Our road led up a winding path, where the mosquitoes were "plentiful and strong on the wing," to the crest of the island, which was divided into the eastern side, all sand and low heather-like plant, sea-thistle and stunted cactus; and the western, all jungly woods. For some miles we had to keep to the eastward. The sand was soft and deep, and the roots of the plants sprawling around gave one no foothold. In anticipation of the difficulty of changing even small paper money in the island pueblos, we had filled a money-belt with two hundred Mexican dollars (£20), each in size nearly as big as an English five-shilling piece. This belt had always, so far, been a bit of a white elephant; to-day it was a positive cross. We realised for the first time what is described so eloquently as "the burden of wealth"; and before we had staggered and floundered our first mile in that relentlessly yielding sand we both, as our turn came to carry it, cursed a civilisation which had created the necessity of bullion and fervently wished we had not a copper in the world.
Following Crusoe's suggestion, we started cutting into the woods at a point where some cocoa palms stood. Though we thus lost the sand we found the mosquitoes; and nobody but the keenest of ruin-hunters would have stood the earthly hell through which we passed for the next hour. In a wood too high and thick to admit air, but too low to shade you from the scorching sun; with every second bush bearing thorns an inch long; your legs entangled in bines and creepers so stout that once caught no struggles, however heroic, would free you; too hot to wear your flannel shirt-sleeves down, and too pestilential with mosquitoes for you to dare expose an inch more skin than was necessary; bathed in sweat, stumbling, stooping, creeping, leaping, over, under, in and out; cutting your way foot by foot,—you need the true explorer's zeal not to sit down and give it up. But we had not come six thousand miles to give it up; and after we had made two false detours we "struck" a ruin which well rewarded us for our sufferings.
Deep in the thickest bush, the trees around shrouding them with a curtain of speckled green, stood a group of buildings upon which we were probably the first white men to look, as there is no record of a Spanish landing in Cancun. At such a moment the most matter-of-fact being must yield to a certain feeling of solemnity. You are gripped by the romance of the quest after a vanished civilisation. But in Cancun at least there are winged fiends who serve as a very practical reminder that you cannot afford to day-dream but must get to work at once. While our men lit a palm-leaf fire to keep the mosquitoes at bay, we cut through the bush to see how many buildings there were and where to begin. There were four, and the first we tackled was an oblong building, 26 feet by 10, erected on a platform built up some 4 feet from the ground-level, making a terrace all round varying in width from 12 to 16 feet. On the west were two small doorways, and on the east three. These were so small that it was necessary to crawl through. Digging down, however, we found under a foot of earth the true flooring. This was a cement of lime and sand, and was two and a half inches thick over the entire floor. The interior of the building was in the same style as those of the mainland, having what is known as the Mayan arch, running up almost to a point, the rough corners of the stones standing out like steps inverted, a slab being laid across the two walls, thus making a narrow ceiling. The outside walls were built up to the same level as the pointed roof, and the space between was filled with rubble, making a flat roof now entirely overgrown with cactus and trees. Above the centre door was a gap where the wall had fallen and where once stood what must have been more than a life-sized figure. On the platform below we found the head and shoulders, a fine piece of carving: legs, body and arms were smashed almost past recognition, and the feathered headdress had entirely disappeared. The head and bust was so heavy that it took the four of us to carry it a few yards and set it against the pyramidal mound near by where we could photograph it, and where it could be for the future out of the line of fire of falling stone.
We next visited the pyramid. It was approached by steps, but the temple which once crowned it had fallen and was a mass of stones, none of them apparently carved. But the most extraordinary ruins were what had evidently been two pillared halls standing about fifty yards apart. That on the south was the largest, and stood on a stone platform 90 feet long and 33 feet wide. The building itself measured 60 feet by 17 feet, and in two rows down the centre, ten in each row, were immense pillars, many monolithic and some as much as 8-1/2 feet high. These had originally supported the roof, now fallen and making a rooting place for trees and undergrowth which covered the whole platform. Around the platform on the ground-level was a paved walk, 16 feet wide, now buried under the fallen walls. The building on the north was no better preserved. It was exactly the same except that it had three rows of pillars running the length of the building, in their broken state looking like grey-barked trees severed by an axe. When newly erected these twin pillared halls must have been really magnificent. The architecture of all the buildings was rougher but more solid than that of those of the mainland. A noticeable feature, which we remarked again in Cozumel, was the prevalence of the monolithic pillar, which we found nowhere on the mainland among the richly decorated ruins such as Chichen, Labna and Sayil, where the pillar, almost always carved in relief, is square and built in sections a foot or two high. Of mural ornamentation there was no sign; and the general appearance of these Cancun ruins showed cruder workmanship than the rich façade work and carvings of Chichen and Palenque.
On our way back to the shore we discovered a small group of ruins, a mound and two or three houses, in hopeless decay. The isolated position of the island and its difficulty of approach perhaps explain the fact that no Spanish landing in the sixteenth century is recorded. Thus time and time alone has been the enemy of this city. Shattered as they were by the ravages of time, these Cancun buildings suggest—nay, they demand as their only explanation—a multitudinous population. The mere erection of the pillared halls by hand labour must have been a colossal task, and how the monoliths, many twice the height of the average Indian, were so perfectly hewn without metal tools seems almost a miracle. Cancun is a limestone island, and there is no doubt that the stones were quarried somewhere on its surface, though we were unable to find a suggestion of a quarry anywhere for miles around.
PLAN OF CANCUN RUINS.
At the extreme southern end of Cancun, whither we now sailed, we discovered another small ruin of no great interest, but further suggesting the once dense population of the island. Here, too, was a fisher-hut, four poles stuck in the sand with two cross-poles covered with palm-leaf for roof. Round this Cancun point, known as Nisuc, are turtle in plenty: both the green turtle (Chelonia midas), beloved of aldermen, and the hawk-billed turtle, the caret (Eretmochelys imbricata), which provides the commercial tortoise-shell. It is this latter which the Yucatecan fishermen chiefly hunt, for they can get as much as eight dollars a pound for the shell. For the flesh of the turtle they have no taste; an example of the truth of the saying that what we have we never value. The beaches of these Caribbean isles, around the fisher settlements, are often littered with the rotting carcases of turtle, spectacles of wilful waste sufficient to break the stoutest aldermanic heart. The preparation of turtle soup demands a culinary artist, and no Yucatecan is this. Their kitchen methods are ever those of the sloven cook who throws meat into a pot anyhow. But they begin to learn that there are people who prize the flesh of turtle, and a certain trade is done in the green reptilian with the captains of American trading schooners which come across the Gulf from Florida and the Eastern States. Thus a feature of the villages are the turtle "crawls," enclosures built some few yards out from the water edge, made of stakes driven in in the form of a small square bound together by lianas. Here the turtles swim about until they are wanted. At the "crawl" in Isla de Mujeres there were some two dozen, many of them monsters weighing four hundred pounds or more.
At this hut on Nisuc Point we met two young Yucatecan fishermen, handsome fellows in spotless cottons, their feet sandalled. They, too, were from Mujeres and they joined us in our evening meal, which we ate in picnic fashion at the water edge. But the mosquitoes were also feeding, so at sunset we put out into mid-stream to avoid their pressing attentions, and fished for picuda till dark. These Yucatecans are quite Arab-like in the simplicity of their sleeping habits, and it was quaint to watch at sundown the five men wrap themselves, head and all, in their coloured blankets, as if they were going to send themselves by parcels post, and fall asleep in little packets all over the fore deck. All night they sleep in the same attitude in which they lie down, a dreamless sleep like that of a cat on a sunny window-ledge. And it is a good thing they do, for the few inches of gunwale would not save them from a ducking if they twisted a hand's breadth.