LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CITY OF THE
SACRED WELL
CHAPTER I
YUCATAN, THE LAND OF THE MAYAS
IMAGINE yourself the sole owner of a plantation within which lies a city more than twelve square miles in area; a city of palaces and temples and mausoleums; a city of untold treasures, rich in sculptures and paintings. Would you not feel shamefully wealthy? And does it not seem strange that Don Eduardo, the master of such a plantation, takes the fact of his ownership with apparent calmness?
But, before your fancy carries you too far, let me tell you a little more about this remarkable city, which may dampen your ardor for ownership, but which only increases its value in Don Eduardo’s eyes. It is a dead city. Its thousands of inhabitants perished or abandoned it nobody knows how long ago—probably before Columbus first saw the shores of America. And it is in the heart of Yucatan, where Mexico, ending like the upflung tail of a huge fish, juts into the gulf, while Cuba serves as a sentinel a hundred and fifty miles to the eastward.
The Treasure City, the City of the Sacred Well, with the queer-sounding name of the Chi-chen Itza (pronounce it Chee´chen Eet-za´), is for the most part overgrown with tropical jungle. Its treasures are valuable only to the antiquarian.
Early in our conversations about the City of the Sacred Well, Don Eduardo told me that because at the time of his purchase the plantation was well within the territory dominated by the dreaded Sublevados, the rebellious Maya Indians, no planter dared live in or even visit the region for long, and so he was able to secure the land from its absentee owners cheap, as plantation prices run in Yucatan.
THE ANCIENT CITY OF CHI-CHEN ITZA IS AT NO GREAT DISTANCE FROM THE UNITED STATES.
“My life-interest has been American archæology,” he said, “and I came first to Yucatan, thirty years ago, to explore its ruins and relics of an ancient civilization. Even before that I had read of the immense Sacred Well at Chi-chen Itza—a well as wide as a small lake and deep enough to hold a fifteen-story building—and had made up my mind that I would be the man who some day made it yield up its secrets. For a long time I tried to persuade various wealthy Americans to finance the undertaking, but organizing a stock company to raise sunken galleons along the Spanish Main would be a simple task as compared with my difficulties in promoting what seemed a will-o’-the-wisp project. At last, however, I did succeed.”
But I am ahead of my story.
The trip from New York to the City of the Sacred Well requires but a week and may now be accomplished luxuriously, whereas my earlier journeys over the same route were anything but comfortable. Mr. John L. Stephens, who was sent to Yucatan by the United States Government in 1841, describes, in his interesting book “Incidents of Travel in Yucatan,” the difficulties of travel which he met. They might have daunted any spirit less courageous than his. His four volumes, although written nearly eighty years ago, retain their pristine freshness and are still authoritative. I recommend them heartily to the reader.
On any Thursday the traveler destined for the City of the Sacred Well may board at New York a Ward Line steamer bound for Progreso, the only port of Yucatan. The liner stops over at Havana, and a day and a night after leaving that hectic city one awakes in the early dawn to the deep-chanted tones of a sailor who is casting the lead. “Four fathoms,” he cries; then, “Three fathoms,” and finally the engines are hushed and out goes the anchor. Through the port-hole is seen a lighthouse and behind it a faint, foggy vista of low-lying sandy shore.
By the time the unhurried ritual of arising has been performed and one appears on deck all is flooded with brilliant sunshine. The sky above is a cloudless cobalt blue. The day is hot, but the sea-breeze keeps it from being uncomfortably so. One senses, nevertheless, in some subtle way, that he is actually in the tropics. So shallow is the water that ocean-going vessels may not safely approach to within less than five miles of the rather uninspiring port of Progreso, marked by several long piers jutting into the sea and the aforementioned lighthouse. Passengers and goods must be taken off in lighters or in small boats. On approaching the shore one sees rows of pelicans sitting alongside the wharves—the most serious and sad-looking birds imaginable. They remind one of the rows of Glooms frequently portrayed by one of our cartoonists in the daily newspaper comic strip.
There is little reason for tarrying in Progreso, even though it is the third most important seaport in Mexico. It is from here that the henequen of Yucatan is shipped, and the cultivation of this cactus-like plant, from whose fiber rope and twine are made, constitutes the chief enterprise of the province. Two railroads, one narrow-gauge, the other standard, cover the twenty-four miles between Progreso and the lovely city of Mérida, capital of Yucatan. Oddly enough, the fare is higher on the narrower, longer, and poorer road than on the road of standard gauge. The latter is modern in every respect and provided with coaches and locomotives imported from the United States. The daily Peniche Express starts on time and arrives in the same fashion.
The Grand Hotel at Mérida is the customary stopping-place for all foreigners and is a very good and well-operated institution. It faces the beautiful tree-lined Plaza Hidalgo, but is, unfortunately, located close to a number of churches and a cathedral whose cracked bells are rung mightily at various hours and particularly when one wishes to sleep. As a result, persons not yet hardened to this venerable Spanish-American custom are likely to have a broken night’s slumber.
Mérida is a city of 63,000 people and is modern in many respects. It is hot there in the sun but cool in the shade, for there is always a breeze from the perpetually blowing trade-wind. The city is healthful, well paved, electrically lighted, and excellently served with street cars, and it has many handsome buildings and residences. Its population varies all the way from the pure Castilian, through the Mestizos, to the Mayas or full-blooded Indians. Almost every night a band plays in one of the several plazas or parks. North-American airs are favored and I have heard them much more badly played by musicians in our own land than here under the tropical moonlight, in a setting of rarely beautiful and fragrant flowers. During the band concert daintily clean Indian girls, in their voluminous embroidered dresses or huipiles and embroidered sandals, circle about. In another circle stroll their Indian beaux in high-heeled sandals and starched white cotton suits. The ladies of the upper class, dressed in the Spanish or European manner, are driven slowly about the plaza in their automobiles. Formerly carriages—the sort we call, or did call, landaus—were used, but the automobile has displaced these and in so doing has destroyed half the charm of the scene. Nevertheless it is still charming. The romance of it may be guaranteed to put a thrill into the cold heart of the loan shark from Chicago. It alone is worth the trip to Yucatan and it cannot be described; it has to be experienced at first hand.
During the month of February there is a carnival in Mérida, ending with a fancy-dress ball for the four hundred socially elect. The carnival rivals the Mardi Gras of New Orleans and is enthusiastically celebrated by the whole populace. The floats and decorations are quite as costly and tasteful as any seen in the New Orleans celebration. One year I happened to be in Mérida at the time of the carnival and through the kindly assistance of my good friends Mr. and Mrs. James I received an invitation to the ball. This gorgeous affair would have compared creditably to any similar festivity in New York.
The ball took place at the palatial home of a wealthy Yucateco. This house is built in the usual Yucatan fashion. In front is a large doorway guarded by a heavy wrought-iron grill or gate. On each side of the doorway are the living-quarters, consisting of a dining-room and what we should call a living-room. These rooms form the front of a quadrangular structure surrounding a patio in which are flower beds, fountains, and tiled walks. Around the inner wall of the quadrangle is a promenade wide enough for several people to walk abreast and this is roofed over, the tile roof being supported by pillars and arches of Moorish type. The wings and rear section of the house contain the chambers for the family and guests, the kitchen, and the servants’ quarters. I imagine that this particular residence had cost not much less than a million dollars. The interior is finished in Italian marble and luxuriously furnished in the Parisian manner.
And this is by no means the most palatial residence in the capital. The wealthy people of Yucatan spend much of their time in Europe and their homes show the effect. The houses have beautiful tiled floors and the walls are frequently frescoed or covered with excellent paintings; yet as a rule the rooms are somewhat bare of furniture. One building particularly worthy of mention is the most ancient in Mérida, erected in 1549 by Don Francisco Montejo, the Spanish conqueror of Yucatan. On its façade is a grotesque Indian-Moorish representation of two armored knights trampling on prostrate Indians, while below is a stone tablet bearing the name of Montejo and the date of building.
Recently an American club was started in the city, with a membership of several Americans, three or four Britons, and the remainder Yucatecos who speak English; and some do speak it fluently. The club is predominantly masculine, as the only ladies who attend are those who have lived at some time or other in the States and have acquired our customs. As a rule the women of Yucatan observe the old Spanish custom of seclusion. Girls are not permitted to go out with young men. A girl’s lover may spend the evening standing before the barred window of his inamorata’s home, conversing with her and strumming upon his mandolin or guitar for her edification. If he is finally accredited as a suitor, he is permitted to enter the house and sit in a stiff-backed chair across the room from his sweetheart, but Mamma and Auntie and all the other ladies of the family are there, too, to insure decorous behavior.
The population of Yucatan is chiefly composed of the native Indians or Mayas. They are simple, kindly people and capable of development, for they are highly intelligent. To the best of our knowledge they are the direct descendants of the early Mayas, who in culture and achievements compare favorably to the people of ancient Egypt. Some of the wealthy Yucatecos are descendants of the old Maya nobility and still retain the original names denoting noble birth. But many descendants of Maya kings of old are now sunk in poverty.
Most of the present-day Mayas speak a language which has developed little from its primitive syllabic form. The Japanese, many of whom are found in Yucatan nowadays, learn the Maya tongue easily. In fact, many Japanese and Maya words are identical in sound, but as far as I know they have absolutely no kindred meaning. Some theorists have even advanced the idea that the similarity in form and construction of the Japanese and Maya languages indicates a common prehistoric origin. But there is scant proof of this, inasmuch as all primitive languages are syllabic in form.
The Maya is short in stature but surprisingly sturdy. A native will carry a load of a hundred pounds for fifteen miles without showing signs of undue fatigue. The carrier supports the load on his back and it is held in place with a band or strap passed around the forehead. Occasionally the carriers stop and let down the loads, but never for more than a few moments. An Indian porter will trot upstairs with a trunk which an ordinary mortal could hardly budge and which, alone, he contrives somehow to lift upon his back. I remember seeing two Indians carry a piano, supported on poles, for a distance of two blocks, with their customary gliding shuffle when carrying a burden. Had they at any time fallen out of step the piano must surely have been wrecked. This shuffle or trot is half-way between a walk and a run and it eats up distance.
Not uncommonly the Mayas are handsome, with regular, delicate features. Some of the young women are very beautiful, even judged by North-American standards. They are mature at twelve years of age and, like the women of so many races of the tropics, they wither or grow fat at a comparatively early age. The color of the skin is about that of a good summer coat of tan, though possibly a bit more reddish in hue. Dress the average Maya in our mode and put him on any street in our country and he would pass without comment. On closer inspection he might be said to be of foreign ancestry, but certainly he would not be mistaken for a negro.
These people, descendants of a truly great race, are decidedly superior to all other native American peoples. Their mentality is of a fairly high order. At first, in my visits to Yucatan, I had no knowledge of either the Spanish or the Maya tongue and when I had only natives for companions I was compelled to communicate with them by sign language made up on the spur of the moment. Even in the jungle my companions always understood my directions easily and carried them out correctly.
The ordinary, every-day dress of the native men is a pair of white-cotton trousers ending half-way between knee and ankle. We should have difficulty in defining them either as long or as short. The upper garment is a short-sleeved undershirt, and the ensemble is topped off with almost any kind of straw hat. Usually they also wear a short blue-and-white-striped apron fastened about the waist. Wide belts are popular—the wider the better. Frequently the men go barefoot, but more often wear sandals, fastened with twine about the ankle, a string passing from the front of the sole and between the first and second toes. When working in the fields the men sometimes discard apron and trousers, wearing only a breech-clout and hat. Sometimes they let their hair grow long so that it falls over their faces and then even the hat is discarded. On Sundays and feast-days the more affluent, at least, blossom out in starched white trousers and jacket and high-heeled wooden sandals.
The women customarily wear a huipile, which garment is neither a Mother-Hubbard nor a nightgown, but belongs, evidently, to the same genus or species. At any rate, it is sufficiently modest. It has a slightly low neck and short sleeves and reaches half-way from the knee to the ground. Beneath this is the pic, a white underskirt tied about the waist with a draw-string. Over all is worn the rebozo, a kind of shawl, and the native woman feels much ashamed if seen without this useless garment. Sandals may or may not be worn. The costume is always essentially the same. Sometimes the huipile is ornately and beautifully embroidered at the neck and on the sleeves. I am told that a girl will spend a year in embroidering a single huipile for her hope-chest. The garment is of ancient origin and I have seen murals in the ruined temples, painted centuries ago, which show women in just such embroidered garments, and at work making tortillas, which are still the main article of food in this land.
Many of the Maya women wear gorgeously embroidered sandals or slippers. The hair is done up in a knot at the nape of the neck and tastefully fastened with a ribbon. Gold chains with various sorts of pendants, such as medallions of the Virgin Mary or crosses, are very popular. Frequently the Maya belle wears several of these chains. And they must be solid gold; plated stuff or alloy may not be worn. It simply isn’t done. In her native costume the Maya girl is very pretty and picturesque, but in European dress she resembles only a shapeless bundle tied in the middle.
The Mayas are all very clean; the daily bath for men, women, and children is universal. A sort of wooden trough serves as a bath-tub as well as the family wash-tub. The bather pours the water over his body and makes a little water go a long way, because water must be carried by hand, usually from a distant well. For a man, even the humblest, to come home at the end of the day and find his bath unprepared is just cause for a rumpus with his wife. Clean bodies and clean clothes are characteristic of the Maya and much of the generally considered more civilized world might well take a lesson from him in this respect.
The women stay at home and attend to their household tasks and take care of their numerous children while the men work in the fields. This custom is universal even among the laboring people, and it is noteworthy because nearly everywhere else in the world both women and men work in the fields. In fact, in many countries the man does the most resting.
The Maya men are exceptionally fond of children and a widow with children stands an excellent chance of finding a stepfather for her brood. It is not uncommon for a man of twenty to marry a widow twice his age, chiefly for the sake of a ready-made family. Incidentally, the unmarried Maya maiden with a child or two, especially if the children are boys, is somewhat more likely to find a husband than her virgin sister. The fact that there may be some question as to the paternity of her offspring is of small consequence in the eyes of her prospective husband. But once married, she may accept no attentions from men other than her spouse. The husband may and does shoot on sight any cavalier found hanging around her. It used to be the custom to suspend a string of shells near the door, and one did not enter a house without giving due warning by shaking the string. A man did not enter at all unless the men of the family were present.
Maya nature is that same human nature found the world over. If abused, these people can be ugly and vengeful. Treated in a reasonably decent manner, they are kindly, generous, hospitable, and scrupulously honest. Personally, I have never been cheated nor overcharged by a native. I suppose that as more and more tourists come to Yucatan the invidious custom of fleecing the traveler will be established here as it has been everywhere else.
As has been said, water is scarce in this land, and frequently the women have to go long distances for even a jugful; yet they are always willing to share their supply with any one. The wayfarer is never turned away from their doors thirsty or hungry, even though he consume the last drop of water or bit of food in the house.
The Indian met anywhere, in the woods or on the trail, invariably removes his hat and voices a polite greeting. There were employed at Chi-chen Itza, during much of Don Eduardo’s work, about one hundred Indians. It was their pleasant habit each evening about sunset to pass in line before the hacienda and bid us good night. The ceremony took place as they were returning from the little near-by church,—for all the natives at that time were good Catholics,—and we saw no more of them until dawn, which was our hour for beginning work.
The modern Maya is devout, but he takes his religion placidly, leaving it to his spiritual adviser to tell him what to do or believe. In nearly every native hut is a shrine before which are dutifully observed the articles of faith—the faith of his conquerors who took away his galaxy of gods and substituted Catholicism.
The Maya home is built much as it was in ancient times. It usually consists of but one large rectangular room. The foundation is of stone held together with plaster called zac-cab, which means “white earth.” The walls are of poles or of stone plastered with zac-cab. The roof is peaked and thatched with straw or with stiff palm-like leaves. The door is of wood and there is sometimes a window, barred but without glass. A wooden cover may be inserted from within to close this opening when desired. No matter how poor the Maya family, there is always a flower garden in the rear of the house. If his domain is very limited, the garden of the Maya may be reduced to what may be grown in a large-sized Standard-Oil can.
Within, the Maya home is very simple. There are no beds as in ancient times; the native has adopted a Spanish innovation, seeking his rest in a hammock suspended from wooden pegs set in the wall. The hammocks are taken down when not in use. A simple stool or two, a bench or a chest, possibly a table, and the ever-present shrine constitute the furniture. Not infrequently there is an American-made sewing-machine. The kitchen is outside, in another smaller building, and the stove consists merely of a crude stone oven or heap of stones. The bath-room and laundry, where there is a wooden trough to hold water, also is outdoors. At meal-times the family sits on stools about a pot or vessel containing the pièce de résistance, and the use of fingers is not frowned upon.
The natives not resident in the towns or cities are for the most part employed on the haciendas, the majority of which are engaged in the raising of henequen. A few years ago there appeared a series of magazine articles, under some such heading as “Barbarous Mexico,” describing in the most approved yellow-journal style the cruelty and tyranny of the Mexican planters. I suppose there really are some isolated cases of cruelty, but in general the treatment of native workers by the plantation-owners leaves little to criticize. The native is free to leave one employer to seek another. His pay is good and he certainly is not overworked. On nearly every hacienda ample provision is made for entertainment and the fiestas and dances so dear to his heart. Many native families have lived and labored on one plantation for several generations—a fair indication that they are not ill-treated. One of the atrocities recited in the magazine articles just mentioned was the tying of an Indian to a post, where he was whipped severely. The whipping-post has existed, but its use was fostered by the Indians themselves and was reserved for the habitual drunkard or him who repeatedly abused his wife and children. Possibly a similar course of treatment might be beneficial to some citizens of the United States.
There was one unfortunate event, however, which reflected no credit on the natives, but for which they were far less to blame than a certain class of whites. Not long ago the creed of bolshevism was spread among these poor credulous people by a Rumanian fanatic, resulting in the murder of several plantation-owners and the burning of several estates. A few Indians at Don Eduardo’s hacienda, who had for some time failed to pay the slight rental required of them, became unruly and the master ordered them to pay up or leave. In reprisal they set fire to his house, Casa Real, and all the out-buildings, destroying many priceless antiquities intended for an American museum of archæology. The house has been rebuilt, but the lost treasures can never be replaced. The Indians also drove off all Don Eduardo’s stock and took everything in the way of valuables that was portable.
Don Eduardo, in relating his experiences as a plantation-owner, once said:
“A certain residue of Indians were never conquered by the Spaniards, nor have they ever been subdued by the Mexican Government; and they pay no taxes. They are called Sublevados and I have been warned ever since I came to Chi-chen Itza that some day the Sublevados would go on the war-path and wipe me and my hacienda clean off the map.
“Eventually I became tired of waiting for them to visit me and enjoy the friendly reception I had prepared for them, which included, among other things, the fortifying of the Great Pyramid. So I decided to make a little reconnaissance. Traveling south into their own country, I lived for some time in their villages, where they still practise the ancient Maya rites and incantations, even though there is a slight veneer of Catholicism among them. Since then I have traveled many times into the Sublevado territory; in fact, have been made a chief of the tribe by solemn bond and ritual. I have found them a peaceful, friendly lot of ignorant Indians, unlikely to do any harm as long as they are left to their own devices and in their present habitat.”
The Maya is happy-go-lucky, improvident, and usually lazy. He dearly loves a good time, a good story, and a good joke, especially if it is of the practical variety in which the other fellow is the butt. He is very fond of fiestas and dances.
The native dances are quite different from ours. The men and women sit close to the walls of the hut or inclosure, sometimes on chairs but more often on stools. On important occasions, the music is furnished by violins, guitars, and perhaps some wind-instruments. But always there is one musician with a long gourd containing stones, which is shaken in time to the music, producing a hollow chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck sound. Sometimes the only instrument is a flageolet. The music is always in a minor key and is without pause or period or end. A girl—any girl—gets up and proceeds to the center of the floor, where she shuffles about for perhaps a minute. Then from the other end of the room some man, who may be a stranger to the girl, comes forth and shuffles about in front of her. They do not touch each other. They gyrate rather slowly and move in circles, always facing each other. When either becomes weary, he or she retires and another takes up the dance. If the room is sufficiently large there may be as many as three couples dancing continuously in this manner. The dancers do not smile nor appear to be enjoying the occasion; yet they must derive pleasure from it, for throughout the country dances are held frequently.
Knowing the Mayas of to-day, and their customs, it is interesting to follow their history back to the earliest times of which there is authentic record, and from there, through legends and scraps of knowledge, into their most ancient past. For four centuries we may trace them backward through well-known history. For still another century the record is fairly clear. Back of that is only legend, with here and there some startling, incontrovertible fact to prove their antiquity. The flickering light of our knowledge becomes dimmer and dimmer. We know a date in their history about one hundred years before Christ, but on what preceded that no feeblest ray falls to enlighten our ignorance.
To one man, long since departed, we owe a great debt. But for him, our knowledge of the ancient Mayas would be almost nil, and it is only by a lucky chance that what he wrote was not lost to us. This man, Diego de Landa, was Bishop of Yucatan (1573-79), and he came to America on the heels of the Spanish conquerors. His manuscript,—almost our only guide to Maya antiquity and known as “Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan,”—lay hidden in Madrid for nearly three hundred years ere it was discovered and published.
To show how little the Mayas have changed in four centuries I am going to quote from Landa, using a very free translation but endeavoring to preserve his meaning. I hope the reader will bear in mind that the following is a description of the Mayas of the sixteenth century and is chiefly interesting when compared with the Mayas of to-day:
The Indians of Yucatan are well built, tall and robust. They are generally bow-legged, because mothers customarily carry infants astride their hips. It is considered a mark of beauty to be cross-eyed. The heads and foreheads are flat, having been bound in infancy. Their ears are pierced for ear-rings and are torn by the sacrifices. The men do not have beards and it is said the mothers burn their boys’ faces with hot cloths so that hair does not grow. Some do have beards, but these are very stiff, like the bristles of a pig. The men permit the hair of the head to grow long except on top, where they burn it off. Thus the hair of the crown is short, but the remainder is long and is braided and wound like a wreath around the head, leaving a small tail in the back as tassels or tufts.
Their dress is a strip of cloth about as wide as a hand and wound several times about the waist, with one end hanging in front and the other in the back. The women adorn these ends curiously with feathers. They wear large square blankets, which they fasten to their shoulders, and sandals of hemp or deerskin.
They bathe a great deal and do not try to hide their nudity from the women, except with their hands. The men use mirrors and the women do not. The expression for cuckoldom is that the wife has put the mirror in her husband’s hair above the occiput.
Their houses are roofed with straw or palm-leaves and the roof has a considerable slant. They put a wall lengthwise through the middle of the house and in it some doors. In the back half are the beds and the other section is whitewashed and is the reception room for guests. This room is like a porch, the whole front being open and without a door. The roof over this part of the house extends well down over the walls, to keep out sun and rain. The common people build the houses of the chiefs and house-breaking is considered a grave crime. Beds are made of small rods with a mat and cotton blankets on top. In summer the men especially sleep in the open room or porch, on mats.
All the people unite in cultivating the fields of the chief and supplying food to his household. In hunting, fishing, or bringing salt, a share is always given to the chief. If the chief dies he is succeeded by his eldest son, but his other descendants are respected and helped. The subordinate chiefs help in all things, according to their stations. The priests live from their offices and from the offerings given to them. The chiefs rule the town, settle disputes, and govern all affairs. The principal chiefs travel a great deal and take much company with them. They visit rich people, where they arrange the affairs of the villages, transacting their principal business at night.
The Indians tattoo their bodies, believing that they become more valiant thereby. The process is painful, as the designs are painted on the body and then pricked in with a small poniard. Because of the pain the tattooing is done only a little at a time, and also because the tattooed part becomes inflamed and matterated, causing sickness. Those who are not tattooed are ridiculed. The natives like to be flattered and they like to imitate the Castilian graces and customs and to eat and drink as we do. They are fond of sweet odors and employ bouquets of flowers and sweet-smelling herbs. They are accustomed to paint their faces and bodies red, which does not improve their appearance but which they consider beautifying.
They are very dissolute in getting drunk, from which follow many evils such as murder, arson, rape and incest.... They are fond of recreation, especially of dances and of plays containing many jokes and witticisms. They sometimes become servants for a time in a Spanish household just to absorb the conversation and customs and these are later artfully represented in native plays.
Their musical instruments are small kettle-drums played with the hand and another drum made of hollow wood, played with a wooden stick containing on the end a ball made of the milk of a certain tree [rubber]. They have long, slender trumpets fashioned from hollow sticks with gourds fastened at one end. Another instrument is made from a whole turtle-shell, which is played with the palm of the hand and emits a melancholy sound. They have whistles and flutes of reed or bones of the deer and from large snail-shells. These instruments are played for their war-dances. One of these dances is called co-lom-che, meaning reed. A large circle of men is formed. Two go into the center. One has a handful of darts and while dancing in an upright position he casts the darts with all his strength at the second dancer, who dances in a squatting position, from which he deftly catches each dart with a small stick. After the darts are all thrown, these two dancers return to their original places in the circle and two new dancers advance to the center and repeat the dart-throwing. There is another war-dance in which about eight hundred men take part. They carry flags and the tempo is slow. They dance the whole day without stopping and during the whole day not one man gets out of step. In no case do the men dance with the women.
There are many occupations but the people most incline toward trading, taking salt, clothing, and slaves to the lands of Ulna and Tabasco, where they exchange for cocoa and counters of stone which are their money. With these coins they buy slaves, or the chiefs wear them as jewels at feasts. They have other counters and jewelry made of certain shells. These are carried in purses made of network. In the markets are all manner of goods. They loan money without usury and pay their debts with good-will. Some Indians are potters and carpenters who are well paid for the idols of wood and clay which they make. There are surgeons—or, rather, wizards—who cure with herbs and incantations. Above all, there are laborers and those who plant and gather the corn and other produce which they store in granaries to be sold in season. They have no mules or oxen.
The Indians have the good custom of helping one another in all their work. In working the land they do nothing from the middle of January to April except gather manure and burn it. Then come the rains and they plant the fields, using a small pointed stick to poke holes into the ground in each of which they deposit five or six seeds which grow very rapidly in this rainy season. They also congregate in groups of about fifty for hunting or fishing.
When going on a visit, the Indian takes a present to his host and the host gives the guest a present of proportionate value. They are generous and hospitable. They give food and drink to all who come to their houses.
They take much pride in their lineage, especially if they are descendants of some ancient family of Mayapan and they boast of the distinguished men who have been of their family. The whole name of the father is always borne by his sons, but not by his daughters. But the children, both sons and daughters, are called by the compound names of father and mother, in which the name of the father is the given name and that of the mother the surname. Thus the son of Chel and Chan would be Na-Chan-Chel, which means son of Chel by his wife Chan. A stranger coming to a village, especially if he be poor, will be received in all kindness by any family of his name. Men and women of the same name do not marry, for this is considered very wrong.
CHAPTER II
THE CHURCH OF SAN ISIDRO AND ITS FRAGRANT LEGEND
“ONE particularly lovely Sunday morning, some time after taking up my abode at Chi-chen Itza,” says Don Eduardo, “I was awakened, as on other occasions, by the softly melodious chiming of the bells in my little church on the hill. As I lay in my hammock, idly listening to the pleasant sound, I could distinguish the different tones of the several bells and it was a pleasant thought to me to know that I had equipped the little church with bells having a superior quality of tone. The sound of them was indeed delightful because while church bells in Yucatan are as plentiful as millionaires in Pittsburgh, they are usually cracked and raucous.
“It was still early when I stood before my manor and turned my gaze eastward toward the little stone church perched cozily on a near-by gently sloping hillside. Both my manor and the little church had for many years been in ruins, unused. Extensive repairs had just been completed on both, to make them habitable. Here and there one of my Indians, or a whole family, dressed in their Sunday best, were already churchward bound, and the chimes continued softly to remind the laggard of his duty. The red rim of the sun was just peeping over the horizon behind the church, while the birds in every tree and thicket were voicing their welcome to this glorious new day. A lazy, blissful breeze laden with the mingled scents of a thousand tropic blossoms ruffled the tree-tops. Before me stretched a vista of wildly beautiful country-side with no sign of the handiwork of man other than the little church. No towering peaks, no gushing streams, no bottomless cañons greeted my eye; merely a terrain that is just saved from being flat. Yet it is all divinely lovely—a study in green and blue with here and there a spot of flaming color. The cloudless sky was of so clear and vivid a blue that I was tempted to stand on tiptoe and take down a handful. Foliage of some sort covered every inch of ground and was of every imaginable shade of green, from the shadowed purple-green where the rising sun had not penetrated, to the pale green of some of the tree-tops, turned golden in the first slanting rays. A gorgeous parrot flashed from tree to tree and disappeared and by his flight brought my eye to rest on a riot of flame-flower high up in a distant tree.
“The sudden silence of the bells warned me that if I too intended to go to church there was no time to lose. My little stone church is not without fame, for in its then-abandoned sacristy that remarkable traveler and historian John L. Stephens made his abode when he visited my City of the Sacred Well. It was here that he wrote his notes on ‘The Ruined City of Chi-chen Itza.’ Though it has been repaired, it looks almost as he left it one cloudy Sunday morning nearly eighty years ago. Its cut-stone walls and bell-tower are the same, but its old roof, bowed with age, has been replaced with a fine new thatch of palm.
“San Isidro is the patron saint of the plantation—for no well-organized plantation is without its patron saint, whose image is venerated by all the natives there employed. The image of San Isidro in this little church on the hill at Chi-chen Itza is of unknown antiquity and is believed to be possessed of miraculous powers which are constantly manifested. Veneration for the image, together with the attraction of the three-belled chimes swinging in their places in the tiny tower, makes the little church a sacred spot not only to the people of my hacienda but likewise to the inhabitants of the near-by village of Pisté and the region for many miles around. Has not the sacred image and the big stone baptismal font been used by the archbishop himself? Was not Mat-Ek healed, who was blinded for many months by the vapor from the ikeban plant, blown into his eyes by the wind while he was gathering his crops? Was he not given back his sight in less than a week after he had prayed for aid and kissed the feet of San Isidro? And did not Mat-Ek, in token of his gratitude, have made an eye of pure silver and give it to the sainted image—an eye which now hangs over the altar for all to see? What more can you ask?
“The church was filled to overflowing in token of a great and special day, for it is only occasionally that the regularly ordained priest comes all the way from Valladolid, and confessions, christenings, and marriage bans await his coming.
“As the congregation slowly drifts into place, the gentle rustling of the unstarched huipiles and pics of the women and the louder rustling of the stiffly starched trousers and jackets of the men sound remarkably like the lapping of summer wavelets upon a sandy beach. The soft laughter of the children outside the building, mingled with the restrained voices of admonishing Indian elders, all combine to create an atmosphere in perfect accord with the surroundings and the low-toned service. Within the chapel many candles of wild beeswax give forth soft lights and heavy odors which, mingling with the fragrant smoke of incense, fall with pleasant, soporific effect upon the congregation.
“The chimes ring their tuneful, familiar message—a message come down the centuries since the Child of Bethlehem was born in a manger; a message brought across the seas to this little stone church, by some unknown, long-departed padre. The solemn peals roll out and up to those gray old temples of another faith, wherein the sacred music of the ancient Mayas, the sound of tunkul, or priestly drum, and dzacatan, once beat in pulsing chorus. These sound symbols of the Sacred Cross are wafted to the altars, still standing, of the Sacred Serpent, whose creed once reigned supreme over this land.
“The beloved priest begins the age-old intoned creed and as the service lengthens through the chants, singing, and sermon, there comes a penetrating, strangely sweet odor. Stronger and stronger it grows, filling the church and floating out into the morning air. The worshipers nod their heads. ‘The xmehen macales have blossomed; God is good to us,’ they murmur. Six graceful, big-leafed plants like large calla-lilies had been placed upon the altar, among other flowering plants. And as I look, the six white buds of these lilies, each slenderly sheathed in green, open slowly to the light, revealing blooms of creamy white. They open in unison, as if at the bidding of an unheard voice. To me it is startling, uncanny. And here is the story about them that met my eager questions at the close of the service:
“Francisco Tata de las Fuentas, caballero of Castile, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, was fair of skin as a Saxon. In his youth he was as hot of blood and of head as a Gascon and traveled the pace with the best and worst of Castile and all the adjoining provinces. His offerings to Venus, to Bacchus, and to the little gods of chance were so fervid and frequent that they soon caused his real castle in Castile to become as those common ones of the air. And his broad lands on the banks of the Guadiana passed to more careful guardians. When nothing remained to him but his horse, Selim, he betook himself with Hernan Cortes to New Spain. Here, under Cortes, he learned discretion bought by hard experience, so that he acquired some wealth. With Francisco de Montejo, trusted friend and lieutenant of Cortes, he came to Yucatan, received a royal grant of land with many natives, and took to himself a wife, the lovely and virtuous daughter of a native chief or batab.
“Time passed and he was gathered to his fathers, leaving an only child, a son named for him. The second Francisco Fuentes inherited the father’s fair skin and bold blue eyes, as well as the gorgeous gold-and-silver trappings of the once fiery Selim, not to mention half a dozen big plantations, houses and lands in Valladolid and Mérida, and scores of minor holdings in several other towns and villages.
“This Francisco Fuentes, or Pancho as his friends called him, had two sons and a daughter. The sons were stalwart, upstanding fellows, recalling in their stature and temper their Spanish ancestry, but showing in their brown skins the admixture of native blood of mother and grandmother.
“Maria, the one beloved daughter, had the plump figure and the sweet temper of her mother, but her proud little head was covered with a wealth of yellow hair and her eyes were of clearest blue, the dauntless eyes of the first Francisco. And now Maria, the idol of her father and worshiped by her brothers, darling of the whole village, was slowly dying; wasting away with a strange fever that could not be abated. By day her body was cool and her brain clear, but with the setting sun came the fever that defied all skill of physicians and nurses. At midnight her frail, fair form was shaken with ague and burned with a fever almost to sear the hands of those who ministered to her as she tossed in delirium. Wasted to a shadow, Maria seemed beckoned by the Grim Reaper.
“The sun again touched the western horizon. The sorrowing family, father and brothers, were at her bedside. Friends and neighbors gathered to watch over the last hours of the helpless little sufferer, for there seemed no hope. A knock sounded at the door, hesitant, timid, as of supplication.
“‘It is but one of the beggars who constantly impose on Maria,’ said a sharp-tongued watcher, peering through the window into the dusk.
“Maria, restlessly turning in her hammock in an inner room, heard the knocking and the words of the watcher.
“‘I think,’ whispered she, ‘it is old X-Euan, come for some milk I promised her for her orphan grandchild. Fill with milk the clean flask which is on the shelf behind the door and give it to her.’
“Old X-Euan took the flask of milk, but from her lips did not come the whining thanks of the mendicant. Instead, from beneath the tattered folds of her shawl, she brought forth a vase of strange antique make, in which was growing a broad-leafed plant with a single swelling bud at its center. Handing the plant to the watcher, the old Maya woman said:
“‘Take this to Maria; place it close by her with the blessing of one to whom she has done as her kind heart, guided by God, has told her to do.’ In her voice was a note of command which brought obedience from those who heard. Old X-Euan departed, but some—those who were nearest and so should have seen clearest—insisted that a faint glow like a halo enveloped her head.
“The hour of twilight had passed. The dreaded time of the quickened pulse and panting delirium had come. Maria lay tossing in her hammock. Close by her the virgin petals of the flower began slowly to unfold. A fragrance, at first almost imperceptible, was wafted through the room. As the blossom opened to full bloom and its perfume permeated the sick-room, the restless turnings, the feverish mutterings grew less and less and at last ceased altogether. A dewy moisture appeared on Maria’s pallid forehead and she sank into deep, refreshing slumber.
“Amid the rejoicing there was a note of awed wonder, for in the very center of the flower the beautiful calyx seemed to have taken the fever heat that was Maria’s, and as her fever abated the heat in the heart of the flower increased, until at midnight it was almost incandescent.
“A week passed. Each night, so the watchers told, the flower took to itself the heat of the fever, while Maria, feverless, slept soundly. And on the morning of the eighth day she was convalescent. But the beautiful blossom was but a withered, brown, shapeless nothing.
“‘La flor de la calentura has performed its task,’ exclaimed the joyful natives, but Maria, lovely once more with returning strength, said, ‘Alas! La flor de la calentura, the flower that saved my life, is dead.’
“And thus it was told by Maria to her grandchildren and retold by them to their grandchildren and is now known by every one in the region. Surely it must be true! Why shouldn’t it be? At any rate, it is accepted as literally by my Indians as the less pleasing story of Jonah and the whale.”
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST AMERICANS
IT has been said that civilization is but a layer-cake of eras—a building up of strata, with the brute state at the bottom. Layer upon layer, each succeeding generation adds its small bit of culture or knowledge, until a golden age is finally reached. And, sadly enough, from that age of enlightenment, the hope of the world, there has always been a rapid decline, until centuries later, perhaps, again begins the tedious gradual uplift.
And the story of man’s rise and fall, in the passing of the ages, usually is buried in the earth, to be laid bare to our eyes if we have but the patience to find and the ability to understand. Just as a good woodsman can read from a scratch on a tree or a faint footprint on the ground things not obvious to the untrained observer, our men of science have developed remarkable expertness in divining the history of bygone eras from the scanty traces that remain. From a skull, centuries buried in a cave, they reconstruct the Neanderthal man. The fragments of an earthen pot tell them the degree of culture and the period of him who once supped from the vessel.
Wherever there are caves there is the likelihood of uncovering vestiges of aboriginal life, for primitive men everywhere used caverns, either as temporary shelters or as permanent abodes. Beneath the cave floor may be the evidence of many generations of men—the relics buried in layers one upon another as the discarded and broken implements of one generation were trampled underfoot and submerged under the charred embers and rubbish of the succeeding one.
The written record of the Mayas gives but little clue to their origin and no indication at all of their descent from more barbarous ancestors. Did these people, already of a high state of culture, immigrate from some other land? If so, were they the first comers or did they find the country even then inhabited? Or were their ancestors natives of this region for hundreds of centuries before them?
Yucatan is a land of caverns, veritably a honeycomb of caves, and eagerly the paleontologist rolled up his sleeves, shouldered his shovel, and set out to find the answer to these vexing questions. The answer was found and is conclusive but disappointing. Beyond the question of a doubt, the Mayas brought with them their culture, and they were the first inhabitants of this country. Whence they came, or how, or why; from what race they sprang, we know not and probably never shall know. A few conflicting legends of their arrival as recorded in some old Maya writings constitute the sum total of our knowledge on this point.
Many intricately derived meanings of the name Maya have been offered. The most obvious, however, is the direct translation. Ma means “not” and ya means “emotion,” “grief,” “tiresome,” or “difficult.” The combination means, “not arduous,” “not severe.” We know that the Mayas frequently alluded to their country as the Land of the Deer and the Land of the Wild Turkey— U-Lumil-Ceh, U-Lumil-Cutz. “Maya,” therefore, may quite likely have been descriptive of the region as a pleasant, comfortable place of residence. Juan Martinez, who knows the Indian and the language, present and past, as no one else, once said to me: “Work and grief are synonymous to the native mind. Work is grief to the Indian; therefore a land of no grief and no sorrow may well mean a land of no work.” However, any explanation of the derivation of so ancient a name is little more than surmise.
According to one myth, the Mayas came over the sea from the east, under the leadership of a hero-deity, Itzamna; hence the name “Itzas” as applied to a part, at least, of the Mayas. In the Maya books Itzamna is represented as an old man with one tooth and a sunken jaw. His glyph or sign is his pictured profile, together with a sign of night, the sign of food, and two or three feathers.
The more credible legend refers to an immigration from the west or north, under a chieftain named Kukul Can. There are reasons for believing that this legend may be founded upon fact. It is mentioned in several of the most ancient of the surviving Maya records and in the testimony of a number of well-versed natives at the time of the Conquest. Farther up the coast, north of Vera Cruz, is another branch of the Maya family called the Huastecs, while in Central America, through Honduras, Guatemala, and even in Costa Rica, are present-day Maya tribes and ruins of ancient Maya civilization. Also, there is a close similarity between the Kukul Can legend and the Aztec annals, indicating a common origin. Everything points to the probability of a remote great migration of their common ancestors from the north.
The Aztec tradition is particularly interesting and describes the arrival by boat of several different tribes at the mouth of the Panuco River, which spot the Aztecs called Panatolan, meaning “where one arrives by sea.” The expedition was headed by the supreme leader, Mexitl, chief of the Mexicans, with whom were other chieftains and their followers. They traveled on down the coast as far as Guatemala, and some turned back and settled at various places along the shore. On this journey an intoxicating drink was originated by one Mayanel, whose name means “clever woman.”[1] There is a possibility that “Maya” is derived from her name. At any rate, one tribal chief, Huastecatl, imbibed too freely and cast aside his garments while intoxicated. His shame was so great when he realized what he had done that he gathered his tribe, the Huastecas, and returned with them to Panatolan and settled there.
Landa says in his book that some old men of Yucatan related to him the story, handed down for many generations, that the first settlers had come from the east by water. These voyagers were ones “whom God had freed, opening for them twelve roads to the sea.” If there is any truth in this tradition, these progenitors may have been one of the lost tribes of Israel. An interesting side light on this hypothesis is the distinctly Semitic cast of countenance of some of the ancient sculptures and murals found at Chi-chen Itza and in other old Maya cities. The dignity of face and serene poise of these carved or painted likenesses is strikingly Hebraic.[2]
While we are in the field of conjecture, we may as well consider the old Greek myth of the lost continent of Atlantis. From the geological point of view, it is not impossible. The whole of Yucatan is low and was once the bottom of the sea, as is indicated by its surface rock and sand. Furthermore, the stretching out of the Antilles as though to form a bridge with the Azores, and the shallowness of the intervening Atlantic Ocean, lends plausibility to the idea that there may have been a cataclysmic upheaval of the ocean-bed during some past era, and not long ago, geologically speaking—an upheaval which created the land of Yucatan and caused what was land to the eastward to sink beneath the level of the Atlantic. What is more natural to suppose than that in some prehistoric period the lost continent of Atlantis did exist and proved an easy means of passage between Europe and America?
The mist-enshrouded history of the migrations of ancient people, the crossing and recrossing of their pilgrimages and of their blood, is a fascinating study, but one which tells us comparatively little that may be crystallized into fact. And so, in these various speculations as to the origin of the Mayas, no theory contains enough weight of evidence to warrant the assumption that it is the right one. It is, however, pretty clearly established from the ancient Maya writings and legends that there were two main immigrations, the greater one coming from the west or north and the lesser one from the east.
Emerging at last from the purely legendary, we reach the middle ground where the history of the Mayas is still unrecorded but where the word of mouth, as handed down from father to son, is more precise and has some relation to definite dates. Then we suddenly step over the threshold into the historical era.
The first recorded date, which corresponds to 113 b.c., is on a statuette from the ancient city of Tuxtla, and there is some doubt as to whether our reading of this date is correct. The next inscription corresponds to 47 a.d., and here we are on sure ground. A monument in northern Guatemala contains a date prior to 160 a.d., at which point the ancient Maya Codices take up the history of the race and carry it on to the time of the Conquest. And even at this early time, the Mayas had hieroglyphic writings and were skilled in stone-carving and the erection of massive works of architecture. With the written Chronicles, the many hieroglyphed stones,—“precious stones,” I like to call them,—and the history of progress as indicated by the different periods of architecture and sculpture, we are able to verify and correlate most of the subsequent dates.
The written Maya records, without which our task of piecing together anything of their history would be almost impossible, are among the most interesting and valuable remains of this bygone civilization. The records are of two kinds. The first, the Codices, are the original texts, written in hieroglyphics. The second, the Chilan Balam, are written in the Maya language but with Spanish characters, and are chiefly transcripts from the more ancient records.
Only three hieroglyphic Codices have survived, and they are known respectively as the Dresden Codex, the Perez Codex, and the Tro-Cortesianus. All are in European museums and many facsimile reproductions have been made of them for use in other museums and libraries. These manuscripts are painstakingly illuminated by hand, in colors, and were done with some sort of brush, possibly of hair or feathers. They are done on paper or, rather, a sort of cardboard which has been given a smooth white surface through the application of a coating of fine lime. The body of the paper is made of the fiber of the maguey plant. The manuscript is folded like a Japanese screen or a railway time-table. According to early accounts, some of these records were also made on tanned or otherwise prepared deerskin and upon bark. None of the hide or bark records has ever been found by present-day explorations. It is known that the Mayas had many records concerning religious history, religious rites and ceremonies, medicine, and astronomy. The Spanish priests caused all of the Maya writings they could find to be gathered together and burned, in the fanatical belief that they were serving the church by so doing.
If only their bigotry had vented itself in some other way, how much these old manuscripts might have told us! Apropos of the burning of the priceless documents Landa says, “We collected all the native books we could find and burned them, much to the sorrow of the people, and caused them pain.”
A PAGE FROM THE PEREZ CODEX, DESCRIBING AN ECLIPSE OF THE SUN. THIS ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT ILLUMINATED IN COLOR IS NOW IN THE LIBRARY OF PARIS
The group of books called the Chilan Balam, which are chiefly ideographic transcripts of the more ancient works, written in the Maya tongue but in Spanish characters, probably were made surreptitiously by some of the educated natives soon after the Conquest. There are sixteen of these books still extant. The meaning of this Maya name, Chilan Balam, is interesting. Chi means “mouth”; lan indicates action. Therefore Chilan is “mouth action,” or “speech.” Balam is synonymous for either “tiger” or “ferocity.” But the tiger was worshiped as a deity and the combination of the words, Chilan Balam, means “Speech of the Gods.” The Maya priests were sometimes called by the name, indicating that they were the mouthpieces of the gods, and doubtless these records took their name from the priestly appellation.
The individual books of the Chilan Balam are known by the names of the villages in which they were found, and in a few cases the name of the village may have been derived from the presence of the book. The most important of these books are Nabula, Chun-may-el (which means “something of the first” or “original”), Kua, Man, X-kutz-cab, Ixil, Tihosuco, and Tixcocob.
Just when these books were written is not known, but there is evidence that the book of Mani was written prior to 1595 and the book of Nabula tells of an epidemic which occurred in 1663. While teaching the natives to write the Maya language in Spanish characters, Bishop Landa employed a rather original method, which is our only key to reading these writings and which serves as our only clue to the more ancient hieroglyphs. The ancient Maya writings were purely picture writings, but to some extent the hieroglyphs had lost their original picture significance and had come to have a somewhat symbolic meaning.
In arranging the so-called Maya alphabet (which was first used by the priests in writing out the prayers for the Mayas), Landa employed a very ingenious method and one that was practical at the time. He took the Spanish alphabet and beginning with “A” he asked the educated Indian to draw the character for him in which the sound of “A” was predominant. Naturally, after many attempts by the Indian to furnish such a character he finally selected the hieroglyph ac, which is a picture of a turtle’s head and which in Maya means “turtle” or “dwarf” or something having a slow movement. Next he took the letter “B” and eventually chose the character be, which means “road,” “walk,” “run,” and consists of the picture of a footprint. Therefore—not to go into a lengthy description of the system—he had “A” from ac, “B” from be, etc. With this extemporized alphabet the priests were able to write out the Catholic prayers in such a way that the Indian could repeat them in Spanish by using the sound of the first part of his hieroglyph for the sound of each Spanish letter.
It may be seen from the foregoing that Landa’s alphabet cannot be used for translating Maya, for when the hieroglyphs are made to represent the sounds of the Spanish alphabet the result does not indicate the original connection of a Maya word with its glyph. This fact was a great disappointment among archæologists, who at first expected to translate the Maya Codices by the use of the Landa alphabet. Their hopes, however, were short-lived and they even pronounced Landa an impostor. On the contrary, he has unintentionally given us what is almost a Rosetta Stone.
The Codices, I fear, will never yield a connected story, as they are written in a stenographic or shorthand style consisting of disconnected sentences.
Many of the stones, or stelæ, may contain history, and as soon as we know the meanings of, possibly, a thousand glyphs we shall be able to make a decided advance in the art of reading the books. Landa in his book explains not the Maya glyphs but the way the priests used these Maya characters for religious purposes. For example, he says Ma-in-kati means “I do not want,” represented in the ancient Maya by three simple glyphs. Written as the priests had arranged, with a glyph for each sound of a Spanish letter, the result is a combination of five glyphs, which, if given their original Maya pictured meanings, leads to the rather surprising knowledge that “no dead animal was seen at this place,” or, literally, “not see tail [animal] death place.”
Besides the Codices and the Chilan Balam, which together are frequently alluded to as the Maya Chronicles, there are some other documents such as titles to land, records of surveys, etc. There is a unique history of the Conquest, written by a contemporary native chief called Na Kuk Pech, whose name means “house of the feathered wood-tick.” The story was written in the native language, by means of Spanish characters, and has been translated recently by Señor Juan Martinez, whose profound knowledge of the Maya language has eminently fitted him for this task.
The history of Chi-chen Itza is of especial interest because this was the Holy City, the Mecca of all the ancient Maya people. According to the Maya Chronicles, one or several tribes set out from a place called Nonual, in 160 a.d., and apparently spent many years in aimless wandering, arriving finally, in 241 a.d., at a place they named Chac Nouitan. Then follows a gap in our knowledge and the next we learn of these people is that in 445 a.d., while they were residing at a place called Bak-Halal, they heard of Chi-chen Itza. It is clear that Chi-chen Itza was already an inhabited city at that time. Soon after this, these tribes moved to Chi-chen Itza, where they lived until about 600 a.d., when, for some unaccountable reason, they abandoned it utterly and migrated to the land of Chan Kan Putun. And this residence was in turn abandoned two hundred and sixty years later, because of some calamity; one Chronicle speaks of a great fire.
For nearly a hundred years, to quote from the Chronicles, “the Itzas lived in exile and great distress under the trees and under the branches.” Then, some of them reëstablished Chi-chen Itza in 950 a.d., while others founded the city of Uxmal or went to Mayapan. The second residence lasted for some two hundred years. About 1200 a.d., the Itzas, under the ruler Ulumil, invaded the city of Mayapan and at about this same time Chi-chen Itza was attacked and depopulated by foreigners—in all probability the Nahuas (Mexicans), who came down from the north. The last event alluded to in the Chronicles is the coming of the Spaniards under Montejo, who found the Mayas already decadent and their cities long ruined and abandoned.
We have no authentic description of the actual condition of Chi-chen Itza when the Spaniards came, but it is known with certainty that Tiho (place of the five temples), one of the ancient cities, the site of the modern city of Mérida, was in ruins. The temples were dilapidated and overgrown with vegetation and great trees were rooted in the walls. The few inhabitants living around these ruins knew virtually nothing of the founders of the city, nor of those who had lived there when it was in its prime.
At the coming of the Spaniards to Chi-chen Itza, about 1541, the city was inhabited by a few people who were, I think, nothing more than campers—inferior people using as shelters the buildings which they had found there and of whose history they were quite ignorant.
While it has no place in this book, the last known migration of some of the Mayas is interesting and it is certain that a considerable number emigrated between the years 1450 and 1451 southward to Lake Peten,[3] where they built a city on an island and there they survived, together with their ancient culture, until conquered in 1697 by the Spaniards, who destroyed all their temples and books and perforce made either good Christians or “good Indians” of all the inhabitants.
Landa says, under the heading, “Various Misfortunes Experienced in Yucatan in the Century before the Conquest”:
These people had over twenty years of abundance and health and multiplied greatly. All of the land looked like one town and they built many temples which can be seen to-day in all parts; and crossing the mountains, one can see through the leaves of the trees sides of houses and buildings wonderfully constructed. After all this happiness, one evening in the winter a wind arose about six o’clock and increased until it became a hurricane of the Four Winds.[4] This wind tore out the large trees, made a great slaughter of all kinds of game, tore down all the high houses, which, as they were thatched with straw and had fire inside against the cold, caught fire. Great numbers of people were burned and those that escaped were torn to pieces by falling trees.
This hurricane lasted until noon of the next day. Some who lived in small houses escaped—the young people who were just married, who were accustomed to build small houses in front of those of their parents or parents-in-law, where they lived the first years.
Thus this land then lost its name, which was U-Lumil-Ceh, U-Lumil-Cutz, Land of the Deer, Land of the Wild Turkey, and was without trees. The trees now seen all appear to have been planted at the same time, as they are all of the same height, and, looking at this land from some spot, it seems as though it had been trimmed off with shears.
Those who escaped felt encouraged to rebuild and cultivate the land and they again multiplied greatly, having fifteen years of health and good weather and the last year was the most fruitful of all. At the time of harvest, there came upon the land some contagious fevers which lasted twenty-four hours. After the fever the victim would swell up and burst open, being full of worms, and of this pestilence many people died leaving the fruit ungathered.
After this pestilence there was another sixteen good years in which they renewed their passions and ravagings. In this way one hundred and fifty thousand men died in battle. After this massacre they were more calm and made peace and rested for twenty years. Then came another pestilence. Large pimples formed and they rotted the body and emitted offensive odors in a way that the members fell off by pieces within four or five days.
This plague has passed more than fifty years ago, the massacres of the wars twenty years before that; the pestilence of the swelling and worms sixteen years before the wars; and the hurricane another sixteen years before that and twenty-two years after the destruction of Mayapan, which, according to this record, makes one hundred twenty-five years since the destruction. Thus by the wars and other punishments which God sent, it is a wonder there are as many people as are now living, although there are not many.
This quaint account by Landa sheds some light upon the condition of the Mayas during the century preceding the Spanish invasion and indicates that the golden age of the race had occurred not many centuries before.
The legendary history of the coming of the Mayas to Chi-chen Itza is alluded to by Landa in several passages. He states:
It is the opinion among the Indians that with the Itzas who populated Chi-chen Itza, there reigned a great man called Kukul Can, and the principal temple of the city is called Kukul Can. They say he entered from the west, that he was very genteel, and that he had neither wife nor children. After he left Chi-chen Itza he was considered in Mexico one of their gods and called Quetzal Coatl and in Yucatan they also had him for a god.
In another place Landa says:
The ancient Indians say that in Chi-chen Itza reigned three brothers. This was told to them by their ancestors. The three brothers came from the west and they reigned for some years in peace and justice. They honored their god very much and thus built many buildings and beautiful, especially one. These men, they say, lived without wives and in great honesty and virtue, and during this time they were much esteemed and obeyed by all. After a time one of them failed, who had to die, although some of the Indians said he went to Bak-halal. The absence of this one, no matter how he went, was felt so much by those who reigned after him that they began to be licentious and formed habits dishonorable and ungovernable, and the people began to hate them in such a way that they killed them, one after the other, and destroyed and abandoned the city.
Virtually the same stories are contained in a document found at Valladolid and dated 1618, which goes on to state that the newer part of Chi-chen Itza was built about 1200 a.d.
The ancient city consists of two parts, the southern, which is ruined to such as extent that it contains almost no standing edifices, and the newer city built to the north, which contains many buildings—some of them almost perfectly preserved. I believe that much of the older city was built at least a thousand years prior to most of the buildings in the newer city, and there is ample evidence to substantiate the belief that the old city was ruthlessly robbed of its carvings and cut stones for use in the construction of the new.
The Nahuatl influence is seen in the newer buildings. It is thought that Chi-chen Itza reached the height of its civil power, though not its artistic supremacy, after it had been conquered by the Aztec warriors from the north, and the native inhabitants were reduced to slavery and driven by their masters to the speedy building of many temples—an undertaking which they would have gone about in much more leisurely fashion had there been no compulsion.
Don Pedro Aguilar, one of the earliest historians of Yucatan, states that six hundred years before the coming of the Spaniards the Mayas were the vassals of the Aztecs and were forced by them to construct remarkable edifices such as those found at Chi-chen Itza and Uxmal.
Herbert Spinden, in his admirable little book “Ancient Civilizations of Mexico,” has most happily drawn an analogy between the traits of the Mayas and Aztecs and the similar traits of the old Greeks and Romans. The Mayas were like the Greeks, the creative race, while the Aztecs were primarily warriors, as were the Romans.
Just what was the impulse which led these people to undertake the mighty works they accomplished,—whether it was religious fervor or plain fear,—we do not know. We do know that their age of greatest progress was within the era of verifiable history. We know that they built many large cities; and that there was a large population; Chi-chen Itza was a city of at least two hundred thousand inhabitants, and some archæologists believe that at one time its population numbered no less than a million.
During their supreme period they built great pyramids and marvelous temples. They wrote books and set up intricately carved record-stones. They brought the whole of Yucatan into a federation of government that held the people together in a unity which has few parallels in the history of the human race. They evolved a calendar which is ingenious, complicated, and amazingly correct. They read the heavens and knew the planets and their seasons and changes. They displayed in all they did a genius to invent and an ability to execute which cause us to rate their culture very high; and this culture is all the more wonderful because it was purely original and cut off by an ocean on each side from any contact with the rest of the world.
CHAPTER IV
DON EDUARDO’S FIRST VIEW OF THE CITY OF THE SACRED WELL
DON EDUARDO has described to me his first trip to Chi-chen Itza, and his impressions, which are somewhat as follows if my notes and memory do not err:
“I had traveled all of a hot and dusty day, on horseback, through the jungle and over animal trails. In many places my Indian guide, who went afoot, had to lead my horse over or around the huge stones that blocked our path. After the first few miles I was painfully aware that running blithely from my city into Mérida, for forgotten trifles or even for sorely needed supplies, was another of my pleasant fancies thoroughly punctured.
“Darkness overtook us ere we reached our journey’s end, and the ensuing coolness was delightfully refreshing even though the dark slowed our already snail-like progress. Just when I had abandoned all hope of making further headway, the moon sailed majestically into view—a gorgeous full moon in a perfect Yucatan night, lighting every object softly, gently, with a caressing touch so lacking in the masculine directness of Old Sol. A more lovely silver and black-velvet night I have never seen. Truly, the moon magic of Yucatan is no less than divine stage-craft which subtly wafts one completely away from the Land of Things as They Are and into the Realm of Enchantment. I should not have been surprised to meet the March Hare, Lancelot, Gulliver, Scheherezade, or Helen of Troy. In fact, I was prepared to stop and chat with any of them and offer a bite from the one remaining cake of chocolate in my pocket.
“Sometime, and most reluctantly, I suppose I must go the way of all flesh. If so, then by all means let it be in the full glory of a Yucatan moon and the going will not be unpleasant.
“For days I had been traveling, first by train, then by volan,—that satanic contrivance which leaves one bruised and bumped from head to foot,—and finally in the saddle, dozing over the head of a somnambulant horse.
“Even the witchery of the moonlight could not long hold alert my fatigued body and mind. On and on we plodded, hour after hour. Midnight passed and how many more hours I do not know, when I heard an exclamation in the vernacular, from my guide. Startled out of a half-conscious dream I came erect in the saddle.
“My Indian was earnestly pointing up and ahead. I raised my eyes and became electrically, tinglingly awake. There, high up, wraith-like in the waning moonlight, loomed what seemed a Grecian temple of colossal proportions, atop a great steep hill. So massive did it seem in the half-light of the approaching morning that I could think of it only as an impregnable fortress high above the sea, on some rocky, wave-dashed promontory. As this mass took clearer shape before me with each succeeding hoof-beat of my weary steed, it grew more and more huge. I felt an actual physical pain, as if my heart skipped a few beats and then raced to make up the loss.
“Thus for the first time I viewed the Great Pyramid of Kukul Can, now called El Castillo—the Castle. And I shall always be glad that I had the good fortune to get my first glimpse of it in this fashion. Times without number I have since passed and repassed this grand old structure, yet never have I walked in its shadow without a quickening of the pulse or without recalling undimmed the vision of that moonlit night. And, as I look back through my years of intimate companionship with my City of the Sacred Well, it seems to me that moonlit nights are linked inextricably with nearly all the important events that have there befallen me—or, at least, with those which are pleasant in retrospect.
“By the time I had dismounted and unsaddled my horse my Indian was already curled up and fast asleep. The poor horse was, I think, in sound slumber the minute his feet came to a halt. But for me, weary as I was, sleep was out of the question. I must see more of this magic city. Reaching the foot of the steep ascent, I crawled painfully up what had obviously once been a tremendous stairway, now overgrown with small trees and shrubs. At the end of a breathless climb I reached a narrow, level stone ledge eighty feet above the ground and faced the north door of the temple—the temple of the great god Kukul Can. This sheer pile of perfectly joined masonry pierced by a forty-foot doorway within whose sides I could dimly discern intricate and fantastically carved bas-reliefs; this time-grayed temple of a forgotten faith, viewed there in the silence and solitude of eerie moonlight—is it to be wondered at if my knees shook just a little and if I glanced apprehensively over my shoulder awaiting the terrible, majestic wrath of the god whose temple was profaned by the eyes of an unbeliever?
“On my eminence I turned slowly and gazed out over the dead city. Here and there, some near by and some at a distance, were a dozen other pyramids surmounted by buildings. A few seemed well preserved, others were in picturesque ruins, all ghostly white in the moonlight, except where a doorway or a shadow stood out in inky blackness. I could see the long shadow of that old temple we call the ‘Nunnery.’ The stillness was broken only by the monotonous hum of hidden cicadas; or was it the distant beat of phantom tunkuls, or sacred drums, warning that the ancient God of the Feathered Serpent did but sleep and might at any moment awake?
“And then my eyes were caught and held by a broad raised roadway leading straight away from the temple toward a vast black pool overgrown with trees. Breathless, frozen to the spot, I could only look and look, for in a blinding flash I realized that I was gazing at the Sacred Way, and at its end the Sacred Well in whose murky depths even then might lie the pitiful bones of many once lovely maidens sacrificed to appease a grim god. What untold treasures this grisly well might hide! What tragedies had been enacted at its brink!
“I descended and as I walked along the Sacred Way I thought of the thousands, millions perhaps, of times this worn thoroughfare had been trodden in bygone ages where all was now desolate. Here was I, a grain of dust moving where kings and nobles of countless centuries before had trod, and where, for all I know, kings and nobles may again tread long years after I am still a grain of dust but moveless.
“At the brink of the well I peered into the blackness and continued to gaze into its depths, picturing in my mind’s eye the awesome ceremonies it had witnessed. The chant of death begins, swelling softly over the slow pulsing of the drums. The solemn procession leaves the holy temple of Kukul Can and the funeral cortège advances along the broad raised avenue of the Sacred Way, toward the Sacred Well, the dwelling-place of Noh-och Yum Chac, the terrible Rain God who must be placated by human sacrifice. The corn in the fields is withering, crying for rain. If the anger of Yum Chac be not appeased famine will follow and the dread Lord of Death, Ah Puch—he of the grinning, sightless skull—will walk abroad in the land.
“Slowly, slowly the cortège draws near. At its head is the high priest, clad in ceremonial vestments and elaborate feathered head-dress, as befits the pontiff of the Feathered Serpent. And what is this embroidered bower borne so reverently by sturdy, sun-browned lesser priests? Is it a bier, a stately catafalque? Is the pitiful victim already dead? Ah, no! she moves, beautiful, flawless—the most lovely maiden to be found in the land. Through every city and village and country-side, for weeks and weeks, a thousand priests have sought her, this fairest flower of Maya maidenhood. Her face is pale. She knows the supreme honor that is hers—she who is to become so soon the bride of the Rain God. But there is terror in those lovely eyes, a benumbing, cold fear of the Unknown.
“And behind them, filling the whole of the Sacred Way, come the king, the nobles, the great warriors and many priests. Already on the far side of the Sacred Well is gathered a silent, grave-faced multitude, the whole populace of the city and pilgrims from afar.
“The high priest enters the little temple at the brink of the well. The dirge ceases, the drums are stilled. He performs his devotions to the Rain God. He lights the sacred incense-burners and the fragrant blue vapor floats, curling, upward. Again the slowly chanted dirge starts, to the muted beating of the drums. He lights a basket of sweet-smelling copal incense, holds it aloft, and casts it into the well. The chant grows louder, the drums beat faster.
“Two powerful nacons, or lesser priests, lift the maiden from her couch, their muscular brown arms forming a sling in which she lies as lightly as a leaf on the bosom of a stream. They advance with her to the edge of the well. The pitiless sun glares down into her upturned fear-stricken eyes and she throws one slender arm over her face. Her gauzy garments reveal the tender flesh and adolescent contours of a girl in her early teens.
“Slowly the nacons swing the feather-light body backward and forward to the beat of the drums and the rhythm of the dirge; forward and backward in an ever wider sweep, while the drums and chant swell to a roar. At a sign from the high priest the drums are suddenly stilled; the chant ends in a high-pitched wail. A last forward swing and the bride of Yum Chac hurtles far out over the well. Turning slowly in the air, the lithesome body falls faster and faster till it strikes the dark water seventy feet below.
“An echoing splash and all is still. Only the widening ripples are left. The child bride has found favor in the eyes of her lord, the great god Noh-och Yum Chac.
“Thus I imagined the sacrifice at the Sacred Well—a sacrifice enacted not once but hundreds of times through many centuries. Thus has it been handed down in a dozen Maya legends and I wondered whether this grim old well really held at its far murky bottom the relics of the ancient rites or, after all, the sacrifices were mere myths founded on some trivial event, which grew and grew with each telling.
“Granting that such sacrifices had been, every vestige of evidence might well have disintegrated into nothingness a thousand years before my time. Assuming even that at the bottom of this watery pit was all I sought, what a mad venture it was for one lone man with but a little money and no great mechanical skill to attempt to recover these evidences!
“And yet my faith was strong. I felt that my quest was not to be in vain and that somehow I would make the well yield up its treasures. At least I must attempt the feat or continue to be haunted by the idea all the rest of my life.
“My wearied brain could no longer sustain these speculations. My whole tired body knew but one desire—sleep. Yet I did not wish to sleep in this gruesome place. Half a mile farther on I should find the Casa Real, the old manor-house that was to be my home. Wearily I strove toward it in the failing moonlight.
“At last I approached the main arched gateway of the corral, built more than two hundred years ago. It was boldly outlined in the pale moonlight, while here and there were long jet shadows cast by some broken portion of a wall or by some partially burned but upright trunk of a great tree. All was desolation, as in the case of the ancient temples, but a newer desolation, for this manor had been built less than seventy years before. As I pushed my way over broken stones a cloud came over the moon and I stumbled full upon what seemed at first the vertebræ of a huge fish. The cloud passed as I halted and an involuntary shudder gripped me as I looked down on the whitened bones of a human skeleton. A little to one side on a slight elevation lay the severed skull; and just beyond was still another and yet another. Ah, yes! I knew the tragic story, but had not expected to be met with so brutal a reminder of it.
“The former inhabitants of this once beautiful hacienda had all been massacred, many years before, by the Sublevados, the untamed tribes of Maya Indians living some miles to the south. These savages had slain every living creature on the estate and had left the several buildings in smoldering ruins. Even at the present time the Sublevados are still untamed and I have often been warned of the menace of a similar fate.
“I turned and gazed at the old gateway under which I had so recently passed—a gateway, so the records say, built in June, 1721. Under it also had passed long lines of weeping captives, and there are men living who remember the event. These poor captives were laden with the booty taken from the villages of Tunkas and Dzitas as they were urged on by their Sublevado captors in their terrible journey to Chan Santa Cruz, the distant Sublevado stronghold. And only the vigorous men with trades and the young women were spared for the journey, while the other prisoners were ruthlessly murdered. Of the prisoners left alive for the journey those who fell by the wayside were despatched with a stroke of the machete and left where they fell. I later found many of their pitiful skeletons.
“Poor boys and girls! What heart-pangs they must have felt; what scalding tears must have fallen on the stone flags as they passed beneath this old arch! Their pangs were soon stilled and the tears they spilled quickly dried, for they all soon came to that tranquil rest which is for eternity. Their lives were like the meteor that flashes for a moment in the sky and is then forever snuffed out. ‘Cigar stubs that the God of Night tosses away’ is the native vernacular for meteors. The souls of these wretched youths and maidens seem to have been no less carelessly tossed away by the God of the Night.
“I sank down upon the corridor of my new-old home, too utterly fatigued in mind and body to care what army of horrid phantoms might there abide. Let graveyards yawn and specters dance, let witches ride; loose Beelzebub and all his imps, but let me sleep!
“And so I did until awakened by a torrid sun burning down upon me through what once had been a roof.”
CHAPTER V
THE ANCIENT CITY
“I AROSE cautiously, expecting to find an ache in every bone and muscle, and was agreeably surprised to discover myself without an ache or a pain, though a little stiff. Apparently the hot sun had baked all pains away. In a shady place near by sat my Indian, not sleeping, apparently not even thinking, but just doing nothing at all, an art in which he was an adept.
“I was conscious of an earnest desire for two things,—a bath and breakfast,—and I wanted a great deal of both. Without much difficulty, in sign language, I made my wishes clear to the native and he conducted me a distance of half a mile or so, not to the Sacred Well but to another well or cenote called Tol-oc, which is about two hundred feet to the left of the road leading to the village of Pisté. How he knew so definitely the location of the well is a mystery to me.
“This great cool, crystal-clear pool was the water-supply of the ancient city. A wide flight of steps, now much broken, leads into its depths and the lower steps are at present actually some distance beneath the surface of the water. On the stone rim of the sides of the pool are deep grooves, worn in olden times by the ceaseless raising and lowering of rope-suspended water-jugs or gourds. And can’t you picture the women of old Chi-chen Itza in a constant stream passing from dawn till dusk along the road to the well of Tol-oc?—the servant glad to escape for a time the sharp tongue of her mistress; the wrinkled, toothless crone to whom a trip to the well means an opportunity to exchange the latest gossip; the comely young matron anxious to get back to her household tasks; the belle of the neighborhood, on her way to the well, light-heartedly swinging her empty water-jug and bantering those who pass. This is a phase of life as old as communal existence. One may see the same scene enacted to-day almost anywhere south of the Rio Grande or in Spain, Egypt, or the Orient.
“As I swam about in the pool fresh vigor flowed into my veins, and I emerged with an increased craving for breakfast. When I reached the hacienda I found my Indian had anticipated this and while the repast he provided might not have appealed to a pampered appetite, I found it a Lucullian feast; and my guide proved no mean trencherman, either, although I suspect he had fortified himself with no less heartening a meal two hours earlier, when he found me asleep.
“While he performed the housewifely task of doing the dishes, which consisted of throwing away the big green leaves we used as plates, I sat in the shade of a magnificent old yax-che—the sacred tree of the Mayas—and puffed my favorite and most disreputable pipe. Sitting somewhere in the shade around Chi-chen Itza is the most pleasant occupation in the universe, for there is a perpetual breeze and no matter how hot the sun, one is always cool and comfortable in the shade. Sitting thus is the favorite and major occupation of the native, and the white man can very easily acquire the habit.
“As I sat there, at peace with the world, my experiences of the previous night seemed unreal—the fantasmagoria of a fevered dream and, much as I enjoyed this shady spot where I sat, the ancient city called me.
“Taking the Indian with me, I returned to make a superficial examination of the place. My newly acquired estate of about thirty-six square miles included the abandoned, dilapidated manor, corrals, and other buildings. And within its boundaries lie the Sacred Well and all of the ancient ruins and temples that are still standing, not to mention many others which are now covered with debris. It also includes several Indian villages. Chi-chen Itza is really two cities. The more ancient is overgrown by a thick forest and its location is indicated only by an occasional grassy, thicket-covered mound out of which grow great trees and whose sides are covered with scattered carved stones. The newer city is clearly defined by the buildings which are still standing. The whole, including the older and the newer city, covers an area of about twelve square miles.
“There is no apparent plan in the situation of the various structures, although most of them are arranged in such a way that their openings avoid the direct rays of the sun at midday. The city was built in this location because of the two great wells and the lesser one, which I am sure are not the work of men, although they may have been altered or enlarged. In all probability there were no definite and continuous streets; with the exception of the Via Sacra or Sacred Way, there is little or no evidence of what might be called a city street.
“I reason that there was little need for streets, because there were no beasts of burden, nor vehicular traffic. Loads were transported upon the backs of men, just as they are largely transported at the present time. The ancient builders did construct very good narrow, ballasted stone roads which led into Chi-chen Itza from various directions, but they were roads for human feet to travel. Surely the architects of these wonderful buildings; these people who knew much of astronomy and who could count into prodigious figures had the intelligence to lay out their cities in blocks and squares if any particular advantage or convenience were to be gained thereby!
“The only evident plan is that the present buildings, which are temples and perhaps palaces for the kings and those of high religious or noble rank, are centrally located. Beyond these for miles about are the remains of small rectangular foundations, evidently the sites of what were once the dwelling-places of the large population of the city.
“In the area which I designate as new Chi-chen Itza are twelve buildings in an almost perfect state of preservation, as though built no more than twenty or thirty years ago. Ten of them are still covered with their original ponderous stone roofs and are entirely habitable. These structures alone might house a considerable population. I have lived for months at a time in one or another of them and have found them to be delightfully comfortable and cool. Indeed, these elevated Maya temples are the most ideal living-quarters, much to be preferred to the usual house built upon level ground. Although they contain no windows, they are well lighted by the reflected sunlight striking through the doorways upon the white limestone floors.
“Passing across what is now a lovely flower garden in the rear of my home,—which is no other than the building in whose broken corridor I spent my first night,—my guide and I came at no great distance upon a rise of ground where are situated two most interesting groups of buildings. The first one, a massive structure on our right, bears the curious name Akab Tzib, ‘House of the Writing in the Dark.’ It is one of the few buildings which has no sub-base or plinth of artificially heaped earth or stone to give it elevation. It is built upon the natural ground-level, which, however, is somewhat higher at this point than the surrounding terrain. And it stands sheer on the edge of a depression in the ground some four hundred feet across.
“It is possible that this depression represents the site of an ancient quarry from which the stone for the building of the city was taken, or it may be simply a natural hollow caused by the caving in of the soft limestone surface rock. The front of Akab Tzib stretches a distance of one hundred and seventy-six feet and in depth the building is forty-eight feet. The structure is low, the façade rising only to a height of eighteen feet. The walls, however, are capable of withstanding a siege. They are of great thickness and constructed of perfectly joined rectangular stones, the surfaces of which are dressed and polished to smoothness. The expanse of the west wall is broken by a shallow recess in the center which divides the wall into three equal sections, with the middle section recessed or offset by a depth of about three feet.
“This central part is pierced by three square-cut doorways. John L. Stephens, who visited the temple more than eighty years ago, says that in the middle section of the interior was a great stairway that led to the roof. It has since collapsed and is now but a heap of stones and dust. Apparently it was about forty-five feet wide. Knowing the Maya custom, which was common, of erecting one structure on top of another, we may surmise that this stairway was probably a sort of flying arch and intended as a means of reaching a second temple to be built on top of the low, massive-walled Akab Tzib. For some unknown reason the upper temple was never erected. Many interesting theories have been advanced as to why the architects abandoned their original plan. On each side of what was once the stairway are doors leading into chambers. Besides these entrances there are seven handsome doorways along the western façade of the building. In all, there are eighteen rooms or apartments.
“The whole massive structure is an unsolved mystery. Over the doorway of a small, dim chamber in the southeastern part of the building is a carved lintel on which is depicted in bas-relief the seated figure of a priest or a god, wearing a feathered head-dress and with a long nose-plug protruding from the nostrils. The figure is seated on a throne and holds in its hand the ceremonial caluac or baton of rank. In front of the figure, at its feet, is a graceful brazier containing what was probably a burnt offering of some sort—copal or incense. On each side of this well-carved picture are double rows of hieroglyphs, the meaning of which is unknown. There are no other carvings, glyphs, or pictures in the entire building. This fact is hard to understand, because these ancient builders usually inscribed every available surface. In one room is a large depression in the floor, and in the center of the building is what appears to be a solid mass of masonry forty-four by thirty feet and reaching clear to the ceiling. Perhaps it contains hidden and secret chambers; that remains to be found out.
“Of one thing, however, I am reasonably sure: the carved lintel was not inscribed nor originally designed for its present position, but was taken bodily from some earlier structure, probably one of the now leveled temples of the older Chi-chen Itza. It represents the period of the highest Mayan art, which occurred before the domination of the Nahuatls, who swept down from the north some centuries later. I believe this building was not erected until after the abandonment of Chi-chen Itza, the long residence at Chan Kan Putun, the return to Chi-chen Itza, and the enslavement of the Mayas by the Nahuatls. Very likely it is the most recently built of all the present monuments in the city, and the one carved piece in it, the lintel, was taken from an older building without reference to the significance of the glyphs. From this lintel is derived the name of the temple, for Akab Tzib means literally ‘House of the Writing in the Dark.’
“Leaving Akab Tzib, we walk for the distance of a city block or so through dense shrubbery and over an old stone fence, built perhaps eighty years ago, and come to a most interesting building called La Casa de las Monjas or the Nunnery. It is what might be called rambling, yet is of exquisite architectural harmony and richly ornamented, in utter contrast to the building we have just left. It is one of the most wonderfully carved edifices of this old civilization to be found anywhere in Yucatan. It spreads out for an eye-filling distance of two hundred and twenty-eight feet, the center part of the huge pile rising for nearly ninety feet, in three separate tiers, each smaller than the one below it. Stretching away on each side of this center portion are one- and two-story annexes.
The Nunnery, the only three-storied structure in the Sacred City.
The second story of the Nunnery.
All that remains of the third story of the Nunnery. Several inscribed stones built hit or miss into the wall were doubtless taken from the older city.
“How well its name fits this grimly beautiful old building is a matter of conjecture. We know that the Maya priesthood was dominant in all matters and that the lives of the people seem to have been governed by a constant devotion to their pantheon of gods and especially to the all-great Kukul Can. Their ceremonies were numerous and elaborate. Doubtless there were many priests and perhaps priestesses. Long training must have been required in the amazing and intricate rituals. And the ancient historians relate that it was the custom to sequester certain girls or women belonging to religious orders. It is not unlikely that this vast building of many rooms and annexes, which seems more fitted to be a place of residence than a temple, may have been the abode of Mayan monks or nuns, or possibly a training school for novitiates. Some believe it to have been the king’s palace.
“Not the least perplexing thing about La Casa de las Monjas is the plain evidence that what now meets our eyes as a symmetrical whole is, in fact, the result of several different periods of building. The principal structure has been built in stages—for all the world as a swallow year after year builds one nest on top of the previous one. And the annexes evidently were built at various times, as the need for them arose. The whole base of the building is buried in debris, which detracts from the true and lovely lines of the architecture. I have excavated a trench part-way around, to clear out this rubbish, and the trench reveals the fact that La Casa de las Monjas has served as a dwelling-place for many people, or that many lived near by even long after the place had lost its sacred significance and its very name and purpose were no longer known.
“Without danger of contradiction, I think we may in fancy reconstruct this Nunnery, in the order of its building. The first structure was a single, rectangular unit about one hundred feet in length. A later builder caused it to be entirely filled with great stones and rubble and cement, so that it formed a solid base or foundation. More masonry was then erected to the same height, on three sides, to enlarge this base area, and upon the whole was erected a building ninety feet long and one third as wide, leaving a flat promenade twenty-five feet wide all around, from which there is a delightful view of the surrounding country. We have dug through the masonry of the sub-structures and into the old, original building which was filled in with stone-work to provide a support for the later and upper buildings, so that our theories are substantiated that far at least.
“To reach the second structure, whose floor is thirty-four feet above-ground, a great stone stairway of forty steps was erected, up which twenty men might march abreast. If they were men of our day they must surely come tumbling down again, for the steps are each nine inches high but with very narrow treads, built for bare-footed or sandaled folk and not for clodhopper boots or shoes.
“A third and still smaller structure—now little more than a jumble of stones, except for a part of one façade and a doorway—was built atop the second temple and served by another grand and steep stairway, a continuation of the first. This topmost temple was rich in carved stones, taken, in all probability, from the oft-ravaged older city. The various annexes were built on to or adjacent to the first and largest building. All this the reader will see from the illustrations opposite [page 65] and page 69 [missing]. The custom of enlarging Maya temples by such methods as just described was not uncommon. Perhaps it indicated growing power or population. Surely it indicated long residence.
“The main building, constituting the second story, has five doorways on the south side and one doorway at each end, and contains many chambers and intercommunicating doorways. The end rooms extend clear across the building. The central rooms are long and narrow, each with three doorways. There are also very many shallow alcoves, scarcely more than niches, which may have contained idols or scrolls—some say books. The center portion is solid masonry, which originally may have contained apartments later filled with stone to provide support for the third story.
“The entire rambling structure is ornamented with symbolistic carvings and murals in a profusion of designs, many of them of matchless beauty in inspiration and execution. The façade of the main building is twenty-five feet in height, with two handsome stone cornices extending its whole length. The eastern façade in particular is crowded with ornamentation. The dominant motif is the face of the god Kukul Can—symbolic masks with upturned snouts which some observers have called ‘elephant trunks.’ The same masks are seen again and again in all these old ruins, but in many cases the projecting snouts have been broken off by vandals; indeed, a special zeal has at some time been devoted to this particular destruction. Linking the masks and carrying the whole in a carefully planned and balanced decorative series are geometrical designs and figures. Above the broad band of the upper cornice and carved in deep relief are geometrical stone screens not inferior to those of the Moors or of India.
“Over the main doorway are two bands of small, undeciphered hieroglyphs, above which project six bold and gracefully curved ornaments. From them, we may imagine, once hung a costly curtain, heavy with embroidery. And still higher above the doorway, interrupting the geometrical sculptures of the whole façade, is a horseshoe-shaped frame within which may still be seen a badly defaced seated figure with feathered head-dress. The lintels over the classic doorways are of huge perfectly cut and polished stones, each bearing a multiplicity of clear-cut glyphs which, like many things in this City of the Sacred Well, tenaciously hold their secrets.
“The Nunnery stands a monument of grace and beauty whose charm is at once evident to any beholder, and doubly so to him who perceives how closely in every line and dimension, yet how subtly, it accords with our modern ideas and rules of good design. But nowhere else in the world is there anything like it. Unique, distinctive, it is characteristic only of this ancient culture. The cut facing [page 65], representing one of the best of my many photographic attempts, tells all that a photograph can, but it cannot begin to convey the beauty of this masterpiece. In the great main hall were once many colorful paintings upon the walls and ceilings, still indicated by bits of color here and there or by an interrupted broad band of black or red. And in the various rooms were paintings, nearly all now obliterated. They seem to have reached quite lately their critical age, for many that were almost perfect as recently as twenty years ago are faded or chipped now. In a few years they will be gone forever, and for this reason I have taken pains to obtain the most faithful possible copies of all of them. These Maya paintings represent several periods of culture. Some are childishly crude. Many are of an excellence of line and balance and color not inferior to the best of modern art. Some even are drawn in a most pleasingly free and sketchy manner which so exquisitely portrays an idea without unnecessary detail that one almost expects to see scrawled in the lower right hand corner the signature of some well-known modern artist.
“The eastern or ground-level portion of the added basic structure contains many rooms entered by way of six wide outer doorways.
“Near the main building are two smaller detached ones, the more interesting being known as the Iglesia or Church. It is small in comparison with the bulk of La Casa de las Monjas, being but twenty-six feet long, half as wide, and thirty-two feet high. It has three cornices and the principal decoration consists of two seated human figures over the doorway. Hardly a square inch of its surface is undecorated. Formerly it was stuccoed, or plastered, and painted. Much of the original color still clings to the crevices and interstices of its carved walls and it is evident that new layers of stucco were added from time to time and new paint in appropriate colors. Such layers of stucco and color may be seen where the stone has been chipped, with the colors sometimes varying from those of the early coats.
“The carvings again portray the mask of Kukul Can, with interlinking geometrical designs. A single doorway gives access to the interior, once rich in murals, and the bright sunshine striking upon the white floor floods the whole room with clear light. Close to the ceiling are traces of a row of medallions which originally contained hieroglyphs.
“Another building of about the same size is similarly finished and decorated with the mask of Kukul Can. It contains several small rooms. The entire wall of one apartment has been removed, by not very ancient builders, for the prosaic purpose of making a stone fence. In passing I might mention also that a good-sized pit has been made near one side of the grand stairway of La Casa de las Monjas, it being easier to get cut stone in this way than to quarry it.
“No great amount of labor would be required to put this group of buildings in nearly its pristine condition. Nearly all the stones that have fallen lie where they fell and could easily be replaced. Near the grand stairway lie many sculptured images of serpents, birds, and animals, of massive size and carved in full relief. These formed the balustrade and might be replaced even though some are missing. I have no doubt that when the debris at the base of the buildings is removed new archæological treasures will be revealed.
“As an interesting bit of authentic history, the main building was occupied by the soldiers of Montejo, who were besieged there by the enraged native populace. They escaped by night, through the rear of the buildings, by means of a ruse. The besiegers did not discover until dawn that the enemy had fled many hours before.
“Just when one decides that there is nothing new to surprise him, in this old city, he comes upon something else to puzzle his brain, spurring his curiosity into vain excursions after the why and wherefore of it all.
“We leave the unexplainable Casa de las Monjas and, walking westward less than a hundred yards, stand before the Caracol or Snail-shell, which is entirely unlike any other building in the City of the Sacred Well or in all of Yucatan. This curious structure, we imagine, was either a watch-tower or an astronomical observatory—though it may have served a quite different purpose. It is round and built on a terrace two hundred feet square of cut stone, twenty feet in height. Above this is a second stone terrace, twelve feet high. These terraces have sheer vertical sides, but much fallen stone and debris have gathered about them. From the west a stairway forty-five feet wide leads to the first terrace; it was once bordered with great stone balusters in the form of tremendous entwined serpents, their heads on the ground, their bodies forming the balustrade and ending at the top in rattles. The same sort of device is found again and again in Maya architecture. A second similar stairway leads to the upper terrace and the door of the building. A projecting ornamented cornice caps each terrace.
“At the top of the second stairway was once some large object which Stephens thought was an idol, and here was uncovered a hieroglyphed monument bearing the longest inscription yet found in the city. The round tower is forty feet in diameter and forty feet high, with two concentric walls, each two and a half feet thick. The inner wall incloses a circular chamber at the center of which is a core of small diameter, solid except for a winding stairway at its center, extending from the ground-level to the height of the double walls. There is also a passage, now almost obliterated, piercing the lower terrace and connecting with this winding stairway. The building at the top of the double walls has a deep-jutting five-tiered cornice above which rises another and smaller single-walled tower, surrounded by a promenade or ledge, not unlike the balcony of a lighthouse, at the height of the cornice.
“The space between the outer and the inner wall provides an arched chamber five feet wide and one hundred feet in circumference. The inner chamber also is arched and is eight feet wide. The usual Maya arch construction is employed, the arch beginning at a height of ten feet and being about twenty-four feet at the peak. The upper ruined tower, about twenty feet high, contained a stone-lined passage facing due west which might have been used as a line of sight for astronomical observations.
“The outer walls are pierced by four openings—windows or doorways, whichever they may have been—corresponding to the four points of the compass. Similar openings occur in the inner wall but, curiously, they are exactly forty-five degrees out of line with the openings in the outer wall. One of the most novel features in the construction are the many wooden beams placed horizontally between the inner and outer shells of masonry. As these are set in the masonry, it is evident that they are an original and integral part of the building, probably put there to help support the stone-work during construction. Many have stood the test of time and are still stanch and firm. They are hewn from the famous sapote tree, whose wood of steel-like hardness alone could have endured through the centuries. There is no ornamentation within the building, nor upon its walls, and the construction is pure Maya except that it is round where all else is square.
“The curious edifice is on high ground and its construction leads inevitably to the idea of a watch-tower. Its builders knew in their time quite as much about astronomy as did any contemporary race—if not more. The periods of sun, moon, and planets they knew with great accuracy. For these reasons I like to think that their priests and sages came to this tower, making divinations from the stars and laboriously charting their positions and courses. Possibly they were panic-stricken by an occasional eclipse of moon or sun, which they called chi-bal-kin, ‘the moon or sun devoured by serpents or other beings.’
“But perhaps this tower was no more than a military precaution, a place where solitary watchers by day and night constantly scanned the horizon. Maybe it was merely the local police station or fire department from which could be seen any undue disturbance or the outbreak of a conflagration. I shall leave it to you to make your own conclusions, which may be quite as near to or as far from the actual fact as my own, over which I have puzzled backward and forward for many years.
“To the north a distance of four hundred feet is the so-called Red House, or Chich-an Chob, the latter name meaning ‘strong, clean house.’ The name Red House is derived from the fact that the antechamber or vestibule across the front of the building has a broad painted band of red running about its four walls. This is the best-preserved building of all my city; scarcely a stone is missing. Its four walls face exactly the four points of the compass; its main entrance is in the western wall, while the eastern wall is unbroken. It now rises from a lovely grassy terrace, slightly sloping from the vertical and about twelve feet high by sixty feet long, faced with large stone blocks and having rounded corner stones at each of the four sloping edges of the pyramidal form. Extending around the top of the terrace is a regular Maya cornice, or projecting coping. Approaching the western entrance is a stone stairway, twenty feet wide, of sixteen high and shallow cut-stone steps—a staircase as distinctly Mayan as the mask of Kukul Can. And this stairway is as perfect to-day as the day it was finished, not a stone out of place or broken. It seems incredible that it could have lain there so many centuries at the mercy of the tropical wilderness and of passing vandals and have suffered not at all.
“Chich-an Chob deceives one at first glance, seeming to rise to a stately height because of its twenty-eight foot façade. The roof, however, is but twenty feet above the floor. The false front is nevertheless very lovely, being made of stone latticework which skilfully weaves with geometrical designs the ever-present elongated masks of the great Kukul Can, with the upturned snouts unbroken. The construction throughout is pure Mayan of the highest period, typical of many buildings seen in the southern part of Yucatan and particularly at Palenque. Three square-cut, high doorways give access to a shallow vestibule running the length of the building. Back of this is a wall with three more doorways, each opening into a separate chamber. A frieze of hieroglyphs cut in the stones somewhat above the doors completely encircles the walls of the vestibule. All of the interior walls are plastered and painted and have been replastered and repainted many times. The outer walls up to the stone latticework are quite plain, the cornices or moldings are unadorned, and except for the absence of pillars it could pass for a gem of Doric architecture. Its very simplicity is a pleasing contrast to the Nunnery; yet it is no less distinctly Mayan.
“Two hundred feet beyond Chich-an Chob is a level terrace, or pyramid, sixty-four feet square, which supports a small three-chambered temple with an entrance to the south. One end has fallen in, but two of the chambers are in good repair. This temple, so far as I know, is nameless and at present is of no special interest. Clustered near by, to the right, are several smaller pyramids whose buildings are merely heaped ruins. Some of these contain tombs. Probably all were burial-places of great men. The principal pyramid of this group contains the tomb of the high priest and it is the scene of one of my most thrilling adventures.”
The story of the exploration of the high priest’s tomb, alluded to by Don Eduardo, is very interesting and will be related in another chapter.
In about the center of the City of the Sacred Well is El Castillo, whose imposing bulk is by far the greatest of all of the silent old structures of this ancient metropolis. Don Eduardo has told us that this huge pile struck him speechless when he came upon it suddenly in the moonlight upon his first introduction to Chi-chen Itza. He is not the only one who has been struck dumb by the first sight of the rugged and beautiful temple, high and huge above its surroundings. Coming back from the States one year, I made the acquaintance, on the boat, of a middle-aged American and his charming daughter, who with some others composed a small party bound for Mérida, the capital of Yucatan. As I had been to Chi-chen Itza many times, I naturally, in my talk with this gentleman, was enthusiastic over the idea of showing him the ruined city, and finally the whole party decided to go there. We arrived at the little town of Dzitas, where the gentlemen on horseback, I on an ambling mule, and the rest in volans set out for the City of the Well. All the way the members of the party took turns in joking me about my pet city and my stories concerning it. I was in every sense the tail of the procession, as my mule had decided ideas of its own, as mules have, and would travel no faster than a slow walk; but the rest of the party were not traveling on a bed of roses and there was no unwillingness to stop and wait for me while they composed ironical witticisms.
When we came near to Chi-chen Itza I ranged my mule alongside the gentleman who was leader in the heckling. I did this knowing that we would travel almost to the Great Pyramid of El Castillo and then, at a sharp turn to the right, view it completely and suddenly.
My friend was in the middle of another verbal dig when the sight smote him. His mouth simply remained open. I have not yet heard the last of his apologies for his previous jesting remarks and I find my revenge very sweet.
The pyramid, or terrace, on which El Castillo stands is two hundred feet square and rises to a height of seventy-five or eighty feet. The exact height is rather difficult to measure because of the debris at the bottom. The top of the terrace has a level surface, or platform, sixty feet square, upon which stands the temple. The four sides of the pyramid rise steeply at an angle of fifty degrees and the pyramid is terraced, each terrace being nine feet high, with a narrow horizontal offset. The rises are faced with cut stone beautifully paneled. Each of the four pyramid faces is vertically bisected by a wide stone stairway more gentle in its incline than the angle of the pyramid itself but still very long and steep. The stairs start at the top flush with the ledge upon which the temple stands and draw away farther and farther, as they descend, from the plane of the pyramid face, with an increasing ratio of projection so that at the bottom they project an appreciable distance beyond the pyramid base. Thus the stairways pleasingly break the monotony of line—which is good art and good architecture. Like all Maya stairways, they have narrow treads and high risers.
The cult of Kukul Can, indicated everywhere in the City of the Sacred Well, nowhere attains so overshadowing an importance as here in this vast temple. Each of the four corners of the pyramid is bounded by the huge undulating body of a stone serpent, extending from the ground clear to the top of the pyramid. Each undulation of the serpent’s body marks a terrace or gradient and to lift a single stone section of one of these mammoth serpents would be a task for a dozen men. Everywhere on the horizontal levels of the terraces springs up each year a thick growth of grasses as high as a tall man’s head.
The principal stairway, facing the north, is guarded at the base by two huge heads of feathered serpents, jaws open, fangs displayed, and forked tongues extended. And each of these heads, excepting only the forked tongue, is hewn from a single solid block of stone, with every crotalic detail perfectly carved. The bodies belonging to these serpent heads, conventionalized into two broad, flat bands, extend up the mound, one on each side of the stairway, to the principal entrance of the temple. On the narrow platform and forming the main doorway of this holy of holies are two more immense monolithic serpent heads, now partially destroyed. They are used as pillars trisecting into three parts the great forty-foot doorway. The conventionalized and foreshortened head of the serpent forms the base of the column and the foreshortened tail forms the capital which is, in its own way, no less a worthy architectural creation than the Greek Corinthian column, with its capital of acanthus leaves.
The triply vaulted ceiling rests upon great sapote beams supported by three-foot-thick walls and massive square-faced, paneled stone pillars. This sapote wood, called ya by the natives, is dark red in color and turns chocolate brown with age and exposure. It is nearly as heavy as iron and is very hard. In many ways it resists the action of the tropical elements better than metal, and insects seem to produce no effect upon its adamantine surface. These beams are wondrously carved and with few exceptions have faithfully sustained the tremendous weight of stone put upon them. Only a few have broken with age, so that but a part of the façade of the temple has fallen. For a thousand years, at least, they have stood and at the time of the Conquest in 1540 they were in much the same condition in which we now find them.
In front of the main doorway originally stood a great stone table with an intricately carved surface. It was supported by curious Atlantean stone figures and some of these strange male caryatids were bearded. Other figures on piers and columns within the temple also are bearded—with one exception the only bearded figures portrayed in this whole city which was inhabited by a beardless race. Close examination shows, however, that the carved figures wear masks and it is the masks which are bearded. This fact only enhances the mystery, pointing to the possibility of a still more ancient past and of ritualistic traditions so remote in their beginnings that all memory of their original meaning has faded and only the ritual or empty shell remains of what was once living fact. Analogous are some of the archaic Greek rituals and Druidical rites.
Who were the prototypes of these bearded figures? Were they the mysterious, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people clad in armor who were supposed to have once landed at Tamoclan near Tampico? Norsemen? Or were they the old Atlanteans whose country Plato says “sank in one day and one night beneath the waves of the ocean”?
Of the many marvelous carvings and paintings in this temple I shall say more in another chapter.
Doubtless upon the wide level roof of the temple were performed religious rites,—solemn invocations to the sun and the like,—for, throughout, this edifice leaves one with the impression that its character was purely religious. There are no warlike scenes pictured, only solemnity and high reverence for the great gods.
Lying within the shadow of El Castillo are the broken remains of another building, called the Temple of the Tigers. It takes its name from a frieze of bas-reliefs which is one of the outstanding treasures of the lost art of the Mayas. In these wonderful carvings the sculptor has perfectly caught the feline vigor and grace of the American jaguar. No doubt he had a first-hand knowledge of jaguars, which were very plentiful then and still abound in this vicinity if one wishes to go to the trouble of looking for them. To the Mayas the jaguar was the “Protector of the Fields” because he lay in wait for the deer in the open and cultivated spaces. It was the custom of the natives to put some gift or friendly token in the corner of the field for this god-like beast. Probably his very life was sacred as are those of many animals in India.
The Tiger Temple is built on a pyramid base with a stairway up the side approaching a wide doorway which is divided by pillars into three parts. Much of the sustaining pyramid has crumbled away, or been removed, leaving the building perched on a sheer wall of roughly cemented rubble as viewed from one side. The façade is thirty-five feet long and twenty-two feet high and at each side of the entrance is a great serpent’s head. Each of these monoliths weighs several tons and is carved with amazing skill; every feature and scale is flawless and they are painted or enameled, the colors being still visible if not vivid. The head of each is green, while eyes and open mouth are red. The scales end with the head, and the remainder of the body, elaborately feathered, rises in a graceful cylindrical column, with the tail now broken but originally projecting upward along the face of the building and terminating in well-defined rattles. A portion of the front roof has fallen, due to the breaking of wooden lintels supporting the mass of stone of which it was composed, but fortunately the serpents’ heads and the door columns are unharmed.
All of the interior walls are solidly painted with battle scenes, scenes of domestic life, and pictures of sacrificial pageants. Many of the colors are as brilliant as the day they were laid on these smooth walls, although the wonderful paintings have been much marred by vandals. The many figures, each in a different posture, each group differently clothed or armed, and all cleverly drawn, in good proportion, and elaborately colored, are capable of holding the most casual observer by the hour and are a never-ending delight to the enthusiast.
The Tiger Temple is in every way the prize exhibit among the various edifices of the Sacred City, not for its size but for the craftsmanship and charm of its every detail. And yet I must make one small reservation, for just back and at the base of the Tiger Temple is a small, almost ruined building, nameless, lacking a roof and a front, yet containing on its three still standing walls and what little remains of a ceiling more than eighty sculptured figures. There are warriors in armor of metal, hide, and wood; priests in ceremonial vestments; kings and chieftains. The various figures are distinct and different from one another and the features are individual, doubtless recognizable if we but knew the great men in whose likeness they were carved. Each figure is identified by its own personal and distinguishing sign, or mark, usually placed overhead. Vivid paint or enamel was painstakingly applied to the sculpture and in many places it is still pronounced.
Some of the work is crude, other parts exquisitely refined, indicating that it is not all the work of one man. I am told by those well versed in stone-carving and the making of bas-reliefs that even with modern stone-cutting tools it would take one man at least twenty years to accomplish this work. For lack of a better name I always call this wonderful roofless place the Temple of Bas-Reliefs. When first observed, the sculptured walls look merely like a variegated patchwork. In order to see it at its best one should arrive at about ten o’clock in the morning, at which time the shadows cast by the background bring out all the raised parts in strong contrast and the whole procession of priests and warriors marches clearly before one’s eyes. The south wall, however, can be seen at its best only for a short time soon after sunrise and it is well worth the discomfort of early rising. Very probably there was an arrangement of smooth-faced, light-reflecting pillars in this building which caused all the walls to stand out in bold relief.
In the middle of the floor and facing the entrance squats a stone jaguar. Perhaps upon his broad, flat back may have been placed holy offerings to the gods.
The fallen front of this temple was once supported by two finely carved and painted square columns, still majestically erect, and remindful of those other ancient temples of Greece and Egypt.
And now we come to what is perhaps the most curious thing in the whole metropolis. The Tiger Temple, the Temple of Bas-Reliefs, and two other buildings surrounded a great inclosure having a flat paved floor four hundred and twenty feet long, bounded on the sides by smooth, perpendicular walls more than twenty feet high and thirty feet thick.
A hundred feet from the northern extremity of this extraordinary court and facing it is a building consisting of a single chamber. Its front wall is lacking, but arising from the rubbish are two ornamented round columns which were evidently the supports for the wall. The whole interior of the building, from floor to peak, is covered with worn and faded bas-reliefs. In the center of the rear wall is the perfect figure of a man, bearded and with decidedly Hebraic features.
At the opposite end of the court and a hundred feet back from it is a building extending nearly the entire width of the court. The roof of this structure has fallen, but the remains of sculptured square columns are visible.
And on the two side walls of the court, on the precise middle line, were mounted two great carved stone rings, like millstones, twenty feet above the floor. Each ring is beautifully carved with the entwined bodies of serpents. The rings are four feet in diameter and a foot thick, and the hole in each is one foot seven inches in diameter. One of these rings is still mounted in the masonry of the wall, while its counterpart once on the adjacent wall has fallen, but, happily, is unbroken.
A very similar court and similar rings have been found at Uxmal, another ancient Maya city of Yucatan.
Obviously this court was intended for some public game and it has therefore been given the name of the Tennis-court or Gymnasium. In an account of the diversions of Montezuma, given by Herrera, who accompanied Cortes, is the following illuminating description:
The Emperor took much delight in seeing the game of ball which the Spaniards have since prohibited due to the mischief which often happens at the game. By the Aztecs this game was called tlachtli—being like our tennis. The ball was made from the gum of a tree that grows in hot countries, which, after having holes made in it, distills great white drops that soon harden and being worked and molded together, this material turns as black as pitch.[5] The balls made thereof, although quite hard and heavy to the hand, did bound and fly as well as our footballs and there was no need to blow them, nor did they use staves. They struck the ball with any part of the body as it happened or as they could most conveniently. Sometimes he lost who touched it with any other part but his hips, which was looked upon among them as very dexterous and for the purpose that the ball might rebound better they fastened a piece of stiff leather on to their hips. They might strike the ball every time it rebounded, which it would do several times one after another, in so much that it looked as if it had been alive. They played in parties, so many on each side, for a load of mantles or what the gamesters could afford. They also played for gold and feather work and sometimes they played themselves away. The place where they played was a ground room, long, narrow and high and higher at the sides than at the ends. They kept the walls plastered and smooth, also the floor. On the side walls they fixed certain stones like those used in a mill, with a hole quite through the middle. The hole was just as big as the ball and he who could strike it through thereby won the game, and in token of its being an extraordinary success which rarely happened, he had the right to the cloaks of all the lookers-on.
It was very pleasant to see that as soon as ever the ball was in the hole, those standing by took to their heels, running away with all their might to save their cloaks, laughing and rejoicing, while others scoured after them to secure their cloaks for the winner, who was obliged to offer some sacrifice to the idol of the Court and to the stone whose hole the ball had passed.
Every Court had a temple day where at midnight they performed certain ceremonies and enchantments on the two walls and on the middle of the floor, singing certain songs or ballads, after which a priest of the Great Temple went with some of their religious men to bless it. He uttered some words, threw the ball about the court four times (towards the four points of the compass) and then it was consecrated and might be played in, but not before.
The owner of the Court, who was also a lord, never played without making some offering and performing some ceremony to the Idol of the Game, which shows how superstitious they were even in their diversions.
This account which has come down to us will save much head-scratching on the part of future archæologists as to the purpose of the unique court and its carved millstones.
The Gymnasium or Tennis-court and the buildings surrounding it were not pure Mayan, but were unquestionably introduced under the Nahuatl or Aztec régime.
Nearly all of the remaining buildings are in too bad a condition to yield much of further interest until careful digging and replacing of fallen parts can restore them to some semblance of their original form. One such fallen temple on a great pyramid is now marked only by four nine-foot pillars whose square sides are chiseled with queer bearded figures, some of whom carry what I can only call a “rabbit-stick”—evidently some sort of ceremonial staff or wand. These pillars were unquestionably the front of an immense temple whose wooden lintels have given way, letting fall the whole edifice. In front of this ruin were several stone tables, and apparently they stretched at one time, end to end, clear across the base of the pyramid. The tables were of various heights and consisted of stone slabs six inches thick and about three feet wide. They were supported by grotesque dwarfish Atlantean figures with upraised hands, the palms held flat and on a level with their heads. While grotesque, these figures have much dignity and sureness of line. Originally they were brightly painted.
The tables have been so disarranged that it is impossible to tell what was their original position or even to guess at their purpose. The temple faced west, as indicated by the broken stairway leading up to it. In the midst of the debris lies a fractured serpent column nearly five feet in length, with a stone tongue projecting two feet from its fanged lips. The column rising from the serpent’s head is two feet in diameter and its capital was the creature’s tail. The broken outlines of a rear chamber reached through a vestibule just behind the serpent column measure thirty-six by fifteen feet. The doorway of the chamber has square-cut, sculptured jambs.
A few hundred feet to the north is the ruined Temple of the Cones. Strewn all about are large cone-shaped stones like big projectiles, but cut and carved. It is thought that they formed some sort of ornamental frieze. Some are handsomely sculptured. There are also in this vicinity figures of the Chac Mool type—an animal body, usually a jaguar, with the head of a man.
Some distance to the right of El Castillo are the ruins of what must have been a very important temple. They occupy a great irregular mound some six hundred feet long and are bordered by several pyramids and other ruins of varied character. The largest of the pyramids is fifty feet high and stands in the northwest corner of the group of ruins. All that remains of it are columns, but there are almost a forest of them, some round, some square. We have called this ruin the Temple of Columns. It seems as though here must have been an elaborate plaza of temples, colonnades, and sunken courts. Even now archæologists from the Carnegie Foundation of Washington, D.C., are at work in reclaiming this portion of the Sacred City from the jungle, clearing the debris and working out the jig-saw puzzle of replacing each fallen stone in its rightful position.
Everywhere for miles one comes upon huddled debris-covered mounds and carved stones. In the very heart of the jungle is the overgrown ruin of a tremendous pyramid and temple, while here and there unexpected columns rise amid the trees. More than thirty such ruins have been counted, choked by rank jungle growth—palaces, no doubt, of high priests and mighty chieftains. And I think sadly as I view them that the study of archæology is long and time is fleeting.
CHAPTER VI
AN IDLE DAY IN THE JUNGLE
SEVERAL thousands of years before that sturdy Scotch engineer John MacAdam gave to the world the broken-rock road surface known as “macadam,” which has done so much to make communication easier, roads were built in Yucatan that embodied all of his sound principles of road-making. And MacAdam lived and died without ever having heard of them. In fact, he had been sleeping beneath the green sod of his native kirk for at least a decade before Europe or North America knew that these old roads of Yucatan existed. The thoroughness and good engineering of their construction rival the famous roads of the Roman Empire or of present-day highways.
In ancient times Chi-chen Itza and all the great and lesser cities of the Yucatan peninsula were linked by a network of smooth, hard-surfaced highways. The Mayas of to-day call these old roads zac-be-ob, or white ways. The name is of ancient origin, used, perhaps, by the very builders themselves and no doubt these roads were like ribbons stretching mile after mile through field and forest and deserving quite as much the appellation of “White Way” as any of our blazing night-lighted thoroughfares.
But alas! they are no longer white, no longer even distinguishable as roads for any great distance, but are buried beneath matted roots and brown earth. And this land which once had the best roads on earth became a place where until recently good roads were unknown, where every cow-path was called camino real or royal road but was decidedly unregal.
Don Eduardo has painstakingly studied the old highways and for the rest of this chapter I will merely repeat what he has so often told me:
“The old roads, each and every one, went down to bed-rock, and upon that solid foundation was built up a ballast of broken limestone, with the larger stones at the bottom. As the surface of the road was reached, smaller stones were used and the crevices were filled in. And the whole face of the road was given a smooth, hard coating of a mortar cement of lime and finely sifted white earth, known then and to-day as zac-cab. The hard-pan of Yucatan is limestone ledge rock and as a rule it is not very far beneath the surface soil. Often in the building of roads the first layer or ballast consisted of large boulders, not merely tumbled in haphazard, but carefully placed and with the interstices filled in with smaller stones, painstakingly fitted and hammered into place. Thus a firm anchorage was provided that has held through the centuries. The second and third courses, each of smaller boulders and stones, were quite as carefully placed. The final course was constructed of stones the size of a bushel basket and smaller, wedged together with rock fragments. Within a foot or so of the desired road-level, rock fragments from the size of an egg to that of a small walnut were leveled in, a grouting made, and the whole pounded until a hard, level surface was obtained. Mortar or cement was then applied in a thin coating and when this had hardened sufficiently gangs of stout-muscled laborers armed with smooth, fine-grained polishing-stones rubbed the plastic surface until it became compacted into a polished flatness almost as smooth-coated as tile and nearly as hard.
“The majority of the stones used were not quarried but were isolated boulders rounded by erosion and stained with iron from the ‘red earth’ in which they are usually found. Seldom was any rock used which could easily be cut and used for the construction of buildings or temples.
“These old highways—what a tremendous labor they must have been! What miles and miles of carrying the stones to build them! And nothing but man-power to move the huge boulders. Centuries, perhaps, were spent in the building, and millions of sweating men.
“Their traffic problems did not concern vehicles, not even horses nor other beasts of burden. The roads were built for travelers afoot and the burden-carriers were men, traveling in single file as human carriers do the world over. And yet there must have been much traffic, for some of these roads are twenty-five feet in width, so that four files of men with their loads could easily pass, two lines going one way and two in the opposite direction.
“The largest and longest of these ancient roadways connects Chi-chen Itza with the once important cities of Uxmal and Tiho. It is twenty-five feet wide. The long road from Chi-chen Itza to ancient Zac-ci (now Valladolid) and the unnamed but important towns between Zac-ci and Lake Co-ba, is bifurcated again and again into more and more narrow highways, resembling creeks flowing together to form eventually a mighty river.
“What a picture these forgotten roads must have been in the golden age of the Mayas!—pulsing with life, crowded with water-carriers, venders, idlers, pious pilgrims, nobles with their retinues, farmers bringing their produce to the city, itinerant craftsmen, rich men, beggarmen, thieves; a cheerful jostling of motley and purple; a riot of color and of all the things men buy and sell.
“Came a squad of soldiers, crystal-tipped lances glinting in the sunlight; or a solemn procession of priests and devotees with sacred whistles shrilling or the boom of the tunkul, while the laughing crowd parted and made silent obeisance to the holy ones.
“Along the sides of the road every now and then are low raised platforms, or elevations, which have lost all semblance of their pristine contours, so that one can only guess at their purpose. It has been suggested that they were originally hollowed out and were holtunes, hollow stones, or water-reservoirs, where the traveler might quench his thirst. My own examination of them convinces me that they were, for the major part at least, nothing more than resting-places where the carrier might deposit his load, letting slip the band from about his forehead which held the burden on his shoulders. And well he might rest, this ancestor of the present sturdy Maya, for he bore just as incredibly heavy burdens for as incredibly long distances.
“There is a striking similarity in the practical engineering of the Maya roadways and the construction of the stone terraces upon which the temples were built. One day, bent upon the study of such construction and to verify certain conclusions I had reached, I had recourse to a deep excavation made in the base mound or pyramid of an important fallen structure which is located some distance north of the Great Pyramid of El Castillo. This excavation, so some of the natives told me, had been made by a ‘stranger’ (white man), short of body but thick-set and very powerful. He was, they said, ‘a very positive man, with a long gray beard, and this was so long ago that few are now alive who remember.’ No one who has ever seen and known the late Doctor Le Plongeon, intrepid investigator and discoverer of the famous monumental ‘Chac Mool’ figure, could fail to recognize the faithfulness of this native description. And from all his years of labor Doctor Le Plongeon evolved a Mayan theology which is either inspired or the result of a mentality unhinged by too great labor. Certainly it seems to be imagination run wild, with little of fact to bear it out. It is no less than tragic, for never did archæologist drive himself to more herculean effort than did Le Plongeon.
“To resume my story, this excavation was like a deep chasm, bisecting the crowning platform and going clear down to bed-rock, and thus it fitted perfectly my purpose. Nearly forty years had passed since Le Plongeon made the excavation, and Nature had done her best with wind and rain and vegetation to heal the wound. Loosened material from the sides of the cut had fallen in, providing an excellent bed for climbing vines, saplings, and big-leafed plants. The roots of big trees, no longer supported by the stones, had given way and the trees had fallen, bridging with their trunks the crevice. Vines, saplings, and flowering plants grew up and twined about and embraced the bridging tree trunks, so that one would scarcely know without close scrutiny that an excavation had been made. The two tree trunks which lay side by side, bridging the space overhead, were both of hardwood. One was a yax-nic, light-colored and with bark of silver gray, while the other was a chac-ti, dark red and with loose-held bark, in decay separating from the trunk in long, curling ribbons.
“Near me were many big spiders, flat, crab-like and motionless, yet with bright pin-point eyes that seemed fiercely awake, waiting and watching for whatever prey might come to their nipper-like jaws. Their long legs and still longer caliper-pointed antennæ lay sprawled flat against the tree trunks so close that on casual inspection the creatures might pass for bits of tree fungus. Small lizard-like reptiles, with beautiful diamond-like eyes and heads as ugly as sin, sprinted up and down the tree trunks and under and over the branches, skilfully avoiding the spiders and other dangers. Both spiders and tiny lizards on the yax-nic trunk were gray in color, blending perfectly with the bark surface, while those on the chac-ti trunk were dull red to match the bark—an example of natural camouflage or protective coloring as striking as any I have ever seen.
“Out came the powerful pocket magnifying-glass which I always carry. While looking at a gorgeous little insect decked in gold and green, I became aware of a commotion in the yax-nic tree and turned the lens in that direction. What I saw was a fearsome-looking head and a body that was no less than an walking horror. The head seemed to be all jaws and glittering eyes—deep, powerful grinding mandibles that worked like steel-cutting shears; eyes lidless, unblinking, bulging, and coldly cruel. And the whole body and pointed legs were incased in gray armor of metallic luster. It was with a sigh of relief that I laid down the lens and realized that I had been gazing only at a spider and not some antediluvian monster. Except for the comforting fact of relativity of size between man and these creatures, I doubt if there ever existed three more terrifying animals than the crab-like spider, chin-tun, the tiny crested lizard, hu, and the giant-armored ant, choch, whose sting is worse than that of the scorpion, often producing fever and sometimes death.
“Directly overhead, between the fallen trees, I could see growing at the top of the mound the thorny katzin, one long branch of which swayed over the brink of the man-made chasm. And almost at the very tip of this branch hung the pensile nest of an oriole, with the brilliant feathered male singing his lungs out beside it. The gold-and-black plumage against the green leaves and the glossy jet-black Spanish moss of which the nest was made produced a picture that Gauguin would surely have longed to put on canvas. Suddenly his song ended in a high-pitched scream, as a brown hawk swooped from the sky and clutched not the bird but the nest. With one scaly talon the pirate gripped the neck of the nest, while with the other he tore at its woven bottom. He worked like a flash, but my revolver flashed yet more quickly and effectively. The mother bird and the eggs, I think, were saved, but the nest was sadly in need of the work of an expert in oriole nest-repairing and I imagine it was some time before the master of the house recovered sufficiently from his fright to resume his liquid melody. At least I heard no more from him that day, although every other bird in the neighborhood immediately dropped what he was doing and came over to view the damage and condole with or congratulate the victims of the assault, so that it was a full ten minutes before the jungle resumed its habitual quiet and the averted tragedy was sufficiently forgotten for the near-by dzaypkin, or tree cicada, to resume his not unmusical note that sounds like a muted automobile siren.
“I had outlined my work for the morrow, selected the place where the shovel should follow out the prodigious work of Le Plongeon, gone these many years. I had even snapped the rubber band back on my note-book and was turning my thoughts luncheonward when almost between my feet I heard a frightened squeak and saw a small brown rabbit dart from the opening under the stone ledge on which I was sitting and scurry into the adjoining underbrush at a speed incredible even for a much frightened bunny.
“This looked promising and I concluded to sit a while longer and wait developments. Only a few seconds elapsed before there emerged from the same hole the blunt ophidian head of an enormous boa-constrictor. The unpleasant creature came out uncertainly and the ugly head wavered about nearly on a level with my knees and much too close for comfort. Boas, I think, have not a very keen power of scent. This one, at least, seemed to take up the trail of the rabbit with some difficulty. Yet I can believe, too, that that particular rabbit got over the ground so quickly that he left no scent whatever. Or it is possible that the near presence of an unseen human being bewildered the scent faculties of the huge snake.
“You may be sure that I had kept very, very still, trying to believe what has so often been told me—that few jungle creatures recognize man by his form alone as long as he remains silent and motionless. At any rate, the big reptile finally started in the general direction taken by the rabbit, which no doubt was several hundred miles away by that time if he had maintained his initial rate of travel. Apparently the same idea came to the boa, for he soon reappeared and, still heedless of my presence, passed almost between my legs and reëntered what appeared to be his permanent home, on the ground floor of the pyramid, in the interstices between the big stones which formed its base.
“After making sure that he had entirely gone in and, figuratively speaking, closed the door after him, I took his measurements from observations on certain stone projections he had passed. He was not less than sixteen and a half feet long. Deciding that I had had quite enough adventure for one morning, I bade the spot adieu and went home to lunch.”
CHAPTER VII
THE SACRED WELL
YUCATAN has a peculiar geological structure. The soil is usually very thin, and beneath it is porous limestone rock. Owing to the thinness of the soil, vegetation, prolific as it is, does not grow high and the few large trees grow only where the bed-rock has in some way been broken, thus providing depth of soil for the roots.
The limestone foundation is of minute sea-shells, for it was all once sea-bottom; and this porous rock is very subject to erosion, so that the whole peninsula is honeycombed with subterranean streams and channels and caves, while every here and there are natural wells, or cenotes. Some, like the two greater wells at Chi-chen Itza, are very wide and deep; others are tiny. Nowhere is the elevation above sea-level great, and many of these natural wells extend down to sea-level and are fed by seepage from the sea. Others, of course, are partly fed by surface drainage and nearly all provide an inexhaustible supply of water. Indeed, I believe that it would be practically impossible to provide any pumping equipment which would drain the huge Sacred Well.
In the case of nearly all these wells, except those very close to the sea-coast, the water does not contain salt or minerals evident to the taste, as the limestone rock is a perfect filter. The water, however, as might be expected in this tropical setting, is fairly alive with animalcula. One soon becomes accustomed to such fleshy nourishment in his beverage and ceases to find it unpleasant.
In the dry season the cenotes provide virtually the only water-supply, because there are almost no lakes or surface streams. Owing to the porosity of the rock, moisture sinks into the earth very rapidly and in only a little while after a heavy rain the ground is again quite dry. To-day, as in ancient times, life is dependent upon the natural wells and it is easy to see why the city of Chi-chen Itza was located as it is. On every hacienda, the manor is built adjacent to a cenote. So, too, are the villages. While cenotes are not rare, still they are not common enough to provide a convenient water-supply for the majority of the populace.
In Mérida the wealthy inhabitants have cenotes upon their grounds, providing delightful places to bathe. And around them many pretty grottos or underground chambers have been hollowed out from the rock by artificial means, where it is always cool and where the families resort in the heat of the day. Cenotes are often found in the jungle and sometimes are ideal places for hunting. Where the well has sloping walls or a reasonably good path down to the water, it is sure to be patronized by wild animals of all kinds. Many cenotes contain fish, especially catfish.
One device employed in olden times and still used to augment the water-supply is a shallow reservoir, or cistern, called a chultun (stone calabash), which fills with water in the rainy season and tides over, to a certain extent, the arid months. But it is usually a dry hole before the dry season is far advanced. These rain-cisterns are of all sizes and shapes. There are a few ruined cities, like Uxmal, which had no cenotes or other natural water-supply and which must have depended solely upon the impounded water of many chultuns.
The inexhaustible natural wells were early utilized by the Spanish plantation-owners, who in the irrigation of their fields employed the noria, that ancient, rather clumsy big wheel with water-buckets or dippers fastened to its periphery. It is in operation to-day in Yucatan just as it is in Spain and the Levant.
At Chi-chen Itza are three main cenotes and some lesser ones. The Sacred Well was called “Chen Ku” (Chen means “well”) and was never called dzonot, or cenote, which gives the impression that the great well may have been made by human effort or at least was thus enlarged. Perhaps, however, this idea that human agency was employed in its construction may have arisen mostly from the fact of its circular form and perpendicular sides, which may quite logically have been the work of Nature alone, or Nature aided by man. De Sander speaks of this well as having been formed in part by man, and I think his theory is not improbable. But surely the great well is, for the most part, a work of Nature.
Tol-oc, the next largest well in the Sacred City, was the main source of potable water. In ancient times a stone stairway led down into its waters. To-day the upper steps are gone, but one can see a clearly defined line of chiseled steps some three feet or more beneath the surface and adjacent to these is distinguishable another line of steps. Don Eduardo thinks the stairway originally consisted of a broad flight leading from the top of the well down to the water-level and that at its base was a narrow stone platform. It is impossible to determine now how wide the stairway was, or whether or not his surmise is correct that there was a platform at the bottom.
His conclusions were made several years ago, when the water in the well was unusually low. The fact that the rise and fall of the water-level in this cenote bears little if any relation to local rain-fall leads to the belief that its principal source is far distant and comes down through some permeable rock strata, until by reason of a rock fault it gushes up into the well of Tol-oc. Overhanging the wall are large trees, orchid-covered, whose delicate perfume floats down to meet the water. There are orchids here that would quickly make a fortune for a New York florist.
At first sight the water seems dust-covered and turgid, but the dust on the surface is only pollen from the orchids and the big lilies that cluster against the cliff-like walls. It is therefore good, clean, and deeply poetic dust, and beneath the surface the water is crystal clear and cold as any bubbling New England spring. To bathe in Tol-oc is an unalloyed joy.
The large cenote of X-Katum also is on the outskirts of the city and is famous among the natives to-day for the purity and softness of its water. It has no recorded history nor traditions, but the worn grooves in the solid stone of its brink, where ropes have raised and lowered countless jars for countless centuries, is testimony more eloquent than words.
The many other cenotes in and around the city all contain very pure water and are apparently inexhaustible. Around them are the remains in stone and mortar of what were surely important structures. Near the cenote of Yula, which is almost six miles from the center of the ancient city, Don Eduardo was fortunate enough to uncover a large stone tablet, one side of which is entirely filled with clear, minutely carved hieroglyphs.
The Via Sacra—the causeway, once so straight and smooth, leading to the Sacred Well—is now in bad condition, its outline dulled by time. Great trees border it and their branches arch overhead, while their roots have raised and broken the smooth avenue until it no longer resembles a road. Smaller trees are rooted in the roadway itself.
The Sacred Well is a great pit, with sheer stone sides which are slightly irregular. Its form is elliptical, almost circular. At the side nearest the Great Pyramid is a small ruined sanctuary where the last rites were performed before a maiden was thrown into the well to become the bride of the Rain God. The ground for some distance about this sanctuary was paved with stones. The Sacred Well, at whose bottom dwelt Yum Chac, the Rain God, is more than one hundred and sixty feet wide and as one gazes down its vertical sides, the drop to the water seems tremendous; indeed it is fully seventy feet.
The sheer wall of the well is laminated, split horizontally into two thousand bands or strata of limestone, of various widths. Some of these bands appear hardly thicker than a sheet of paper, others as wide as a house is high, and every lamination is separated from its neighbor by a sandwich filling of thin lime-powder. The striated appearance is very striking, because the laminations are dead black except where vines, trees, and orchids or other parasitic plants or fungi cling to and lend color to the surface. The layers of lime-dust between the strata of rock are either pure white or cream-colored. The powder has a hard-packed coherency, but the elements—sun, wind, and rain together—loosen enough of it so that the plants and the surface of the water are always covered with a thin film of dust. All about the edge of the well is a fringe of trees, and a surprising amount of vegetation has found a root-hold between the rock laminations of the perpendicular walls.
THIS PLAN INDICATES THE GENERAL SHAPE AND SIZE OF THE SACRED WELL AND THE LOCATION OF THE SHRINE OF THE LAST RITES
The placid water of the pool is jade-green, due partly to the great depth, and partly, I believe, to traces of certain salts or solubles in the water, although I cannot speak with certainty on this point, as I have never subjected it to chemical analysis. I have tried many, many times to get a really good photograph of the Sacred Well and have come to the conclusion that only the motion camera, or an airplane view can ever succeed in reproducing the sight. The “still” photograph, taken from the brink, shows either an expanse of wall and little water or much water and little wall. For this reason the illustration opposite [page 113] fails to show the whole well and does not begin to do justice to this most interesting, historic spot.
As Don Eduardo and I sat on the crumbling walls of the shrine, at the very brink of the Sacred Well, he told me of his famous undertaking, now so successfully carried out—the removal of the ancient treasures from the very bottom of the Sacred Well.
“For many years,” he said, “the thought of exploring the bottom of the Sacred Well had filled my mind. I thought about it by day and dreamed about it by night. It became a mania which would not let me rest and earned for me the reputation of being a little queer in the head. A thousand times I had gone over in my mind the practical ways and means that might be employed. Draining, dredging, or diving—it must be one of these three. I early became convinced that probably the well could not be drained, and certainly not with the slender finances at my command. I concluded at last that it could be dredged, and with comparatively simple equipment consisting of a stiff-legged derrick with a hand windlass, a long boom which might be swung out over the well, and a steel orange-peel buck-scoop, or bucket.
“Simple as the undertaking sounds, it was beset at every turn with difficulties. The equipment, especially contrived and designed, was easily ordered in the United States and put aboard ship. Getting it ashore at Progreso, where it had to be unloaded five miles out and lightered to shore, was the first hard job. Loading it on flat-cars and finally unloading it at Dzitas, sixteen miles from my city, was no less difficult. With only native assistance, without trucks or anything adequate on wheels, and over the poorest excuse for a road, the equipment was moved piecemeal, until, after months of the hardest work I have ever done, it was all piled beside the Sacred Well.
“Assembling the machinery was a task of shorter duration but no less strenuous. I would at that time have given gladly some years of my life for the services, for a few hours, of one or two brawny, profane, and competent Yankee ‘riggers.’ Time and again, before the cumbersome outfit was completely in place, I expected it to topple into the well or fall upon me and my Indians.
“At last all was ready. My Indians, about thirty in number, each had his appointed task. The most trusted were to man the windlass and the turning of the boom from whose projecting end hung the cable-suspended dredging-scoop. The boom was swung out until it extended far over the well. I gave the signal and the steel bucket descended, disappeared under the green water, and at last came to rest on the bottom. Slowly the boom was swung back toward the brink of the pit and stopped. Eager hands manned the windlass to raise the bucket. Seemingly endless feet of wet cable were wound about the drum before the filled bucket broke the surface of the water. Up and up it rose, until it was on a level with our heads; then it was swung in by the boom and lowered to the spot which I had selected, where every precious scoopful should be minutely and painstakingly examined on the sorting-tables I had erected. No treasure must slip through our hands; nothing must be damaged by careless handling. Anything perishable must be immediately treated with the preservatives which were ready and waiting. My hands trembled, in spite of my effort to control them, as I emptied the contents of the scoop upon the sorting-tables, for soon I must be either ‘that clever chap who recovered the treasures from the Sacred Well in Yucatan’ or else the prize idiot of the whole Western Hemisphere.
“I went over the muck, spreading it out, examining every bit of it, and found nothing; not a trace of anything interesting. It might just as well have come from any cesspool.
“Again the winch revolved, its ratchets clinking against the brake. The big scoop, with its hungry steel lips wide open, plunged into the still water. The Sacred Well seemed sullen in the reflection of a black cloud overhead, as though determined to the very last to withhold its secrets.
“And so it was, day after day. The winch rolled and unrolled its cable of steel and its manila ropes. The triple-pointed steel jaws dived into the soft, yielding muck many feet below the surface of the well, and came dripping up to deposit their burden. And day after day I found nothing but ill-smelling rotted leaves and a few stones, prevented from sinking into the mud by rotting tree branches which had fallen into the well and which, when not too decayed to stand the bite of the steel jaws, were brought up by the dredge. Sometimes whole trees were brought up and their weight made our steel cable sing like the string of a bass viol as the sodden mass was swung underneath the surface to free as much of it as possible and so reduce the weight before raising it clear of the water and dropping it again in another part of the pool where it sank with a splash and swirl of water.
“At times the dredge, working between two entangled trees, was caught as in a trap and we experienced very real difficulties and dangers in freeing it. When the whole mass could be raised to the surface, agile natives with axes and machetes always managed to get down to it and, clinging precariously to cable and bucket, free it from its rotting incubus. For hours at a time we labored with such delaying obstacles, but always in the end the winch again rolled out its cable and then coiled it up with nothing but a mouthful of the mucky bed of the pool.
“Several times we brought up the skeletons of deer or of wild hogs and once the tangled skeletons of a jaguar and a cow, mute evidence of a long-past forest tragedy—the cow feeding quietly, probably at night; the spring of the hungry forest cat and the agonized, purposeless flight of the bleeding quarry with the clawing jungle beast clinging to it; the last frantic leap into the well where both were doubtless stunned or killed by the seventy-foot drop to the surface of the water.
“Then, for a long while, finds even as interesting as these ceased. Absolutely nothing was brought up but mud and leaves, leaves and mud, with an occasional stone thrown in for good measure. My high hopes dwindled to nothing and became less than nothing. The work was interminable, nauseating. Doggedly I kept at it, however, determined not to stop until the absolute rock bottom of the well was reached. I tried not to let my Indians see that I was discouraged, but they did see it nevertheless and I think wondered every day how much longer the crazy stranger would persist in his foolishness and pay them high wages for bringing up mud, useless even as fertilizer, from the bottom of an abandoned well.
“But Fate was even then preparing a pleasant surprise, for one day when things seemed darkest—a gloomy, rainy day when everything was soggy and sodden with moisture—the dredge brought up what first appeared to be two ostrich eggs, cream-colored and oval against the black mud in which they rested. These proved to be balls of copal incense and they revived at once my waning hopes. We had several times previously brought up fragments of earthenware which seemed to be of ancient origin and probably were, but I could not permit myself any illusions about them. Similar ancient potsherds are not uncommon on the surface of the ancient city. A boy ... some boy ... this year ... ten years ago ... a hundred years or ten centuries ago ... might have taken up a potsherd and skittered it into the well. Boy nature has not changed through the centuries and certainly no boy with a nice, flat chip of a water-jug at hand could have resisted the urge to see it skip far down and across the water of this big pool. And so the potsherds we brought up might well be ancient without having been long buried in the well.
“But the balls of copal, or aromatic resin, left no doubt. Surely they were thrown into the Sacred Well as an offering to the Rain God in those long-past centuries when Chi-chen Itza was a great and holy city, the Mecca of the Mayas! With the evidence that this day brought forth came the conviction that the long siege was at an end and that it was merely a question of time before other and more important treasures would be brought to light. They proved to my satisfaction that the well did really have a religious significance in the olden days and therefore the legends concerning it were doubtless true in the main.
“From that time on, nearly every shovelful contained some trove—balls of copal incense or baskets that had been filled with plastic copal. The basket-work had nearly all rotted away, but the deep impress of its weaving still remained on the masses of hardened copal. There were tripod vessels often filled with copal and rubber incense; wooden fragments of various forms and of unknown use but indicating the skill of some ancient craftsman. And among these wooden things were several pieces of wood made in the form of an old-fashioned English bill-hook or of a pruning-knife. My natives looked at them as they came up from the sacred pool and called them machetes of wood, but my heart sang with joy as I viewed them. No sword of damask steel, no Toledo blade could compare in historical value to these simple wooden implements, for they were, in the most primitive form, those strange weapons of the ancient Mayas and kindred races which the eye of the twentieth century had never previously beheld except in pictured form. These wooden weapons were dart-throwers— the hul-che of the Mayas; the atlatl of the Nahuatls. They are pictured many times upon the walls of the old temples. Warriors are shown in every attitude of throwing the dart from the hul-che.
“The hul-che, or throwing-stick, of the Mayas is in its most primitive form more elemental than the bow and arrow, more elemental even than the yun-tun, or sling, for throwing stones. The first ones we brought up from the well were so near the birth-type that the hook was actually formed by the natural twist of the wood where the branch had been cut from the parent stem. In ages past, some jungle man, lacking a club and needing a weapon, pulled up a sapling that had attached at its root a secondary branch. As he gave the sapling a downward whirl, the secondary branch flew off at a tangent and straight as an arrow. Thus, probably, came the idea of the hul-che.
“It is a singular and interesting fact that the hul-che, so universally used by the Mayas and their contiguous neighbors, is almost exactly duplicated by the bone or ivory throwing-stick of the Eskimos, while there are absolutely no traces of its use by the Aztecs or other northern Mexican peoples. In those dim ages when the human race was young—those ages as vague to us in outline and substance as the clouds that float across the sky—the hul-che and not the bow was the common weapon of battle and the chase. Then we must suppose some great gelid cataclysm blotted out all humans throughout a whole region, leaving an ethnic break between the two extremes. Gradually the break was filled in by intrusive fragmentary races having no knowledge of the arts and weapons that had been before, leaving only the extremes, the arctic and the tropic, with their descent of man and his arts unbroken.
“Later on I was to have the keen pleasure of finding several votive and ceremonial examples of the hul-che representing the highest artistic development. Possibly they are the very ones which served as models for the carvings showing such weapons in the hands of stately priests and other figures portrayed upon the walls and square stone columns of my Sacred City.
“While the Mayas seem never to have used the bow and arrow, their neighbors to the north did. Possibly the Mayas actually preferred the more primitive and possibly more powerful weapon in whose use they were very expert, holding it in the hand with the hooked portion down and resting the feathered end of the dart upon it. The shaft of the dart lay between the fingers grasping the hul-che, with the pointed arrow-head even with the wrist. A powerful overhand motion of the arm or a side swing and release of the dart sent it hurtling through the air, and legend says that the dart thus thrown by a strong man might be driven clear through the body of a deer.
“When these weapons of wood were brought up from the Sacred Well they seemed to be in as good condition as on the day, centuries before, when they were cast into the water; but almost immediately upon being exposed to the air they began to decompose and it was only by treating them immediately with preservatives that I was able to save them.
“With the copal balls and baskets and the wooden objects, we also brought up great quantities of rubber incense and rubber objects. The early legendary people who are supposed to have settled Yucatan were called Hulmecas, which means literally ‘rubber people,’ and the name was derived from the extensive use of rubber in their religious and public rites; just as the Sapotecas, or ‘sapote people,’ are so called to this day because of their extensive use of the sapote tree and its fruits and derivatives. So says the gifted historian Torquemade, following much the same line of reasoning as other writers, who say that the name of the tribe called Olmecas was derived from their general term or name for their chief or overlord.
“Whatever the answers to these mooted questions of etymology may be, it has become evident, from the finds brought up from the Sacred Well, that the Mayas were users of rubber in various ingenious ways. Many of the masses of copal which I raised from the well bore, imbedded at or near the surface, nodules or small cylinders of rubber, and in some cases wooden splinters still protruded from the rubber insets. Obviously both the splinters and the rubber portions were intended as lighters for the copal, and this evidence substantiates Torquemade’s statement: ‘They light the fires in their vessels containing the copal used in their sacrificial ceremonies with rubber.’
“Upon several of the balls or masses of copal, as found either in their original baskets or vases or without their containers, small figures of rubber, built around the wooden splinters, were placed in a standing position. At times the legs of these little rubber grotesques were half buried in the copal. Evidently they were merely more elaborate forms of lighters or fuses.
“One day when the dredge came up with its customary load of decayed leaves and silt and one of my natives had, as usual, pushed his arms, clear to the elbows, into the oozy mass, he leaped back with a cry of terror. We all clustered about him to see what was amiss. Silently he pointed to the head of a small dark-colored serpent with a white-ringed neck, which stood up menacingly from amidst the muck. It was precisely of the shape, size, and appearance of a small and extremely poisonous viper which is native to Yucatan. Some seconds elapsed before we became convinced that it was, after all, made of rubber. Although made by hands dead, possibly, ere Christ was born, it turned sinuously in our fingers as we drew it from the mud. It has retained the elasticity of vulcanized rubber, a substance reinvented by Goodyear in modern times. After its centuries of immersion it would surely have shriveled and crumpled to bits if it had been long exposed to the air. I took no chances, but at once put it in a rubber-preserving fluid.
“A number of dolls were found, made of wood and adorned with plastic copal and rubber. They are perfectly formed and artistically colored and decorated. Several have movable arms and legs, with joints made of rubber.
“There was evidence that human nature has not changed—that there were cheats and dishonest sharpers then as now. Some of the copal balls, instead of being clear, heavy, and pure throughout, as were the majority, had a perfect exterior appearance but within were a conglomeration of leaves, sticks, and rubbish—evidently the skimming or residue from the melting-pot. Doubtless some ancient and not too honest profiteer grew wealthy through their fabrication.
El Castillo, the Temple of Kukul Can, on its great pyramid, is the center of the Sacred City and the largest edifice.
Looking down into the Sacred Well. Because of the size of the well and the fringe of trees about it, the whole scene cannot be readily photographed.
“Weight for weight, I imagine we accumulated ten times as many potsherds as all other specimen material combined. At times a large portion of the silt in the dredge seemed to consist of terra-cotta grains—an indication of the enormous number of earthenware vessels which must have been hurled into the well. Probably for centuries the custom was observed of casting into the pool these containers filled with burning incense or copal. Very likely some, heated by the flaming incense, disintegrated almost at once when they struck the cold water, while others lasted for a time and finally crumbled into dust. But to furnish all this red-gray mud and burnt earth-silt an almost incalculable number of vases and jars and basins must have been required. Luckily, by no means all of them were destroyed or even broken beyond repair. Scores were saved entirely whole and among them are many strange and interesting ones.
“The range in pattern and workmanship of potsherds is wide. The larger vessels or fragments of them—cinerary urns and incense-holders—were generally of a coarse, granular biscuit mass, well turned but unevenly burned. They are capable, however, of withstanding a considerable degree of heat. Between this class and a hard slate-gray ware almost as thin and fine as porcelain, are many grades and numerous interesting forms, such as well-made models of human heads, manikins, animals, reptiles,—especially crocodiles,—grotesque Atlantean figures, and tripodal temple vessels used in the sacrificial ceremonies, to hold votive offerings or viands.
“Not always did we have such good fortune in our dredging. At times the soft upper layers of mud caved into the pits we had excavated and we spent many days and weeks in hauling up this mud before we again reached the treasure-level.
“And then, one day, the dredge brought up a perfect skull, bleached and polished to whiteness. Examination showed it to be that of a young girl. Later came other skulls and human bones, scores of them. Most of the skeletons were those of youthful maids, but every now and then one was raised which had the breadth of shoulders, the thick skull, and the heavy frame of a powerful man—no doubt some mighty warrior sacrificed in the flower of his vigor, sent to grace the court of the Rain God.
“I remember as if it were but yesterday finding in the mud raised by the dredge a pair of dainty little sandals, evidently feminine, once worn by some graceful, high-born maid. These more than the bleached skulls and bones, more than any other of the finds, brought home to me the pathos and tragedy of those ancient, well-intentioned, and cruelly useless sacrifices. Frequently bits of cotton fabric were brought up, perfectly preserved but carbonized. My own theory was, and still is, that the copal incense, falling upon the robe of the victim, together with the substance with which the body was painted ere it was sacrificed, exuded an oil which penetrated the fabric and gradually carbonized it, thus preserving it. These specimens of cloth, many of which are lovely in design and texture, are, I believe, the only relics of ancient Maya fabrics in the world to-day.
“Detached skeletons were raised until we had upward of ninety, and at sight of the whitened bones my heart was wrung with pity for the young creatures whose lives had been snuffed out just when living was sweetest. Our finds proved conclusively that the statements made to Landa in 1565 by the natives were true—that both maids and warriors had been frequently sacrificed to the god of the well.
“The female skeletons were those of girls ranging in age from fourteen to twenty. The first one we raised and completely assembled had a small, thin-walled skull, with the sutures almost separate. The skull was delicate, shapely, with small, regular, perfect teeth. The sympathetic imagination without effort clothed the naked bones with flesh and substance, so that one saw instantly the graceful, lovely, high-bred maiden and the last solemn act that had stilled the poor girlish body, clad in all its finery and left to sink into the ooze at the bottom of this terrible pit.
“By comparing the female skulls with those of modern Mayas, obtained from the cemeteries of several villages, I came to the conclusion that there was no appreciable variation or difference. These century-old skulls might pass as typical crania of pure-blooded young Maya women of to-day.
“The male skulls are a contrast to the female ones. Some are relatively large, thick-walled, with protuberant surfaces, receding foreheads, and prognathic jaws. Evidently their possessors were ferocious, primitive, almost gorilla-like—not of the same race which bred the girl-brides of the Rain God. Again this tallies with the tradition that the warriors sacrificed were captives—fighting-men of high renown, who, after being made drunk with bal-che (the sacred mead of the Mayas), were hurled into the well as fit offerings to the deity.
“Some years before the time of which I am speaking I had the good fortune to discover in a sealed stone-walled grave the now famous Sabua skull. I had to work on it for three days, with atomizer and glue water, because the skull, which was perfect in shape, was no more than lime-dust which would crumble at the least touch. By this treatment I saved it and it is to-day a priceless museum piece kept under glass. In view of this experience it seemed strange, almost uncanny, to see these perfect skulls and bones come from the well, so wonderfully preserved that they required no other treatment than cleansing and rubbing with a weak solution of formalin to render them ready for packing and shipment. In the Sacred Well, big and gruesome as it is, are no large reptiles, no saurians, no fish which would or could tear apart a human body or gnaw or crush the bones. I know this to be true, in spite of the local traditions which speak of huge serpents and strange animals to be seen about the well and to be unpleasantly encountered should one be so foolish as to roam about in its vicinity at midnight. I have been that foolish many times and have never met anything of the sort. On the contrary, in the glorious moonlight of Yucatan the big pool has for me an even greater lure than it has in the sunlight.
“As the excavations in the well became deeper and deeper we passed from mud to powdered limestone, which became more and more compact until we reached a marl-like bed into which the steel-lipped bucket bit with difficulty, finally making almost no impression at all. It became obvious that, although we had by no means dredged the whole well, we had literally reached the end of our rope as far as dredging was concerned. I was convinced that further work of the sort would bring us many more finds, but I was quite as certain that they would not differ greatly in character or variety from those already accumulated.
“I could not quarrel with our good fortune thus far. I felt well repaid, even if we should discover nothing else, for all my effort and expense. My highly speculative venture had amply justified itself. I had proved conclusively the history of the Sacred Well. But our dredging operations, together with soundings made from time to time, indicated clearly that the bottom of the well was very uneven—a series of hummocks; almost a miniature mountain range. And in the pockets between those hummocks, where our dredge could not reach, might there not be other treasures?—objects heavier and smaller in size than anything we had yet found; things which, because of their weight, would sink through the mud to the very bottom of the well.
“Never could I leave the spot until, by some means or other, this last and final ghost was laid.”
CHAPTER VIII
SIXTY FEET UNDER WATER
WE had reached the stage where it was very slow work for the dredge to get even a mouthful of the stiff, almost shale-like bottom of the well, but, while we brought up fewer treasures than previously, I was not ready to discard the derrick and dredge as long as the bucket brought up any finds whatever.
“To facilitate the work at this stage, a plan which I had long considered was put into effect. We built a big flat-bottomed scow, crude but serviceable, and capable of holding ten scoopfuls of muck from the dredge. The scow was constructed, right on the brink of the well, of logs and such other materials as we had at hand. Then we lowered it, by means of the derrick, until it floated easily seventy feet below, on the still surface of the water.
“I fancy if the grim old Rain God, Noh-och Yum Chac, the Indra of the Mayas, was enraged when the dredge first began to rob him of his long-held treasures, the presence of this clumsy craft, as it tipped and yawed on its slow seventy-foot descent to the water, must surely have excited him to frenzy. Yet inexorably we continued our quest, undaunted by the thought of the god’s wrath and determined to strip him of every secret. We moored the craft, by a long rope, to a projecting stone knob on the sheer wall of the well, so that it was directly over the area where the dredge had been working. Our system was to lower the bucket, raise it, and pour its dripping contents upon the scow, and this we continued to do until we had heaped upon the boat ten buckets of bottom mud. Loaded to its capacity, the scow was drawn to a narrow sandy shelf or beach which had formed at one side of the well. Then we transferred and examined the load, handling ten buckets from the dredge in about the same length of time it had taken us previously to dispose of one. And thus, for a while, the dredge was made to work profitably even under the increasing scarcity of ‘pay dirt.’
“During this phase of our labor we accumulated a great quantity of potsherds, copal, and rubber nodules. Each time the filled scow came to the little beach, the big toads retreated into their rocky cavities amidst the roots and the myriad eyes that usually shone in these twilight depths became invisible. Only the iguanas and the lizards in the branches of the cork-trees that shadowed the tiny beach remained sleepily undisturbed, while the little painted tortoises on the half-submerged logs or branches floating near by became so accustomed to the sight of the scow that they stayed brazenly in their places and eyed the proceedings without fear.
“As the work went on, the tailing or discard from our dredge began to spread out and extend our little beach until it became a solid peninsula jutting out into the well and making our labors easier by providing much-needed footing and elbow-room.
“Long hours I spent gazing over the side of the scow, waiting for the dredge to come up with its load, and while I waited I glimpsed fascinating highlights of a hitherto unknown world—a world with its tragedies, grotesqueries, and surprises; a world in which humans took no part; one unseen until then by human eyes. Drifting past on the turgid waters were curious jelly-like formless creatures and tiny water-insects, some moving slowly as with effort, others like an arrow in shape and speed. Here was a plethora of twisting, darting, gyrating forms of life, all intent on the one object of preserving life—that bitter jest of Nature who instils in us each, great or small, the belief that our own particular and individual existence is of amazing import when she herself values it so lightly.
“Floating on the water were many small red worms no larger round than a pin and perhaps a quarter of an inch long. As one floated lazily by, a small red ant, blown or fallen from the land above, struck the water and instantly was attacked by the worm. The struggle was titanic but brief and the worm, which was more slender than its victim, simply swallowed the ant—body, struggling legs, and all. As the swallowing continued the body of the worm became almost transparent and I could easily follow the journey of his dinner inside, until diner and dinner drifted out of sight.
“Close by the cliff-like wall of the pool was a school of tiny jet-black catfish—pouts, we used to call them in New England when I was a lad. They were but a few days beyond the egg state and were carefully herded by a portly, motherly old catfish. Her inclination evidently was toward dignified, unhurried movement, well tempered with complete repose, but the erratic and swift excursions of her hundred or more infants kept her on the qui vive to head off their ceaseless turnings and dashes, for they seemed possessed to venture into the outer and unknown world, even as other infants since time began. To add to her trials, the whole school was more or less surrounded by tadpoles just as black and even more lively than the baby fishes. They seemed not to have nor to require any motherly care and, like impudent street gamins, they delighted in teasing and leading astray the more tenderly nurtured youngsters. Slyly they tried to swallow the little fishes, tail first, in their sucker-like mouths, and were dissuaded only by the wrathful dash of Mother Catfish.
“It was during this time, which I call the intermediate stage of the work, that many of our specimens of lighter weight were obtained. Among them are pieces of gourds, copal fragments, parts of wooden objects, and bones, all wonderfully preserved in this colossal silo—for the Sacred Well is in many respects like a silo. Some of the potsherds and wooden objects, and even a few of the gourds, had been covered with a thick white paint, almost as hard as enamel, and upon the surface of this the artists of old had worked and drawn figures and hieroglyphs similar to those found in the Codices. Some of the finest pieces of ancient fabrics were recovered at this time. The gradual caving in of the mud about the cavity we had scooped out permitted these fabrics to slip gently into the hole and to be brought up unharmed by the steel lips of our dredge. They are all carefully preserved and are the only authentic specimens of their kind known to archæological science. I deem them among the most important of my treasures from the well.
“There came up ropes and cords, both of bark and fiber, and curiously knotted masses of copal; images carved from light wood and covered with rubber and copal; and always bones and more bones, of maidens and warriors.
“At last the dredge bit only on rock and boulders, against which the steel jaws made no headway. Again and again the bucket came up empty and with its jaws twisted and bent.
“If the first stage—the beginning of the work, when the steel bucket first plunged into the still water of the pit—was exciting, I found myself now laboring under a still greater emotion, for the time had come which I had long foreseen, when the dredge unaided by human hands could accomplish nothing more. There must be hands at the bottom of the well—not the dead hands of pitiful maidens, but live hands of sturdy men to explore every inch of the uneven rocky bottom. From dredging with windlass and bucket, we must pass to a season of deep-sea diving with all the paraphernalia of diving-suits and hose and air-pumps.
“What could be more interesting, more romantic than to go down under sixty feet of water to the very bottom of this grim pit?—to tread the corridors of the most sacred and abysmal abode of the Rain God? I might possibly remain at the bottom, myself, a modern sacrifice to the ancient deity, but I was willing to take that chance; for nothing could now keep from the world the treasures already recovered from the well and if I perished in the attempt at further discoveries, my effort would be, as a whole, not in vain. It was almost like trying to push aside the veil that separates living man from the nether world. Who might say but that the ancient people spoke the truth when they said that the entrance to the habitation of the Rain God was guarded by huge serpents and that none might pass but those expressly summoned by the god, to carry out his mandates? Or might there not live in that deep ooze slimy-bodied monsters of the antediluvian era, to which the passing of the centuries was but as the passing of hours? This was no time for speculation. I did not crave to serve as a brontosaurian breakfast, yet I must know the bottom of this well.
“Long hours and many days must be spent down on the bed-rock, under high water-pressure, in total darkness and in a temperature but little above freezing. My hands must explore the cracks and crevices and corners and pits where the dredge could not enter, and each find must be carried to the bucket and placed carefully within it, to be raised later.
“I went over every detail of the plan with great care, for not only my own life but the lives of others depended upon its practicability. A hitch, an unforeseen obstacle, a piece of bungling, and one or more of us would never return alive to the sunlight. I was prepared for this part of the business, having become an experienced deep-sea diver back in the United States. But diving under bright skies in open water spaces bathed to some depth by clear sunlight reflected from the sandy sea-bottom is not at all the same as descending into turgid, green, almost opaque water confined by high-cliffed walls overgrown with mighty trees and festooned with huge vines twisting and turning like giant serpents. I knew it to be very different from and far more dangerous than clearing off the barnacles and seaweed from the clean-lined bodies of United States cruisers and lighthouse tenders.
“Early one bright morning my crew who worked the windlass and managed the bucket stood grouped about the derrick. The winch which had so long rattled and clanged as the steel jaws of the dredge opened and plunged down to their task, was silent and motionless; but its silence, like that of the men grouped about, seemed to be a sort of watchful waiting rather than the lazy inertia that comes with a holiday hiatus. The cogged wheels were hooked introspectively, as it were, but the jaws of the bucket hung loosely open like those of a school-boy, agape with interest and wonder. On the refuse-built level space between the derrick and the examination platforms were strewn strange-looking suits of armor, canvas-lined and metal-covered, piles of rope and rubber hose, canvas-covered rope ladders, a small but powerful air-pump, and divers other things. Yes, even the divers themselves, for he who was to be my aide in this undertaking had come under contract from the sponge-banks of Florida with his striker, or pump attendant, and all the necessary equipment. Both men were Greeks, young, lithe, handsome as Apollo himself. All that day we spent assembling, testing, and getting everything ready for actual diving operations early the next morning. As fast as the apparatus was put in order we placed it on the scow, which had been scoured and cleaned and was now transformed into an ideal diver’s craft. Before nightfall the air-pump was securely fixed on the scow, the air-tubes and life-lines were in place, and the rope ladder dangled over the side and disappeared into the green water. From its bottom rung I should, on the morrow, step off into the unknown.
“The morning of the next day was heavy with clouds that soon broke in a deluge—a three-day norther that kept us all under cover except for a diurnal excursion when the Greeks and I and my native striker went to the edge of the well and from there carefully scanned the scow to make sure our equipment was weathering the storm. Luckily, the entire apparatus, pump and all, was almost amphibious by nature and habit, and so far as the eye could see the wetting was doing no damage.
“Dawn of the fourth day was clear and bright and the leaves and grass, even the sky, seemed to have been washed clean by the long rain. After a hasty breakfast we hurried to the well and descended via the air route, in the dredge bucket, to the rain-soaked, water-covered deck of the scow. We bailed out the water and sponged off the deck, on which we then laid out with minute care the two rubber-lined canvas diving-suits, making sure that there were no holes through which the compressed air could issue in lines of silver bubbles into the surrounding water. Our wrists were carefully soaped and we stepped into the clumsy uniforms, forcing our hands through the tight-fitting rubber wristlets. The neck-bands were adjusted and the copper helmets, cloth-lined and with glassed goggle eyes, were put over our heads and securely fastened. Then came a necklace of lead plates and finally heavy metal-soled boots.
“A trial puff of air from the pump, a touch of the valves in the helmets, and we were ready to call on Noh-och Yum Chac at the bottom of the Sacred Well. With a final hand-clasp all around and with my Indians looking very awed and solemn, I waddled to the edge of the craft and clambered down the rope ladder about as gracefully as a turtle falling off a log.
“I must confess that as I loosed my hold of the last rung and went swirling down into the watery darkness my heart beat far faster than could be reasonably accounted for by the increasing water-pressure; and my mind, like that of a drowning person, reviewed at lightning speed all the errors of commission and omission of my whole life. But almost automatically I took the precautions of every experienced diver, making sure that the air-line and life-line were free and clear of obstacles. Almost at once the weak, greenish light faded into utter blackness. Once or twice during the descent my lines brushed against some sunken tree roots or branches and I was instantly alert, for in such encounters there is always an element of real danger. These woody projections were, however, quite rotten and with no more strength than soaked punk, and fortunately always broke off at the mere touch of the stout rope.
“Meanwhile, as I went down and down, at a distance of every ten feet or so I felt acute pains in my ears, as though sharp objects were being thrust into them. By adjusting the valves in the helmet and opening wide my mouth, I succeeded in equalizing the air-pressure on the ears, causing a sound like the exhaust of a motorcycle on the ear-drums but relieving the pain. Once I was at the bottom, the helmet valves alone required attention; for only by opening them frequently is fresh air forced down from the pump and the vitiated air expelled.
“I had reached the bottom but a moment before I sensed that the Greek diver had also descended and was close beside me. He had waited only long enough, before joining me, to make sure my native pump attendant was handling my air-supply properly. The darkness was complete, a perfect blindfold, but I reached out and touched the Greek so that we might be sure of our relative locations and not get our lines entangled.
“Standing upon the uneven, rocky bottom of the well, I was thrilled with the knowledge that I stood where no living man had stood since time began. I think I felt much the same high elation that must have filled Peary and Shackleton at the end of their respective dashes to the polar caps.
“I had foreseen the need of light and had provided myself with the very latest and best submarine electric light obtainable. What any illuminant could do, this light would do. But what light can force its beams through a lake of chocolate-colored porridge? Our lights were of not the slightest use in this grim old water-pit and we had to depend entirely upon the sense of touch. And this sense served us well, for under constant use our finger-tips grew highly sensitive. The palpi in the skin whorls and curves became so responsive that we were frequently able to distinguish the form and texture of the objects we touched and even got so far as to guess at colors, although we made many wrong hazards.
“Another modern invention which we carried at the bottom of the well was the submarine telephone. It operated satisfactorily, but we found little use for it, as it was less bothersome merely to give the required number of tugs on the signal rope when we wanted to communicate with those above. The Greek and I found also that by touching the metal fronts of our helmets we could converse easily with each other. The voice tones were muffled, but with a little practice we had no trouble in understanding each other. I even recollect hearing the chattering of the strong white teeth of my Hellenic companion. The water was very cold and every time we came to the surface after our daily two hours of immersion our lips were blue and our bodies covered with goose-flesh and trembling with chill. Coffee, very hot and very strong, was our first requisite.
“The water-pressure at a depth of sixty feet is considerable, and both the air-tubes and life-lines were buoyed in several places by tightly corked quart bottles. When drawn up after the day’s work, the lower ones were always half full of water, in spite of the fact that the empty bottles had been corked as tightly as possible before being lowered into the water. This will give some idea of the tremendous pressure.
“This pressure, offset by a corresponding pressure of air in the diving-suit, affects in a peculiar manner the movements of the diver. In spite of my necklace of leaden plates and my two-inch lead soles, I seemed to weigh nothing at all. A slight stamp of my foot upon the bottom would take me soaring upward perhaps ten feet in the water, and I would then come slowly down to rest two yards from my original position. It took good judgment to land in any precise spot, because it was so very easy to overshoot the mark. It seemed as though one real leap would carry me clear to the surface of the well and perhaps entirely up the cliff-like sides.
“On one occasion I became so interested in the finds on the bottom of the well that I quite forgot to let out the accumulated air by means of the helmet valves. I had been working diligently, feeling along the silt-filled cracks of the rocky bottom; then, satisfied with my examination, I gave a stamp of my foot and started upward. But my diving-suit was so filled with compressed air that I turned in the water topsyturvy and finally hit the bottom of the scow feet up, with a resounding thump of my metal soles which almost caused a panic among the natives on the deck of the craft. Meanwhile I swung around turtle-wise from under the boat, found the rope ladder, and started to climb over the side. My henchmen, pallid with fear, were pumping for dear life, while I, at the side of the boat but below their line of vision, opened wide the helmet valves to prevent them from blowing me up like a toy balloon. When I appeared over the side they all crowded around me and Juan Mis, my faithful old servant, took my helmet-encased head in both his hands and peered eagerly through the thick glass insets. ‘God be praised, he is laughing!’ shouted Juan, and they all chuckled with happy relief, while I sat on the gunwale and was divested of my cumbersome habiliments.
“Our first task was to discover the nature of the stone objects that had so often cramped the jaws of our dredge and strained its chains, costing us hours of hard work in repairs. The fact that the dredge had never secured a sufficient purchase on any of these stones to bring them to the surface led me to surmise that the majority were smooth-faced and probably hieroglyphed. Mere rocks or boulders rarely were so smooth that the steel bucket could not grip them and bring them up after a trial or two.
“By feeling over the bottom of the well with my hands, I located the stones one after another and found my surmise correct. We managed to fasten chains about them and by means of the derrick raised them from their watery bed. One by one the heavy, wondrously carved stones were hauled up through sixty feet of water and up another seventy feet until they rested upon the brink of the well. One great stone was a perfectly sculptured statue of a seated god or priest which reminded me of ‘The Thinker,’ by Rodin.
“The next day we again descended into the well, this time not in search of large objects such as carved stones, but rather in quest of small things lying in the silt between the humps and in the crevices at the bottom.
“I remember distinctly my sensations as my fingers touched upon curious small objects like coins, small nuts, and rings. I could hardly contain my curiosity as I tucked them into my pouch, and my eagerness to get up to light and air to examine them was almost irresistible. When I had collected perhaps twenty or thirty I gave the signal and started upward. Before my diving-dress had been more than half removed I plunged my chilled fingers into the dripping pouch and drew out beautiful embossed rings, small bells of copper, and several bells of pure gold. There were bells and ornaments and medallions of gold repoussé and gold filagree, of exquisite design and craftmanship. There were lovely carved jade beads and other objects of jade. Just as truly as any mining prospector, I had struck gold, but gold tremendously more valuable than his raw nuggets; for, whatever might be the mere intrinsic value of my golden finds, each bit was in reality beyond price.
“This was but the beginning. We now had at our command two means of bringing up the treasure. The big carved stones having been removed from the well, the dredge could again be used, or we could don the diving-suits. In many instances the Greek and I directed from the bottom the work of the dredge. The golden objects brought up, if simply thrown into the goldsmith’s melting-pot, would net several hundreds of thousands of dollars in bullion—dividend enough, if one were sufficiently sordid of mind, to justify all my investment of time, effort, and money in the undertaking.
“One particularly wet and dreary day the dredge had worked all morning long, in a monotonous round in which nothing of value was brought up. Toward lunch-time I had about decided to send the men to their quarters for the rest of the day, to let them recover from their half-drowned state. Just then the men at the receiving-platform gave a shout that brought me running. For several blissful minutes we were busy picking lovely little copper bells from the black ooze. The rain was forgotten. Bearers were sent to bring our lunch, and eagerly we sent the steel bucket down again. And again it came up with a pudding of mud plentifully plummed with copper bells. All afternoon we plied the dredge, and nearly every load contained more copper bells, of all sizes and shapes, none larger than our old-fashioned sleigh-bells and many much smaller. In fact, they so resembled sleigh-bells that I could not rid my mind of the idea that they were modern bells used for barter and exchange, like the hawks’ bells of Spain. At the end of the day we had piled up over two hundred of these curious specimens of Maya workmanship, and even the most cursory examination showed them to be of genuine ancient origin.
“We carried the bells to the plantation house, where all the servants looked with awe and wonder at los cascabeles de los antiguos, the bells of the ancient people. From that time on hardly a day passed that we did not add a handful of copper bells to our growing collection. The bells are mainly capsule-shaped or spherical. Some still have a carbon core within, showing clearly the method by which they were molded. Very rarely did the bells contain clappers or rattles, and this fact supports the tradition that the ancient people believed that all things had life and souls. By removal of the clappers the bells were ‘killed,’ made mute forever, and their souls, thus released, entered the realm of Ah Puch, the God of Death. Incidentally, the portraits of Ah Puch show him with anklets of bells.
“Certain of the larger copper bells have rope-like designs embossed on them, while others are fashioned like animals and birds and the grinning heads of Cheshire cats. Some represent the heads of foxes or of the anteater, showing unmistakably the long, tapering snout.
“Intermingled with the bells were copper circlets like finger rings, and curious flat copper ferrules, from a fourth to three quarters of an inch thick and about an inch long.
“One day we brought up a handful of small masks, about an inch long and half an inch wide, made of thin, well-worked copper. By a strange coincidence they came to us on the very day of a modern native carnival when every one wears a mask. My Indians commented upon the fact and seriously debated whether Yum Chac had not sent them up to us in remembrance of the day. And it is a fact that no other masks of the kind were found previously, nor have any been found since.
“Specimens of well-modeled hard copper chisels were recovered at various times. Some are small, others of the customary size and shape of modern chisels, but with the heads burred, showing much use. All of the copper chisels, rings, and masks have the reddish color of pure copper, but many of the bells, particularly the smaller ones of round sleigh-bell shape, are of a color indicating copper alloyed with silver or tin. Some of the other bells contain a considerable percentage of gold, which may be either a natural admixture from the ore itself or an alloy added by the ancient artisans.
“One of the most prized treasures was brought up one day while visitors were present—Mr. and Mrs. James of Mérida and Dr. Marston Tozzer, now professor of American archæology at Harvard University, who knows the Mayas intimately and has lived among them and shared their huts and hammocks. We were all standing at the edge of the Great Well when the dredge bucket heaved itself from the roiling swells of green water. As it came up toward the level of our eyes we saw dangling precariously from one of its fangs a gray, nondescript article which some one in the party facetiously remarked must be a cast-off overshoe of the Rain God. We all laughed at the witticism and then stopped short as the bucket swung around, bringing the object into plainer view, and we discovered it be a large copper disk covered with figures in repoussé and representing the Sun God. My heart was in my mouth for fear it would drop off and sink back into the well before my eager hands could reach it, but grasp it I did after what seemed an age of waiting. It is so beautifully and intricately worked, so fine in artistry that I deem it one of the most priceless of all these antiques. What it loses by not being pure gold is more than compensated for by its mass of exquisite ornamentation.
“From copper to gold, so John Hays Hammond once told me, is but a short step and one likely to be bridged at any unexpected moment, and this I found to be the case in the Sacred Well.
“One fine day I discovered, among the several copper bells brought up by the dredge, one small round bell of pure gold, shining as bright and clear as if newly molded. After that every day was literally a golden day with finds of yellow gold—golden bells of all shapes and sizes, some as small as a pea, others large and heavy. And these gold bells were all more or less flattened, as though they had been struck with a hammer or even mauled with a sledge. Some were so flattened that the shape of the clapper within was outlined on the outer side of the bell. The clappers were, like the bells themselves, made of pure gold, but most of the smaller bells, like our previous finds of copper ones, had been ‘killed’ by having the clapper removed.
“Many disks of gold were brought up, which are covered with finely worked figures in repoussé, while around the outer edges are characters and symbols and sometimes hieroglyphs. Some of these disks were originally flat and others have curving surfaces like breastplates. A few are plain or nearly so, but the majority are completely covered with incised work. One disk, a mask, is two thirds the actual size of a human face and represents a face with the eyes closed. Upon the closed eyelid is engraved a symbol of unknown meaning. Another disk of solid gold is eleven inches in diameter and weighs nearly a pound. It contains no carving or design and I judge it to have been some sort of temple basin or standard.
“Among the golden objects are two very handsome tiaras representing entwined feathered serpents, worked partly in repoussé and partly in filagree. There are also a number of emblematic figures, dancing frogs and monkeys, and several queer objects like brooches. They are from one to three inches high and very thick. There are objects like sandals and objects similar to candlesticks. Some of the latter are of copper, gold-plated. I found, too, a considerable amount of gold-leaf nearly as fine and pure as that of to-day.
“Also among the golden treasures are several specimens that look like the heads of canes. These I believe to have been the tops of the official wands or emblems of authority—the caluac pictured many times upon the walls of the temples.
“I found virtually no silver and no metals other than those mentioned, except iron pyrites. This substance, backed with hard-baked clay or stone, was used for mirrors, and I found large fragments of several such mirrors with the mirror surface of iron pyrites still bright and shiny. One metal object about three inches in diameter is white like silver, absolutely uncorroded, and seemingly as hard and refractory as tin alloy or hard steel. I do not know yet what the metal is, but shall know as soon as it can be examined by metallurgists. Can it be that rare, indestructible metal, platinum?
“And with all the precious objects I have taken by force from the Rain God I am very sure that I have wrested from him not a tenth of his jealously held treasure. There are many, many more golden ornaments hid away in the recesses of the uneven floor of the pit, and many, many things even more priceless than gold to the antiquarian.
“All this I leave to the engineer of a future day—and I say engineer advisedly, for it is going to be an engineering task to strip the old well of all it holds. It will first have to be dredged over its whole area, not with the crude hand-operated device which I have used, but with more powerful and modern, mechanically operated equipment. Then a huge, specially designed diving-bell will be required, so that men may work under it quite protected from the water and with ample illumination.
“Among the treasures we found are three sacrificial knives. One is perfect, while the flint blades of the other two are broken close to the hilt. I am inclined to think that the two broken ones were purposely broken or ‘killed’ before being thrown into the well and that the perfect one was not cast into the pit but fell in by accident. These knives have intricately worked and fluted handles of gold. The one which is unbroken is especially lovely—a bit of perfect artistry worthy of a Cellini.
“One golden bowl is nine inches in diameter, and we obtained several smaller ones about three inches in diameter. These, I think, were temple dishes used by the high priests. The several gold disks of the Sun God vary from seven to eleven inches in diameter. And we recovered forty flat gold washers about an inch and a fourth in diameter, each with a hole in the center. Regarding the use to which they were put I have no clue and can only surmise that they were fastened to the garments of priests or of sacrificial victims.
“The several brooches, as indicated by the designs upon them, were used for personal adornment. The finger rings are peculiar in that they have an enlarged face like a signet-ring, but the enlarged portion is designed to fit at the side of the finger, rather than on top, and this enlarged part always contains a pictured face.
“There are many golden figures of animals and insects, the most interesting being frogs with exaggerated flat feet, such as are found in the graves of Puerto Rico. Among the great quantity of other articles, too numerous to describe here, are twelve plain disks of gold which I imagine are blanks, originally intended by the goldsmith for some craftsman to ornament with designs, but for some reason or other thrown into the Sacred Well in their uncompleted state.
“Many of the larger golden objects, apparently, were not ‘killed’ before being offered to the Rain God, but nearly all the smaller articles of gold were crushed. Most of these have since been painstakingly straightened into their original shapes.
“Of the pottery vessels, very few were recovered unbroken. Some, as I have said, were containers for copal and rubber incense. Others, I am led to believe, contained the ancient libation of bal-che or sacred mead which was thrown into the pool together with the captive warrior victims. This fermented drink made of rainwater, wild honey, and the bark of the yax tree, according to tradition, was for men only. Women were never permitted to taste it nor to be present at the ceremonies where it was used as a libation to the gods. The narrow-necked vessel in which it was contained was called a pool and had a flat clay stopper fastened to the neck with cords of bark. We brought up several of the necks of such containers with the stoppers still held in the orifices by the bark binding.
“Several of the open vessels with tripod legs are glazed with red inside and out; others have a blue lining, and many were red on the outer surface but left the natural clay color upon the inside. The legs were either rounded and hollow, containing rattle pellets, or thin and solid. They are often fashioned as the heads of alligators or as human grotesques. Many large flat vessels and shallow circular dishes, some nine inches in diameter, were found, of the same design and finish as those I have unearthed in ancient graves in Labna and other old Maya cities.
“The ancient devotees seem to have been especially partial to a certain cylindrical vessel about six inches in diameter and nine inches high. These were often of thin structure and covered with designs and hieroglyphs or bearing the outlined figures of some deity surrounded with the conventional symbols of his attributes.
“A large circular earthenware pan, seven inches in diameter and with a long, thick handle which frequently ended in a carved head, was in common use as an incense-burner. It was rarely made of well-kilned ware and was evidently intended only for brief service. We found many broken utensils of this sort, but only one perfect specimen, which is exceptional in that it is of better-kilned material and of most artistic workmanship. Its pleasing outline is ornamented with openwork spaces intended to give needed draft to the burning copal in its basin. Nearly all the incense-burners of this type have hollow legs containing burned clay pellets evidently designed to produce a rattling sound at religious dances and rituals.
“The mortuary urns are large vessels ornamented with the likeness of a human figure surrounded with a conventional design. The figure usually bears upon its back a vase-like receptacle doubtless designed to receive and preserve the ashes of the dead. I do not know whether these urns were empty when thrown into the well or actually contained human ashes. I hope this point may be settled by laboratory examination.
“The finding of copal and the intimate association of the copal masses with the potsherds and unbroken earthenware vessels, leaves no doubt as to the use and purpose of both. The employment of copal resin as a medicament and as a sacred offering seems to have occurred almost simultaneously with the appearance of man upon the peninsula of Yucatan. In the primitive rock sculptures in the famous cave of Loltum is shown the burning of copal as a religious rite, while the earthen vessels found in the cave contain the blackened residue of burnt copal—a residue that, despite its antiquity and long inhumation, gives forth, when burned, the characteristic odor of copal resin, a fragrance not to be mistaken for any other. The copal tree, anciently known as psom, still grows sparsely in nearly every part of Yucatan and in ancient times it was carefully cultivated, while the gathering of the resin partook of the nature of a religious ceremony. One of the early Spanish chroniclers says:
Psom is the name of a tree from which the natives take out a certain kind of resin-like incense which they burn before their idols and in their houses. We Spaniards took advantage of this resin to cure many diseases and we called it copal, which is a Mexican word.
“The first piece of copal we found was nearly round and about the size of a baseball. The resin when fresh is light in weight and almost transparent, but time and the pressure of water at the bottom of the well have given our copal specimens the general lack-luster appearance of the bog-butter found in the lacustrine deposits of Switzerland. Several hundreds of these copal masses were brought up in round or oval form and many with the marks on them of wicker containers or baskets. One of the largest of these copal specimens, weighing several pounds, was thus incased, some portions of the basket fabric still clinging to the copal. Evidently the copal was still plastic when placed in the baskets. A number of the copal nodules had been wrapped in leaves, the veined imprint of which upon the copal surface is so clear that I doubt not that any good botanist would be able to identify the tree or vine from which they were plucked.
“Quantities of bark were brought up which have upon the inner surface pellets of copal arranged in the conventional symbol or prayer for rain. Several of the copal masses are molded in the semblance of human figures or faces, many of them fantastic or grotesque. Many are in the form of frogs and some of these frogs hold a small ball of rubber in their mouths.
“Gourds of all kinds we brought up—small tree gourds which broke even under the most careful handling and which were preserved with the utmost difficulty; leks or big gourds, some measuring a foot across and with a two-gallon capacity; gourds cracked and mended with bark lacing, just as they are still mended and used by the Mayas of to-day; gourds coated with the same whitish enamel used on terra-cotta vessels and painted or hieroglyphed. The gourds were undoubtedly used not only as containers for liquids but for other things such as corn and beans, as they are used by the modern Mayas. None of these gourds was found with a top or stopper in it, but we brought up separately many of the top sections which had been removed to permit the hollowing out of the gourd. Some still had an inch or two of stem left on them purposely to provide a handle and were undoubtedly used as covers or stoppers. Possibly some of these gourds with their contents of food or drink were originally sealed before being cast into the well.
“Among the wooden objects, the hul-che, which I have previously described, is the most interesting, and our finds in the well represent the whole history of the development of this weapon, from its most primitive bill-hook appearance to its most finished and ornamented ceremonial form.
“The highest stage in the development of the hul-che is represented by two specimens from the well. One represents an entwined serpent, its fangs at the hook; in its now hollow eye-sockets probably were once glittering eyeballs of jade. The shaft of the second specimen is formed of human figures and is fronted with a fine mosaic or mask of burnished gold. The whole weapon is as elaborately and minutely carved and inlaid as the finest example of Japanese wood-carving. And we found the stone-headed darts which were used with the hul-che. They are pictured clearly on the walls of the temples, but an actual dart or any part of one had never been found before we raised our specimens from the well. Any one may now view them in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University—some without the stone heads but showing the cleft in the wooden shaft into which the head was fitted. There are also several of the sharp stone dart-heads, made of common chert and flint. A few are beautifully formed and fashioned of translucent chalcedony, jasper, and even jade. These specimens represent the highest known development of ancient stone point-work of the American continents and probably of the whole world.
“Portions of lance-poles were found, and stone lance-points. Some of these, like the beautiful dart-points, still carry traces of the hard black bitumen—possibly hardened copal—that once fastened the stone point to its wooden shaft.
“Wooden objects shaped like the incisors of a jaguar and bearing fragments of handsome mosaics encrusted on them are probably parts of what were once jaguar head-masks. Other similar objects are plated with gold—portions of golden jaguar-masks. Parts of large trough-shaped wooden objects are doubtless the remnants of shields. The wood is Yucatan cedar, light and easily worked, yet resistant to the destroying effect of weather and insects. All of the wooden objects required quick and skilful application of preservatives, for, while they had about the consistency of wet punk when they came from the water, even a few moments’ exposure to the air would have been sufficient to crumble them into dust. Happily, I was fully prepared for this contingency, and not a single important wooden find was lost or injured for lack of proper treatment.
“Next to the hul-che, the most important of the wooden treasures is the caluac, the wand, scepter, or symbolic badge of high priesthood or nobility. Many times upon the temple walls are pictured dignitaries holding this device, as a king might hold a scepter or a bishop his crook. The general form is that of a forked rabbit-stick. It may be significant that the figure portrayed carrying the caluac is never depicted as carrying also the hul-che, and perhaps the caluac may be a ceremonial weapon, symbolic substitute for the hul-che. Whatever its purpose, we have several specimens. Some are nearly perfect and there are several sizes. The most common of these finds is about half an inch thick by three inches wide and twenty-four inches long.
“In addition to the wooden dolls and figures I have previously mentioned, I obtained a curious ritual rattle inlaid with mosaics, and several spatulas somewhat like Japanese praying-sticks. The spatulas are thin and about three inches wide by seven in length. Both faces show traces of the same hard white enamel found on several of the gourds and potsherds. The faint characters on these spatulate wooden objects are so precisely like those in the Dresden Codex that one might readily believe them the work of the same artist.
“That phallic rites were practised in some, if not all, sections of the peninsula is indicated by a phallus, well carved from hardwood, which we brought up from the well. It was recovered from the deeper layers of the well-bottom, and this fact precludes any chance that it is a later intrusive artifact. Some distance to the south of El Castillo lies a straggling line of large stone phalli, evidently taken from some portion of the ruined city by early Spanish settlers and then abandoned by the roadside. The House of the Phalli in old Chi-chen Itza further emphasizes the fact that the cult here existed and there are unmistakable evidences in the ancient ruins of Uxmal.
“The several wooden labrets, or lip- or cheek-plugs, are of some dark, hard wood, possibly circicote or ebony. The frontal surface is a sunken panel on which is usually carved in relief the figure of a plumed warrior. The carving in many cases is as fine as that on the best cameos and is brought out by red pigment. Slight traces of green are indicated, also, following the same general scheme as the large carvings on the temple walls, where green and yellow pigments are used to indicate respectively jade and golden objects or ornaments. That these colors have withstood centuries of immersion is truly remarkable; I doubt much if any of our modern colorings would have the same lasting qualities.
“Now I come to the last and perhaps most important of our finds—various objects of jade. We brought up from the very lowest part of the well seven jade plaques or tablets, broken but later fitted together with almost no parts missing. They measure, approximately, three by four inches, and are well carved with cameo-like designs of Maya deities. Of similar design and length, but only two inches wide, are nine additional plaques.
“Of jade personal ornaments we recovered a hundred and sixty large, handsome carved beads and pendants of varying sizes. These are nearly all perfect. There are seventy carved jade ear, nose, and labret ornaments, from two inches in diameter down to half an inch. They are all well cut and polished. Among the loveliest specimens are fourteen jade globes or balls, an inch and a half in diameter. These are beautifully polished and several of them are finely carved with human figures and other designs.
“The most prized of all the jade objects is a figurine four inches wide and of like height. It represents a seated figure of the Palenquin type, with an elaborate head-dress, and is probably the finest figurine of the Maya era which has ever been found. It is of flawless jade, perfectly carved and polished, and absolutely unharmed by its centuries at the bottom of the well. It alone is worth, a thousand times over, the hard years of my life spent in solving the mysteries of the great green water-pit whence it came.
“I have purposely left the mention of the jade finds to the very last, for they are the culmination of our discoveries, treasures which, instead of enlightening our ignorance, only add another unanswerable riddle, another intriguing enigma.
“These plaques and ornaments, green, gray, or black; this wonderful figurine—all are of genuine jade, and jade is simply not indigenous in America. Despite all seeking and all investigation, not one single outcropping vein of jade has been found on the American continents, not even an elementary nodule or crystal. Nephrite, or near-jade, and soft serpentine are common to both North and South America, but the jade of the ancient Maya cities is real jade, as easily distinguishable from nephrite as a real diamond from ordinary glass. Furthermore, I have never found, nor have I seen, any similar objects taken from the ancient Maya cities which are of nephrite, though the present-day Indians, particularly in northern Mexico, file out objects of soft serpentine and sell them to the gullible tourist as chalchuitl. The Nahuatl word chalchuitl originally meant nephrite or American jade—near-jade—but even before the coming of the Spaniards the word had become prostituted to mean almost any greenish stone.
“To the ancient Mayas jade was very precious—immeasurably more valuable than gold (sun metal), of which they had great store—even as in China to-day one may pay thousands of dollars for a string of perfect jade beads. The following authentic tale concerning Cortes and Montezuma illustrates the point. The story was recorded by one of Montezuma’s followers and has the ring of truth:
“Although Montezuma was, toward the last, virtually the prisoner of Cortes, he was for a long time treated not as a prisoner but as an honored guest. Cortes and Montezuma were accustomed to play each day a native game which in many ways resembles chess, and both became much interested. It was their further custom at the close of each day’s game to present each other with some gift.
“At the close of one day’s game the Aztec monarch presented Cortes with several large disks of gold and silver handsomely worked. Cortes was greatly pleased and so expressed himself. Montezuma smiled and said: ‘The gift of to-morrow shall be such that to-day’s gift will seem in value and preciousness, when compared with it, as no more than a single stone tile of the roadway.’
“As may be supposed, the mighty Cortes spent a sleepless night in anticipation of the priceless gift he was to receive. At length the morrow came and the game was played to a long-drawn finish. The gift of Cortes to Montezuma does not matter, but the royal treasurer of Montezuma brought in on a golden salver the royal gift, four small carved jade beads. The bitter disappointment of Cortes was so great that he could scarcely conceal it, but Montezuma had acted in good faith, for jade had throughout the Aztec ages possessed an intrinsic value far above that of gold and silver.
“So far as I can learn, the ancient Mayas considered silver of slight value, and they esteemed gold or sun metal more for its adaptability and malleability and its supposedly sacred origin than for its monetary value. It was an object of barter simply because of its utility in adornment and as a temple metal. Possibly copper may have had nearly as great a value in the eyes of these ancient people.
“Of all the jade objects we recovered, not more than a fifth are unbroken, and the broken jade ornaments were broken not by chance or accident but deliberately and by a practised hand. The fractures are not the result of a casual crushing blow, but of the splitting or cleaving impact from a sharp-edged instrument guided by a deft hand, so that the jade was broken but not pulverized or marred. Like so many of the relics from the well, they had been killed, just as the bottoms of terra-cotta vessels were punctured and weapons were broken so that the departing soul of him who died might be accompanied by the souls of the material objects he had most loved or used during his earthly life. And when the departed souls completed the long journey and at last stood before the almighty Hunal Ku, the supreme god in the heavens, each would wear the souls of his earthly jewels and have at hand the souls of his earthly implements.
“Although virtually all of the ancient rites and beliefs are unknown to the modern Mayas, this one belief has persisted in an esoteric fashion. Many years ago I attended the funeral of a young Maya woman whose husband had been devoted to her. Her burial attire was of the richest the family could possibly afford, the huipile and pic wonderfully embroidered of xoc-bui-chui (embroidery of the counted threads). Her slippers of pink silk also were elaborately embroidered. Long slits had been cut in both pic and huipile where they would not be noticed, and the soles of the slippers each had three longitudinal slits cut in them. When I asked the old grandfather why this had been done, he professed ignorance and would only reply that it was the custom among his people. But when I told the old H’men of Ebtun what I had seen, and of my conviction regarding it, he admitted that I was right and that the ancient belief and custom have been handed down through the generations, although the subject is never discussed with the Catholic clergy.
“Always since that time and the finding of the jade in the great well I have thought of these lovely stones as ‘soul jewels,’ although, according to the Maya belief, their souls are departed.
“Unfortunately, some of the finds from the well were stolen. How many I do not know—not a great many, I think. But these things are priceless and it is cause for grief that even the least of them should fail to reach a safe place of exhibition. One of my natives abstracted some gold from the finds and had it melted up and made into a chain before we detected him. Later I found, also, that one of my straw bosses had been bribed by another archæologist to secrete and hand over for a price whatever of the finds he could. While I shall never know just what the sum of these losses was, it could not have been great, because no finds were brought up except in my presence, and every find that came under my eye was catalogued and accounted for.”
CHAPTER IX
TWO LEGENDS
ON one of Don Eduardo’s trips into the country of the Sublevados he chanced across an old Indian, the troubadour of his tribe. This man had a wonderful store of ancient traditions and legends and was an excellent spinner of tales. As nothing pleased him more than to sit by the hour and tell his stories to Don Eduardo—a most interested audience—they spent many pleasant days together. The following legend, especially, remains fresh in Don Eduardo’s memory and seems to me worthy of being recorded ere it dies for lack of appreciative ears.