SEVERAL thousands of years before that sturdy Scotch engineer John MacAdam gave to the world the broken-rock road surface known as “macadam,” which has done so much to make communication easier, roads were built in Yucatan that embodied all of his sound principles of road-making. And MacAdam lived and died without ever having heard of them. In fact, he had been sleeping beneath the green sod of his native kirk for at least a decade before Europe or North America knew that these old roads of Yucatan existed. The thoroughness and good engineering of their construction rival the famous roads of the Roman Empire or of present-day highways.
In ancient times Chi-chen Itza and all the great and lesser cities of the Yucatan peninsula were linked by a network of smooth, hard-surfaced highways. The Mayas of to-day call these old roads zac-be-ob, or white ways. The name is of ancient origin, used, perhaps, by the very builders themselves and no doubt these roads were like ribbons stretching mile after mile through field and forest and deserving quite as much the appellation of “White Way” as any of our blazing night-lighted thoroughfares.
But alas! they are no longer white, no longer even distinguishable as roads for any great distance, but are buried beneath matted roots and brown earth. And this land which once had the best roads on earth became a place where until recently good roads were unknown, where every cow-path was called camino real or royal road but was decidedly unregal.
Don Eduardo has painstakingly studied the old highways and for the rest of this chapter I will merely repeat what he has so often told me:
“The old roads, each and every one, went down to bed-rock, and upon that solid foundation was built up a ballast of broken limestone, with the larger stones at the bottom. As the surface of the road was reached, smaller stones were used and the crevices were filled in. And the whole face of the road was given a smooth, hard coating of a mortar cement of lime and finely sifted white earth, known then and to-day as zac-cab. The hard-pan of Yucatan is limestone ledge rock and as a rule it is not very far beneath the surface soil. Often in the building of roads the first layer or ballast consisted of large boulders, not merely tumbled in haphazard, but carefully placed and with the interstices filled in with smaller stones, painstakingly fitted and hammered into place. Thus a firm anchorage was provided that has held through the centuries. The second and third courses, each of smaller boulders and stones, were quite as carefully placed. The final course was constructed of stones the size of a bushel basket and smaller, wedged together with rock fragments. Within a foot or so of the desired road-level, rock fragments from the size of an egg to that of a small walnut were leveled in, a grouting made, and the whole pounded until a hard, level surface was obtained. Mortar or cement was then applied in a thin coating and when this had hardened sufficiently gangs of stout-muscled laborers armed with smooth, fine-grained polishing-stones rubbed the plastic surface until it became compacted into a polished flatness almost as smooth-coated as tile and nearly as hard.
“The majority of the stones used were not quarried but were isolated boulders rounded by erosion and stained with iron from the ‘red earth’ in which they are usually found. Seldom was any rock used which could easily be cut and used for the construction of buildings or temples.
“These old highways—what a tremendous labor they must have been! What miles and miles of carrying the stones to build them! And nothing but man-power to move the huge boulders. Centuries, perhaps, were spent in the building, and millions of sweating men.
“Their traffic problems did not concern vehicles, not even horses nor other beasts of burden. The roads were built for travelers afoot and the burden-carriers were men, traveling in single file as human carriers do the world over. And yet there must have been much traffic, for some of these roads are twenty-five feet in width, so that four files of men with their loads could easily pass, two lines going one way and two in the opposite direction.
“The largest and longest of these ancient roadways connects Chi-chen Itza with the once important cities of Uxmal and Tiho. It is twenty-five feet wide. The long road from Chi-chen Itza to ancient Zac-ci (now Valladolid) and the unnamed but important towns between Zac-ci and Lake Co-ba, is bifurcated again and again into more and more narrow highways, resembling creeks flowing together to form eventually a mighty river.
“What a picture these forgotten roads must have been in the golden age of the Mayas!—pulsing with life, crowded with water-carriers, venders, idlers, pious pilgrims, nobles with their retinues, farmers bringing their produce to the city, itinerant craftsmen, rich men, beggarmen, thieves; a cheerful jostling of motley and purple; a riot of color and of all the things men buy and sell.