The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

The front portion of the roof is now fallen in, but I surmise that originally the illumination of the building was such as to bring out the relief work most prominently.

At present one gets a much better impression of this work at about ten o’clock in the morning than at any other period of the day.

In the National Museum at Washington, there is a reproduction of these bas-reliefs, but this modern work has scarcely caught the spirit of the old Maya artists. It should be the immediate aim of archæologists to preserve or duplicate the bas-reliefs in the most faithful manner, for the sake of posterity, for I doubt if we shall ever uncover anything finer in American antiquity.

Teoberto Maler spent a great deal of time in making photographs, drawings, and tracings of the old Maya murals and reliefs, and the world owes him a debt of gratitude for the minute care he took and the faithfulness of his reproductions. Maler, who is now deceased, was no mean antiquarian. He was also an artist and a man of most peculiar personality.

For several years his more or less undirected exploration was done for the Peabody Museum, and then he fell out with the heads of that institution and thereafter worked as a free-lance. For years his livelihood was derived by selling information, photographs, and drawings to dilettant antiquarians. So many of these failed to pay him for such services that the poor fellow became suspicious of virtually every one who attempted to be friendly with him. I called on him four times before I could even get him to talk about archæology. But I always took several bottles of beer with me, so he became more cordial; and as I was especially careful not to question him in any way to indicate an interest in his work, he finally thawed out completely.

An Austrian by birth, he had accompanied the ill-fated Maximilian to Mexico and had finally drifted southward into Yucatan, where he centered his interest on archæology.

One day he presented me with about twenty photographs from his collection, which I was happy to have, although some were discards. Seeing the sincerity of my gratitude, he offered to show me some things which he said had never been seen by any one else. Among these treasures was his excellent tracing of the battle scene in the Tiger Temple. The next day I asked him with some trepidation if I might make a copy of the tracing. He was quite willing and when I suggested that I would travel to Mérida to get some tracing-paper for the purpose he produced a whole roll of it. I spent an entire week making this tracing and several others, Maler working beside me and helping for several hours each day.

I tried to pay him when the work was completed, but he would never accept a penny, saying I was the only man who had ever come to him without trying to get something for nothing, and he repeated this remark, I have been told, to other people. He told me he trusted only two men in the world. Naturally, I was very glad to have won his regard.

One day, some years later, he showed me several golden ornaments which I afterward found had come in some devious way from the Sacred Well. I fortunately made some photographs and drawings of them, for the next year, when I asked to see them again, Maier no longer had them. Some he had evidently sold to a museum abroad and the remainder he had disposed of otherwise.

Maler had a foolish hatred for Don Eduardo and called him “falsifier Thompson,” but the latter had no such feeling toward Maler; in fact, one can scarcely imagine Don Eduardo’s hating anybody.