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

by Anne Cary Maudslay; Alfred Percival Maudslay

On the other nights of the week society was not so formal, and the Spanish lady had to give way to the apparently more attractive Mestiza. One can generally tell from the flare of torches where a fandango is going on, usually in one of the large wooden houses just off the main streets. Here the Mestiza comes out in all her glory; and very pretty she looks in her spotlessly white petticoats and low cut camiseta, each garment very prettily embroidered along its edges. Alas! these white and coloured borderings are now machine-made and bought in the stores, and are no longer the work of her own delicate little hands. Her smooth black hair is combed straight off her forehead, and fixed at the back with a large gilded comb; she wears large gold earrings, and if she is prosperous two or three coloured bead and golden necklaces round her neck.

It always seems to me as if all the sorrows of the race had sunk into the Mestizas’ eyes; even when the face breaks into a smile it is a sad smile, and in the dance it is the men who grow active and excited and echo the passionate dancing of Spain, whilst the women are graceful but slow in movement, with downcast eyes, as though to mark the Indian side of the mixed blood. Of course there is a drinking-shop attached to the dancing-room; but it is pleasanter outside in the roadway, where the old women have lit their lamps under the trees and set up their supper-tables and stalls of food and fruit, and where the light does not fall too strongly one hears a low murmur of voices and occasionally a little cry of protest. And now my friends the sea-captains are in their element: they keep the barmen hard at work opening numberless bottles of lager beer; they lead out the prettiest of the dancing girls, not always to the satisfaction of their duskier partners, and feast them to their heart’s content on all the dainties which the old women’s stalls afford, whilst they keep up a conversation in the most wonderful jargon of broken Spanish and scraps of every other language under the sun.

For the first three days Laguna was amusing enough; it was not a highly moral atmosphere, but the surroundings were quaint and often picturesque, and my sailor friends were full of good stories and strange experiences: but before the end of a week I fled at the sight of a sea-captain, so as to avoid the inevitable drink which followed a meeting, and in spite of the heat of the afternoon sun I explored every road leading out of the town. Uninteresting enough they all proved to be, for after passing the suburbs which began with the white-washed adobe walls and thatched roofs of the houses of the Mestizos and ended in wattle huts bowered in shady trees and cocoanut-palms, I was always brought to a stop by the surrounding swamp. At last I settled down to a daily walk to the lighthouse on the point and a long stretch over the sandy beach, which was pleasant enough when the breeze was blowing and kept off the swarms of sand-flies; but sometimes the wind dropped, and then I wished myself back even in the stifling sun-baked streets of Laguna.

During the last part of the two weary weeks I had to pass in the town, much of my time was passed in the Custom House. Orders had come from Mexico to pass all my stores free of duty; but this did not prevent the Custom House officers opening every case and weighing the contents, and making out endless lists with gross and net weight and much unnecessary detail, to ensure, as I was told, the unquestioned passage of the goods into the State of Chiapas, but to a great extent, as I believe, to satisfy their own curiosity as to what the cases contained, and to give employment to the superabundant clerks who draw salaries and tumble over one another in all Spanish-American ports. At last my preparations were finished: Mr. Price, who had volunteered to come out from England and assist as a surveyor, had joined me, and I had secured a small steamer belonging to Messrs. Jamet y Sastre, a firm engaged in the mahogany trade, to take us up the river. In Laguna I had made the acquaintance of M. Chambon, a young Frenchman who was travelling through Mexico, and asked him to accompany us, as he wished to make his way to Tenosique, in hope of being able to pay a visit to the ruins of Menché.

As usual there was some delay in starting, and after we had crossed the big lagoon and passed through the narrow passage into the smaller one our troubles began. We had missed the top of the tide and found it running out strongly against us and we stuck on one sand-bank after another; at last we reached the mouth of the river, where huge alligators lay sunning themselves on the sand-spits, and here, where the stream was at its narrowest, we stuck fast; there was no chance of getting off until the tide rose on the morrow. Then began a night of torment. The mosquitos were monsters and they came off to us in myriads: we had no nets to protect us against their attacks, and the only thing to be done was to roll one’s self up in a rug in a beddingless bunk and swelter until morning. Soon after sunrise we were afloat again and entered the broad stream of the river. The land was still low and there was not a hill in sight, but gradually the banks grew firmer and lost their swampy appearance. A short distance above the village of Palisada, which we passed before dark, the river divides in its downward course, the other half of the stream flowing to the west and reaching the sea below Frontera. Above this fork the Usumacinta is a fine broad stream, sometimes more than half a mile from bank to bank. On the third day we reached the little village of Monte Cristo, which was to be our starting-place for the ruins of Palenque; and here we parted from M. Chambon, who continued his voyage in the steamer to Tenosique.

At Monte Cristo we fell into good hands: Don Carlos Majares, who kept the largest of the two or three village stores, gave us a big shed in which to house our baggage and hang up our hammocks, and he and Don Adolfo Erezuma did their best to help us on our way, but the difficulties could not be overcome in a hurry. The ruins of Palenque lay buried in the forest forty miles away, and as pack-mules and carriers were equally scarce nearly a fortnight passed before we had succeeded in despatching the most necessary part of our stores to Santo Domingo, a village six miles distant from the ruins. Although we had much repacking and arrangement to occupy us, the time hung heavy on our hands. The climate was an improvement on that of Laguna, and although we could see the storm-clouds still hanging over the country inland, the rain seldom reached us. The river which rolled by us in magnificent volume of water stretching from bank to bank began to show slight signs of decrease, and the muddy channels joining it to the numerous lagoons which received its overflow in the rainy season were already drying up. The pleasantest time of the day was the hour before sunset, when I used often to stroll quietly along the bank of the river or edge of the lagoons and swamps, wherever the country was sufficiently open, carrying with me a strong field-glass, through which to watch the innumerable aquatic birds feeding or at play. White and slate-coloured egrets would perch in the branches of the trees near to the shore of the lagoon, beautiful little parras ran with their long toes spread out over the water-weeds, raising their wings as they moved just enough to show the brilliant yellow colour underneath against their cinnamon-coloured bodies; a few ducks, teal, and divers would be swimming in the open water, and great crane-like birds stalked about looking for their food; but most beautiful of all were the great flocks of rose-coloured “chocoloteras,” spoon-billed wading-birds as big as cranes and more brilliant than flamingos. They were not very quick to take fright, and now and then I could so manage that a flight would pass in long line close overhead, and I could watch them until they faded from sight in a sunset sky.

One day we hired a dug-out canoe from a man who was also the possessor of a casting-net, and set off at dawn on a fishing-expedition. After paddling and poling up the river for about a league, we came to the mouth of a small stream with muddy banks half hidden in giant reeds. A few hundred yards from its mouth the stream broadened out into a pool about eighty yards long and forty wide, and here I counted sixteen alligators, some sunning themselves on the bank, others basking on the top of the water. Our canoe-man kept straight on, as though alligators were of no account, and the great brutes on the bank slid down into the water as we approached, while those floating gradually and silently sank out of sight—first the bulk of their bodies disappeared, leaving above the water what looked like a long row of black spines along the back and tail, then one by one these went down, the last to go under being the nostrils and wicked-looking eyes. We were not so kind to the alligators as they had been to us, for as soon as we were across the pool we landed in the mud and forced our way through the reeds to get a shot at them as they rose; but after a few shots we gave it up, as those that were hit made a great splash and sank, and the water was so muddy there was little chance of recovering their bodies. Paddling up the stream a short distance, we came to a fence of logs and reeds, through which we made a hole large enough to push the canoe and then closed it up after us. These fences are intended to keep the fish which swarm up into the lagoons during the rains from passing back into the river. By the end of March both stream and lagoon would be dried up into a number of rapidly dwindling pools and the fish would be easily captured. Above the fish-fence the stream was only a few yards wide, and here our canoe-man began to cast his net: in a quarter of an hour we had about two hundred mountain mullet, weighing from a quarter to half a pound each, in the bottom of the canoe, well covered over with reeds to keep them from the sun. As we knew that the lagoon could not be far off, we made an effort to reach it, but the waterway was so narrow that it was not easy to work the canoe; the banks were high and muddy and overshadowed by trees, and at almost every turn in the stream a startled alligator rolled off the bank with a splash and dived down under us. At last the water shallowed and we stuck fast; so leaving the canoe we scrambled through a narrow belt of scrub and gained a view over the broad sheet of shallow water, whence great flocks of wading-birds disturbed at their morning meal rose with discordant cries into the air.

At last the day came that we were able to make a start for Palenque: Don Adolfo had lent us horses for ourselves, and four or five wretched pack-mules carried part of the baggage. Luckily for us some half-dozen Indians from the Sierra had just paid their yearly visit to Monte Cristo to sell their cargos of wild cacao and buy machetes and a supply of salt, and, as their return loads were not heavy, after much persuasion they agreed to carry some of our things, and it was to their care that we had to confide our surveying instruments and such articles as could not safely be put on a mule’s back. As the Indians had all been hopelessly drunk the night before, we did not get off very early, although our efforts to start commenced before dawn, and what with bad mules, sulky muleteers, and half-drunken Indians we had a hard day of it. The track was in a bad state from recent rains, and a long detour had to be made in order to avoid some deep mud-holes. Towards evening we found ourselves in a large savannah far away from Palenque, with the pack-mules dead-beat and the Indians stopping and putting down their loads whenever one’s back was turned. At last we could get them no further, and had to leave them to camp by themselves while we pushed on in the moonlight, trusting that the path we were following would lead us to the cattle-rancho which we believed to be on ahead of us. Cattle-tracks ran in all directions, and we never knew if we were on the right one. At about nine o’clock we saw the glimmer of a light and riding towards it were civilly received at the rancho by some wild-looking vaqueros, half negro, half Indian, who quieted their evil-looking dogs, and carried their hospitality so far as to offer us a share of the big log bench covered with bullock-skins, on which some of their companions were lying asleep; luckily we had our hammocks with us, and, after making some soup, turned in utterly tired out.

About noon the next day we arrived at Santo Domingo, and with some difficulty managed to hire an empty hut—it was hardly worthy of the name of house—as a lodging-place. This sleepy little village of twenty houses lies so far out of the world that it was strange to find the two inhabitants of most importance to be one the son of a Frenchman, the other the son of a Swiss doctor, and the latest addition to the society to be a Corsican, who, although his poverty forced him to live the life of the poorer class of native, had not yet lost all his energy and was wildly excited about some minerals which had been found in the sierra, on which he was building golden hopes of a return in riches to his own country. Alas! the specimens with which he loaded my boxes on my return home proved to be nothing but valueless pyrites, and I fear the sandalled feet of the cheery fellow still tread the grass-grown street of Santo Domingo.

As the track to the ruins was, we were told, entirely overgrown, our first business was to get it cleared, so I made play with a letter from the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Mexico, which recommended me to the attention of all local officers; by this means I managed to secure a few labourers until arrangements could be made with the higher authorities for a regular supply of workmen. My letter to the Governor had already been despatched from Laguna, but as he lived at San Cristóbal, a week’s journey distant, it would be still a few days before his answer would reach me; meanwhile a messenger was despatched to the Jefe Político, who lived nearer and could be reached in three days.