CHAPTER XV
THE TOMB OF THE HIGH PRIEST
JOSÉ ALVARADO, once a common mine laborer, an ordinary peon, became the Silver King of Mexico, so fabulously rich that he offered to pay off the whole national debt of Mexico. His offer was declined by Porfirio Diaz, then President of Mexico. Alvarado inherited from a hard-working father a meager silver-mine and he took up the arduous working of this mine upon the decease of his parent, gaining from his toil scarcely enough to pay for his scant frijoles, chiles, and tortillas, until chance led him aside and caused him to strike his crowbar into an obscure cliff, a mountain of virgin silver.
“Some of my finds in the Sacred City,” says Don Eduardo, “have been as much a matter of sheer chance as that of José Alvarado. And if the truth be told, I fancy a good many pioneer operations, scientific or otherwise, depend largely on Dame Fortune—or Lady Luck, as I understand she is now called in the States.
“Earlier in life I gave rather less credit to chance and more to scientific deduction, and once I made a discovery in the Sacred City which followed so closely my calculated prediction that I concluded I had evolved a formula which, so far as this special class of work was concerned, would eliminate chance entirely. I went at the work of excavation with a new vim and mounting enthusiasm. It was hard, back-breaking toil for me, digging and heavy lifting, yet I was sure of my diagnosis, certain of final triumph. I kept on digging,—endlessly, so it seemed, but with hope unflagging,—until suddenly I brought up against a solid ledge of living rock. It could not be explained away. To me it seemed to say, ‘Well, here I am and here I have always been, and your wise deductions, your clever calculations—where are they now?’ And to prove to me further that I must not ignore the little gods of chance, as I returned dejected and crestfallen along the deep trench, my crowbar accidentally struck a projecting limestone fragment which fell to the bottom of the trench, disclosing a dark cavity, within which were a rich find of pottery and a most interesting skeleton. But for the chance dislodgment of the stone, I should have missed the object of my search.
“While I was engaged in some excavation in the building called Chich-an-chob (literally, “The Strong, Clean House,” called now the Red House) a small but unusually high mound to the southwest of the building was often in my line of vision. Although I could only guess at its outline through the thick growth of tall trees and matted vines that covered its sides, the little I could make out of its peculiar form excited my interest and kept it in my thoughts.
“Eventually the progress of the work brought me to it and I had the opportunity to obtain at least an approximate idea of its structure. I found it to have been originally a small but well-built shrine or temple crowning a steep-terraced pyramid, but now converted by time and disintegration into a mere conical mound. The greatest factor in the decomposition of the shrine, as in the case of many others, was not wind and weather but the wrenching apart of the stone-work by the growing roots of trees.
“The temple itself was similar in plan to the great edifice which towers above Chi-chen Itza. In fact, it was El Castillo in miniature but differing in several important details, among which were corner and lateral stelæ or carved stone monuments, the rear ones bearing inscriptions which seemed to place the shrine in a different category from any of the other buildings I had examined in the Sacred City. Like huge El Castillo, this miniature temple has a main stairway facing the northeast, and similarly the approach is guarded by twin serpent heads, each a finely carved monolith. Protruding from the massive heads are forked tongues extending for some little distance. The serpent bodies, conventionalized into wide, flat bands, serve as balustrades, extending one on each side of the wide, steep stairway, clear to the temple platform. The big blocks of stone and masonry, fallen from the temple level, had rolled down these stairs and carried away most of the stairway, leaving just enough of the handsome, carefully cut steps and balustrade to indicate what had once been a perfect thing. Indeed, the stairway is no longer usable, although a few of the steps remain in place, and the difficult ascent is made by grasping projecting roots of trees and stone fragments and treading in the gashes left in the mound by the avalanche of rock masses from above.
“Gaining the crown of the pyramid, we found there massive serpent columns corresponding to those encountered on the plain below. Well carved, artistic, they were half buried in the fallen walls of the temple, while one of the impressive capitals of the now famous serpent columns, consisting of the conventionalized rattles of the rattlesnake, lay precariously balanced on the very edge of the platform. Its twin companion had long since crashed down the steep incline and its great bulk lay amid the debris and matted growth at the base of the mound.