THE PALACE, SAYIL.
In the centre of the building was a grand staircase 32 feet wide which ascended to the top of the structure. This staircase and the right-hand portion of the building are in hopeless ruins, but enough remains to prove the grandeur of the conception of these wonderful Indian architects who, working without metals or tools of precision, were able to plan and raise a pile which in its majesty and size is fitting to rank with the architectural wonders of the world.
The palace measures on the ground-floor 265 feet in frontage and 120 feet in depth. The second storey was 220 feet long and 60 feet deep. The third storey is 150 feet long and 18 feet deep. The general design of the façades, those of the lower two having been columnar, as seen clearly in the second, was identical. The façade of the upper terrace was plain. The entablatures of the first and second were elaborately decorated with carvings, among which the most remarkable is the figure of a man supporting himself on his hands with his legs bent wide apart at right angles to his body in an attitude which certainly cannot be said to err on the side of delicacy. The building is to the rear much what it is in the front, though the platforms of the back terraces are narrower. The rooms vary in length from 23 feet to 10. In the second range to the northward there were ten doorways sealed up with masonry like those we had earlier found in the Nunnery building at Chichen. Stephens in 1842 broke into these and discovered that there were ten rooms, 220 feet long altogether, each 10 feet deep, filled with solid masses of mortar and stone. The most extraordinary fact disclosed by him is that the filling up of the rooms must have been done in the course of the erection of the building; for as the stone fillings rose above the top of the doorways the workmen could not have entered the apartments through the doors to complete the work of filling in.
The only way of explaining the means by which these rooms could have been thus made solid is to assume that the work was done from the top before the ceilings of the rooms were superimposed. Stephens is at a loss to explain this feature of the building, for, as he says, if the filling up of these ten rooms was necessary to strengthen the supports of the third terrace, "it would seem to have been much easier to erect a solid structure at once, without any division into apartments." We think he missed the simplest explanation of all. It is quite possible that the palace as first designed was to be two-storeyed. Indeed this is most probable, as this marvellous palace at Sayil is one of the few Mayan buildings which have three habitable storeys. When the building operations had reached the second terrace the cacique, impressed with the grandeur of his work, determined to give the building the added glory of a third storey. But the master architect had his doubts as to whether the foundation work would bear this added weight, and to guard against any "settling" stayed the completion of the rooms in the rear and filled up these ten before the roofs were put on. Surely this is a very natural and very simple explanation of what is otherwise inexplicable.
From the terraces of the palace towards the north-west we see a high wooded hill surmounted by a building. The densest wood covers the intervening space of about a quarter of a mile, and the "going" was of the hardest. But the actual climb of the hill was really the most difficult job; and slipping and sliding, with bleeding hands and torn clothes (for the whole surface is spread with cactus and acacia-like shrubs with thorns two or three inches long and a quarter of an inch wide), we deserve to reach a remarkable building. We do not get our deserts, for it proves to be a much ruined three-roomed house, the only remarkable feature being a carved face of life size over the centre door, and within the print of the red hand. From the terrace the view into the valley below, with the mighty palace breaking the endless woodland, evoked our enthusiasm despite our breathlessness.
At a distance of about half a mile to the south of the palace stand the ruins of a building like that described by us at Labna. On a mound an ordinary building 40 feet wide and flat-roofed is surmounted by a perpendicular wall some 30 feet high and 2 feet thick. This had the same oblong openings like small castle windows which we had seen at Labna, and bore on it the remnants of carved human figures and varied ornamentation. To the S.S.W. of this Stephens discovered yet another remarkable building 117 feet long, 84 feet deep, and divided into sixteen rooms. This stood upon what he describes as probably the largest terrace in Yucatan, from north to south at least 1,500 feet in length. With only one Indian we had to give up the idea of piercing the woods in this direction; but we had seen enough to feel satisfied that Sayil was once a city of first-rate importance. The immense palace alone must have entailed a continuous labour of thousands of workmen for some years.