“When you cut down the tree, a lot of new ones grow up around it. Most people don’t know that. They tell about a new superintendent here that got all excited because the men were chopping down the grove. And we always kid new men by sending them for a ladder on their first boat day.”
One bruised banana will rot, and contaminate an entire ship load, wherefore they were handled with great care. They were piled along the track on a prepared bed of leaves. When the pick-up train passed, other negroes shouldered each bunch gently. They might toss it aboard, but other negroes caught it by each stem, without touching the fruit, and laid it upon another bed of leaves.
“We shipped out three and a half million bunches last year—and when we say ‘bunch’ we mean the whole ‘bunch’ and not just a ‘hand’ with a dozen bananas on it,” explained the superintendent. “No, that popular song that everybody sang at home was never heard down here. We’d have killed anybody that dared to sing it. You should have been here one day last week, just to see how sore everybody was when the cook had the nerve to offer us sliced bananas for breakfast. Nobody’d eat them.”
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Every visitor to Guatemala makes the trip to Quiriguá, not to see the plantation, but to observe the famous Maya ruins hidden in the neighboring jungles.
Like most famous sights which every one travels far to see, they prove extremely disappointing. Their only beauty is that one has to ride horseback through a swamp to reach them, and that they are so completely surrounded with tropical forest, which forms an ideal setting. The ruins themselves, although interesting, are not impressive. There are some four straight columns about thirty feet high, covered with intricate carving somewhat obscured by mildew and moss. Each visiting archeologist scrapes off the fungus in order to obtain a clearer view of the carving, and with it scrapes off part of the carving. Near the columns are a few other queer rocks, fantastically cut to represent a frog or a turtle or some other creature, whose significance no one has been able to explain.
These are the work of the Mayas, who peopled Yucatan and southern Mexico while the Aztecs occupied the Mexican tableland. While the earlier people of the north built pyramids, these people built temples and monuments of lesser stature, but with more elaborate ornamentation. They possessed a system of hieroglyphics which have never been deciphered. Supposedly, the ruins of Quiriguá were erected to commemorate events in local history, but they are small, as ruins go, and lack imposing grandeur. Few ruins in the world can equal the marvelously-carved Maya ruins of Yucatan, but these of Quiriguá fail to astound the observer. Near them, however, has recently been unearthed a fortress upon a hilltop, a very rude fortress of small stones, and scientists believe that marvelous discoveries may yet be made by excavation—possibly of a great Maya City buried long ago by the rotting jungles.
Guatemala has only very recently taken an interest in her past. In the capital I had met a Dr. T. T. Waterman, now the official archeologist of the Guatemalan government, who had just brought to light on the Pacific Coast some ancient carvings more impressive to me than those of Quiriguá.
“I wouldn’t say I discovered them,” he explained, as he showed me photographs of statuary wherein faces and figures were not the fantastic work usually performed by primitive artists, but extremely real and life-like—altogether quite the best sculpture that I had seen in these countries.
“In fact, I didn’t discover them,” Dr. Waterman continued. “Ex-president Herrera did. They were on his coffee finca at Pantaleon. They happened to be on good farming land, so he dumped them all on his rubbish heap. That’s where I found them.”