A Glimpse at Guatemala / And Some Notes on the Ancient Monuments of Central America

by Anne Cary Maudslay; Alfred Percival Maudslay

Almost all round the ruined town there are numberless limestone hills between fifty and three hundred feet in height, and at the top of nearly every one of them are foundation-mounds or tumuli. In some cases these foundations are merely outlined in rough stones, in others they are flat oblong mounds, which may have supported buildings of a perishable material. A common arrangement of the remains on these hill-tops is given in the accompanying sketch. I opened one set thus arranged. The mound A had probably supported a small “cue” or shrine; a terrace ran in front of it, which was reached by a short flight of steps. The total height of the mound was about sixteen feet, and the level space on the top of it did not measure more than six feet by four. We dug a trench right through this mound, and found traces of interments and broken pottery within a few feet of the top, and below this nothing but a mass of rough stones and earth. B, C, and D may have been the foundations of small houses, but they also served as places of sepulture, as we found in them traces of bones and broken pottery. The four smaller mounds were tombs only. The vessels buried with the bodies appear to have consisted of a flat dish and a round pot. The body was probably seated with its knees doubled up, for we found the fragments of bones all close together, and portions of the skull in the midst of them. In one instance the skull, or rather the earthen impression of it, was actually resting in the dish and the bones lying around it, as though the body had been seated in the dish, and as the skeleton had decayed the skull had sunk down through them. We found three or four chipped stone lance-heads, a good deal of unworked flint, but only two obsidian flakes. There were also a few pieces of mealing-stones and a considerable quantity of potsherds showing traces of yellow and black and red colouring. A little trickling stream at the foot of the hills had evidently formed part of the water-supply of the ancient inhabitants, for it was enclosed in a wall forming an irregular oval about twenty-five by forty feet. On the level ground between the hills we found several round holes about eighteen inches in diameter, faced with plaster or stone, forming the mouths of small underground chambers, which may have been intended for storage, or possibly were used for vapour-baths.

On the whole our excavations were unsatisfactory, and the hard work of digging was rendered all the more unpleasant by a change in the weather, which now became intensely hot and oppressive. We were tormented when at work in the open ground by myriads of small black flies, which crawled all over us and bit viciously. Great heaps of the long grass were collected and set on fire in the hope that the smoke would drive the flies away; but the smoke seemed only to attract fresh swarms, and they danced in it in great columns, following it round whenever the wind changed its direction.

We were now in the country where the Peten turkey (Meleagris ocellata) abounds, and, as I wished to obtain a few good skins, I sent out some of my men to shoot the birds, which can be most easily done near the time of the full moon. There was no sport in the process, which is as follows:—Setting out an hour before sunset the hunter will post himself on the edge of one of the numerous thickets of trees and shrubs which are scattered over the savannah and listen for the cry made by the cock bird as he goes to roost; with good luck he may be able to mark two or three of the roosting-places, and then, after waiting, a prey to mosquitos and ticks, until the moon rises, he creeps round to the trees from which the sound has come and takes a pot-shot at the sleeping bird, whose body looms black against the moonlit sky. In the daytime these birds are very shy, but I have several times come upon them unexpectedly and have got a shot, and once succeeded in getting two, right and left, both young birds and very good to eat. As the hens do not call when going to roost, their skins are much more difficult to obtain. Several attempts have been made to bring these beautiful birds to England, but they have never survived the change of climate for more than a few months. They are easily tamed and cross freely with the domestic turkey, and some hybrids which have been raised by Mr. Blancaneaux in British Honduras are extremely handsome, having both the beautiful plumage of the wild bird and the conspicuous wattles of the tame one. During our stay at Yaxché my men brought in five cock birds, four of them with good skins, and we feasted sumptuously on their bodies.

Before leaving the village we had an addition made to our party; one of the Indians, when returning from work, shot a monkey, which fell from the tree dead, and was found to have a baby clinging to its breast. The poor little beast was uninjured, and was brought home to me howling piteously; for the second time I had to be nurse to an infant monkey, and I don’t think any human child could have demanded more attention. My first experience of nursing had occurred at the ruins of Quirigua, where a baby monkey had been brought to me in much the same way. It was so young that I had to feed it through a short piece of india-rubber tubing cut from a photographic drop-shutter; however it throve well, and, when not asleep in its box, it would spend hour after hour clinging on to the upper part of my left arm with a firm grip of its tail, and its little hands and feet buried in the folds of my flannel shirt; but for its occasional demands for a caress, I could go on with my work in the forest hardly conscious of its presence. At the end of three weeks I had occasion to make a long journey in search of more labourers, and I took my baby with me, intending to leave it at the village of Quirigua in charge of a friendly old negress, whose unfailing kindness to my men when they were ill had endeared her to us all, and whose love for pet birds and animals was well known. Half an hour after leaving the shelter of the forest on our way to the village, I felt the little monkey suddenly relax his hold on my arm, and only just managed to catch him as he fell. It had never occurred to me that a monkey might suffer from sunstroke, but such was evidently the case. He partly recovered consciousness before we arrived at the village, where my kindly old friend Saturnina Alvarez made a comfortable little nest for him, and he seemed to be on a fair way to recovery. Saturnina brought him to the door the next morning when I was starting on my journey; as I rode away he stretched out his thin little arms and cried for me to take him. This was the last I saw of him, for I learnt on my return that he had died within a few hours.

The new baby was a little older than my Quirigua pet, and could take its food from a spoon, but unluckily there was not much food to be had which suited him. However, I had heard that there was a company of mahogany-cutters in the neighbourhood, and sent one of my mozos to their temporary headquarters or “Monteria,” which was distant two days’ journey, to try and buy a tin of condensed milk from their stores. Running after ruins and sculptured stones was a sufficiently incomprehensible proceeding to the Indian mind, but journeying for four days to buy a tin of food for a juvenile monkey must have seemed an act of sheer madness; when the order was given an expression of incredulous surprise was visible on the usually stolid faces of my mozos, and I believe that in their eyes it was the wildest eccentricity in which I was ever known to indulge. The little beast soon became devotedly fond of me, and my sympathy with mothers who have to bring up naughty and querulous children has vastly increased. My baby gave me no rest; he cried when he should have been quiet, and refused to be comforted unless I nursed him to sleep in my arms; and he woke up at unseemly hours in the night and demanded food. When we started on our journey again there was some difficulty in knowing what to do with him, and he protested strongly against the position assigned to him on the top of the Indian’s pack; whenever his bearer came within sight of me during the journey the little fellow would hold out his tiny arms and clamour for me to take him. I usually had to give in to him before the day’s journey was over, and then he would sit contentedly on my shoulder with his tail round my neck crooning to himself; or if he were sleepy would find his way inside my flannel shirt, as though he took me for an organ-grinder. During one night, however, we had a serious difference of opinion, and actually came to blows. He had been put to sleep in his basket as usual, with his mosquito-curtain carefully arranged over him, but he became uncomfortably restless and awoke again and again, demanding food and attention, and tried to howl as though he were grown up and had a fully developed thyroid cartilage through which to trumpet. At last I determined to take no further notice of him, in hope that he would tire himself out; but he turned the tables on me, and finally, to ensure some sleep for myself, I had to take him into my bed. By this time he was in a towering rage, and instead of going to sleep where I placed him under the blanket, he dashed out and danced a sort of war-dance on my chest, gesticulating fiercely. Then, after the manner of nurses, I had finally to give him a good spanking, which only made him angrier than ever; but he knew that he was beaten, he gave up his war-dance and went to the bottom of the cot, covering his head with the rug; then, like a naughty child, every few minutes he would raise his head to boo-o at me, and then hide it again under the rug, until at last, tired out, he fell asleep. It was a moonlight night, and for some time longer I lay awake listening to the sound of the alligators clashing their teeth—which sounds like a traveller’s tale, but it is not fiction. The river literally swarmed with these hideous creatures, and they have a queer habit of a night of opening their mouths wide and bringing their teeth together with a snapping sound which can be heard for a long distance.

The journey from Yaxché to Benque Viejo took us from the 5th to the 11th of April, and was of no particular interest. We passed two ruins on the way: the first, near Salísipuede, was of the Ixkun type, but without sculptured stelæ; the second, near Takinsakún, was probably of late date, as parts of some of the stone-roofed houses were still standing, and the plaster covering the walls was in good condition. These houses are of remarkable size—one measured 118 feet in length, and contained two long parallel chambers running the whole length of the house, each 9 feet wide and 16 feet 9 inches high.

Takinsakún is a name with a good Indian sound about it, but I have sometimes seen it written in the Colonial Reports as “Take in Second.” With regard to Salísipuede (get out if you can), there is a local tradition that the name marks the site of a “Monteria,” which had to be abandoned on account of the difficulty met with in floating the mahogany logs down a small streamlet to the Mopan River. But the most puzzling of all these frontier names is one within British territory; the German map gives it as Arinchuak (Ar-in-chu-ak), which sounds like a good enough Indian name, although I have not the slightest idea whether it would have any meaning in an Indian dialect. On the other hand, it is precisely the pronunciation given by the Creole negroes to “Orange Walk,” a village on the Belize River, and it is possibly a repetition of that name; but whether the negro has Anglicized an Indian name or the learned German has made a good-sounding Indian name out of the negro pronunciation of Orange Walk, must be left to a philologist to decide. Benque Viejo (Old Bank: this name again is a mixture, as Banco and not Benque is the Spanish for Bank) is the frontier village on the British side, and was an insignificant place when I passed through it in 1882, but has now risen to considerable importance, owing to the influx of Ladinos and Indians from the Guatemala side of the boundary-line. Not far from the village on the left bank of the river, within the Guatemala frontier, there is an important group of ruined buildings, and several carved stelæ, but, unfortunately, all the monuments are broken and much weather-worn. I was only able to give a few hours to the examination of these ruins, and could not attempt to make any plan of the many-chambered buildings, which I feel sure would well repay further exploration. The next day we rode into the Cayo, where I was hospitably received by Mr. Milson, the resident English magistrate.

From the Cayo I sent off Carlos and José Domingo Lopez, with five or six mozos, on an expedition to the ruins of Tikál (which lie hidden in the forest about twenty miles to the N.E. of the Lake of Peten, four or five days’ march from the Cayo), with instructions to make paper-moulds of the carvings on some small stelæ, of which I possessed no plaster copies, although I had taken photographs of them during my visit to those ruins in 1881 and 1882. I myself set about making arrangements for a short journey into the unknown interior of British Honduras, through what is called the Great Southern Pine Ridge.

It was not until the 23rd of April that I was ready to start with Gorgonio and eight mozos, and accompanied by Mr. Blancaneaux, a Frenchman, who, after fighting through the German war, had come out to Belize, where he had for some time served as an inspector of the Colonial Police, and had finally settled at the Cayo, where he occupied his time in collecting natural-history specimens. Our first day’s journey took us up the Makál branch of the Belize River as far as Monkey Fall, where we crossed the stream, and, leaving it on our right, walked through the forest along an old Truck-path (as the temporary roads in the forest are called along which the mahogany logs are dragged to the river-bank), until we arrived at the little village of San Antonio, where we passed the night. The next morning, continuing our march in a S.S.E. direction for a little more than an hour, we passed from the forest into a more open country, with occasional clumps of oak and pine-trees; in front of us we could see a great stretch of undulating country clothed with coarse grass, and for the most part sparsely covered with pine-trees, which here and there formed clumps and protected a scrubby undergrowth. During this and the next day we crossed numerous clear and rapid rivulets which ran through narrow strips of forest and thickets of “Camalote” (high reeds), or, as we gradually rose to higher ground, spread over broad stony beds, where the shrunken streams were half hidden amongst great granite boulders. On the third day we reached the top of a range of hills known as the Blue Mountains, and found that, by a very gradual ascent, we had reached a height of 2600 feet. Here we found the air fresh and invigorating, and we obtained an extensive view over the Pine Ridge, which stretched away for about twenty miles to the north of us. From the southern side of the hills we could see the Cockscomb Mountains, about twenty-five miles to the S.S.E. We camped for the night on the southern slope of the hills, about two hundred feet below our highest point, and at 11 P.M. the thermometer stood at 65° Fahrenheit. The Pine Ridge came to an end at the distance of two or three miles to the south of our camp, and we could see the main branch of the Rio Makál issuing from between the forest-clad hills which bounded our view in that direction. These hills form the watersheds of the rivers San Ramon and Machaquilá, as well as of some streams flowing into the Gulf of Honduras, and are probably identical with the “Sierra de los Pedernales,” whose recesses have never been penetrated since Cortés and his army lost their way among them in 1526, on the celebrated march from Mexico to Honduras.