The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

Finally, there are the wonderfully worked ornaments of fine flint, flawless and shaped curiously like the parts of a bishop’s crozier.

In the Tiger Temple is a frieze near the top of the wall, extending clear around the four sides, which shows a procession of jaguars. It is a thing of sheer beauty, for the artist has caught in his paintings the very nature of the beast. There he is, in all his slinking, lithe, feline ferocity, conventionalized but losing nothing of his character.

Above and below the row of jaguars is an ornamentation of conventionalized serpent motif which is graceful, accentuating the litheness and grace of the huge cats. The whole frieze is done on a surface of stone polished to such smoothness that it conveys the idea of white marble worked by the hand of an old Italian master.

Another remarkable mural was upon a stone which was found by Sylvanus Morley in the debris of a partially ruined temple in old Chi-chen Itza which he named the Temple of the Owls. It is so named from the fact that many of the fallen columns bear sculptures of owls. For a number of reasons I believe that this is one of the earlier temples, built when Maya art was at its best, and I was thrilled at the quality of workmanship on the stone. The colors were much faded and the entire picture too faint for the camera. I found first, in cleaning the corners or unimportant parts by washing in water, that the paint would stand almost any sort of gentle rubbing. In fact, the only way it could be destroyed was by scraping it off with an edged tool. Washing showed that the colors were somewhat more vivid when the stone was wet and it occurred to me that it could be treated in much the same manner as an old oil painting, which may be greatly revivified by cleaning and then applying a coat of varnish.

Acting on this assumption, I first cleaned the stone with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid, which had no effect on the pigments but did remove much dirt. The next question was varnish. I had some turpentine and a few other chemicals but no varnish. And then I thought of the copal incense that Don Eduardo had taken from the Sacred Well. I took a ball of this and scraped off the calcined outer surface. The remainder of the copal I broke up and placed in an earthen bowl which also came from the well. Then I added a little turpentine and heated the mixture over a slow fire until the copal was melted. Finally I strained the liquid through a piece of cloth and had an excellent transparent copal varnish. I tried it out on several unimportant stones and found that it gave a fine surface gloss. I then applied it very carefully to the painted stone I had discovered, first to the blue border and then to the whole surface. I was overjoyed, when the varnish had dried, to find the colors magically restored, several of them being nearly as bright, I think, as when originally applied, perhaps a thousand years before.

It was now a simple matter to obtain excellent photographs and I took several, both in black and white and with color separations.

This stone, which I named the Stone of Kukul Can, told a complete story. It represented the long-nosed god, the particular deity of the Sacred City, emerging from the mouth of a serpent, just as shown in the old Maya books and in many other places. In other words, it depicted the birth of Kukul Can, the feathered-serpent god. Below the serpent and the figure of the god was shown the bowl of the earth, or the archaic representation of the earth. Here and there were cacao pods, from which was obtained chocolate—then as now an important article of food, a highly prized delicacy among the Mayas and other races. Cacao is one of the fruits the Mayas thought to have been brought them by Kukul Can.

The god held in his hands emblems of life and generation. Above were the celestial heaven and the zodiac. At right and left were the hieroglyphs of the sun and planets. On the upper margin was an inscription. The whole was majestic and exquisitely done. It indicated all of the good things of life,—prosperity and plenty,—bestowed upon his people by the mighty god Kukul Can, born of a serpent.

When I had finished photographing and studying this extraordinary stone, I wrapped it carefully and stored it in Don Eduardo’s hacienda, where it was later ruined when the hacienda was burned by unruly Indians.

This lost stone was an excellent example of the older and finer Maya art and a careful comparison of it, as photographed, with the pages of the Perez Codex, one of the few remaining ancient Maya books (now in the National Library in Paris), shows its similarity to the work therein displayed. The portraits of Kukul Can are identical. The hieroglyphs have the same peculiarities of shading, due to the stroke of the brush being heavier on one side than on the other. If the artist who painted the Stone of Kukul Can did not also illuminate some of the Maya books, he at least belonged to the same period and the same school of artists. I am sure that the great work of Mr. Morley of the Carnegie Foundation, which is now going on at Chi-chen Itza, will uncover many more stones similar to this one and it will be demonstrated that many of the Maya books were produced in the ancient city.