This is indeed a climax; and one needs to pause and take breath before following M. Perrin any further up his winding stairs. Can we attach any credit to one who is so lavish in the use of words and figures? He has evidently a supreme disregard for nice distinctions, and ordinary measures of time and place. Marble enough in Ancor-Viat to build all the cities in the world? C'est un peu fort, M. Perrin. But let us hear him to the end. We can believe a good deal about cities excavated or still underground, for we have seen several such with our own eyes; but credulity itself has its limits. "I saw," M. Perrin continues, "the leg of a statue the great toe of which measured eleven times my fowling-piece in the length. It is in marble, like the rest of the figure; there is no other stones here used for building, except colored stones, which are employed as borders or for the eyes of statues. There are pedestals with flights of steps, of which the crowning images have disappeared, as high and as large as St. Germain l'Auxerrois. Fancy octagonal pyramids cut short at half their proper height—all in marble, recollect. Who the devil raised all this? If it was some famous dynasty, it cannot be very well satisfied with the oblivion into which it has fallen, in spite of its sumptuous monuments. What are the ruins of Palenque, or even Thebes with its hundred gates, or of Babylon, compared with this unknown city without history and without name?"
Now, setting aside Thebes and Babylon, it may be well to compare what we really know of Palenque with the general's singular account of Ancor-Viat. It is more than a hundred years since the Spaniards first heard of it from the Indians, and the reports of its extent differ as widely now as they did then. The natives say the ruins cover an area of sixty miles; Du Paix and Del Rio seven leagues; and Waldeck about three miles. But though travellers are not agreed as to their extent, they are quite unanimous as to the remains themselves. All admit that they are "unique, extraordinary, and mournfully beautiful." The largest building is on a mound forty feet high, raised by the hands of man, originally faced with stones, and measuring 310 feet by 260 at the base. It is richly adorned with paintings in the style proper to the ancient cities of Mexico; the corridors are sumptuous, the flights of steps broad, and the figures of giant proportions, uncouth and expressive of suffering. The tallest statue, however, that has been discovered is only ten feet six inches high, by which it appears that the stone figures of Mexican Indians were dwarfish compared with the huge heroes and idols of the East. M. Perrin had been questioned about the existence of religious monuments in the eastern Peninsula of India, and the answers which he returned are as follows: "Sacred stones are found here. Some of them are simply rocks which at some period or other were sufficiently soft to receive very clearly the impressions of the feet of men and animals. Of this sort the one most highly venerated is that of the Buddhist monastery at Phrabat. An immense number of pilgrims visit it annually. Others are enormous monoliths raised on socles roughly quarried. If there ever were any inscriptions, they have been effaced. I have also seen here gateways or arches of triumph built of huge stones laid one upon another. What giants or what machines moved these immense blocks? They stand alone. Not a vestige of any building is near them. Sometimes there are not even any quarries to be found within a great distance. I saw two such monuments as those I now speak of among the Stiengs, when I conducted a military expedition against them. They stood in the midst of marshy and almost impassable forests, and had certainly never before been seen by any European. Some of the people of Laos had spoken to me of these remains, but I very nearly missed seeing them. The difficulties in the way of getting to them were so great that at first I did not think they would be worth the trouble. But they amply repaid me. I examined them most carefully with a powerful glass. They did not appear to bear any inscriptions. Even the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics had been unable to disjoint them. What roots could rend asunder these stones laid one upon the other without cement, and raise so heavy a weight? The side-supports were, I believe, as high as the top-stone laid across was long. The soil is evidently raised by the vigorous growth that marks the vegetation of these forests. These remains must rest on monolith socles or on the rock, or on gigantic foundations; for the ground on the surface is so soft and wet that you may easily thrust a cane into it up to the handle."
When M. Perrin inquired of the natives who reared these monuments, they replied the Gai; and by the Gai they meant some barbarous white men, who came from the land of perpetual snow, who were as tall as three Siamese, and whose fingers and toes, though articulated, were not separate from one another. They rode on horses double the size of those now seen, but bones of which are often found in the earth. Impious men were these Gai; they hunted elephants, and feasted on their flesh; they offered sacrifices of blood to their gods. Chinese merchants informed the general that monuments of the same huge description are to be found in the north and west of China, and that the people there call them "giants' stones." The traveller in Central America is, we know, sometimes amazed to find monstrous blocks evidently hewn by the hands of men, yet hundreds of leagues distant from any calcareous strata. Men in the neighborhood who are learned in other matters are quite at fault when their opinion respecting them is asked. Some will tell you that the nature of the soil is changed from what it was before the conquest, and others that the Incas had means of transport unknown to us. Probably there are quarries of granite under the surface of the savannas; but how the Indians could extract the stone without gunpowder or machinery is a problem we are unable to solve.
Important discoveries are not always due to scientific and discerning men. The earliest accounts of anything new and surprising are likely to be overdrawn; but they are not the less valuable from this circumstance. Their very exaggeration may stimulate inquiry, and thus be an advantage rather than otherwise in the outset. It was a poor Tungusian fisherman who discovered the most perfect specimen of the mammoth near the mouth of the river Lena, nearly seventy years ago, and his sale of the creature's tusks for fifty rubles led to an accurate knowledge of the monster's structure and habits, as well as to a great extension of the trade in ivory derived from mammoths' tusks. General Perrin's testimony appears to us well worthy of attention, in spite of its being highly colored here and there. It may, on the whole, fall far short of the reality, and may lead to the solution of questions of importance in oriental history.
Original
On the Planting of the Cross.
Dig deep: the tree will surely grow,
And spread its branches far and wide;
No tree had e'er such fruit to show,
Nor with its shade so much to hide.