The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

The Spanish conquerors discovered many of the ancient cities and wrote about them in their annals; and the world promptly forgot about them for two hundred years. Then vague stories about them began to drift back to civilization, carried by adventurous wanderers who had seen or heard of them. At the end of two hundred years we knew considerably less about early Mayan culture than was known by Landa and Cogolludo and the other Spanish padres who followed in the wake of the conquering Spanish flag. It remained for Stephens to lead the way once again and show us the wonder and mystery of the old cities. The great Von Humboldt came and was deeply impressed. Le Plongeon labored like ten men for years and tragically broke under the strain, leaving little to advance the world’s knowledge from the much that he discovered. Then came Maler and knowledge of a hidden city—knowledge lost to the world when he died.

To Don Eduardo must be given credit for bringing to light in the past thirty years the things which gave a real forward impetus to this particular phase of American archæology. Many of his finds, consigned to the Peabody Museum, are not yet accessible to the general public, having been held in reserve by that institution, doubtless for sound reasons which are unknown to me. For thirty years Don Eduardo has followed unswervingly the ambitious, adventurous dream of his boyhood. Literally, he has followed the rainbow to its end and unearthed the pot of gold. His dream was to make the Sacred Well yield up its treasures. That he has done and more.

Edward Thompson—or Don Eduardo, as I have called him through these pages, because that is the name by which I have known him so long and well—is no richer in a material sense than if he had never raised the fabulous treasure from the great Sacred Well of Chi-chen Itza. But he has had what money cannot buy: a life of notable achievement; a cherished dream realized to the full; a thousand gorgeous memories, each packed with such adventure and thrill as we less favored folk have never experienced.

He has made the well of sacrifice yield its secrets. The skeletons of the girl brides of the Rain God; the bones of sacrificed warriors; the copal incense and the religious vessels; the jade ornaments and objects of gold; the hul-ches; the sacrificial knives—each is a link in the chain of evidence which makes fact out of legend. His finds prove the existence of the ancient belief in the Rain God and the fact that sacrifices were made to him. They prove that this great water-pit actually was the Sacred Well. They make plausible the legend that Chi-chen Itza was the Sacred City, the center of the cult of Kukul Can.

The finding of the date-stone, by Don Eduardo, may, to the casual reader, seem insignificant, but from the scientific point of view it is tremendously important, for it gives us one more indisputable fact. From it we know that the city existed in the seventh century, A. D. We do not know how much older than that it is actually or how long it flourished thereafter. There remains the incontrovertible date from which we may, in time, proceed forward or back to a further knowledge.

His discovery and excavation of the Tomb of the High Priest is a brilliant achievement. It lays bare more facts and opens up new avenues for speculation. Time alone can prove whether it is, as Don Eduardo so sincerely believes, the tomb of the hero-god, the great leader, Kukul Can, around whom all Mayan theology revolves.

And now Don Eduardo is no longer in his first youth. He is still far from decrepit, but the time has come when it is fitting for him to step aside from the active and strenuous work of exploration and he has leased all his holdings, including the Casa Real, to the Carnegie expedition. I know that he takes a profound pleasure in the feeling that this expedition is going to finish thoroughly and completely what he has so ably started and carried on under handicaps that will not beset the newer work.

To the layman Don Eduardo’s achievements may seem small as against thirty years of ceaseless endeavor, but do not forget the days and weeks and months of profitless effort that must be spent in this sort of work. It does not move forward like the building of a railroad, the manufacture of goods, or the planting and reaping of fields.

Thirty years are well spent if their labor helps in the least to shed even a feeble ray on the nearly obliterated pages of the past. And each rising sun brings fresh the hope that to-day will be the day of a great discovery, the finding of a key that will unlock the door to knowledge concerning a wonderful people whose monuments are to us as a few torn pages of some master manuscript without beginning or end, but still of such absorbing interest that one cannot rest until the missing pages are found.

As antiquarian thirst grows—as it surely must, for few things in the world contain a deeper human interest than antiquity—attention will certainly turn more and more to the still unsolved mystery of ancient American and, particularly, Mayan culture. Instead of one great scientific exploration there will be scores. Each of the ruined cities is worthy of research. There are magnificent temples to be restored; priceless finds to be bared; and that vexing riddle to be completely solved—the clear reading of the Maya glyphs.