Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vol. I.

by John L. Stephens

The next day was a repetition of the same scenes. In the afternoon, at the bull-fight, I fell into conversation with a gentleman who sat next to me, and who gave me information of some antiquities in Maxcanú, a village four leagues distant. That I might take this place on my return to Uxmal, it was advisable to visit the ruins on Don Simon's hacienda the next day. Don Simon could not go with me until after the fair, and amid the great concourse of Indians it was difficult to find one who could serve as a guide.

It was not till eleven o'clock the next day that I was able to set out, and I had as a guide a major domo of another hacienda, who, being, as I imagined, vexed at being obliged to leave the fiesta, and determined to get me off his hands as soon as possible, set out at a swinging trot. The sun was scorching, the road broad, strait, and stony, and without a particle of shade, but in forty minutes, both considerably heated, we reached the hacienda of Sijoh, two leagues distant.

This hacienda belonged to a brother of Don Simon, then resident in Vera Cruz, and was under the latter's charge. Here my guide passed me over into the hands of an Indian, and rode back as fast as he could to the fair. The Indian mounted another horse, and, continuing a short distance on the same road through the lands of the hacienda, we turned off to the right, and in five minutes saw in the woods to our left, near the road, a high mound of ruins of that distinctive character once so strange, but now so familiar to me, proclaiming the existence another unknown, nameless, desolate, and ruined city.

We continued on to another mound nearer than the first, where we dismounted and tied our horses to the bushes. This mound was a solid mass of masonry, about thirty feet high, and nearly square. The stones were large, one at the corner measuring six feet in length by three in width, and the sides were covered with thorns and briers. On the south side was a range of steps still in good condition, each fifteen inches high, and in general three feet long. On the other sides the stones rose in a pyramidal form, but without steps. On the top was a stone building, with its wall as high as the cornice standing. Above this the façade had fallen, but the mass of stone and mortar which formed the roof remained, and within the apartment was precisely like the interior of the buildings at Uxmal, having the same distinctive arch. There were no remains of sculpture, but the base of the mound was encumbered with fallen stones, among which were some about three feet long, dug out so as to form a sort of trough, the same as we had seen at Uxmal, where they were called pilas or fountains.

Leaving this, we returned through the woods to the mound we had first seen. This was perhaps sixty feet high, and was a mere mass of fallen stone. Whatever it might have been, its features were entirely lost, and but for the structure I had just seen, and the waste of ruins in other parts of the country, it might have seemed doubtful whether it had ever been formed according to any plan or rules of art. The mass of stone was so solid that no vegetation could take root upon it; its sides were bare and bleached, and the pieces, on being disturbed, slid down with a metallic sound like the ringing of iron. In climbing up I received a blow from a sliding stone, which nearly carried me back to the bottom, for the moment completely disabled me, and from which I did not entirely recover until some time afterward.

From the top of this mound I saw two others of nearly the same height, and, taking their direction with the compass, I descended and directed my steps toward them. The whole ground was covered with trees and a thick undergrowth of brush and thorn-bushes. My Indian had gone to lead the horses round to another road. I had no machete, and though the mounds were not far distant, I was excessively scratched and torn in getting to them. They were all ruined, so that they barely preserved their form. Passing between these, I saw beyond three others, forming three angles of a patio or square; and in this patio, rising above the thorn-bushes and briers, were huge stones, which, on being first discovered, suddenly and unexpectedly, actually startled me. At a distance they reminded me of the monuments of Copan, but they were even more extraordinary and incomprehensible. They were uncouth in shape, and rough as they came from the quarry. Four of them were flat; the largest was fourteen feet high, and measured toward the top four feet in width, and one and a half in thickness. The top was broader than the bottom, and it stood in a leaning posture, as if its foundation had been loosened. The others were still more irregular in shape, and it seemed as if the people who erected them had just looked out for the largest stones they could lay their hands on tall or short, thick or thin, square or round, without regard to anything except bulk. They had no beauty or fitness of design or proportion, and there were no characters upon them. But in that desolation and solitude they were strange and striking, and, like unlettered headstones in a churchyard, seemed to mark the graves of unknown dead.

On one of the mounds, looking down upon this patio, was a long building, with its front wall fallen, and leaving the whole interior exposed to view. I climbed up to it, but saw only the remains of the same narrow corridor and arch, and on the wall were prints of the red hand. The whole country was so overgrown that it was impossible to form any idea of what its extent had been, but one thing was certain, a large city had once stood here, and what its name was no man knew.

At this time my visit was merely intended as preliminary, for the purpose of judging whether there were any subjects for Mr. Catherwood's pencil, and it was now about one o'clock. The heat was intense, and sweating and covered with briers and burrs, which stuck to every part of my clothes, I came out into the open road, where my Indium was waiting for me with the horses. We mounted immediately, and continued on a gallop to the hacienda of Tankuché, two leagues distant.

This hacienda was a favourite with Don Simon, as he had created it out of the wilderness, and the entire road from the village he had made himself. It was a good logwood country, and here he had erected machinery for extracting the dye. In general, it was the most busy place of all his haciendas, but this day it seemed as if a desolating scourge had swept over it. The huts of the Indians were closed and locked up; no barebodied children were playing around them, and the large gate was locked. We tied our horses by one of the panels, and, ascending by a flight of stone steps, entered the lane and walked up to the house. Every door was locked, and not a person in sight. Moving on to the high stone structure forming the platform of the well, I saw a little boy, dressed in a straw hat, dozing on an old horse, which was creeping round with the well-beam, drawing in broken buckets a slow stream of water, for which no one came. At sight of me he rose from the neck of his horse, and tried to stop him, but the old animal seemed so used to going round that he could not stop, and the little fellow looked as if he expected to be going till some one came to take him off. All had gone to the fiesta, and were now swelling the great crowd I had left in the village. It was an immense change from the thronged fair to the solitude of this desolate hacienda. I sat down under a large seybo tree overshadowing the well, and ate a roll of bread and an orange, after which I strolled back to the gate, and, to my surprise, found only one horse. My guide had mounted his and returned to his hacienda. I walked into the factory, returned to the well, and attempted speech with the boy, but the old horse started forward and carried him away from me; I lay down on the platform of the well; the creaking of the beam served as a sort of lullaby and I had made such progress that I was not very eager to be interrupted, when an Indian lad arrived, who had been hunted up by my missing guide, and directed to show me the ruins. This fact, however, he would not have been able to communicate, but, fortunately, he was accompanied by an Indian who spoke Spanish. The latter was an intelligent, middle-aged man, of highly respectable appearance, but Don Simon told me he was the worst fellow on the hacienda. He was desperately in love with a girl who did not live on the estate, and he was in the habit of running away to visit her, and of being brought back with his arms tied behind him; as a punishment for a late offence of this kind, he had been prohibited from going to the fiesta. Through him I had an understanding with my new guide, and set out again.

In five minutes after leaving the hacienda, we passed between two mounds of ruins, and, from time to time having glimpses of other vestiges in the woods, in twenty minutes we came to a mound about thirty feet high, on the top of which was a ruined building. Here we dismounted, tied our horses, and ascended the mound. The whole of the front wall had fallen, together with the front half of the arch; the interior chamber was filled with dirt and rubbish nearly up to the cornice, and the arch of the back wall was the only part above ground; but this, instead of being of smooth stones, like all the others we had seen in Yucatan, was plastered and covered with paintings, the colours of which were still bright and fresh. The principal colours were red, green, yellow, and blue, and at first the lines and figures seemed so distinct, that I thought I could make out the subjects. The apartment being filled up with dirt, I stood above the objects, and it was only by sitting, or rather lying down, that I could examine them. One subject at first sight struck me as being a representation of the mask found at Palenque. I was extremely desirous to get this off entire, but found, by experiments upon other parts of the plaster with the machete, that it would be impossible to do so, and left it untouched.