Carved Door-Jamb in the Castle.
In the northern part of the city, at B, is the Pyramid, or Castle, of Chichen. Its base is one hundred and ninety-seven by two hundred and two feet; its height about seventy-five feet; and its summit platform sixty-one by sixty-four feet. A stairway thirty-seven feet wide leads up the western slope to the platform, and on the north is another stairway of ninety steps forty-four feet wide, having solid balustrades which terminate at the bottom in two immense serpent's heads ten feet long, with open mouths and protruding tongues as in the opposite cut. On the platform stands a building forty-three by forty-nine feet, and about twenty feet high, having only a single doorway in the centre of each front. These doorways have all wooden lintels elaborately carved, and the jambs,—probably of stone, although Norman says they are of wood—are also covered with sculpture. The upper portion of one of these sculptured jambs is represented in the cut, and the designs on the others are of a similar general character. The northern doorway, which seems to have been the principal entrance, is twenty feet wide and its lintel is supported by two columns, each eight feet and eight inches high, with projecting bases, and having their entire surface decorated, like the jambs at the sides, with sculptured figures. The interior plan of this building differs materially from any we have met; since the doorways on the east, west, and south open into a corridor six feet wide, which extends without partition walls round the three corresponding sides of the edifice; while the northern doorway gives access also to a corridor forty feet long and six and a third feet wide. Through the centre of the rear wall of this corridor a doorway leads into a room twelve feet nine inches by nineteen feet eight inches, and seventeen feet high. This room also differs widely from any before described, for its ceiling, instead of being formed by a single triangular arch running lengthways, has two transverse arches supported by immense carved zapote-beams stretched across the room, and which rest, each at its centre, on two square pillars whose dimensions are twenty-two inches on each side and nine feet in height. The cut shows the ground plan of this remarkable structure, the squares at a representing the feet of the interior pillars, and the circles at b, the pillars that support the lintel of the northern doorway.[V-76]
Ground Plan of the Castle.
Stone Ring at Chichen.