The building at E on the plan is called by the natives Chichanchob, or Red House; Charnay terms it the Prison. It's front is shown in the cut, the whole being in an excellent state of preservation. The three doorways lead into a corridor extending the whole length of the building, forty-three feet, through which three corresponding doorways give access to three small apartments in the rear. Over these doorways, and running the whole length of the corridor, is a narrow stone tablet on which is sculptured a row of hieroglyphics, of which the first and best preserved portion is shown in the cut. Their similarity to, if not identity with, the characters at Copan, will be seen at a glance. There are traces of painting on the walls of the three rear rooms.[V-79] The building D presents nothing of particular interest.
Hieroglyphic Tablet at Chichen.
CHICHEN—THE CARACOL.
At F is the Caracol, or winding staircase, called also by Norman the Dome, a building entirely different in form and plan from any we have seen. Of the two supporting rectangular terraces, the lower is one hundred and fifty by two hundred and twenty-three feet, and the upper is fifty-five by eighty feet. A stairway of twenty steps, forty-five feet wide, leads up to the former, and another of sixteen steps, forty-two feet wide, to the latter. The lower stairway had a balustrade formed of two intertwined serpents. On the upper platform is the Caracol, a circular building twenty-two feet in diameter and about twenty-four feet high, its roof being dome-shaped instead of flat. The annexed section and ground plan illustrate its peculiar construction. Two narrow corridors, with plastered and painted walls, extend entirely round the circumference, and the centre is apparently a solid mass of masonry.[V-80]
The Caracol at Chichen.
The only remaining monument at Chichen which demands particular mention is that at C on the plan. Here occur large numbers, three hundred and eighty having been counted, of small square columns from three to six feet high, each composed of several separate pieces, one placed on another, standing in rows of from three to five abreast, round an open space some four hundred feet square, and also extending irregularly in other directions in connection with various mounds. The use of these columns is entirely unknown; but any structure which they may have supported must have been of wood, since absolutely no vestiges remain.[V-81] Besides the monuments described, there are the usual heaps of ruins, mounds, fallen walls, and sculptured blocks, scattered over the plain for miles in every direction. Chichen was evidently a great capital and religious centre, and its ruins present, as the reader has doubtless noticed, very many points of contrast with those of the central or Uxmal group.[V-82]