The ruins of Palenque stand shrouded in the dense forest about one hundred miles south-east of San Juan Batista, the capital town of the State of Tabasco. Their ancient name is unknown. For years they had been called by the Spaniardised Indians Casas de Piedras (Houses of Stone). They lie about eight miles from the village of Palenque, from which they take their present generally accepted name. Apart from the fact that they are, beyond dispute, culturally the most remarkable of all the groups of ruined cities so far discovered in Central America, they have a very special interest in having been the first "discovered" to archæology, and the first to fire that train of enthusiastic research which, during the many years which have elapsed since the first romantic accounts of them penetrated to Europe, has borne such rich fruit.
The Spanish vandals had taken good care to destroy on the sites of the newly founded cities, such as Merida and Valladolid, all vestiges of the ancient grandeur of Mayan buildings. If anybody troubled to remember that in the earliest years of the Conquest the caciques of Chichen, Uxmal and so on had proved troublesome foes, there was certainly no one intelligent or energetic enough to bother himself with a journey to these dead cities. And so it was that when in 1770 some stray Spanish travellers stumbled across Palenque, the news of their discovery burst like a bombshell in archæological Europe. It was not until 1776, however, that the King of Spain ordered an exploration. On the 3rd of May, 1787, one Captain Antonio Del Rio was commissioned to investigate the romantic report of the hidden city. In his official account he writes that on his first attempt, owing to the thickness of the woods and a fog so dense that it was impossible for the men to distinguish each other at five paces, the principal building was completely concealed from their view.
GROUND PLAN OF PALACE AT PALENQUE.
After a delay of a few days, occupied by him in collecting several score of Indians to clear the woods, he was enabled to make a survey. His written report for some unexplained reason was for years buried in the archives of Guatemala, not seeing the light until 1822, when the original MS. somehow fell into the hands of an English traveller who published it in London in that year. Meantime in 1807, by the order of Charles IV. of Spain, a Captain Dupaix visited Palenque. It was not until 1835, twenty-eight years after his expedition, that the report of Dupaix was published in Paris in four folio volumes at the price of eight hundred francs.
Before Stephens's investigations the wildest reports as to the extent of the ruins were current. These varied between sixty miles and twenty miles. Stephens once and for all gave the lie to these fairy tales, and showed that the ruins did not cover a square mile. But this fact does not weigh against the assumption, so soundly based upon the grandeur and artistic glories of the buildings, that Palenque was once a great and powerful city; for, as elsewhere, the hundreds of dwellings which clustered around its temples and palaces were houses of perishable materials which long ago rotted away in the forest. The largest ruin is the palace, which stands on an oblong mound 40 feet high, 310 feet long, and 260 feet wide. This gigantic mound was once faced entirely with stone. The building on it faces east, and has a frontage of 228 feet, a depth of 180, and a height of 25. There were fourteen doorways, each about 9 feet wide. It is of stone throughout, though the whole front was once stuccoed and painted. The spaces between the doorways were carved with bas-reliefs. The chief doorway is approached by stone steps. Along the cornice outside, which projected about a foot, holes had been drilled through the stone, which suggests that by their means an immense sun-curtain was sometimes lowered to cover the fourteen doorways. Two parallel corridors run lengthwise on all four sides of the building, and it is upon the corridor to the east that all fourteen doors opened. These corridors are about 9 feet wide. The floors are of cement; the walls 10 feet high and plastered. The inner walls are broken by apertures about a foot long, doubtless for the ventilation of the interior. Some of these window slits were cross-shaped, some T-shaped.
