“‘La flor de la calentura has performed its task,’ exclaimed the joyful natives, but Maria, lovely once more with returning strength, said, ‘Alas! La flor de la calentura, the flower that saved my life, is dead.’
“And thus it was told by Maria to her grandchildren and retold by them to their grandchildren and is now known by every one in the region. Surely it must be true! Why shouldn’t it be? At any rate, it is accepted as literally by my Indians as the less pleasing story of Jonah and the whale.”
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST AMERICANS
IT has been said that civilization is but a layer-cake of eras—a building up of strata, with the brute state at the bottom. Layer upon layer, each succeeding generation adds its small bit of culture or knowledge, until a golden age is finally reached. And, sadly enough, from that age of enlightenment, the hope of the world, there has always been a rapid decline, until centuries later, perhaps, again begins the tedious gradual uplift.
And the story of man’s rise and fall, in the passing of the ages, usually is buried in the earth, to be laid bare to our eyes if we have but the patience to find and the ability to understand. Just as a good woodsman can read from a scratch on a tree or a faint footprint on the ground things not obvious to the untrained observer, our men of science have developed remarkable expertness in divining the history of bygone eras from the scanty traces that remain. From a skull, centuries buried in a cave, they reconstruct the Neanderthal man. The fragments of an earthen pot tell them the degree of culture and the period of him who once supped from the vessel.
Wherever there are caves there is the likelihood of uncovering vestiges of aboriginal life, for primitive men everywhere used caverns, either as temporary shelters or as permanent abodes. Beneath the cave floor may be the evidence of many generations of men—the relics buried in layers one upon another as the discarded and broken implements of one generation were trampled underfoot and submerged under the charred embers and rubbish of the succeeding one.
The written record of the Mayas gives but little clue to their origin and no indication at all of their descent from more barbarous ancestors. Did these people, already of a high state of culture, immigrate from some other land? If so, were they the first comers or did they find the country even then inhabited? Or were their ancestors natives of this region for hundreds of centuries before them?
Yucatan is a land of caverns, veritably a honeycomb of caves, and eagerly the paleontologist rolled up his sleeves, shouldered his shovel, and set out to find the answer to these vexing questions. The answer was found and is conclusive but disappointing. Beyond the question of a doubt, the Mayas brought with them their culture, and they were the first inhabitants of this country. Whence they came, or how, or why; from what race they sprang, we know not and probably never shall know. A few conflicting legends of their arrival as recorded in some old Maya writings constitute the sum total of our knowledge on this point.