These several statements can hardly be said to prove the fact of the use of a mortar of lime and sand. Mr. John L. Stephens, in speaking of the ruins at Palenque, is more explicit: "The building was constructed of stone, with a mortar of lime and sand, and the whole front was covered with stucco, and painted." [Footnote: Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, vol. ii, p. 310.]
The back wall of the governor's house at Uxmal is nine feet thick through its length of two hundred and seventy feet. In this wall, by means of crowbars, "the Indians made a hole six and seven feet deep, but throughout the wall was solid and consisted of large stones imbedded in mortar, almost as hard as rock." [Footnote: ib., vol. i, p. 178.]
At the ruins of Zayi, there was one row of ten apartments, two hundred and twenty feet long, called the Casas Cerrada, or closed house, because the core over which the triangular ceiling was constructed had not been removed when the house was abandoned, of which Stephens says, "We found ourselves in apartments finished with the walls and ceilings like the others, but filled up (except so far as they had been emptied by the Indians) with solid masses of mortar and stones." [Footnote: Central American, Chiapas and Yucatan, vol. ii, p. 23.]
Norman, speaking of the ruins of the House of the Cacique at Chichen, remarks, "that the wall is made of large and uniformly square blocks of limestone set in mortar, which appears to be as durable as the stone itself." [Footnote: Rambles in Yucatan, p. 120.]
Elsewhere, speaking of the ruins of Yucatan generally, he observes, "the stones are cut in parallelopipeds of about twelve inches in length and six in breadth, the interstices filled up of the same materials of which the terraces are composed." [Footnote: ib. p. 127]
That these tribes used mortar of some kind in their stone walls cannot be doubted, but these several statements do not prove the use of quick-lime, which is the main question. Mr. Stephens' statement satisfied me until I saw the New Mexican pueblos. These show that a very efficient mortar can be had without the use of lime. The Indians of Mexico and the coast tribes near Vera Cruz plastered their houses externally with gypsum, which made them a brilliant white, and the stucco used upon the inner walls of houses in Chiapas and Yucatan was not unlikely made of gypsum. This mineral is abundant as well as easily treated. From it comes plaster of Paris, and from it may have come in some form the bond which held the mortar together, to the strength of which Mr. Stephens refers.
The neatness and general correctness of the masonry is now best seen in the doorways. In the standing walls of the second story, and of the first, where occasionally uncovered, there are to be seen two doorways in each room, as before stated, running in all cases across the building from the court side toward the external wall, and never in the direction of its length. These doorways measured some three feet two inches in height by two feet six inches in width, and others three feet four inches by two feet seven inches.
The stone used in these doorways are rather smaller than those in other parts of the wall, but prepared in the same manner.
I brought away two of these stones, taken from the standing walls of the main building, as samples of the character of the work with respect to size and dressing. Fig. 41 represents one of them, engraved from a photograph. It measures eight inches in its greatest length by six inches in its greatest width, and it is two and three-quarter inches in thickness.
[Illustration: Fig. 41.—Stone from doorway.]