“Two powerful nacons, or lesser priests, lift the maiden from her couch, their muscular brown arms forming a sling in which she lies as lightly as a leaf on the bosom of a stream. They advance with her to the edge of the well. The pitiless sun glares down into her upturned fear-stricken eyes and she throws one slender arm over her face. Her gauzy garments reveal the tender flesh and adolescent contours of a girl in her early teens.
“Slowly the nacons swing the feather-light body backward and forward to the beat of the drums and the rhythm of the dirge; forward and backward in an ever wider sweep, while the drums and chant swell to a roar. At a sign from the high priest the drums are suddenly stilled; the chant ends in a high-pitched wail. A last forward swing and the bride of Yum Chac hurtles far out over the well. Turning slowly in the air, the lithesome body falls faster and faster till it strikes the dark water seventy feet below.
“An echoing splash and all is still. Only the widening ripples are left. The child bride has found favor in the eyes of her lord, the great god Noh-och Yum Chac.
“Thus I imagined the sacrifice at the Sacred Well—a sacrifice enacted not once but hundreds of times through many centuries. Thus has it been handed down in a dozen Maya legends and I wondered whether this grim old well really held at its far murky bottom the relics of the ancient rites or, after all, the sacrifices were mere myths founded on some trivial event, which grew and grew with each telling.
“Granting that such sacrifices had been, every vestige of evidence might well have disintegrated into nothingness a thousand years before my time. Assuming even that at the bottom of this watery pit was all I sought, what a mad venture it was for one lone man with but a little money and no great mechanical skill to attempt to recover these evidences!
“And yet my faith was strong. I felt that my quest was not to be in vain and that somehow I would make the well yield up its treasures. At least I must attempt the feat or continue to be haunted by the idea all the rest of my life.
“My wearied brain could no longer sustain these speculations. My whole tired body knew but one desire—sleep. Yet I did not wish to sleep in this gruesome place. Half a mile farther on I should find the Casa Real, the old manor-house that was to be my home. Wearily I strove toward it in the failing moonlight.
“At last I approached the main arched gateway of the corral, built more than two hundred years ago. It was boldly outlined in the pale moonlight, while here and there were long jet shadows cast by some broken portion of a wall or by some partially burned but upright trunk of a great tree. All was desolation, as in the case of the ancient temples, but a newer desolation, for this manor had been built less than seventy years before. As I pushed my way over broken stones a cloud came over the moon and I stumbled full upon what seemed at first the vertebræ of a huge fish. The cloud passed as I halted and an involuntary shudder gripped me as I looked down on the whitened bones of a human skeleton. A little to one side on a slight elevation lay the severed skull; and just beyond was still another and yet another. Ah, yes! I knew the tragic story, but had not expected to be met with so brutal a reminder of it.
“The former inhabitants of this once beautiful hacienda had all been massacred, many years before, by the Sublevados, the untamed tribes of Maya Indians living some miles to the south. These savages had slain every living creature on the estate and had left the several buildings in smoldering ruins. Even at the present time the Sublevados are still untamed and I have often been warned of the menace of a similar fate.
“I turned and gazed at the old gateway under which I had so recently passed—a gateway, so the records say, built in June, 1721. Under it also had passed long lines of weeping captives, and there are men living who remember the event. These poor captives were laden with the booty taken from the villages of Tunkas and Dzitas as they were urged on by their Sublevado captors in their terrible journey to Chan Santa Cruz, the distant Sublevado stronghold. And only the vigorous men with trades and the young women were spared for the journey, while the other prisoners were ruthlessly murdered. Of the prisoners left alive for the journey those who fell by the wayside were despatched with a stroke of the machete and left where they fell. I later found many of their pitiful skeletons.