PLAN OF PRINCIPAL GROUP OF RUINS AT PALENQUE.
I accepted Don Adolfo’s hospitality for the night, and was ready to set off early the next morning on a good horse he had lent me; but Don Carlos and Don Adolfo had put their heads together and agreed that it was out of the question that I should ride the forty miles to Santo Domingo alone, saying that I was sure to lose my way amongst the numerous cattle-tracks; they had been so uniformly kind and courteous to me, that, although I was fairly certain I could find the path, I felt obliged to give way to their wishes, and endure a further delay whilst a guide was being found for me. At last all was arranged and by eight o’clock we set off, and as we journeyed over the first few miles of the track, where the roots of the trees were thick and progress necessarily slow, I chatted with my guide and heard all the stories of the Carnival; then, as the track became clearer, I pushed my horse to a gentle canter and shouted to the guide to keep up with me. Time after time I had to wait for him, and each time he seemed to lag further and further behind, so about midday I left him and pushed on to the only place in the track where water was to be found and there stopped to eat my breakfast. I rested nearly an hour and still no guide made his appearance; at last, fearing he had met with some accident, I rode back along the track for about two miles, when I found him seated on the ground in the middle of the track and his mule quietly grazing close by. Nothing seemed to be the matter with him, and when I asked him why he did not come on to the water, he replied that he needed his breakfast, and, as far as I could find out, had made it solely off a large bottle of aguardiente, which was now quite empty.
With some difficulty I got him on his mule again, whilst he kept muttering “Galope, galope! con los Ingleses es siempre así, galope, galope!” and for the remaining twenty miles, with the aid of a long stick, I kept his mule in front of me at a ‘galope,’ or rather at a sort of shuffling canter which was all she was equal to. The guide swayed fearfully in his saddle, and at times I thought that he must come off, but somehow or other he always managed to save himself just in the nick of time; by degrees he got better, and, much to my astonishment, when he dismounted at Santo Domingo he was as sober as a judge. There we parted on the best of terms, and as I learnt that the arriero had also arrived safely with the pack-mules, I mounted my horse again and rode on to join Mr. Price at the ruins.
CHAPTER XXIII. PALENQUE.
On the 20th February, Gorgonio, José Domingo, and Caralampio Lopez arrived at Palenque, having ridden overland from Guatemala, and we at once set to work making paper moulds of the inscriptions; by the end of three weeks a large number of moulds had been dried and stored in one of the temples, and others in process of making were still adhering to the sculptured slabs, when, late one evening, a heavy rain-storm unexpectedly burst upon us. It was impossible in the dark to reach the temple where the moulds were stored, as the whole of the intervening space was covered with felled trees, and even in the daytime it was a severe gymnastic exercise to get from one building to another. When daylight came and we were able to reach the temple, we found that the waterproof sheets with which the moulds were covered had not sufficed to keep out the driving rain, and that half of the moulds had been reduced to a pulpy mass, and those in process of making had been almost washed away. The rain continued to fall all day long, the rooms where we were living were partly flooded, the walls were running with water, and the drip came through the roof in all directions. It was not until the next day that the remnant of the moulds could be carried out to dry in the returning sunshine, and then we made certain that the greater part of the work would have to be done over again.
GORGONIO LOPEZ, PALENQUE, 1891.
I will not weary my readers with any further account of the troubles in engaging labourers, it was the old story of effusive offers of help and broken promises over and over again; at one time, for a few days, we actually had as many as fifty men at work, and during the next week we were left without a single one. For many days our only connection with the village was kept up by the two small boys who brought over the supply of tortillas for which a contract had been made. These plucky little fellows walked the twelve miles through the forest alone, although they were so small that on arriving at the ruins they had to help one another up and down the rather steep steps which led in and out of the Courts. Perhaps the chocolate and sweet biscuits with which they were rewarded had something to do with the persistence with which they stuck to their task.
The forest which surrounds the ruins is as heavy as any I have seen in Central America, and we were not able to clear away the undergrowth and fell the timber over more than three quarters of the area included in the plan, but this was sufficient to bring to light all the principal buildings. A fortnight of sunshine is needed to dry up the leaves after the trees are felled, and it is of course of the greatest importance to burn off the whole clearing at the same time, as the dried leaves easily catch fire and the great heat ensures the destruction of all the twigs and smaller branches; but unluckily we were denied a continuous fortnight of dry weather, and each succeeding rain-storm beat the dried leaves off of the branches and reduced the amount of easily inflammable material. It was not until the 15th April that we were able to run fire through the clearing, and as the result was not very satisfactory, a good deal of our time was afterwards taken up in heaping together the unburnt branches and starting secondary fires. The trunks and larger limbs were of course left unconsumed, although some of the drier logs would go on smouldering for many days.