided courtyard, the fourth—the south—side being open. This gigantic building is divided into a series of low narrow rooms, the doors an equal distance from one another, and the whole front alternately formed of flat-hewn stones and pillars, the latter, like half tree-trunks, mortared flat upon the building, slightly barrel-shaped and never monolithic: many of them broken into two columns by two or three small rounds of stone. This curious façade, the like of which we had not met with in the north-east, was crowned by an entablature some 3 feet deep running the whole length of the building, the architrave elaborately carved in rectangular designs interspersed with rosettes, leaves, lozenges, and diamonds, the corners ornamented with gaping alligator jaws in which are carved human heads.
The upper storey of this extraordinary building was reached by a central staircase now in ruins, and stood far back upon a terrace. All two-storeyed Mayan buildings have this peculiarity: the upper storey never forms one sheer face of stone with the lower as in ordinary house-building, but always stands back on a platform more or less wide. Here at Labna this platform was some 25 feet wide, and had once been stone-paved throughout its whole length. At about the middle of it was a circular hole between 2 and 3 feet in diameter. This led to a vault-like chamber about 4 feet deep with parallel walls and triangular arched ceiling, a doorless replica, in fact, of the other rooms of the palace. This subterranean room was built in the solid part of the terrace which formed the roof of the first storey.
Stephens mentions that the Indians of his day were very superstitious about the hole and believed it haunted. This is not surprising, for even to-day, after sixty years' further contact with civilisation, weird stories are associated with most of the buildings. There are other of these secret rooms with entrances from the top both at Labna, Uxmal, and elsewhere. The ancient use of these chultunes, as the Mayans call them, has been much discussed, and Stephens, we think quite rightly, rejected the idea that they were reservoirs for the storing of water. It is far more probable that they were storerooms for grain or other eatables, or possibly treasure-houses; though we incline to the belief that they may have been prisons; a suggestion which we think we are the first to advance.
Standing at right angles to the eastern end of the palace, facing westward, is a second building, one-storeyed, divided into eleven rooms. It is a solid structure in fair preservation, and in singular contrast with the palace in being almost entirely devoid of decoration or carving. But the most remarkable building at Labna stands on a mound about 50 feet high, its slopes now a mass of shrub and débris. It consists of a two-roomed structure which, by reason of the perpendicular wall that rises up some 30 feet above the roof-level, is one of the most extraordinary in Yucatan. Most curious is the effect of the isolated position of this wall, which towers above the ruined rooms of the south side. It is slotted with narrow perpendicular apertures like the window openings so often seen in a Norman castle wall. It is elaborately carved with designs in deep relief, now so ruined that it is next to impossible, at the distance at which one is obliged to stand from the wall, to follow the original scheme of ornamentation. Along the top was once a row of death's-heads. Beneath were two lines of human figures, of which only arms and legs now appear. Over what was the centre doorway are the remains of a colossal figure with beneath it what certainly looked to us like a phallic emblem. The whole of the wall still bears trace of the colours with which its extraordinary carvings were once painted. There can be little doubt that, like the Castillo at Chichen, this building was of a religious nature, and it is one more proof of the extraordinary versatility of the ancient Mayan architects.
Right below this mound to the westward stands the most beautiful of all the ruins at Labna, an arched gateway, our photograph of which we reproduce. This archway is remarkable as being the nearest approach so far discovered in Central America to the classic archways; but as will be seen by our illustration it is still distinctly Mayan with its narrow roofstone. Through this archway you pass into what formed once a quadrangle. Each side of the arch and all round, doorways lead into chambers 12 feet by 8. Over each doorway had been a square recess in which were the relics of a carved ornament which, as Stephens says, looks like the representation of a rayed sun. Right and left of this archway the building of which it formed a grand entrance ran out for some distance, and when complete it must have been a striking example of architectural majesty and grace.
The distance as the crow flies from Labna to Sayil (our next destination) is but a few miles. But the cross-country journey, the whole district studded with limestone hills, is an impossible one, and thus we had to return to Tabi, whence it is some sixteen miles, taking the hacienda of Santa Anna on the way. In many ways Sayil is a replica of Labna, but on a grander scale. We should almost despair of giving any adequate idea of the majesty of what must have been the palace of Sayil if we were not able to reproduce on the plate opposite our photograph of it. The building is immense, sublime in its immensity. Even in its ruined state it strikes one dumb with wonder. To-day no less than eighty-seven rooms can be counted, and there once were probably upwards of one hundred and fifty. What it must have been like when its triple terraces were perfect, and its three columned storeys, carved and decorated, housed their ancient inhabitants, one must leave to the imagination.
ARCHED GATEWAY, LABNA.
THE PALACE, SAYIL.
In the centre of the building was a grand staircase 32 feet wide which ascended to the top of the structure. This staircase and the right-hand portion of the building are in hopeless ruins, but enough remains to prove the grandeur of the conception of these wonderful Indian architects who, working without metals or tools of precision, were able to plan and raise a pile which in its majesty and size is fitting to rank with the architectural wonders of the world.
The palace measures on the ground-floor 265 feet in frontage and 120 feet in depth. The second storey was 220 feet long and 60 feet deep. The third storey is 150 feet long and 18 feet deep. The general design of the façades, those of the lower two having been columnar, as seen clearly in the second, was identical. The façade of the upper terrace was plain. The entablatures of the first and second were elaborately decorated with carvings, among which the most remarkable is the figure of a man supporting himself on his hands with his legs bent wide apart at right angles to his body in an attitude which certainly cannot be said to err on the side of delicacy. The building is to the rear much what it is in the front, though the platforms of the back terraces are narrower. The rooms vary in length from 23 feet to 10. In the second range to the northward there were ten doorways sealed up with masonry like those we had earlier found in the Nunnery building at Chichen. Stephens in 1842 broke into these and discovered that there were ten rooms, 220 feet long altogether, each 10 feet deep, filled with solid masses of mortar and stone. The most extraordinary fact disclosed by him is that the filling up of the rooms must have been done in the course of the erection of the building; for as the stone fillings rose above the top of the doorways the workmen could not have entered the apartments through the doors to complete the work of filling in.
The only way of explaining the means by which these rooms could have been thus made solid is to assume that the work was done from the top before the ceilings of the rooms were superimposed. Stephens is at a loss to explain this feature of the building, for, as he says, if the filling up of these ten rooms was necessary to strengthen the supports of the third terrace, "it would seem to have been much easier to erect a solid structure at once, without any division into apartments." We think he missed the simplest explanation of all. It is quite possible that the palace as first designed was to be two-storeyed. Indeed this is most probable, as this marvellous palace at Sayil is one of the few Mayan buildings which have three habitable storeys. When the building operations had reached the second terrace the cacique, impressed with the grandeur of his work, determined to give the building the added glory of a third storey. But the master architect had his doubts as to whether the foundation work would bear this added weight, and to guard against any "settling" stayed the completion of the rooms in the rear and filled up these ten before the roofs were put on. Surely this is a very natural and very simple explanation of what is otherwise inexplicable.
From the terraces of the palace towards the north-west we see a high wooded hill surmounted by a building. The densest wood covers the intervening space of about a quarter of a mile, and the "going" was of the hardest. But the actual climb of the hill was really the most difficult job; and slipping and sliding, with bleeding hands and torn clothes (for the whole surface is spread with cactus and acacia-like shrubs with thorns two or three inches long and a quarter of an inch wide), we deserve to reach a remarkable building. We do not get our deserts, for it proves to be a much ruined three-roomed house, the only remarkable feature being a carved face of life size over the centre door, and within the print of the red hand. From the terrace the view into the valley below, with the mighty palace breaking the endless woodland, evoked our enthusiasm despite our breathlessness.
At a distance of about half a mile to the south of the palace stand the ruins of a building like that described by us at Labna. On a mound an ordinary building 40 feet wide and flat-roofed is surmounted by a perpendicular wall some 30 feet high and 2 feet thick. This had the same oblong openings like small castle windows which we had seen at Labna, and bore on it the remnants of carved human figures and varied ornamentation. To the S.S.W. of this Stephens discovered yet another remarkable building 117 feet long, 84 feet deep, and divided into sixteen rooms. This stood upon what he describes as probably the largest terrace in Yucatan, from north to south at least 1,500 feet in length. With only one Indian we had to give up the idea of piercing the woods in this direction; but we had seen enough to feel satisfied that Sayil was once a city of first-rate importance. The immense palace alone must have entailed a continuous labour of thousands of workmen for some years.
Three miles from the hacienda of Santa Anna, where we stayed, are the ruins of Kabah. There is every reason to believe that these ruins represent the remains of what was once, though probably only for a short period, a large and powerful city. As far as it is possible to piece together from traditional history the records of this group of cities of the Southern Sierras, it would seem to be fairly certain that the ruins we find to-day represent a vigorous recrudescence of building immediately after, and as a result of, the destruction of Mayapan by the confederation of caciques. Doubtless Labna, Sayil, and Kabah existed as cities before this great victory. But just as the downfall of the overlord of Mayapan was, we believe, the signal for that temporary supremacy of the Itzas, what we might call "the golden age" of Chichen, so it heralded in a period short of a century during which this group of Southern Sierra cities enjoyed an hitherto unknown prosperity. We shall later try to show what exact connection we believe existed between the art of these sierra towns, of fifteenth-century Chichen, and Copan and Palenque.
This architectural period, which is perhaps best of all represented in Kabah, is essentially florid and, though highly adroit in its intricacy, distinctly barbaric. The most notable feature at Kabah, as at most of the ruined cities of Yucatan, is the huge mound or teocalli some 80 feet high, now a mountain of loose stone rubbish and overgrowth, though once stepped all round and crowned by a building. North-eastward on a terrace 200 feet wide by 142 deep (these are Stephens's measurements) stands one of the only two buildings of Kabah which are in any sort of preservation. The structure had a frontage of upwards of 150 feet, and its façade is so remarkable for its ornamentation that we reproduce at page 318 Stephens's drawing, which will give a far better idea of the design than any description. Over the doorways had been a cornice of which remnants remain, and which, as Stephens says, "tried by the severest rules of art recognised among us, would embellish the architecture of any known era." This building had been surmounted by a sort of elaborate stone combing extending the full length of the front and reaching a height of about 15 feet. The interior was planned on the usual arrangement of rooms found in these Mayan cities, each doorway admitting to a front room which in turn gives admission to an inner chamber raised a foot or two above the ground-level of the first and reached by a step. In the centre apartment at Kabah this usually simple step had been replaced by two stone steps carved out of a single block, the lower step being in the form of a scroll. The sides of the steps were carved, as was also the wall under the doorway.
To the north-east stands a second palace, three-storeyed, which must once have been a smaller replica of the majestic building at Sayil. Although hopelessly ruined and silted over with débris, the plan of the building was obviously the same in all particulars, even to the staircase by which ascent was made to the topmost range of apartments. To the westward of these ruins, Stephens, in 1842, found two buildings erected on a great terrace some 800 feet long and 100 feet wide. The first of these houses, with a 217-foot frontage, has seven doorways, each opening to single apartments, except the centre one, which led into two. The doorways had had wooden lintels, which had disappeared. The other house, with a 143-foot frontage and 31 feet deep, was two-storeyed, with a wide staircase in the centre leading to the topmost range. Here Stephens discovered a wonderful carved lintel consisting of two beams, the outer one split in two lengthwise. This constitutes the best example so far discovered of Central American wood-carving.
Tradition relates that this city of Kabah was contemporaneous with the most prosperous days of Uxmal (pronounced Ooshmal), which city we shall now shortly describe. Between the two ran, says tradition, a great paved way of pure white stone, serving as a highroad of communication for the two allied chiefs, upon which their messengers passed bearing letters written on leaves and the bark of trees. Uxmal, at once the largest and the best preserved of all the ruined cities of the Southern Sierras, is between fifty and sixty miles to the south-west of Merida, and stands on the hacienda of Don Augusto Peon, who, however, has not visited it, he told us, more than two or three times during the past nine years, because of its extreme unhealthiness as a place of residence owing to the malaria-breeding swamps. The ruins cover about half a square mile, and consist of five principal buildings. These are the pyramid temple, a castillo such as that at Chichen; a quadrangular edifice which archæologists have agreed to call the Nunnery; the House of Turtles, named from the nature of some of the decorations; the House of Pigeons, from the high, pierced combing which has some likeness to the front of a long dovecote; and the Governor's Palace.
The latter-day names of Mayan ruined buildings are usually unsatisfactory, and perhaps those of Uxmal are the most unsatisfactory of any. Taking the pyramid first, as being at once the largest and the most prominent feature of the ruined group, we find it to consist of a mound upwards of 80 feet high, 240 feet at the base and 160 feet wide. The platform-top of the pyramid measures about 23 feet by 80. The pyramid is built of rough stone and rubble, and was faced with stones flat-hewn, some of which are still in position. On the east side a stairway, steeper than that of Chichen, ascends to the top. The pyramid is crowned with a temple which measures some 70 feet by 12 and is three-roomed. This castillo at Uxmal is distinguished from those at Chichen and elsewhere by a unique feature, namely the building-out of a small edifice or temple some 20 feet below the level of the platform summit of the mound, and having its roof level with it. This building stands on a projecting platform of its own, on the west side of the pyramid, and originally communicated with the ground by a stairway 24 feet wide. It has one doorway, and its façade is more richly ornamented than that of any other building in the group, notable being the colossal "snouted mask" over the doorway. This rests upon a pedestal with two jaguar heads looking each way. The door lintels are sapota beams, which are to-day still in their places, as they were when Stephens visited the city in 1842.
Separated from the pyramid by what appears to have been a small courtyard, is the Nunnery, a group of four buildings roughly forming a quadrangle, with passage-way at the corners; really four distinct buildings forming the sides of a large courtyard. Three of these edifices present a solid front externally, while that on the south, 279 feet long, has as its centre a gateway spanned by an arch, 10 feet 8 inches wide and some 15 feet high. The whole four buildings, though on slightly different levels, may be roughly said to stand on a terrace some 300 feet square. All the buildings have the walls plain and the entablature elaborately sculptured. That on the east had a centrepiece above the cornice; while that on the north was adorned with a false front, consisting of a series of triangular gables. In the scheme of decoration, the most notable features are the so-called snouted mask, which we found at Chichen, and the feathered serpent design. Between the Nunnery and the Castillo Stephens found what he called the House of Birds, because of its exterior being ornamented with rude representations of feathers and birds. To the south of the Nunnery quadrangle still stand the ruined walls of what was a tennis-court, such as we have described and illustrated at Chichen. Still further south stands the Governor's Palace, about 300 feet long, 40 feet wide, and some 25 feet high. It has eleven doorways in front and one at each end. The interior is longitudinally divided into two corridors which are in turn partitioned off into oblong-shaped rooms, the chief of which, in the centre of the building, are 60 feet long. There is nothing notable in the actual building of this palace, which conforms to the designs common at Chichen and elsewhere. The rear of the building is unbroken by doorways, but has two arches towards each end let into the building. The full length of the entablature is elaborately carved in a latticework pattern, with ornamentation superimposed, in which the snouted mask is a leading feature. Over the doorways the ordinary design is broken by specially elaborate carvings which usually take the form of a V shape bordered with a lattice pattern and small projecting squares. To the north-west of this palace is the so-called House of Turtles, which gains its name from the curious frieze on which turtles are the chief ornamentation. It has a frontage of 94 feet and is about 30 feet deep. The east and west ends are much ruined, and portions of the roof have fallen. It is remarkable as entirely lacking the profuse ornamentation of the Governor's Palace and the Nunnery.
To the south-west of this stands the building, in shape a quadrangle, to which the absurd name of House of Pigeons has been given in allusion to a series of nine gables, of which eight are still standing, which form a false front, each gable pierced with thirty rectangular openings in seven horizontal rows. The whole building is 240 feet long. In the centre of the front, which looks northward, is an arch 10 feet wide, leading into what was once the courtyard of the building. The other wings of the quadrangle are in hopeless ruin. To the south of the House of Pigeons is another small courtyard enclosed once on the east and west by buildings, with a mound on the south side up which runs a well-preserved stairway. At the south-west corner of the Governor's Palace is a large truncated pyramid between 60 and 70 feet high and about 270 feet at the base. The top is about 70 feet square, and some 15 feet from it on the north side is a ledge or terrace which suggests that the buildings which once stood on this mound were similar in design to those which we have described as still standing on the mound called the House of the Dwarf.
THE PALACE, UXMAL.
Around Uxmal no excavations of any moment have been made. The owner of the land, Señor Don Augusto Peon, very courteously told us that if we were able to delay our departure he would grant us all facilities for spade-work among the ruins. Unfortunately we could not alter our arrangements; but undoubtedly there is a large field for work here, which will amply reward archæologists in those days when the "dog in the manger" policy of the Mexican "Jacks in office" is a thing of the past, and intelligent landowners such as Señor Peon can assist students in every way instead of having their hands fettered by absurd Federal rules. But though no excavation work has been done, many pieces of sculpture have been unearthed from a surface layer of débris. Such was a column 5 feet high tapering toward the base, where it had a diameter of 20 inches while at the top it measured 28, and ornamented with two rows of hieroglyphics. Another sculpture, found by Stephens, is a seat or couch carved out of a single block of stone and measuring 3 feet 2 inches in length and 2 feet in height. Its design is a double-headed animal of the jaguar type, but which Stephens thought to represent lynxes. Its interest lies in the fact that the representation of some such ceremonial seat was found at Palenque, as we shall presently show.
[CHAPTER XII]
COPAN AND QUIRIGUA
Time did not allow of, nor indeed had we ever contemplated, a visit to Guatemala and the ruins of Copan and Quirigua, or to those scarcely less important ones in the State of Chiapas and around the Usumacinta River. But these are so intricately connected with the problems of the origin of Mayan civilisation and with those views which we venture to advance in a later chapter, that we have thought it best to give here some account of the results of the exploration and excavation work among these groups.
The ruins of Copan are situated in the frontier country of Guatemala and the Republic of Honduras on the east bank of the Copan River, which flows into the Motagua, finally emptying into the Bay of Honduras near Omoa. The name Copan seems to be strictly that of a district or province; but it is now used as the title of a village which has sprung up among the ruins. Of the history of Copan in the century immediately succeeding the Spanish Conquest, somewhat confusing accounts are given. The truth is that north-westward of the ruins, right in the heart of Guatemala proper, stands a town "Coban," and the past of these two places would appear to have become a good deal mixed. The Spanish historian Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzman relates that a town of the name, which he places in the old province of Chiquimula de Sierras, was besieged by Hernandes de Chaves in 1530.[6] A desperate resistance was made by the Indians in defence of an entrenchment formed of strong beams of timber, the interstices filled with earth, with loopholes for the discharge of arrows. Finally a Spanish horseman blundered through at one weak spot and the Indians were routed. The account of this battle cannot very easily be reconciled with the description of ruined Copan given by J. L. Stephens and Mr. A. P. Maudslay. Stephens describes it as surrounded by a wall of cut stone well laid, and of what seems the incredible height of a hundred feet. But allowing for any exaggeration of enthusiasm (he was there in 1839, and it was the first Mayan ruin he had ever set eyes upon), it seems certain that the old Copan was a powerful and well-fortified city, and Mr. Maudslay is probably right in his suggestion that it had been abandoned before the Spanish Conquest.
This is certainly suggested, if not actually corroborated, by the only Spanish account of the ruins extant. Writing at the time of the Conquest, Licienciado Diego Palacio, an officer of the Audiencia de Guatemala, reports to King Philip II. of Spain on the 8th March, 1576, as follows: "I endeavoured with all possible care to ascertain from the Indians through the traditions derived from the ancients, what people lived here or what they knew or had heard from their ancestors concerning them. But they had no books relating to their antiquities nor do I believe that in all this district there is more than one, which I possess. They say that in the ancient times there came from Yucatan a great lord who built these edifices, but that at the end of some years he returned to his native country, leaving them entirely deserted. And this is what appeared to be most likely, for tradition says that the people of Yucatan in time past conquered the provinces of Uyajal, Lacandon, Vera Paz, Chiquimula, and Copan, and it is certain that the Apay language which is spoken here is current and understood in Yucatan and the aforesaid provinces. It also appears that the designs of these edifices are like those which the Spaniards first discovered in Yucatan and Tabasco." It is quite certain that Copan was in ruins in 1576, because Palacio's letter continues, "On the road to the city of San Pedro, in the first town within the province of Honduras called Copan, are certain ruins and vestiges of a great population and of superb edifices and splendour as it would appear they could never have been built by the natives of that province."
The ruins are, as we have said, on the river-bank, and Stephens concluded, judging from the dispersal of the stone remains found throughout the woodlands, that the city had a river frontage of some two miles. On the western bank the only ruin is one on the top of a mountain 2,000 feet high, and it seems probable that this was an isolated shrine, and that the city did not extend to the western bank. A very important feature of Copan—one to which we shall have to refer in a later chapter—is the absence of all remains of palaces or private buildings such as we have described at Chichen and Uxmal.
The existing ruins consist of pyramidal structures and terraces, but apparently without any relics of buildings crowning them. The chief ruin is that which Stephens calls the temple. It is an oblong enclosure, the river-wall of which is no less than 624 feet long and varies in height from 60 to 90 feet. It is built of cut stones from 3 to 6 feet in length and 1 1/2 broad. The other three sides of this enclosure consist of ranges of steps and pyramidal structures varying in height, measured on the slope, from 30 to 140 feet. Near the south-west corner of the river-wall Stephens found a recess which he suggests was once occupied by a colossal monument fronting the water. Beyond are the remains of two small pyramids between which he found traces of a gateway, probably the chief entrance to the city on the riverside. The south side of the enclosure has in its eastern corner a huge pyramid 120 feet high on the slope. To the right of this are other terraces and pyramids with what was probably a gateway into a quadrangle 250 feet square. Here Stephens found many sculptured stones, notable among these a series of gigantic sculptured heads ranged in rows half-way up the side of one of the pyramids. These he took to be death's-heads, but he afterwards reconsidered this decision and suggested that they were intended for apes' heads. For this view he found corroboration in the remains of a colossal ape carved in stone which lay fallen near by, and which certainly seems to suggest that the early occupants of Copan may have reckoned a monkey deity in their mythology. Remarkable, too, was the carving of a head and bust which appears to be a distinct effort at portraiture.
Facing eastward, 6 feet from the pyramid base, he found the first of those many stelae, the upright stones which give Copan its special interest in the Mayan controversy. We here reproduce his representation of it. It is 13 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 3 feet deep, and is sculptured on all four sides from base to summit. It had originally been coloured, the red paint still adhering in places. Some 8 feet away there was a large block of sculptured stone, easily identifiable as an altar. On it was carved, in the front, a full-length figure; on the sides are hieroglyphics. These stelae and altars are the peculiar features of the Copan ruins. Nothing like them has been discovered so far in Yucatan, and from them it is possible to draw certain deductions, as we shall endeavour to do later. A little further on, Stephens found another stela of the same size. The eastern side of the enclosure consists of an almost continuous pyramid-shaped structure, broken here and there by isolated pyramids. At right angles to it, a confused range of terraces, ornamented with death's-heads, branch off into the forest. This plan of building appears to have continued throughout the north side till the river-wall was again reached.
Stephens says that he found no entire pyramid, each mound consisting of at most two or three pyramid sides, and joined, Siamese-twin fashion, to erections of the same kind. The outer side of the pyramidal mound, which thus appears to have formed a confused and rough continuous border for a huge square, littered with stelae and their altars, was broken here and there by stairways, the steps about 18 inches square. These stairs had originally been painted. The interior of this enclosed space was occupied by a series of smaller pyramidal mounds and many stelae. One of the most remarkable of these latter is notable as being, though about the same height as the last shown, shaped differently, being broader at the top than at the base.
Near it is a most remarkable altar. Like the stelae, the Copan altars are monolithic. Each one, Stephens reports, appears to have special reference to its stela, the carvings differing. The four corners of this monolith had been carved into ball-shaped feet, upon which the altar rested. The whole was 6 feet square and 4 high. The top is carved with hieroglyphics. The four sides are sculptured, each with four human figures in bas-relief, and it is noteworthy that this is the only example of such carving found by Stephens; all the stelae and altars being in bold alto-relief. The west side of the sculptures appears to be the chief one, for there the principal figures are represented as addressing each other, while on the other sides the figures are seated as if mere attendants at a ceremonious meeting between chiefs. It will be noticed in the pictures reproduced that the figures are all seated in a peculiar cross-legged fashion, suggestive of nothing so much as the attitude of the figures on the Buddhist stupas. Each man appears to sit on a cushion which displays a glyph, probably his name or office. Between the two chief interlocutors is carved a pair of glyphs. It is remarkable, as Stephens points out, that the figures do not appear to be armed. This is quite the exception among Mayan monuments, and if Stephens is correct in believing that there is no representation of weapons in any of the ruins at Copan,—and he is corroborated by Mr. Maudslay, who made a careful survey,—he would seem to be certainly justified in his conclusion that the ancient inhabitants were not pre-eminently fighters. We shall show that another most important conclusion is possible.
Close to this altar Stephens found the ruins of two towers at each side of a staircase. Half-way up was a pit, lined with stone, 5 feet square and 17 deep. At the bottom was an opening leading to a chamber 10 feet long, 5 feet odd wide, and 4 feet high. At each end of the chamber was a niche. It was clearly a sepulchral vault, and a Colonel Galindo, who, in 1770, was the first man to visit Copan with a view to archæological investigations, put this beyond dispute by his discovery on the floor and in the niches of a number of vases and dishes of pottery, more than fifty of which he declared were full of human bones packed in lime. He also found several sharp-edged and pointed knives of chaya, a kind of flint, and a small head carved in jade, its eyes nearly closed, the lower part of the face distorted, and the back symmetrically pierced with holes. There could be no doubt as to the use of this curious carving. We have ourselves seen in Yucatan exquisite pieces of jade cut into face form and pierced. These were talismanic plastrons, worn by the priests on their breast much as the Lord Mayor of London wears the City Badge. We shall suggest later that these badges constitute valuable evidence as to the origin of the building civilisation. In the reproduction of the elliptical tablet from the palace at Palenque on p. 217, just such an amulet is seen decorating the breast of the deity there figured. Colonel Galindo also found many jade beads and large quantities of periwinkle shells. It might be here worth mention that we ourselves found in a ruin we were examining on Cozumel island, a large conch shell filled with charcoal which was actually embedded in the outer wall. Its position forbade the idea of it or the charcoal having got there by mere chance.
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BAS-RELIEF ON SOUTH SIDE OF ALTAR AT COPAN. |
BAS-RELIEF ON WEST SIDE OF ALTAR AT COPAN. |
Just above this sepulchral vault Stephens found a passageway opening through the side of the pyramid, and running as far as the river-wall, where there was an oblong opening which has caused the ruins to be locally known as Las Ventanas (the windows). The passage-way was just large enough for a man to crawl through on his stomach. Stephens looked in vain for any remains of buildings. Juarros,[7] the Spanish historian of Guatemala, quoting Fuentes, declared that between two of the pyramids at Copan "was suspended a hammock of stone, containing two human figures, one of each sex, clothed in Indian style. Astonishment is forcibly excited in viewing this structure, because, large as it is, there is no appearance of the component parts being joined together; and though entirely of one stone and of an enormous weight, it may be put in motion by the slightest impulse of the hand." For this Stephens also looked, but in vain, though he found an Indian who declared that his grandfather had spoken of such a relic. The whole account sounds incredible.
Stephens discovered the stone quarries of Copan, a range of hills some two miles north from the river, running east to west. Out of the side of the hill the pre-Columbian masons had cut the materials for the many stelae, pyramids, and steps which lay in the plain below. Stephens found many blocks which had been quarried and then rejected for some defects; and in one ravine leading towards the river was a huge monolith, larger than any used in the ruins, which had been left thus half-way on its journey to the city. How such huge masses of stone were carried over even two miles of woodland must always remain one of the greatest of the many puzzles which the erection of the cyclopean Mayan buildings presents to baffled archæology.
To the south of the enclosure described, Stephens found within terraced walls a group of stelae and altars. He thinks that these walls and their statues formed an annexe of the large enclosure which he is probably right in calling the main temple. The stelae were quite close together and are of such interest both artistically and archæeologically that we cannot resist the temptation of reproducing some of them from Stephens's excellent plates. The monoliths averaged 12 feet in height, and are such masses of ingenious ornamentation as would arrest attention even if found as relics of a race the civilisation of which was perfectly understood. But here we have a series of the most intricate alto-reliefs undertaken with such success that they can be accurately copied after many centuries. Stephens found at the Copan quarries blocks of half-prepared stone with hard flints embedded in them. These blocks had been rejected by the workmen for the very excellent reason that their only tools were flint chisels, and with these, of course, they could not shape smoothly the side of the stone which contained flints. At the back of one of the stelae Stephens found that flints had been picked out, leaving holes which formed flaws in the sculpture. Nothing can more plainly indicate the limitations imposed upon these wonderful artists by the circumstances of their culture. They were in the Stone Age, but it was a Stone Age so glorified by their skill that it would put to shame many modern nations armed with tools of precision. Mr. A. P. Maudslay visited Copan in 1884, and in the course of his investigations excavated one of the mounds. He corroborates the statement of Stephens that the monuments of Copan show no traces of buildings such as are found in Yucatan. The mound excavated ran almost to a point. On the east side were the remains of steps. The upper part was formed of rough blocks of stone interspersed with layers of cement and sand. The lower part of the mound was formed of stone and earth, and below ground-level, digging 12 feet down, he found nothing but solid earth. Some 6 feet from the top of the mound he came across a vessel of pottery containing "a bead-shaped piece of green stone, pierced, with a diameter of 2-3/4 inches; six jade beads (the remains of a necklace); four pearls and small rough figures cut out of pearl-oyster shells; the jade whorl of a spindle; some pieces of carved pearl shells. At the bottom of the pot was some red powder and several ounces of quicksilver."
A foot or more above the pot Mr. Maudslay found traces of bones, but he does not say whether they were human or animal. On the ground-level were more bones mixed with red powder and sand, and a bead-shaped stone 3 inches in diameter. Eight or nine feet below ground-level he unearthed the skeleton of a jaguar beneath a layer of charcoal. The teeth and part of the skeleton had been painted red. This is very curious. It is obvious that the animal had not served as a burnt sacrifice, or the bones would have been charred. The flesh must have been stripped off and the painting done before burial. Mr. Maudslay does not explain this strange find. Might it not be that the animal was sacrificed on the altar of the neighbouring stela as a dedicatory offering to the god in whose honour the mound was about to be erected; a kind of consecration sacrifice which had as its purpose the obtaining of the deity's blessing on the new undertaking. The flesh may have been eaten or possibly burnt after it had been removed from the bones, the skeleton being painted red before entombment as a compliment to the colour of the deity's own stela. Such burial of a victim after sacrifice to obtain a blessing upon a new undertaking is a very common rite among savage peoples. Thus the Dyaks and other peoples of Malaysia killed a slave and buried his body in the foundations of a house.
In another small mound Mr. Maudslay found fragments of human bones, two small axes, and portions of a jaguar's skeleton and some animal teeth which he suggests were dog's, but which were probably jaguar's. In yet another mound stones carved into death's-heads were found and small stone serpents' heads. He speaks, too, of figures of jaguars carved on either side of the stairway of one of the pyramids, and on the top step "a human head in the jaws of an animal." He believes that he found traces of glyphs on the facings of the steps; and the edges of many of the stairways were elaborately carved, usually with entwining snakes. His reports make it obvious that Stephens had not exaggerated in any degree the wonders of Copan. It is indeed very doubtful if the Spaniards at the time of the Conquest ever came across the ruins, though, as Stephens points out, Cortes in his memorable journey from Mexico to Honduras must have passed within two days' march of the city. This fact certainly goes far to prove that in Cortes's day Copan was already deserted, or he would have heard of it and turned aside to subdue its cacique. But after all, this is but theorising. The Spaniards may have seen Copan in all its wonder of carving and paint, and been so little impressed as to leave us not a line about it. For, as even the ever amiable Stephens admits, "the conquerors of America were illiterate and ignorant adventurers, eager in pursuit of gold and blind to everything else."
The ruins of Quirigua stand on a level plain covered by dense forest, a little more than half a mile from the left bank of the Motagua River near En Cuentros, some five miles from the town of Quirigua. They consist of monuments almost identical in shape and arrangement with those of Copan. Mr. Maudslay, to whose patient and scholarly researches there for several years archæology is indebted for the remarkable detailed account contained in the Biologia Centrali Americana, says the site must have always been subject to inundations, and that the level of the ground would appear to have been raised since the monuments were erected.
FRIEZE AT PIEDRAS NEGRAS, USUMACINTA RIVER.
(From a photograph by Herr Maler.)
STELA AT COPAN, GUATEMALA.
He describes the ruins as consisting "of numerous square and oblong mounds and terraces 6 to 40 feet high." Most of them are faced with worked stone, and approached by steps. In the central space around which they are grouped stand thirteen carved stelae. Six of these vary between 3 and 5 feet square, and 14 to 20 feet high out of the ground. The altars in front of these stelae are described by Mr. Maudslay as oblong or rounded blocks of stone shaped to represent huge turtles or armadillos or some such animals. The largest altar found by him was shaped like a turtle, weighed about 20 tons, rested on three slabs, and was roughly a cube of 8 feet. He says that the carvings on the stelae and altars are human heads or faces of animals, and that plants or leaves never occur though there is a free use of plumes and feathers and occasionally a plaited ribbon. Mr. Maudslay's account supports in the main Stephens's short account of the place. The stelae the latter describes as being twice or three times as high as those at Copan, and always monolithic. One of which he gives a drawing is carved on the front with the figure of a man, on the back with that of a woman. The sides are covered with hieroglyphics in low relief just as at Copan. Another stela stands 26 feet out of the ground, and, as Stephens said, has probably 6 or 8 feet buried. It is notable as leaning 12 feet 2 inches out of the perpendicular. The side towards the ground is ornamented with the figure of a man.
As has been said, the general type of the ruins is identical with those at Copan; but the monoliths, though much larger, are carved in lower relief, and the ornamentation is distinctly less rich in design. Stephens's supposition was that Quirigua is older than Copan. Mr. Maudslay believes that the whole site was once paved. He notes that the carvings exhibit no weapons. This, as we have mentioned, was specially remarked by Stephens at Copan. There is much significance in this fact, though we scarcely think that it justifies the presumption to which it seems to have led Mr. Maudslay, who in a paper he wrote for Nature in 1892, declares the colossal figures on the stelae of Copan to represent female deities exclusively.