Due north of Tizimin the country is still for the most part in the hands of the Yucatecans; but the cultivation of it is handicapped by a dearth of labour, for here the Indians do not submit to the conditions of serfdom existing in so-called civilised Yucatan, but will only work for fair wage, and often not long for that. Kikil, some miles from Tizimin on the north, is a straggling settlement of such working Indians, once the site of a large Indian town before the Spaniards built Tizimin. Here there were said to be extensive ruins, but we were disappointed as usual. Nothing is more disheartening than the glib way the idiotic Yucatecans send one on wild-goose chases after ruins which prove to be hideous Catholic churches of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The Indians, too, are untrustworthy guides in such matters, for they have a perfect indifference to the architectural skill of their ancestors, and speak of their productions as "xlap-pak" (old walls).
Christmas week is a grand time for Tizimin, for it heralds in the great local fiesta of the year, a feast which lasts from Christmas day till the New Year. Though synchronous with our Yuletide, it is not in celebration of that, but in honour of the local patron saint. The great feature of this gala are the bullfights. It is really doing them too much honour, though, to give them this dignified name; for they are really nothing less than a series of cowardly baitings of young bullocks. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory of the bullring hath departed from Yucatan. We shall have more to say of this decadent torturing of domesticated animals in a later chapter. But the people "see blood," and in this respect the Indians are as bad as the mongrel usurpers of their country, and crowds flock in from the settlements for miles round. They bring with them their wives, their children, and packs of dogs; the babies astride their mother's hips, the bigger children clinging to her huipil; while the men bend under huge loads of basket-baggage slung on their backs, but the whole dead weight of which is on the man's forehead, the broad plaited string of the basket passing just above his eyes. This is the queer way that all the Mayan Indians carry loads; and as you pass them they look up at you from under the strings, their uneasy attitude giving their eyes a quite unfair appearance of sneaky shiftiness.
This fiesta week, then, we had the local life of Tizimin at its brightest. The plaza turns itself into a fair, with rows of tiny wooden booths whereat cheap gewgaws and tasteless finery in cottons and tinsels, necklaces of beads and the inevitable rosaries hung with cheap gilt crosses, bankrupt the Indian wife; while her lord fuddles himself with liquid poisons at the drinking-shops. Foodstuffs leap up to famine prices. The skinny fowl which would have cost you a dollar (two shillings) "booms" to three; eager crowds surround the butchers' stalls where from dawn are trays, none too clean, piled up with blood-boltered lumps of meat (they never cut their beef in joints in Yucatan) calculated to rob an average tom-cat of his appetite. Trays of unspeakably sticky sweets reek in the sun, surrounded by eager-faced children. Strung like onions, hundreds of tortillas hang festooned on strings round the shops, as if some huge type of yellow mushroom had been utilised for decoration. Hour after hour gallop into the dusty plaza caballeros from the local plantations—fine young dandies these! who fancy themselves, intent on conquests among some of those black-eyed girls who stare from the shaded doorways as they clatter past. The three-muled waggon, too, huge-wheeled, shaded with green canvas, rolls its lumbering way into the town, bringing some family from Espita or Valladolid; and the tired mules, released from their rope and leather trappings, look about for the dustiest spot in the plaza and roll and roll and roll, backwards and forwards, in an ecstasy of freedom, to presently regain their feet, shake themselves like a dog from the water, and look about for the much desired drink.
The people come in to enjoy themselves, and perhaps they do. But there seems little or no real gaiety in the crowd. The drunken Indian is at best a maudlin creature, often quarrelsome and never merry and boisterous, and his women and children are the most silent of beings; while over the whole scene hangs the mephitic atmosphere engendered by that mischievous superstition, mainstay of a sickeningly hypocritical ecclesiasticism—that web of priest-cunning which Catholicism has woven, spider-like, round the race she has enmeshed and degraded. And so you see the poor bewildered, stumbling Indian drunkard wasting his last few centavos on a dirty melting tallow dip which, with many genuflexions, he places before a plaster St. Andrew or St. Peter. Yes! the Church is there, and makes high holiday. It is the padre's great harvesting (later we will describe an amusing "corner" made in candles by the Tizimin "curer of souls"), and hour after hour the Yucatecan sacristan climbs to the belfry to summon the faithful. But the Indian faithful are made, the wise padres know, the more faithful by a little liquor; and so outside the church doors are little drinking-shops, and the devils of superstition and drink, hand in hand, work their evil will on the weltering crowd. All the burning day the people sit huddled in the dust of the plaza, and when the chill black night settles down, the light streams from the gaping doorways of the church, where the whining sing-song of the priest and the treble voices of the boy choristers make one long inharmonious chant, punctuated with the metallic ring of cymbals, while beneath the ink-black shade of the church walls the Indian families squat, shivering in their blankets, around small fires.
Our final preparations for the journey to the coast took some days, and the fiesta was in full swing before we were ready to leave. Owing to the swamps, we thought it well to cut our baggage down to vanishing point. Having thus almost attained "that consummation devoutly to be wished" by all good travellers,—the toothbrush and blanket state,—we rode out from Tizimin late in December. Contrario had gone back to Valladolid, and we had hired an Indian boy. Our route lay for nine miles over a fair road to Sucopo. Thence a narrower path led to Zonotake, whence after eighteen miles through the jungle we reached the old Indian settlement of Occeh. Here we made a day or two's stay at the hacienda, and discovered a series of sepulchral mounds, each crowned with the ruins of a building. Below one mound we found, hidden by the tangled thorn-bushes, what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. It was little more than two feet wide, and looked uninviting. But hoping it would prove a passage to the centre of the mound, and first taking the precautionary measure of throwing in a stone to disturb any snake which might be sheltering, we wriggled in. It was only a cave of fair size; at the back a mass of limestone had lately fallen, blocking up any passage-way, if indeed any existed. In Mayan burial mounds the corpse was nearly always deposited in a well sunk from the top, and often extraordinarily deep.
Between Occeh and the sea lay forty miles of forest. As we approached the coast the land became low and boggy till the whole country seemed a swampy wood. The animals were often floundering up to their bellies in water and black mud. In places a stretch of water looking like a river formed the path ahead of us. When night came and the moon rose, the forests seemed a piece of water fairyland. The mule-track we followed lay between woodland so thick that it seemed like an ebon wall on either side save where the moon, glinting through the overgrowth, speckled the path with silver light. A great silence reigned, broken only by the cry of some night bird or the whispering rustle of the palm-leaves. Here and there the trees parted a little, as we reached some clearing where the moon was reflected in the pools and struck upon the sapota trees, making them, with their smooth grey barks, look like granite pillars. Now and again the animals waded through shallow swamps around which a thousand fireflies flitted, and from the edges of which white ibises splashed and fluttered up, a ghostly flock, at our approach. On reaching the coast a kindly welcome was accorded us at El Cuyo, a tiny port, by the Cuban superintendent of a wood-cutting company which has its headquarters there.
[CHAPTER VIII]
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES
On the coast from El Cuyo to Cape Catoche and round as far east as Contoy Island are mounds, sometimes many miles apart, averaging about 50 or 60 feet in height. We examined some of these. They are obviously artificial, quite roughly built of earth and unhewn stones, and, there can be little doubt, were erected during the later years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth centuries as "look-outs" to warn the tribes of the interior of the approach of the Spaniards. Around them are no traces of buildings. From them smoke-signals by day and fire by night doubtless served as a perfect means of collecting the tribes at any threatened point.