THE GREEKS OF THE WEST
We were in Cozumel four days. I saw nothing of it but the grassy
streets of San Miguel, being cooped up in a rented room while I wrote
accounts of our finds for the New York _Times_, which generously
financed the expedition.
Everyone sent messages to relatives at home by the Mexican radio.
Griscom engaged a score of small boys to hunt birds and already has
established the fact that several of the eighteen or twenty species
reported to be peculiar to this island do actually exist here.
Cozumel is like a sheep town at the end of the shearing season. Most of
the _chicleros_ have come out of the bush, and San Miguel is the Mecca
where they like to spend in a few weeks debaucheries the proceeds of
months of toil.
McClurg and Whiting and I went to a _fiesta_ in the local movie house,
bar-room and dance hall. Everyone in Cozumel who amounts to anything
was there, except our friend, Adolfo Perez, the chicle magnate, who
amounts to too much.
First they crowned a “Queen of Love and Beauty,” who had to sit on a
throne beside the stage through the rest of the proceedings and look
self-conscious, the only expression on her otherwise uninteresting
face. They had probably picked her as a beauty because she was of
lighter complexion than most of them, for the Mexicans, like the
Japanese, seem to prefer blondes. When she had been selected a series
of youths of local importance read long odes and prose poems which they
had written in her honor. This tedious affair was succeeded by amateur
theatricals which were quite well done and very amusing.
The audience was stiffly dressed, but was kindly in mien and frank in
its manners.
Between the acts I felt a sudden warm dampness on my left shin, which
I had stretched under the seat before me. The woman in that seat had
brought a baby with her. I warned Whiting, who warned McClurg beyond
him. McClurg’s mirth was so conspicuous that we became the object of
many stares.
“What’s the matter with you?” I reproved, “remember you were once a
baby, they happen in the best of families.”
“Yes,” he managed to say, between spasms of amusement, “but the baby is
on the mother’s breast.”
We met a man in San Miguel named Ramon Coronado who said he could take
us to two pyramidal temples in the interior of the island. From his
description they do not seem to be among the ruins found by previous
expeditions. The bush of Cozumel is so thick and undisturbed by man
that it is quite possible there are “new” ruins here. But Adolfo Perez
told us that he has heard Gann is coming down this coast soon in a
schooner, exploring the edge of the mainland. We therefore decided to
postpone Coronado’s temples until we had made an effort to find the
ruins we have heard of at Xkaret, Paalmul, Acomal, and more recently,
at Chakalal and Inah. A handsome fisherman with a piratical moustache
whose name is Silverio Castillo, was engaged to pilot us along the
mainland shore. We told him we wanted to go first to whichever of these
places was most southerly, and then work northward.
“_Si_,” said he, “Paalmul.”
“Oh, then, Paalmul is south of Acomal? Yesterday you said it was the
other way around.”
“No, Paalmul is most to the south.”
“And Xkaret is north of Acomal?”
“Xkaret is south of Paalmul.”
“Then, hombre, go to Xkaret first, of course.”
“_Si_,” said Silverio dutifully, and his handsome brown face resumed
its usual expression of _ennui_. Either he knew nothing of any of the
places we had engaged him to show us or he thought we were so crazy
that it was hopeless for him to attempt to understand our wishes. Like
the other mariners of this coast whom we have met he knows nothing
of compass let alone barometer. He uses his eyes and his memory and
generally arrives somewhere.
After pointing in a direction several degrees south of southwest and
explaining that that was where Inah lay and that there we would go, he
put the schooner on a course only one-half degree south of west and
held that course till he was close to the mainland opposite San Miguel.
When I was tactless enough to ask why he did this he explained it was
to avoid the current which swept northward and which was stronger
midway between Cozumel and the mainland than close to the latter.
But probably McClurg’s explanation of our pilot’s course was the right
one.
“Don’t you see,” said McClurg, “he hasn’t the slightest idea where to
go, and he thinks if he gets near enough to the mainland he may see
something which will give him his bearings.”
Perhaps the native pilots used by the early Spanish discoverers were as
uncertain as Silverio Castillo. At any rate, the accounts of the places
those explorers visited on the east coast of Yucatan are maddeningly
vague. But the references to towns opposite the island of Cozumel are
so persistent that we were sailing in high hopes of finding something
worth while.
Luck seemed to be with us in regard to weather. The wind was northerly
again, and that meant that we should find a lee under the mainland,
which takes quite a turn to the eastward here, and that our two small
boats could land on the beach in comparative safety. The norther had
been blowing long enough to kill the prevailing easterly swell and we
were now close enough ashore to see that only a small surf was breaking
on the short patches of white sand which relieved the monotonous
hostility of jagged coastline (this shore is mostly the saw edge of a
former coral reef, rising as abruptly as a Connecticut stone wall).
A little to the right of our bow were several thatch-roofed native
houses. Castillo said this was the town of Playa Carmen, where an
expedition of the Carnegie Institution had found ruins a few years ago.
About a mile and a half south of this was a single native house.
“That’s Inah,” said our pilot, straightening his well made body under
its simple covering of blue flannel shirt and white duck trousers.
(Later he was to announce “Inah” again opposite a spot some four and
a half miles south of this. We have never learned which place he
ultimately decided should bear this name.) He swung our bow toward the
lone hut. When we were within some three hundred yards of the shore
he gave the wheel another twirl and kept the schooner parallel to the
thin, white ribbon of surf.
This seemed an ideal time for Whiting to climb the mainmast with our
most powerful binoculars strapped about him. Several wooded mounds
along the shore looked worth inspecting. But, alas, the outline of
trees on a natural knoll and the outline of trees growing from the
roof of a ruin are annoyingly similar. Whiting soon descended from the
maintop.
“Breakfast ready,” announced the cook’s assistant, who calls every meal
breakfast. Then several things happened in rapid succession. I had
taken the binoculars from Whiting, and about a mile ahead, and close to
the water’s edge, I saw a small ruin. Three other pairs of glasses were
brought to bear and verified my analysis. The engineer coaxed a few
extra ounces of power from the twin motors, and soon with the naked
eye it was evident that the ruin was a Maya temple, not large but well
preserved. As the ship ran in closer to anchor the biggest barracuda
which we have yet seen affixed himself to McClurg’s lucky green line
which constantly trails behind the _Albert_. Our two San Blas Indians
let out whoops of hysterical delight. A different whoop came from me
standing on the roof of the house over the engine room. Spinden’s
lizard had just dropped from the mainmast head to my foot.
Now the schooner was running into the wind with sails shivering and
engines sputtering. Half of us were shouting advice to the two Indians
engaged in landing the big barracuda and the rest of us were pursuing
the lizard till a lucky kick tumbled him overboard--whence he swam
ashore, no doubt the most traveled lizard in Central America.
We hurried through lunch, discussing the temple on the rocky shore.
It may have been one of those coastal buildings apparently seen from
a distance by Stephens on his way to or from Tulum about eighty-five
years ago, but which a heavy sea prevented him from visiting. It
may have been seen more recently by an expedition of the Carnegie
Institution which adverse weather similarly kept from a first-hand
examination of certain buildings sighted along the shore.
When we landed in our tenders we found the temple as well preserved as
it had appeared at a distance. It was the smallish type of temple on a
low raised platform so common on this east coast, being twenty-one feet
four inches long, fifteen feet eight inches broad, and ten feet three
inches high--all outside measurements. Three Indians who arrived just
as we were beginning to measure it told us it was called “Kanakewik.”
It proved to be important chiefly as an outpost of other buildings less
than half a mile away in the bush. To these we were now conducted by
the leader of the three Indians, a sturdy fellow with a decisive manner
who announced in a robust voice that his name was Agapito Katzim.
While some of us went south along the beach with Katzim others followed
by water in the two dinghies. Within perhaps three hundred yards we
found a lovely little cove, a mere tuck in the rough shore with a
native hut mirrored in the clear water at the upper end. A few feet
beyond the end of this cove we came upon eight buildings arranged in a
plaza formation. Most of them were well preserved and there were traces
of painting around the characteristic inset lintels of nearly all of
them. And projecting from the front wall of one was a somewhat damaged
carved stone representing the head of a parrot or macaw. This was
a realistic carving. What the bird represented other than a mere
decoration we do not know. In the three Maya books or _codices_, which
escaped the destructive bigotry of the Spanish priests, are pictured
anthropomorphic birds, which may represent lesser deities. The Yucatan
screech owl was aptly named the Moan Bird, and was associated with
death in Maya art.
[Illustration: Behind this temple to some god of Maya sailors we found
the walled town of Xkaret]
Realism played a comparatively small part in Maya art. Of course, all
art is somewhat conventionalized, but the Maya variety is extremely so,
for the sculptor and painter of ancient Central America generally was
more concerned with registering an idea than with merely producing an
imitation of the model. Of all ancient sculptors and painters in this
Hemisphere the members of the race which built Copan, Tulum, and Muyil
were the most original. The nations of Nahua stock, the Toltecs and
especially the Aztecs, are better known, alas, to the modern world. But
as Spinden points out in his masterly “Study of Maya Art,” which was
given in the _Prix au Grand_ by the French Government, “Maya art was
vital, original and constructive, while Nahua art was largely devoted
to imitations and to derived forms.”
At the risk of appearing flippant, it may be said that the Mayas have
never had a first-class press agent. While the works of Stephens found
many readers, they were overshadowed by the publication of Prescott’s
fascinating _Conquest of Mexico_. Prescott dwelt on the semi-barbaric
culture of the Aztecs. He failed to stress the fact that the Mayas had
an older and higher civilization, and to this day, if you speak of
“ruined cities in Mexico,” the average layman will respond, “Oh, yes,
you mean the Aztecs.” The fact is that the Mayas were far superior to
the Aztecs in art, in science, in most of the refinements which make
what we loosely call civilization.
Indeed the Mayas, Aztecs and Toltecs have been properly ranked for all
time by Spinden in the following words (and would that every person
interested in the splendid accomplishments of the first Americans would
paste them in his hat!):
“A remarkably close analogy,” says Spinden, “may be drawn between the
Mayas and Aztecs in the New World and the Greeks and Romans in the
Old, as regards character, achievements, and relations one to the
other. The Mayas, like the Greeks, were an artistic and intellectual
people who developed sculpture, painting, architecture, astronomy
and other arts and sciences to a high plane.... The Aztecs, like the
Romans, were a brusque and warlike people who built upon the ruins
of an earlier civilization that fell before the force of their arms
and who made their most notable contributions to organization and
government. The Toltecs stand just beyond the foreline of Aztecan
history and may fitly be compared to the Etruscans. They were
the possessors of a culture derived in part from their brilliant
contemporaries that was magnified to true greatness by their ruder
successors.”
Two of the buildings in this group of eight were very small, not
so small as the tiny shrine at Chenchomac but nevertheless, very
diminutive. To me the reason for this is extremely interesting:
“Very often,” says Spinden, “what was originally a small independent
shrine later became the sanctuary of a temple built around it. If
worship of the God to whom the shrine was erected proved profitable
he was rewarded with a temple.”
Perhaps these small buildings of religious purpose were erected so
slight a time before the arrival of the Spaniards that the Conquest
prevented any enlargement of them. At any rate they are well made
specimens of their type, a type represented by several of the buildings
found by the Carnegie Institution at Xelha, a few miles south of here.
And all the buildings in this group are well preserved--which may also
indicate their late construction. Our elation at discovering them was
not diminished when Katzim said that the name of this place was Xkaret.
The most easterly of these buildings was a temple characteristically
raised on a low pyramid, and from here through the leaves one could see
the ocean. But from the sea this temple and the others in the plaza
group were invisible.
When we gave Agapito Katzim eight pesos and explained to him that such
buildings were worth a _peso_ apiece to us he remarked that he could
show us five more. He led us perhaps two hundred yards inland and a
third of a mile north. But before we glimpsed the five buildings there
located we came upon something even more interesting. This was a well
made stone wall, which I roughly measured as six feet high and six
feet broad. Katzim said it enclosed the city on three sides, running
practically to the sea on the north and south of the ancient Indian
town.
Undoubtedly this wall was defensive in character. Stephens found traces
of a wall about Mayapan, but the only known cities besides Xkaret with
walls standing today are Tulum and Xelha, and the wall at the latter
place merely cuts across a peninsula, the major part of the city’s
protection having been afforded by water.
[Illustration: McClurg took the first motor boat into Xkaret harbor,
once filled with Maya trading canoes]
It will be noted that these three walled towns, Tulum, Xelha and Xkaret
are all on the east coast of Yucatan, where the presence of water or
cliff or both as a protection on at least one side of the city made the
task of the Indian engineers easier.
The five buildings which Katzim led us to were built along the wall
with the exception of the smallest, which stood some fifty feet outside
it. The other four, which averaged larger than the other buildings of
the city, were raised on pyramidal mounds whose bases apparently had
been built either into the wall or just inside it. This question was
hard to decide in the few minutes we remained at this spot for the wall
here was practically demolished, was, in fact, a mere widely scattered
mass of stone.
There were many traces of other walls, lower and slighter than the one
which had been built to protect the city. It is quite possible that
these marked the limits of private property.
The wind was showing a tendency to shift from north to east, which
filled us with much concern. Only a few minutes of east wind here would
raise a sea which would put a big strain on the _Albert’s_ anchor.
But Agapito Katzim was excited by the clink of our _pesos_, and he
wanted to make the most of the good luck which had brought rich
strangers to this almost deserted shore. Before we left he collected
three more _pesos_ by showing us three more coastal temples. All are
very much like Kanakewik, the first we had seen. One is north of that,
just beyond the hut of Katzim, which is tucked in a fold of the rocky
coast. The other two are south of the little cove. Katzim said that
once when hunting for the _zapote_ trees which produce chicle he found
a beautiful temple of the high, pyramidal type, a few miles behind
these other ruins. He has since searched for it in vain, but he is sure
he can find it within ten days. We have promised to return to Xkaret
soon after the expiration of that period, and we have agreed to give
him ten _pesos_ for the temple if it is as beautiful as he describes it.
Our promise means that we should return to Xkaret soon after February
18. Yet we have also promised Florencio Camera to be at Santa Cruz de
Bravo on February 20 ready to start for the promised temple of Tabi.
How can we keep both these promises, look for Ramon Coronado’s ruins on
Cozumel and explore the coast north of here to _Mugeres_ Island? Our
difficulty seems to spring not from a dearth of ruins, as I once feared
it would, but from a superfluity of them!
Xkaret is a gem, however, and we are determined to return to it.
Practically every one of the seventeen temples we found there has an
altar with evidence that it once supported a stone or clay figurine.
Merely by scratching around a little (not violating the spirit of the
Mexican Government’s prohibition of excavation) we may be able to find
some of these and learn whether the people of Xkaret worshipped some of
the known deities of the Mayas or gods as yet unplaced in the pantheon
of the highest civilization of ancient America.
Above all, though, it would be interesting to trace the course of that
thick white wall. Such an exploration would probably bring to light
other buildings than those Katzim showed us. Even McClurg is interested
in doing this, he has begun to catch fire at last. That wall and the
compact, well preserved white buildings of this old seaport have broken
down his indifference to “musty ruins.”
There is not much doubt that Xkaret, with its snug little harbor for
small boats, was known to the Spanish Conquerors. We have not taken
actual measurements but Xkaret seems to be as near Cozumel as any
place on the mainland with shelter for canoes. Very likely it was from
there that Geronimo de Aguilar, one of the two survivors of a party of
shipwrecked Spaniards who fell into the hands of the Indians in 1511,
took a canoe in 1519 to join Cortez who had just reached Cozumel
on his way to begin the subjugation of Mexico. And it may have been
here that in 1527 there began a turn in the fortunes of Montejo, the
conqueror of Yucatan. The historian, Oviedo, relates that with his
small army decimated by sickness Montejo fell in with a _Cacique_ from
Cozumel at a point on the mainland opposite that island. This chief was
proceeding with 400 men (more than four times the Spanish force) to the
marriage of his sister with a mainland nabob. He directed Montejo to a
rich town called Mochi, where the Spaniards were well fed and restored
to a strength which they later exerted to slaughter the countrymen of
those who had succored them.
We reached the schooner to find Gough more than a little anxious about
his anchor, which he was afraid would drag in the freshening easterly
wind. As the _Albert_ got underway I looked back at the “little bay”
which gave Xkaret its name and imagined the great canoes of the Cacique
Ah Naum Pat paddling into this harbor laden with textiles, pottery
and jewels for the wedding, and with natives in their gala attire of
feathers and decorated cotton robes.
We ran south one mile and a half to a very slight indentation in the
shore, which slight though it was gave us a little more protection than
we should have had off Xkaret. Through ten feet of water we could see
our anchor resting on coral sand. In the two tenders we landed on a
white hard beach which will be removed bodily in scows if it is ever
seen by Florida realtors. For an hour we thrashed through the bush, all
armed till we must have looked like a party of treasure buriers. The
reason for the distributed arsenal was the desire to get both fresh
meat and rare birds for Griscom, who remained on board skinning those
which he had shot at Xkaret. We saw no sign of a ruin, and only common
birds, but acquired an appetite of a degree unusual even for this party.
One reason we half hoped for ruins here is that our pilot says this
bend in the shore line is called Inah. The explorer Howe, in writing of
his visit to Tulum some fifteen years ago, mentioned a report of ruins
at Inah; but we are not at all sure that the locality of this shallow
bay and beautiful beach is Inah, for Castillo applied the same name to
a place nearly five miles north of here yesterday.
The maps and charts which we have brought, including the charts of the
United States Government, seem to be more often wrong than right when
it comes to putting down names above dots along this shore. We have
been particularly anxious to locate Pole, which was an Indian port
of importance somewhere opposite Cozumel in the time of the Spanish
Conquest. It was here that the chiefs of Cozumel formally submitted to
Montejo. Pole is indicated on several maps of this coast, but none of
the natives we have asked about it has ever heard of such a place. Not
even with any of the combinations and permutations of pronunciation
which we have tried.
This morning at seven we left the second so-called Inah and with one of
the _Albert’s_ engines helping the fair wind in her rather abbreviated
sails we reached Paalmul at seven-fifty. We judge, therefore, that
Paalmul is some five miles below our anchorage of last night.
Long before we were abreast of the mouth of the mile-wide bay on which
this village of _chicleros_ is placed we sighted splotches of the
familiar bleached thatch color which indicates native huts. A moment
later Griscom, who enjoys glimpsing a ruin almost as much as a new
species of humming bird, exclaimed:
“That gray peak to the left of those huts looks like a temple.”
It was a temple. And before the _Albert’s_ port anchor was in the
sand again we could see enough through our glasses to feel reasonably
certain that this was a ruin which we had been looking forward to with
a good deal of interest. There is a picture of it on page 166 of that
excellent _Archæological Study of the East Coast of Yucatan_ by S.
K. Lothrop. On the same page the author tells how it was seen from a
distance by an expedition of the Carnegie Institution in 1916.
“We had lost our bearings during the night and towards morning the
lighthouse on Cozumel came into view. Our boat was consequently
turned towards the mainland; we approached the shore shortly after
sunrise and soon passed close enough to a pyramid temple to secure
the photograph” ... (above mentioned).
A visit to this temple made complete its identification as the one
shown in Lothrop’s photograph. Of the pyramidal mound on which the
temple was placed a rather imposing heap of loose stones remains, but
of the temple itself only the inner wall over a crumbled stairway is
left. This is enough, however, to let us be certain of the interesting
conclusion that here--as in the chief temple at Tulum--the Maya
architects deliberately turned their backs on a magnificent view of
sapphire sea and faced their building inland. Today one wonders what
they faced it on, were there other edifices or at least a platform for
religious pageantry where now are only guano palms and little hawks
swooping for lazy lizards? Perhaps there was a road to the group of
eleven other buildings which we found about a kilometer to the north,
and which that expedition of 1916 might have found had it landed at
Paalmul.
As a matter of fact this temple on the shore was the last of the
Paalmul ruins we visited. When the schooner had anchored we went ashore
in the _Imp_ through a passage in the reef too narrow to be safe for
the schooner. The _Imp’s_ prow scratched the fine hard beach before a
large building about which some thirty mules and horses were tethered.
Ten or twelve _chicleros_ crowded to the water’s edge, intensely
curious about our little outboard motor, as are all the natives. Within
five minutes after we had made the usual preliminary offerings of
cigarets we had heard that there were other ruins in addition to the
temple on the shore and we had engaged as a guide to show them to us a
man who seemed of importance among the chicle gatherers, one Anaclito
Oc. He was little interested when Spinden told him his last name
was the name of a Maya day. For the most part this lack of interest
in ancestors far superior to themselves is characteristic of these
modern natives of Yucatan. Their attitude toward the past is pretty
perplexing. We are gathering conclusive evidence that to this day many
of them use the old temples as places of worship, and that their race
has done this almost continuously since the first effort of the
Spanish priests to break down the native religion. In a ruined temple
of Yaxchilan--on the border between Guatemala and Mexico--Spinden has
found offerings of little figurines placed on the old altar by modern
natives _who made them_. The latter fact is the more significant
because these figurines are very similar to those which the ancient
Mayas made. In northern Yucatan Spinden has seen the Indians putting
out bowls of _posole_ (a drink made of corn) as offerings to the Wind
God, _and over these bowls they hung the cross of Christ_!
[Illustration: This “lighthouse-temple” is the “broken pyramid” which
gives the ruins behind it the name Paalmul]
Apparently the need of religion is strong in these Indians, so strong
that they do not much care whether they get a pure brand or a diluted
article. Toward the visible reminders of the great past of their own
race many of them seem to have reverence without very intelligent
interest.
Although we afterwards learned that the buildings to which Anaclito Oc
led us were only a kilometer from the temple down the shore, they were
two miles away over a rough trail from the spot where we landed. The
piece of cleared land on which they all stand is perhaps two-thirds of
a mile long and half as broad and some seasons ago was swept clean of
forest to make a native _milpa_, or cornfield. For this reason, despite
the fact that the buildings are somewhat scattered, there are several
of them from which most of the others can be seen.
Oc led us first to a two-story temple. Buildings of more than one
floor level are quite often found in other parts of the Maya area; but
the second story is often set back of the first one on a foundation
of solid masonry. Only toward the end of Maya history did architects
dare put one stone building directly over another, as here. On the
lower floor was the characteristic Maya sanctuary--really a little
temple in itself--like the small ones at Xkaret and Chenchomac, with
a gallery running around it on three sides. There were traces of
several thicknesses of paint in several colors over the front door. The
structure above had four doors, one on each side, the southern door
opening directly onto an altar, upon which was seated a statue, or
rather, a large fragment of a statue. Other pieces were scattered over
the floor. We found enough of them to reconstruct most of the figure
except the head, which was gone. The god, if such he were, had been
seated in a niche on the raised altar, his left foreleg folded under
his body, his right leg stretched forward. The body had been of hollow
terra cotta painted red, white, and green. The whole figure had been
perhaps three feet high.
[Illustration: On an altar in the upper story of this building at
Paalmul we found the fragments of a terra cotta god]
Our guide said he could take us to a building nearby which contained
another _bicho_, as he called the statuette (a word which my Spanish
dictionary translates as “grub; insect; ridiculous person”). He said
this one was in perfect condition when he saw it three months ago.
He led us past two buildings which we explored later, and kept losing
his way in thickets of annoyingly thorny bushes.
“Maybe it’s a son of a _bicho_,” said Whiting in exasperation.
At last we reached a one-storied temple beside a mound where another
had fallen.
“It’s in here,” said Oc.
But the _bicho_ was not there.
We reported this disappearance to the leader of the _chicleros_
encamped on the beach, in order to establish an alibi for ourselves.
It is no uncommon thing for archæologists to be blamed by the Mexican
Government for the looting of temples actually done by ignorant
natives. The Indians are often superstitious about their idols,
however, and it is possible that this statuette was removed only an
hour or two before our arrival to save it from profanation at our hands.
We do not know what the statuette we found was made to represent. But
it is similar to terra cotta figures which have been found in Tabasco,
far west of here. And we are gathering an abundance of evidence that
in Quintana Roo terra cotta figure sets of this style were put on table
altars and in niches over the doors of shrines.
This sort of thing may seem unimportant. But it is just this way,
picking up a piece of knowledge here and a piece there and fitting them
together, it is just this way that science has been working out the
Maya Riddle bit by bit. To me it is one of the most romantic exercises
man has practised since intelligence first flickered up in his brute
mind. Remember that most of the easy evidence was wiped out when the
bigoted Spanish Bishop, Diego de Landa, deliberately destroyed the Maya
books and records which the Indian priests brought to him.
Archæologists who first tackled the problem had to work in the dark.
The task has been one of tremendous patience. The frequency of glyphs
from all the known inscriptions has been counted, their variations
studied, and sculpture, for example, such as we have found at Paalmul,
has been compared with sculpture in another part of the Maya area, and
both compared to surviving fragments of Aztec, Zapotecan or other early
American art. Thanks to much arduous work of this sort the indelible
ink of truth is beginning to shine through the scrawls made with the
gaudy crayon of imagination.
Less than two hundred yards westward of the two-storied temple is a
patio group of buildings, four pretty badly decayed and two reduced
to mere mounds of stone covered with bush and vines. We spent little
time here before going eastward some two hundred agonizing paces
through thorny vines to the most interesting structure at Paalmul.
This appeared at first a mere abrupt knoll of earth covered with dense
shrubbery. Fifteen minutes hard work with the _machetes_ opened up a
view of masonry, and half an hour more of hacking produced proof that
the masonry had been in rising terraces. Near the top of the knoll of
stonework we found a low door opening into a small sanctuary with altar
at the back. Then it was time to return to the schooner, in fact we
were two hours late to lunch.
The sun was well down the sky before we confirmed an exciting
suspicion which we had been entertaining, namely, that this building
is round. Only two other round buildings have ever been found, of
Maya construction. One of these, which was at Mayapan, in northern
Yucatan, was destroyed by lightning in 1867. The other is the
so-called _Caracol_ at Chichen Itza which is believed to have been an
astronomical observatory.
[Illustration: Front view of round building at Paalmul which was
perhaps an astronomical observatory]
This Paalmul building is thirty-one feet eight inches high, but bigger
than that measurement indicates, for it is roughly cone shaped and
has a considerable diameter at the bottom. It has four different walls
or belts of masonry, looking not unlike four turrets of a battleship,
placed one above another, the smallest at the top. The only room which
we could find was a small one in the uppermost “turret.” An altar at
the back of this room had been broken, exposing crevices which ran
down several feet. Cold air emerged from these perpendicular cracks,
suggesting the possibility of hidden chambers, such as those Mr. E.
H. Thompson found in the pyramidal structure at Chichen Itza called
the Grave of the High Priest. In other words this building may be a
tomb. Or it may have been associated with worship of Kukulcan, God of
the Air, as is said to have been the function of the round building at
Mayapan. But the possibility which suggests itself with most force to
me is that this peculiar edifice like the Caracol at Chichen Itza was
an astronomical observatory. Most of the thirty per cent of the Maya
hieroglyphs which have been “translated” relate to the calendar and
astronomy of the ancients, or to methods of counting. As an example of
how advanced was the science of these first Americans consider the fact
that in an old Maya book, the Dresden Codex, are computations involving
nearly twelve and a half million days, or about thirty-four thousand
years. In the same book 405 revolutions of the moon are set down, and
Dr. Morley, of the Carnegie Institution says,
“so accurate are the calculations involved that although they cover
a period of nearly 33 years the total number of days recorded
(11,959) is only 89/100 of a day less than the true time computed by
the best modern method--certainly a remarkable achievement for the
aboriginal mind. It is probable that the revolutions of the planets
Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Saturn are similarly recorded in the same
manuscript.”
Among the Mayas art, science and religion marched together. Art was
used almost entirely as a vehicle for the expression of the religious
impulse. As for science, the Maya priests were the Maya scientists.
They put up stone monuments to use as astronomical sighting lines for
measuring the length of the year. Night after night they scanned the
heavens, never fearing lest what they found should upset established
religion! These “barbarians,” as the Spanish discoverers called them,
would have considered barbarous a society in which a man would be
persecuted as Galileo was persecuted for holding that the earth moved
around the sun.
On the other hand a comparison with mediæval Europe helps us in
reconstructing a picture of Maya social life. During the “dark ages”
in Europe, painting, sculpture, and indeed most of the knowledge of
reading and writing, was the very nearly exclusive property of the
professionally religious. So it was with the Mayas, and this is one
reason why knowledge of the meaning of the hieroglyphs was lost. When
civil war, epidemic or other cause of which we are not yet certain, had
wiped out the numerically small ruling priesthood of the Mayas there
was left only men of the lower classes possessing very little tradition
as to what the body of learning had been and no ability equal to the
task of reconstructing such science and art.
Of all the buildings we have found yet perhaps none would be so
interesting to excavate as this Caracol. And our interest in this
structure is not lessened by recalling that Lothrop, who is recognized
as an authority on East Coast architecture, has written that “it is
probable that a circular building was beyond the powers of East Coast
architects!”
[Illustration]