This important city is apparently without civic architecture; no public buildings are found, there seems to have been nothing but temples and tombs. Consequently the great edifice was not a royal palace, but rather a priestly habitation, a magnificent convent occupied by the higher clergy of this holy centre, as the reliefs everywhere attest.
Had Palenque been the capital of an empire, the palace a kingly mansion, the history of her people, fragments of domestic life, pageants, recitals of battles and conquests, would be found among the reliefs which everywhere cover her edifices, as in Mexico, at Chichen-Itza and other cities in Yucatan; whereas the reliefs in Palenque show nothing of the kind. On them we behold peaceful, stately subjects, usually a personage standing with a sceptre, sometimes a calm, majestic figure whose mouth emits a flame, emblem of speech and oratory. They are surrounded by prostrated acolytes, whose bearing is neither that of slaves nor of captives; for the expression of their countenance, if submissive, is open and serene, and their peaceful attitude indicates worshippers and believers; no arms are found among these multitudes, nor spear, nor shield, nor bow, nor arrow, nothing but preachers and devotees.
The interest attaching to these studies is certainly profound and sincere, yet it does not entirely banish the consciousness of our very arduous life among these ruins. The rain is incessant; the damp seems to penetrate the very marrow of our bones; a vegetable mould settles on our hats which we are obliged to brush off daily; we live in mud, we are covered with mud, we breathe in mud, whether amongst the ruins or wandering away from them; the ground is so slippery that we are as often on our backs as on our feet.
No rest for the explorer, is the fiat that has gone forth. At night the walls, which are covered with greenish moss, trickle down on our weary heads and awake us out of our sleep; in the day-time we are a prey to swarms of insects, rodadores, mosquitoes, and garrapatas. It is impossible to bear up long against such odds, and first young Lemaire, next Alfonso the cook, are laid up with malaria. Julian and I are the only two of the party whom this scourge has spared. Yet this wretched life is not without some gleams of sunshine. Since our men opened a large space in front of the palace, and cleared the courtyard of the dense vegetation which blocked it up completely, allowing a free passage for the air to circulate, the birds have not been slow to avail themselves of this new retreat, and our mornings and evenings are cheered by their sweet notes. We have our night concerts also, when innumerable creatures, whose names we know not, mingle their voices with the chirping of the cricket, the song of the cicala, the croaking of frogs, followed by the howling of huge monkeys, which sounds like the roaring of lions and tigers; all this is new to us, and not without a certain amount of excitement, yet it sinks into utter insignificance as compared with the great joy of our discoveries, the ever fresh interest of our photographs, the looking forward with immense satisfaction to the time when we shall produce the splendid squeezes of these grand, mysterious inscriptions, not yet found in any museum. Well weighed together, these things are calculated to make us forget the hardships and troubles of the moment.
Quinine has done wonders; our men are themselves again, and Alfonso, to make us forget the meagre fare he inflicted upon us during his illness, served up a magnificent luncheon to celebrate his recovery. The reader may like to read the menu of a déjeuner in the wilds of America:—
Soupe: Purée de haricots noirs au bouillon d’escargots. Olives de Valence, saucisson d’Arles. Poulet de grain, sauté a l’ail et au piment rouge. Morue frite. Chives, pointes de petits palmiers en branches d’asperge. Fritures: haricots noirs rissolés. Crêpes. Fromage américain. Vins: Bordeaux et Aragon. Café, habanero et cigares de Tabasco.
I am not sure about the order of succession, but I can vouch for the items being correct, from which it may be seen that even at Palenque, with fine weather and a grateful cook, one need not starve, but he would be greatly mistaken who thought that this was our every day’s fare. Let us return to graver concerns.
The Temple of Inscriptions is the largest known at Palenque, standing on a pyramid of some 48 feet high, to the south-west angle of the palace; its façade, 74 feet by nearly 25 deep, is composed of a vast gallery occupying the whole front, and of three compartments of different sizes, a large central chamber and two small ones at the sides. The front gallery is pierced with five apertures, supported by six pillars of 6 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 7 inches thick. The two corner pillars were covered with katunes, and the other four with bas-reliefs. No sanctuary is found in the building known as the Temple of Inscriptions, but both the gallery and the central room have flagstones covered with inscriptions. Two panels enclosed in the wall of the gallery measure 13 feet wide by 7 feet 8 inches high, one in the central chamber is over 7 feet by 6 feet. Amidst the katunes of this panel Waldeck has seen fit to place three or four elephants. What end did he propose to himself in giving this fictitious representation? Presumably to give a prehistoric origin to these ruins, since it is an ascertained fact that elephants in a fossil state only have been found on the American continent. It is needless to add that neither Catherwood, who drew these inscriptions most minutely, nor myself who brought impressions of them away, nor living man, ever saw these elephants and their fine trunks.
But such is the mischief engendered by preconceived opinions. With some writers it would seem that to give a recent date to these monuments would deprive them of all interest. It would have been fortunate had explorers been imbued with fewer prejudices and gifted with a little more common sense, for then we should have known the truth with regard to these ruins long since. Of all the buildings the temple was the best preserved, as seen in every detail. The floor, which in the palace is but a layer of plaster, is laid down here with beautiful slabs 9 feet 9 inches on one side by 5 feet by 7 inches thick.
The roof is unfortunately in a very ruinous state, and the dense vegetation which covers it prevents seeing anything of the large figures which presumably occupied its surface; even a photograph is difficult to get, for want of sufficient space, and the one we give is not a success.