[CHAPTER IX]
EL MECO TO PUERTO MORELOS
Across the shallow blue harbour of Isla de Mujeres and a four-mile stretch of the Yucatan Channel, clear as crystal, its small rippling waves flecked to foam by the trade winds, lies the eastern mainland of Yucatan. Here on the low wooded shore, in direct line with the southern point of the island, are the ruins of El Meco. Our new boat was some two or three tons heavier than the "Esperanza." Our captain and its owner was a Yucatecan fisherman, Lucio Sanchez, who some years before, to avoid service in the National Guard, had migrated to Key West and become an American citizen. He had now returned to his native island, had taken unto himself a Yucatecan wife, and was the happy father of four children. In all our dealings with him, which extended over several weeks, we found him scrupulously honest, and in all ways a marked contrast to his detestable fellow-countrymen. If this were the result of two years' residence at Key West, it is surely a happy augury of the improvement which is likely to take place in the Yucatecan people when they form, as they inevitably will, a portion, however unworthy, of the Land of the Stars and Stripes.
Besides Lucio our crew consisted of his half-brother, a handsome black-eyed lad of sixteen, who looked far older and rejoiced in the girlish name of Dolores, and a middle-aged Yucatecan sailor whose name was Pedro Paz. With a new stock of provisions, and with a welcome addition of elbow-room compared with the "cabined, cribbed confinement" of the tiny "Esperanza," we made our start in the highest spirits. The run across took less than an hour, and opposite a sandy bay a mile north of the ruins we anchored. The coast for the most part here is shelving coral rock, and even small sailing-boats dare not go right in; landing always being a matter of wading. We could see the main ruin, a pyramid, showing above the woods some little way inland, and as there are no paths hereabouts, and we knew we should have to cut our way, we were all armed with machetes. We stopped under a clump of cocoa palms on the beach—one of our sailors shinning up for the green fruit—and had a delightful drink of the water; and then tramped down the rocky shore till we came opposite the ruins.
But we had no sooner plunged into the woods than we discovered we had not got them to ourselves. They were thickly populated, and the natives were the most savage and inhospitable we had yet met. The air was simply filled with mosquitoes, which evidently regarded our arrival as the occasion for a "dia de fiesta," and started stinging our faces, hands, and arms till their pestilent persistence nearly maddened us. If there is anything to urge you to work in such a spot where the least movement causes the sweat to run down you in rivulets, it is mosquitoes. While your machete is at work and the bush tops and branches fall around you, the midget fiends keep off a bit. Thus goaded into frenzied activity, we were not long in reaching El Meco.
It is a pyramid faced with stone, but, unlike that at Chichen, it is built in perpendicular terraces, each smaller than the one below, giving its sides the appearance of a gigantic stairway, save that the ledges are not of equal height or width. On the east side there had been a staircase, now ruined. We scrambled up, clinging on to the gnarled roots and branches of trees growing from it, and once on the top a refreshing sea breeze greeted us, for the time driving our persecutors away. To make anything like accurate measurements the dense overgrowth had to be first cut away, and we stripped off our coats and revolver belts and set to with a will. The building, which our energetic assault on the vegetation disclosed, was now roofless. It had consisted of two rectangular rooms running north and south. At the top of the stairs on the east, forming the doorway of the first chamber, stood two pillars 18 inches in diameter. The inner room had two stone platforms about 4 feet high, probably altars: for there is no doubt that all the strictly pyramidal buildings of Central America were religious in character. We say "strictly pyramidal" to differentiate these temples from the other buildings of Yucatan which are, almost without exception, erected on mounds. While making our measurements one of us, tape in hand, nearly touched a snake which was hiding in a crevice in the wall. He was quite small, of a ringed black and brown colour, but Lucio declared him one of the deadliest of all snakes. He called it calom. We tickled the reptile's tail with a machete, and he squirmed deeper into the wall and disappeared.
RUINS OF EL MECO, EASTERN YUCATAN.