The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

“And so it was, day after day. The winch rolled and unrolled its cable of steel and its manila ropes. The triple-pointed steel jaws dived into the soft, yielding muck many feet below the surface of the well, and came dripping up to deposit their burden. And day after day I found nothing but ill-smelling rotted leaves and a few stones, prevented from sinking into the mud by rotting tree branches which had fallen into the well and which, when not too decayed to stand the bite of the steel jaws, were brought up by the dredge. Sometimes whole trees were brought up and their weight made our steel cable sing like the string of a bass viol as the sodden mass was swung underneath the surface to free as much of it as possible and so reduce the weight before raising it clear of the water and dropping it again in another part of the pool where it sank with a splash and swirl of water.

“At times the dredge, working between two entangled trees, was caught as in a trap and we experienced very real difficulties and dangers in freeing it. When the whole mass could be raised to the surface, agile natives with axes and machetes always managed to get down to it and, clinging precariously to cable and bucket, free it from its rotting incubus. For hours at a time we labored with such delaying obstacles, but always in the end the winch again rolled out its cable and then coiled it up with nothing but a mouthful of the mucky bed of the pool.

“Several times we brought up the skeletons of deer or of wild hogs and once the tangled skeletons of a jaguar and a cow, mute evidence of a long-past forest tragedy—the cow feeding quietly, probably at night; the spring of the hungry forest cat and the agonized, purposeless flight of the bleeding quarry with the clawing jungle beast clinging to it; the last frantic leap into the well where both were doubtless stunned or killed by the seventy-foot drop to the surface of the water.

“Then, for a long while, finds even as interesting as these ceased. Absolutely nothing was brought up but mud and leaves, leaves and mud, with an occasional stone thrown in for good measure. My high hopes dwindled to nothing and became less than nothing. The work was interminable, nauseating. Doggedly I kept at it, however, determined not to stop until the absolute rock bottom of the well was reached. I tried not to let my Indians see that I was discouraged, but they did see it nevertheless and I think wondered every day how much longer the crazy stranger would persist in his foolishness and pay them high wages for bringing up mud, useless even as fertilizer, from the bottom of an abandoned well.

“But Fate was even then preparing a pleasant surprise, for one day when things seemed darkest—a gloomy, rainy day when everything was soggy and sodden with moisture—the dredge brought up what first appeared to be two ostrich eggs, cream-colored and oval against the black mud in which they rested. These proved to be balls of copal incense and they revived at once my waning hopes. We had several times previously brought up fragments of earthenware which seemed to be of ancient origin and probably were, but I could not permit myself any illusions about them. Similar ancient potsherds are not uncommon on the surface of the ancient city. A boy ... some boy ... this year ... ten years ago ... a hundred years or ten centuries ago ... might have taken up a potsherd and skittered it into the well. Boy nature has not changed through the centuries and certainly no boy with a nice, flat chip of a water-jug at hand could have resisted the urge to see it skip far down and across the water of this big pool. And so the potsherds we brought up might well be ancient without having been long buried in the well.

“But the balls of copal, or aromatic resin, left no doubt. Surely they were thrown into the Sacred Well as an offering to the Rain God in those long-past centuries when Chi-chen Itza was a great and holy city, the Mecca of the Mayas! With the evidence that this day brought forth came the conviction that the long siege was at an end and that it was merely a question of time before other and more important treasures would be brought to light. They proved to my satisfaction that the well did really have a religious significance in the olden days and therefore the legends concerning it were doubtless true in the main.

“From that time on, nearly every shovelful contained some trove—balls of copal incense or baskets that had been filled with plastic copal. The basket-work had nearly all rotted away, but the deep impress of its weaving still remained on the masses of hardened copal. There were tripod vessels often filled with copal and rubber incense; wooden fragments of various forms and of unknown use but indicating the skill of some ancient craftsman. And among these wooden things were several pieces of wood made in the form of an old-fashioned English bill-hook or of a pruning-knife. My natives looked at them as they came up from the sacred pool and called them machetes of wood, but my heart sang with joy as I viewed them. No sword of damask steel, no Toledo blade could compare in historical value to these simple wooden implements, for they were, in the most primitive form, those strange weapons of the ancient Mayas and kindred races which the eye of the twentieth century had never previously beheld except in pictured form. These wooden weapons were dart-throwers— the hul-che of the Mayas; the atlatl of the Nahuatls. They are pictured many times upon the walls of the old temples. Warriors are shown in every attitude of throwing the dart from the hul-che.

“The hul-che, or throwing-stick, of the Mayas is in its most primitive form more elemental than the bow and arrow, more elemental even than the yun-tun, or sling, for throwing stones. The first ones we brought up from the well were so near the birth-type that the hook was actually formed by the natural twist of the wood where the branch had been cut from the parent stem. In ages past, some jungle man, lacking a club and needing a weapon, pulled up a sapling that had attached at its root a secondary branch. As he gave the sapling a downward whirl, the secondary branch flew off at a tangent and straight as an arrow. Thus, probably, came the idea of the hul-che.

“It is a singular and interesting fact that the hul-che, so universally used by the Mayas and their contiguous neighbors, is almost exactly duplicated by the bone or ivory throwing-stick of the Eskimos, while there are absolutely no traces of its use by the Aztecs or other northern Mexican peoples. In those dim ages when the human race was young—those ages as vague to us in outline and substance as the clouds that float across the sky—the hul-che and not the bow was the common weapon of battle and the chase. Then we must suppose some great gelid cataclysm blotted out all humans throughout a whole region, leaving an ethnic break between the two extremes. Gradually the break was filled in by intrusive fragmentary races having no knowledge of the arts and weapons that had been before, leaving only the extremes, the arctic and the tropic, with their descent of man and his arts unbroken.

“Later on I was to have the keen pleasure of finding several votive and ceremonial examples of the hul-che representing the highest artistic development. Possibly they are the very ones which served as models for the carvings showing such weapons in the hands of stately priests and other figures portrayed upon the walls and square stone columns of my Sacred City.