The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

“This was but the beginning. We now had at our command two means of bringing up the treasure. The big carved stones having been removed from the well, the dredge could again be used, or we could don the diving-suits. In many instances the Greek and I directed from the bottom the work of the dredge. The golden objects brought up, if simply thrown into the goldsmith’s melting-pot, would net several hundreds of thousands of dollars in bullion—dividend enough, if one were sufficiently sordid of mind, to justify all my investment of time, effort, and money in the undertaking.

“One particularly wet and dreary day the dredge had worked all morning long, in a monotonous round in which nothing of value was brought up. Toward lunch-time I had about decided to send the men to their quarters for the rest of the day, to let them recover from their half-drowned state. Just then the men at the receiving-platform gave a shout that brought me running. For several blissful minutes we were busy picking lovely little copper bells from the black ooze. The rain was forgotten. Bearers were sent to bring our lunch, and eagerly we sent the steel bucket down again. And again it came up with a pudding of mud plentifully plummed with copper bells. All afternoon we plied the dredge, and nearly every load contained more copper bells, of all sizes and shapes, none larger than our old-fashioned sleigh-bells and many much smaller. In fact, they so resembled sleigh-bells that I could not rid my mind of the idea that they were modern bells used for barter and exchange, like the hawks’ bells of Spain. At the end of the day we had piled up over two hundred of these curious specimens of Maya workmanship, and even the most cursory examination showed them to be of genuine ancient origin.

“We carried the bells to the plantation house, where all the servants looked with awe and wonder at los cascabeles de los antiguos, the bells of the ancient people. From that time on hardly a day passed that we did not add a handful of copper bells to our growing collection. The bells are mainly capsule-shaped or spherical. Some still have a carbon core within, showing clearly the method by which they were molded. Very rarely did the bells contain clappers or rattles, and this fact supports the tradition that the ancient people believed that all things had life and souls. By removal of the clappers the bells were ‘killed,’ made mute forever, and their souls, thus released, entered the realm of Ah Puch, the God of Death. Incidentally, the portraits of Ah Puch show him with anklets of bells.

“Certain of the larger copper bells have rope-like designs embossed on them, while others are fashioned like animals and birds and the grinning heads of Cheshire cats. Some represent the heads of foxes or of the anteater, showing unmistakably the long, tapering snout.

“Intermingled with the bells were copper circlets like finger rings, and curious flat copper ferrules, from a fourth to three quarters of an inch thick and about an inch long.

“One day we brought up a handful of small masks, about an inch long and half an inch wide, made of thin, well-worked copper. By a strange coincidence they came to us on the very day of a modern native carnival when every one wears a mask. My Indians commented upon the fact and seriously debated whether Yum Chac had not sent them up to us in remembrance of the day. And it is a fact that no other masks of the kind were found previously, nor have any been found since.

“Specimens of well-modeled hard copper chisels were recovered at various times. Some are small, others of the customary size and shape of modern chisels, but with the heads burred, showing much use. All of the copper chisels, rings, and masks have the reddish color of pure copper, but many of the bells, particularly the smaller ones of round sleigh-bell shape, are of a color indicating copper alloyed with silver or tin. Some of the other bells contain a considerable percentage of gold, which may be either a natural admixture from the ore itself or an alloy added by the ancient artisans.

“One of the most prized treasures was brought up one day while visitors were present—Mr. and Mrs. James of Mérida and Dr. Marston Tozzer, now professor of American archæology at Harvard University, who knows the Mayas intimately and has lived among them and shared their huts and hammocks. We were all standing at the edge of the Great Well when the dredge bucket heaved itself from the roiling swells of green water. As it came up toward the level of our eyes we saw dangling precariously from one of its fangs a gray, nondescript article which some one in the party facetiously remarked must be a cast-off overshoe of the Rain God. We all laughed at the witticism and then stopped short as the bucket swung around, bringing the object into plainer view, and we discovered it be a large copper disk covered with figures in repoussé and representing the Sun God. My heart was in my mouth for fear it would drop off and sink back into the well before my eager hands could reach it, but grasp it I did after what seemed an age of waiting. It is so beautifully and intricately worked, so fine in artistry that I deem it one of the most priceless of all these antiques. What it loses by not being pure gold is more than compensated for by its mass of exquisite ornamentation.

“From copper to gold, so John Hays Hammond once told me, is but a short step and one likely to be bridged at any unexpected moment, and this I found to be the case in the Sacred Well.

“One fine day I discovered, among the several copper bells brought up by the dredge, one small round bell of pure gold, shining as bright and clear as if newly molded. After that every day was literally a golden day with finds of yellow gold—golden bells of all shapes and sizes, some as small as a pea, others large and heavy. And these gold bells were all more or less flattened, as though they had been struck with a hammer or even mauled with a sledge. Some were so flattened that the shape of the clapper within was outlined on the outer side of the bell. The clappers were, like the bells themselves, made of pure gold, but most of the smaller bells, like our previous finds of copper ones, had been ‘killed’ by having the clapper removed.