The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

“Nobody seemed particularly anxious to go down into the pit, so I thought it might be just as well to make some long-range observations before starting any hand-to-hand encounter with whatever was down there. A reflecting mirror threw a shaft of clear, strong sunlight into the well or shaft and my field binoculars, adjusted to a short-distance focus, revealed to me the coiled body of an amazingly large snake. As the shaft of light played about, the big fellow raised his head, waved it uncertainly, and then dropped it again. To judge from the size of the head and the shape of the body, the snake evidently was not a crotalid, or rattler, but rather some species of boa. Boas are not very difficult to handle, especially if you would just as soon have your boa dead. This particular representative of the boa family was, apparently, sleeping off a hearty meal and was still rather torpid, and it was no trick at all to kill him.

“When brought to the surface, the deceased proved to be a chaib, a kind of boa noted for its beautiful skin, handsomely marked with large mottles—greenish yellow and chocolate brown. Our victim was fourteen feet long and had a maximum diameter of eight inches. From his skin, native tanners made me a money-belt and a very comfortable pair of slippers. The chaib is not poisonous and I have never heard of a case where a human being has been attacked by one as South American and African boas are said to attack. Nevertheless this snake bears an evil reputation among the Mayas, who believe that a nursing mother crossing its path becomes powerless in its coils and that the reptile sucks the milk from her breasts, though it does not otherwise harm her.

“After disposing of the snake we resumed operations in the shaft. We discovered that some emanation of a gaseous nature or perhaps a fine dust from the roots produced a violent headache, much like that caused by the fumes of dynamite. I remembered that quarrymen find relief from dynamite-fume headaches by drinking strong, hot coffee, and similarly we found this beverage an effective remedy for our headaches.

“Cleared of invading roots, the cavity was now really a cavity. Descending hand over hand by the rope a full twelve feet from the level floor of the temple, I found myself standing on what seemed to be an accumulation of little stones and plaster, intermixed with small bones which I took to be those of animals that had been the prey of the chaib. There was a good deal of parchment-like material lying about, which I thought at first was cast-off skin of the big boa, but which was actually an epidermal root-covering sifted down from above. Standing at the bottom of the square shaft and looking up at the vertical walls, I saw that each wall-surface was built up of a myriad of small cut blocks of tan-colored limestone, so smoothly polished as to suggest marble. It was unlike any ancient wall-surface I had ever seen. The stones were not inserted in mortar like Florentine wall mosaics; neither were they built up into high relief, like the famous walls of tombs and chambers at Mitla. Rather, each tier of small stones was cut to a bevel, with the upper or horizontal surface projecting some two inches beyond the face of the tier above.

“As nearly as I can describe it, the effect was like the siding, or clapboards, on a house, supposing that the siding were put on upside down, thick side uppermost. The stones were cut with exceeding niceness, and each wall section, though simple, combined with the others to form a most artistic whole. At the four corners, where the lateral bands would have met, they were intercepted by vertical stone bands about four inches wide, running from bottom to top of the shaft.

“At the time I could spare only a passing interest in these walls, for in the debris beneath my feet were fragments of pottery and a projecting human jaw-bone. We painstakingly removed the stone fragments and mortar-dust. Working with trowel, spatula, and whisk-broom, I found that the chamber contained the disordered remains of two graves.

“Evidently one grave had originally been superimposed on the other, and the contents of the two had been thrown together by the force of falling debris from above. The two graves, I think, were once square and separated by stone slabs. Here I found fragments of pottery and splintered human bones, brittle with age and gnawed by rodents. Reconstructing the scene from the fragments, I surmise that each grave contained, besides its human remains, a small, shallow tripod vessel, the outer surface of which was burnished with red pigment, and a deeper gourd-like vessel. I believe that the shallow dish contained food and that the deeper one was filled with drink of some sort—very likely sacca or bal-che, both of which the ancient Mayas believed were acceptable to the soul of the departed and to the gods.

“The skeletons were so broken and disturbed that beyond the fact that they were two in number and that the bones were so old they were fragile as pipe-stems, nothing else was casually to be noticed. The finding of skeletal remains and of funerary urns made it clear beyond dispute that this building was a mausoleum, a tomb of kings or of priests.

“I carefully collected all of this fragmentary material and sent it aloft to be preserved for future study. Then I made measurements of the chamber and jotted them down in my note-book. This being done, I turned my attention to the stone floor of the tomb. My steel stethoscope indicated that below there was a still deeper cavity. With much careful effort we pried up the stone floor-slabs, disclosing another grave. Apparently this burial-vault had suffered but slightly from the concussions and disturbances which had all but destroyed the two upper graves. The walls and bottom were lined with thin slabs of stone covered with mortar. Much of the mortar had flecked off and lay spread out unevenly over the various objects in the grave, but no serious harm had been done either to the skeletal remains or to the funerary vessels. The bones, however, had been gnawed and dragged out of place by rodents.

“A shallow earthen vessel was found in the grave, of the customary small tripod type, painted red, with a blue line around the rim. A bowl-shaped vessel, gray-colored and smooth, was placed at the right of the skeleton, and both vessels were half filled with sifted mortar. Even though the bones were somewhat disarranged, it was plain that the human remains had been buried with the knees drawn up to the chin, and the arms placed over them, with hands clasped. I found the hunched-up remains reclining upon their right side. Whether the body had been so buried or had been buried in a sitting position and had later toppled over, is a matter for conjecture. If this grave or the others had ever held anything of perishable nature it had completely disappeared.