“Poor boys and girls! What heart-pangs they must have felt; what scalding tears must have fallen on the stone flags as they passed beneath this old arch! Their pangs were soon stilled and the tears they spilled quickly dried, for they all soon came to that tranquil rest which is for eternity. Their lives were like the meteor that flashes for a moment in the sky and is then forever snuffed out. ‘Cigar stubs that the God of Night tosses away’ is the native vernacular for meteors. The souls of these wretched youths and maidens seem to have been no less carelessly tossed away by the God of the Night.
“I sank down upon the corridor of my new-old home, too utterly fatigued in mind and body to care what army of horrid phantoms might there abide. Let graveyards yawn and specters dance, let witches ride; loose Beelzebub and all his imps, but let me sleep!
“And so I did until awakened by a torrid sun burning down upon me through what once had been a roof.”
CHAPTER V
THE ANCIENT CITY
“I AROSE cautiously, expecting to find an ache in every bone and muscle, and was agreeably surprised to discover myself without an ache or a pain, though a little stiff. Apparently the hot sun had baked all pains away. In a shady place near by sat my Indian, not sleeping, apparently not even thinking, but just doing nothing at all, an art in which he was an adept.
“I was conscious of an earnest desire for two things,—a bath and breakfast,—and I wanted a great deal of both. Without much difficulty, in sign language, I made my wishes clear to the native and he conducted me a distance of half a mile or so, not to the Sacred Well but to another well or cenote called Tol-oc, which is about two hundred feet to the left of the road leading to the village of Pisté. How he knew so definitely the location of the well is a mystery to me.
“This great cool, crystal-clear pool was the water-supply of the ancient city. A wide flight of steps, now much broken, leads into its depths and the lower steps are at present actually some distance beneath the surface of the water. On the stone rim of the sides of the pool are deep grooves, worn in olden times by the ceaseless raising and lowering of rope-suspended water-jugs or gourds. And can’t you picture the women of old Chi-chen Itza in a constant stream passing from dawn till dusk along the road to the well of Tol-oc?—the servant glad to escape for a time the sharp tongue of her mistress; the wrinkled, toothless crone to whom a trip to the well means an opportunity to exchange the latest gossip; the comely young matron anxious to get back to her household tasks; the belle of the neighborhood, on her way to the well, light-heartedly swinging her empty water-jug and bantering those who pass. This is a phase of life as old as communal existence. One may see the same scene enacted to-day almost anywhere south of the Rio Grande or in Spain, Egypt, or the Orient.
“As I swam about in the pool fresh vigor flowed into my veins, and I emerged with an increased craving for breakfast. When I reached the hacienda I found my Indian had anticipated this and while the repast he provided might not have appealed to a pampered appetite, I found it a Lucullian feast; and my guide proved no mean trencherman, either, although I suspect he had fortified himself with no less heartening a meal two hours earlier, when he found me asleep.