The history of Chichen Itza before the arrival of the Spaniards is as vague and as untrustworthy as all else concerning the ancient Mayans. In a later chapter we shall review the evidence available as to the date of its building. M. Desiré Charnay labours needlessly to prove that the city was inhabited at the time of the Conquest. Of that, at least, there is no doubt. Even if no credence could be given to the report of the expedition thither of the elder Montejo in 1528, there is a sufficiency of Spanish documentary evidence to show that the city was not only inhabited, but the centre of a vast and powerful population in the twenties of the sixteenth century. But there is no reason to doubt the truth of Montejo's account of his sojourn there which has been outlined in Chapter III. He found Chichen the metropolis of the vast tribe of the Itzas. The Spanish historian Herrera asserts that Montejo had a return of the population taken with a view to apportioning the Indians among his soldiers as slaves, and that each Spaniard became master of between two and three thousand. Montejo's troops possibly numbered on his arrival at Chichen some 350, and this would make the census of Indians work out at something like a million. This is obviously a gross exaggeration, for even if there was any evidence that Montejo succeeded so completely in subjugating the Itzas as to be able to enslave them, we are quite certain from a careful personal survey of the district, that the country around never could have supported, any more than it could to-day support, so many inhabitants.
But as a matter of fact it is thoroughly clear that though Montejo succeeded in making a lodgment at Chichen and possessed himself of the principal buildings, occupying these for something like two years, the vast horde of Indians were not in any sense conquered, but had simply temporarily withdrawn into the surrounding woods and village suburbs of the city. Unable in the face of firearms to recapture their palaces, the natives played a waiting game, setting about slowly but surely to starve the Spaniards into submission. Weakened by months of privation, with every square mile of woodland thick with his enemies, Montejo's position became at last desperate, and there was nothing for him but to evacuate the city. This was done in a picturesque way. Choosing a dark night, Montejo collected his men, keeping the sentries on the walls till the last moment, and then, muffling with cloths the horses' hoofs, he tied a dog to the bell-rope attached to the clapper of a bell, putting a piece of meat a few feet away, but just out of his reach. Stealthily the war-worn Spaniards moved off into the woods, and naturally, as the dog saw them going, he pulled at the rope, thus ringing the bell. When they were actually out of sight the dog presumably scented the meat, and thereafter throughout the night made efforts to reach it, ringing the bell the while. This ruse entirely succeeded, the Indians believing their enemies still in camp; and it was not until their suspicions were aroused by the continuous ringing of the bell until dawn that they approached the buildings and found them deserted. But it was too late, and the Spaniards on their horses were able to make good their escape to the coast.
At the hacienda a kindly welcome awaited us from Mr. Edward Thompson, Consul-General for America in Yucatan, who has for some years been the owner of the property. A keen archæologist, he pluckily entered into possession of the estate some fifteen years ago when the neighbourhood had long earned an unenviable reputation. The last two haciendados and their families had been massacred by the revolted Indians and the house pillaged. Even to-day Chichen, which practically stands on the borderland of the disaffected eastern district of the Peninsula, is not as peaceful as it looks. A fortnight before our arrival a village some thirty miles off called Xocen had been raided and burnt. But these outbreaks do not distress Mr. Thompson, whose sympathies are with the Indians, and who, speaking Maya like one of them, is beloved by all around. An experienced traveller himself, Mr. Thompson gained our hearts at once by introducing us, as soon as our greetings were over, to a palm-thatched bathhouse in his garden, where in a stone trough we revelled for some time in the pleasures of cold water after our dusty, burning ride.
With the dawn we were up and out at El Castillo, to use the stupid Spanish name of the great pyramid. It loses none of its majesty in the daylight. It is a truncated pyramid close on 100 feet high, squared almost to the four cardinal points, but not, we believe, orientated; the northern side being the front because in that direction lies the Sacred Cenote which we shall describe in a moment. The four base lines are each, as near as can be, 200 feet long. On each of the four sides were gigantic staircases. That on the west, still in fair preservation, up which we must climb directly, is 37 feet wide. That on the north was 44, but this latter and that on the east are so entirely destroyed as to be barely traceable. The stairs on the south, about 40 feet wide, are much broken and overgrown by cactus and shrub. The pyramid is built of rubble and earth, and was completely faced with flat-hewn slabs of limestone about 5 feet by 4 and 4 to 6 inches thick. In places these are still in position. This is particularly the case with the south front. The four corners were evidently once dressed with rounded stone blocks from top to bottom.
It is difficult to exaggerate the magnificent appearance the mound must have once presented. The stairways, which are so steep as to appear in some places almost perpendicular, were balustraded, each balustrade ending on the ground in those gigantic carved stone serpent-heads, the jaws wide gaping, which we find again and again in Mayan ruins. The climb of the 120 steps, on the average about 9 inches high and 8 broad, is an undertaking before which any one not a practised Alpine climber might be excused for quailing. Pausing for breath at the eightieth step and looking downwards, your head reels; for the edges of the steps appear to merge into one another by reason of their steepness, giving one the feeling of being perched, fly-like, on the face of a grey cliff. On reaching the top step, a few feet of platform separates you from the temple. Climbing as you have been from the western side, the real one-time grandeur of the sanctuary does not strike you. It is not the front, and you must pass to the north, where was the state entrance to the Holy of Holies. This is 20 feet wide and the lintel of the gigantic doorway is supported by two pillars, 8-1/2 feet high, carved with a snake pattern and once ending at the base in snakes' heads, open-mouthed, the now empty eye-sockets having once been filled with brilliantly painted stone or pieces of polished jade. These heads are broken up, and only enough remained for the tutored eye to reconstruct the whole. Entering, you are in a now roofless room running the full length of the building east to west, 40 feet long and 6 broad. In front of you is a second doorway, its massive doorposts carved with life-sized figures of warriors in full ceremonial dress. By this you enter the central room, 20 feet by 12. Two pillars, each 1 foot 10 inches square, carved on every side with life-sized figures of warriors or priests in feathered costumes, support beams of sapota wood, once carved, but now too decayed to permit of the designs being traced.
There is no doubt that the building formed a temple. The religious nature of the Castillo must be indubitable to any one standing in front of it. Whether the bloody rites which are known to have been celebrated by Moctezuma's people in honour of Huitzopochtli, God of War, on the pyramids of Mexico had their equivalent on Chichen's mound is a very different matter. There is really no proof for or against. And if it were argued that the fact that there is no altar stone within, as is the case, goes far to prove that there were no such rites, there would be no value in such negative evidence. If bloody deeds in honour of a Sun-Deity were here enacted, possibly the flattened serpents' heads at the outer door, which would have been in view of the congregated thousands on the plains below, formed the butcher-blocks upon which the victim's palpitating heart, after his breast had been sliced open with the silex knife, was torn from its tissues to be burned as an offering to the god in the inner Holy of Holies; while the body, scarcely lifeless, was pitched (as some writers who value the picturesque rather than the accurate would like us to believe) down the steps to be sacramentally eaten by the worshippers. On the other three sides of the building runs a corridor 6 feet wide, three doors with sculptured jambs facing almost due south, east, and west.
A woodland path, in places wide enough to merit the title of road, and here and there showing signs of an ancient cementing, leads from this grimly majestic shrine of fallen gods to perhaps the grimmest pool in the world. Yucatan is peculiar in being riverless and lakeless. Rivers and lakes there are, but these are all subterranean, generally from fifty to two hundred feet beneath the surface. But dotted over the Peninsula are deep holes or water-caves, reservoirs carved by nature out of the limestone and fed by these underground sources. For these the Mayan Indian name is "cenote," and they are often huge. Two of the largest are at Chichen. Indeed the very name is due to them; for "chi" is "mouth" and "chen" is "wells." Thus Chichen was the city at the "mouth of the wells."
But only one of Chichen's natural wells served as water supply. This flower-bordered path we follow leads to the Sacred Cenote, round which grim rumours have long collected; rumours which it is now our privilege to confirm as facts. As we approach, the trees on either side give a denser shade. A few yards further and the path debouches into a small semicircular space with tiers of stone running round it to the left, suggestive of a tiny amphitheatre. In front of you is a small stone building, one-roomed, possibly the scene of the penultimate acts of the terrible dramas played so many centuries back in this tropic woodland. A step more and you are on the brink! Hold the branch of that sapota sapling fast, for the fall is sheer! Seventy feet below you in a huge limestone basin, two hundred feet or more in diameter—so nearly a perfect circle that as you look into it you find it hard to believe it has not been engineered by man, that it has worn thus from the infinitely slow corrosive action of the rainfall and natural drainage water—seventy feet beneath you lies the black, still water. It is an inky black. High above it on the limestone sides of the great hole sprawl ferns, cactus, and orchid; higher still, fringing its verge, thorn-bushes and pale-green acacias, the grey-barked sapota, and the heavy-leafed ceibo-tree raise their branches into the sunlight. But the sun never touches that gruesome, deadly still, pitchy lake. Its very glassy stillness sends a shudder through you. In its sepia depths what wonder that Mayan priest and people saw the home of the terrible Rain God, at whose will the land might smile with plenty or the spectre of famine lay his bony hand on the shrinking townsfolk?
From the earliest days of the Spanish invasion to the present time rumour has been busy in circulating many gruesome stories of the exact sacrificial uses to which this terrible pothole in the limestone was put by the ancient Mayan Indians. If Montejo the elder, during his stay at Chichen in 1528, was cognisant of human immolation in the cenote, he has left no record of it. But this is no evidence that he was not, because, like most of his fellow-adventurers in the New World, he left no chronicles at all. The probability is, however, that he knew nothing accurately and certainly witnessed no sacrificial rites, for during the foreign occupation of their city the ritual of the Indians would almost certainly be in abeyance, or at any rate practised with the utmost secrecy. The first actual written Spanish testimony to the sacred character of the pool appears to be that of Bishop Landa in his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan (1556). He writes: "A good wide road led to a well into which in times of drought the natives used to throw men, as indeed they still do, as an offering to their deities, fully believing that they would not die, even though they disappeared. Precious stones and other valuable objects were also offered; and had the country been rich in gold, this well would contain a vast quantity, because of the great veneration of the natives for it.... On its bank rises a small building filled with idols in honour of all the principal deities in the country, exactly like the Pantheon in Rome. I cannot say whether this is an ancient practice or an innovation of the aborigines, who find here their idols to which they can bring their offerings. I also found sculptured lions, vases, and other objects, which from the manner they were fashioned must have been wrought with metal instruments; besides two statues of considerable size of one single block, with peculiar heads, earrings, and maxtli round their loins."
The bishop's remarks were based, obviously, on an actual visit he paid Chichen and upon such tittle-tattle as he could obtain from the Indian peasantry. A more serious notice of the cenote is contained in a report, clearly inaccurate in detail and based on hearsay, which was drawn up in 1579 by the Spanish Governor of Valladolid and transmitted to Madrid. It runs as follows:—