Mound at Mayapan.
RUINS OF MAYAPAN
Circular Structure at Mayapan.
About ten miles northward of Ticul, and twenty-five miles southward of Mérida is the rancho of San Joaquin, included in the hacienda of Xcanchakan, on which are the remains of Mayapan, the ancient Maya capital. According to the traditional annals of the country Mayapan was destroyed by an enemy, in one of the many civil conflicts that desolated Yucatan, not much more than a century before the Spanish conquest. Numerous mounds, scattered blocks, and a few ruined buildings are all that remain to recall the city's ancient splendor. The best preserved mound is that shown in the preceding cut, one hundred feet square at the base, and sixty feet high, with a stairway twenty-five feet wide in the centre of each side. The top is a plain stone platform, with no signs of its ever having supported any building. Most of the sculptured fragments contain only parts of ornamental designs and are fitted with tenons by which they were probably secured on the front walls, as at Uxmal. One building of the ordinary type was sufficiently entire to show the triangular ceiling. A circular building similar to that described at Chichen was also noticed. It is twenty-five feet in diameter, and twenty-four feet high, with only a single doorway facing the west. A single corridor only three feet wide runs entirely round the edifice, the outer wall being five feet thick, and the inner wall is a solid circular mass of stone and mortar nine feet in thickness. The interior walls of the corridor are plastered with several coats of stucco, and yet retain vestiges of yellow, blue, red, and white paint. The preceding cut shows the exterior of this structure, and also gives a good idea of the similar one at Chichen. On a terrace of the mound which supports this dome, are eight round columns, two and a half feet in diameter, and each composed of five stones placed one upon another. Among the sculptured blocks with which the country for miles around is strewn, are some which differ from those mentioned as parts of façade decorations. They are rudely carved, and each represents a subject complete in itself. Two of these, one four and the other three feet high, together with some of the decorative fragments alluded to, are shown in the cut on the opposite page. An idol was also found in one of the subterranean passages of a senote. The inhabitants of the locality report that the ruins extend over the plain within a circumference of three miles, and that the foundations yet remain of a wall that once surrounded the city.[V-85]
