Façade of First Palace—Mitla.
STONE COLUMNS.
The interior of the building, A, has a pavement of flat stones covered with cement, which latter has mostly disappeared. The inner surface of the walls is of rough stones and earth, probably the same as the interior filling, and covered with a coat of plaster, a greater part of which remained in 1859, and is shown in Charnay's photograph; there were also traces of red paint on these walls in Dupaix's time. There are no windows, or other openings except the doorways; but on the northern wall, at mid-height, there is a niche, perhaps more than one, one or two feet deep, square in form, and enclosed by four blocks of stone. Extending in a line along the centre of this apartment, are six round stone pillars, g, g, of the plan, each about fourteen feet high, three feet in diameter, and cut from a single block of porphyry or granite. The tops are slightly smaller than the bases, and five or six feet of each stone, in addition to the height mentioned, are buried in the ground.[VII-43]
Interior—South wing of the First Palace.
The following cut I take from Baldwin's work, for which it was copied from one of Tempsky's plates. It is very faulty, as is proved by Charnay's photograph taken from the same point of view, in representing the walls as if built of large rough stones without mortar, in putting a doorway in the central part of the northern wall, and in making the columns diminish in size towards the top much more than is actually the case.[VII-44]
MOSAIC GRECQUES AT MITLA.
Passing now to the northern wing of this building, C, the exterior walls are the same in style and construction as those of the southern wing just described, as is proved by the photographic views.[VII-45] The court, C, is about thirty-one feet square, and its pavement was covered with cement, as that of the larger court, E, may have been originally. The ground plan shows the arrangement of the four apartments, b, b, b, b, although it is to be noted that other plans differ slightly from this in the northern and western rooms. The only entrance to the northern court and rooms is from the southern wing through the passage f, f, which is barely wide enough to admit one person. The interior façades, fronting on the court, are precisely like the southern façade of the southern wing, A, being made up of mosaic work in panels.[VII-46] The interior walls of the small apartments, b, b, b, b, unlike those of the southern apartment, A, are formed of mosaic work in regular and graceful patterns, except a space of four or five feet at the bottom, which is covered with plaster and bears traces of a kind of fresco painting in bright colors. The mosaic grecques or arabesques of the upper portions are arranged, not in panels as on the exterior, but in three parallel bands of uniform and nearly equal width, extending round the whole circumference of each room. The cut is a fac-simile from Charnay's photograph of one of these interiors, and gives an excellent idea of the three mosaic bands that extend entirely round each room.[VII-47]