In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

So—we to our horses once more, leaving, like the others, the Tree behind like old Time itself.

9. From the Ruins of Mitla

Mitla is the American Luxor, and in the quieter days of Diaz' rule in Mexico many were the travelers who went there, to gaze and wonder. The ruins are those of some great city of a bygone civilization but what civilization, whose civilization, none can tell. History does not work for them as for the ruins of ancient Athens or Thebes—for they are entirely without record and their story, whatever it may be, interweaves in no way with the story of mankind as we know it. How rash the Outline of History seems when we look at the broken outlines of what is called Mitla! And the biblical traditions can hardly be felt to have any reference to Mitla either, unless, as some archeologists have believed, the country was originally settled by one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The greater part of the North American continent is without ruins, unless one thinks of the evidences of primitive man living there for ages. The mounds on the high banks of the Mississippi and the cliff dwellings of New Mexico tell not of a romantic past but of the uncouth savagery of the Stone Age. But away south, in the latitude of what is now British Honduras, are evidences of a way of living not unlike that of Greeks and Romans, or of Egyptians. In fact the dumbfounding truth is that the ruins are of a convincing resemblance to the ruins of the East. Whoever lived there prized gold and gems as did humanity in the Old World, and there is evidence enough that they lived for Empire as did Persians and Babylonians. But they also built as humanity built in ages past, in Egypt, in the East. The ruins of Mitla would not be supremely remarkable in the vicinity of Athens or Tyre or on the Nile. They would be almost in place. It is not merely because of the pyramids. The principal site of pyramids in Mexico is two hundred and more miles to the north, and though of course one is tempted to link the Mexican pyramids with those of Egypt the likeness is less startling than at first appears.

It is common in peoples to imitate in their architecture the natural contours of their surroundings, and I think the Mexican pyramids with their truncated tops are imitations in stone of the altarlike pyramidal mountains, the little mesas so characteristic of the Anahuac plateau. First, victims were offered for sacrifice on sacred mountains, and then as a stage of progress on stone piles shaped like mountains.

But Mitla, and again Palenque in a similar latitude two hundred and fifty miles east, are not imitations of anything in Nature, but rather triumphs over ordinary life in vast untamed wildernesses. Their buildings have tradition and style. Whoever lived at Mitla lived sumptuously there.

I traveled to the little mining town of Tlacolula where the high road hastens downward to Tehuantepec and the Pacific, and then took horses from the Zapotecs. Here all the inhabitants are either Zapotec or Mixtec Indians. And I spent a dusty day at Mitla. Riding up a strange valley betwixt cavernous rock walls marked by splurges of ancient color I thought of an immemorial road and slaves with pots on their heads and princes in chariots drawn by men. I thought of wars, invasions, and the massacre and destruction in what must have been the last days of that Mitla Empire when some barbarous race which cared not for Art swept in upon the people and destroyed them.

There is a Zapotec village now. There were Kings of Zapotec when Cortes came and he made nothing of their kingship, though the greatest ruler that the Mexican people now acknowledge was a Zapotec, the famous and beloved President, Benito Juarez.

Behind the village, scorched and sunbleached, lie the heaps of what was Empire, of what was ancient wreckage in the days when the Spaniards came. Some of it lies in shapeless ruin—perhaps the homes of the poor. Zapotec houses of adobe have added to the heaps. There were Zapotec buildings which the Spaniards sacked; there were tombs of Zapotec Kings or the mummies of Kings, stored with gold and gems in the ancient vaults of stone. Mitla figured for long in the quest for El Dorado. And still to-day it is believed by the Indians that vast sacred treasures are here stored away. They guard the place with superstitious horror still, and a grand work of excavation leading to the discovery of subterranean temples and mausoleums might credibly lead to an uprising.