On our way back to the shore we discovered a small group of ruins, a

mound and two or three houses, in hopeless decay. The isolated position

of the island and its difficulty of approach perhaps explain the fact

that no Spanish landing in the sixteenth century is recorded. Thus time

and time alone has been the enemy of this city. Shattered as they were

by the ravages of time, these Cancun buildings suggest--nay, they demand

as their only explanation--a multitudinous population. The mere erection

of the pillared halls by hand labour must have been a colossal task, and

how the monoliths, many twice the height of the average Indian, were so

perfectly hewn without metal tools seems almost a miracle. Cancun is a

limestone island, and there is no doubt that the stones were quarried

somewhere on its surface, though we were unable to find a suggestion of

a quarry anywhere for miles around.

[Illustration: PLAN OF CANCUN RUINS.]

At the extreme southern end of Cancun, whither we now sailed, we

discovered another small ruin of no great interest, but further

suggesting the once dense population of the island. Here, too, was a

fisher-hut, four poles stuck in the sand with two cross-poles covered

with palm-leaf for roof. Round this Cancun point, known as Nisuc, are

turtle in plenty: both the green turtle (_Chelonia midas_), beloved of

aldermen, and the hawk-billed turtle, the caret (_Eretmochelys

imbricata_), which provides the commercial tortoise-shell. It is this

latter which the Yucatecan fishermen chiefly hunt, for they can get as

much as eight dollars a pound for the shell. For the flesh of the turtle

they have no taste; an example of the truth of the saying that what we

have we never value. The beaches of these Caribbean isles, around the

fisher settlements, are often littered with the rotting carcases of

turtle, spectacles of wilful waste sufficient to break the stoutest

aldermanic heart. The preparation of turtle soup demands a culinary

artist, and no Yucatecan is this. Their kitchen methods are ever those

of the sloven cook who throws meat into a pot anyhow. But they begin to

learn that there are people who prize the flesh of turtle, and a certain

trade is done in the green reptilian with the captains of American

trading schooners which come across the Gulf from Florida and the

Eastern States. Thus a feature of the villages are the turtle "crawls,"

enclosures built some few yards out from the water edge, made of stakes

driven in in the form of a small square bound together by lianas. Here

the turtles swim about until they are wanted. At the "crawl" in Isla de

Mujeres there were some two dozen, many of them monsters weighing four

hundred pounds or more.

At this hut on Nisuc Point we met two young Yucatecan fishermen,

handsome fellows in spotless cottons, their feet sandalled. They, too,

were from Mujeres and they joined us in our evening meal, which we ate

in picnic fashion at the water edge. But the mosquitoes were also

feeding, so at sunset we put out into mid-stream to avoid their pressing

attentions, and fished for picuda till dark. These Yucatecans are quite

Arab-like in the simplicity of their sleeping habits, and it was quaint

to watch at sundown the five men wrap themselves, head and all, in their

coloured blankets, as if they were going to send themselves by parcels

post, and fall asleep in little packets all over the fore deck. All

night they sleep in the same attitude in which they lie down, a

dreamless sleep like that of a cat on a sunny window-ledge. And it is a

good thing they do, for the few inches of gunwale would not save them

from a ducking if they twisted a hand's breadth.

With the dawn, after cocoa and biscuits, we sailed down the coast once

more towards San José de Bega, near where it was rumoured there was a

ruined cenote with remarkable carved figures. San José is the

headquarters of a Mexican wood-cutting company which has a paper

concession of the whole east coast from Cape Catoche to Vijia. We say

"paper concession" deliberately, for these Mexican trespassers on the

independent Indian territory live in a state of siege, and of their

nominal holding of about 4,000 square miles the administrator of the

Company told us that his chicleros (chicle-cutters) were only able to

work fifteen square miles just round the settlement. Thither from the

rickety little pier we travelled up by mule-drawn trolley car on the

plantation railway, the seats empty sugar-boxes, through swamps haunted

by alligators. As at La Compañía Agricola, the administrator and the

chief officials were Spanish Cubans, the "hands" all Mexicans. A dusty,

dirty garbage-littered street of boarded shanties; in the midst the

stuccoed administrative building. At one end a palisaded corral for the

mules; at the other a desolate square of clearing, which looked as if it

had never known any other use save its apparently present one of a

gigantic rubbish-shoot, surrounded by wood cabins built up a foot or two

from the ground. This was San José, and here we were received with a

courtesy as kindly as that we had experienced at La Compañía Agricola.

This Mexican company is known as La Compañía Colonisidora, and we shall

have something to say directly about its finances in the sketch we are

going to give of the war of extermination in progress hereabouts. The

officials knew nothing about ruins, and cared less; but they were

politely tolerant of our enthusiasm, and the administrator kindly

dispatched a cowboy, dressed in leather from head to foot and armed with

rifle, revolver and machete, a bandolier of cartridges slung round him,

to a distant part of the estate to fetch a chiclero who could act as

guide. Meantime we sat down to breakfast with loaded Winchester rifles

leaning against the wall behind us, and every man with a revolver belted

on him. They take their life of siege very easily; the Company owns a

tramp steamer which comes round from Vera Cruz once a month with

provisions; and after the meal the administrator showed us a stone fort

which he had had erected in case of a general attack.

As it was now midday and no start could be made for the ruins till next

morning at dawn, he proposed we should go out peccary shooting, and we

sent down to the boat for our guns. Our hosts donned the most wonderful

Mexican shooting-boots reaching almost to their waists, decorated with

tassels of string. They had some half a dozen fine boarhounds, one of

the dogs, a redoubtable hunter, bearing many a scar from duels with

jaguars and the wild pig, the male of which latter, always heavily

tusked, often accounts for two or three dogs before he is bagged. It was

a picturesque afternoon we spent in the woods. The five Spaniards were

keen sportsmen, if a trifle reckless in the angles at which they held

their guns. The beating through the dense undergrowth was something of a

"follow-my-leader," and we spent most of the time looking down their

barrels, realistically literal personifications of "the man behind the

gun."

The peccary were not at home, but one of the party bagged a superb

specimen of the _hoco_, as large as the largest gobbler turkey, with

crested head, its feathers all of gold and bronze. While we were supping

the leather-clad _vaquero_ returned with the Mexican workman who was to

act as guide, and who, under severe cross-examination, seemed to sustain

the reputation of the rumoured cenote. So it was arranged that at dawn a

whole party of us should make a day of it, the administrator prettily

assuming a positive archæological zeal (alas! he will never do so again)

and giving generous orders for the preparation of the picnic baskets.

It is sad to reflect that man's pleasure is so largely dependent upon

untimely deaths in the animal world, and we fear that the arranging for

our archæological woodland junketings of the morrow was answerable for a

porcine tragedy which was enacted while we took our coffee. The

stone-floored room in which we supped opened out into the kitchen yard,

and, in the friendly way to which we had now become quite accustomed,

chickens, turkeys, and pigs ran through the room at intervals; one of

the latter affording the dogs quite a boar-hunt between our legs and

those of the chairs. We had dined both wisely and well, and were

contentedly smoking the strong Mexican cigarettes when piercing shriek

after shriek rent the night air. A poor pig was going the way of all

flesh at the hands of the Mexican cook, not at a respectful distance

from our Lucullus-like feast but actually at the door with its head in a

pail; and its piteous cries, ending in a last gurgle as the knife did

its brutal work, like the writing on the wall of the banqueting hall of

Belshazzar, shook our nerves.

We had some reason to think on the morrow of poor piggy "butchered to

make an archæologists' holiday," for we were destined to a fiasco as

complete, to a disappointment as bitter, as any in our tour, and there

were many. While it was still dark, the finest mules in the corral were

saddled and brought round. Mexican cowboys, in all the glory of leather

jerkins, hung wicker baskets, bursting full of cold meat and fruits, of

flasks of cognac and flagons of red wine, over their saddlebows. The

administrator's zeal had not evaporated with the night, and he appeared,

booted and spurred, to preside over the coffee which was served to us

just as the light was beginning to do successful battle with the

slate-grey of the before-dawn sky. It was a most imposing cavalcade

which started off a little later. All the shanties emptied their human

contents among the rubbish on the clearing to give us a fitting

send-off. First, in true military fashion, there were the Mexican

guides, as scouts, on foot and mounted. Next came the administrator,

commanding-in-chief, then came the archæological heroes of the occasion

(not, alas! long to be heroes); and then some eight or ten sleek mules,

in leather and braided string trappings, bearing Mexicans and Cubans

eager for the cenote.

Everything was sunshiny at first. The forest was exquisite in the early

morning sunlight. And then ... after a few miles a "change came o'er the

spirit of our dreams." Long before the hour came for broaching those

flagons of wine and sampling the contents of those ample baskets, "the

travellers had returned" to San José, a very dispirited train of men and

mules. The ruins were the fullest-grown, most phenomenally robust type

of archæological failure possible. The cenote was a small surface cave

with no suspicion of carvings or figures; the building was a

post-Conquest erection of absolutely no merit. Our humiliation was

complete. It was really quite a good thing that we were not alone with

that guide, or we might have been sorely tempted to avenge with our

revolvers the wrongs of hoodwinked archæology. With exquisite courtesy,

the administrator waded into the cenote cave in his eagerness to "save

our faces" and discover those obstinately invisible figures. But it was

all no good. It was obvious, as he turned his mule's head San

José-wards, he thought us fools, Probably, with Mr. Pickwick, he would

have gone further and declared us impostors. The pig was avenged!

Twenty miles southward from San José is the Company's port, half a dozen

huts and a jetty where provisions are landed, and such slender export of

chicle, as it is possible to make from the limited area of forest the

Indians permit the chicleros to work, is loaded. This is Puerto Morelos,

and, as we were now in the district where war is--despite all official

contradictions--actually in progress, it will be well here to tell

briefly the story of perhaps the most iniquitous attempt at race

extermination in modern times.

The Indians of the east coast have ever been independent. There is no

doubt about that. Neither the old Spanish nor the modern Mexicans have

ever conquered them; and when in 1872 some Mayan raidings on British

Honduras boundaries brought a protest from England, Mexico's answer was

equivalent to "These Indians are independent. Deal with them direct as

with a separate State." Well, England did. She made an agreement with

the chiefs which was amicably abided by. For years past these Indians,

though bitterly resenting the presence of any white man on their lands,

have been friendly to the British authorities, and have proved

themselves a peaceful, self-supporting, industrious people who only

asked to be left alone. They hate the Mexicans and Yucatecans, and with

sound reason; and troubles occurred whenever there was a collision

between the two. In 1893 the trading of the Mayans with the British

attracted the jealous attention of Mexico. This jealousy took the form

of a protest against the alleged selling of arms and ammunition by

English traders in Orange Walk (second biggest town in Honduras) to the

Indians. But though England promised to do all she could, matters did

not improve; and when Mexico discovered that the Indians were turning

the mahogany, logwood, and chicle in their territory to profit, she

sought an excuse for starting the war which has now lasted for eight

years.

The Mexican Government attempted to stop the Mayans from dealing in

their own wood; and, when this failed, they tried to levy a tax on all

lumber and goods going out of the Territory. The Indians flatly refused

to pay, and when the Mexicans feebly urged that, as inhabitants of a

geographical portion of Mexico, the Mayans should pay taxes and thus

support the Federal Army and Navy, the latter said in effect, "We don't

want your forces to protect us. If our land is threatened, every man

and boy of us is ready to fight. We aren't doing you any harm: we simply

ask to be left alone."

The Mexicans then played another card. They proclaimed their absolute

authority over Eastern Yucatan, and granted concessions of the

wood-cutting lands to Mexicans. Such proclamation was in direct breach

of the Treaty rights of the Indians, and in contradiction of their own

deliberate statement to the British Government that these Indians were

independent. It was a Machiavellian scheme, and succeeded. The Indians

naturally resented the companies' trespass, and, after due warnings,

killed the trespassers. This was just what Mexico expected, and wanted.

Talking blather about unprovoked outrages, cannibals, and a menace of

savages to the Republic, she started a war of extermination. From the

first it was as cowardly a war as it is now. Troops were sent before

dawn to surprise defenceless villages. Men, women, and children were

butchered as they slept. In one case, that of Chansenote, a settlement

of many hundreds was so successfully wiped out that when we visited the

district the inhabitants numbered about thirty. To the south of the

Peninsula the same policy has been pursued. The Indians have been

ruthlessly massacred, whenever a cowardly opportunity offered. The

Mexican troops have invariably got the worst of it in such open fighting

as the country permits.[5] Their actual invasions of the Indian

strongholds have always resulted in their withdrawal without the

slightest permanent success. The Indians are now concentrated at Tuloom,

on the mainland opposite the island of Cozumel. Three times the Mexicans

have taken this place, and three times have been obliged to evacuate it.

The position is a curious one. Scarcely any one probably in Mexico, even

including the members of the Cabinet, knows the truth except President

Diaz. The general who has had the conduct of the war throughout is an

octogenarian, Ignacio Bravo, a ruthless, bloodthirsty old soldier who

rejoices in the Gilbertian title of "Inspector-General of Primary

Instruction." He is an old comrade-in-arms of Diaz, and he has probably

his orders, though it is said that the President is most anxious not to

have the Indians killed. If you ask officials, they tell you the war is

long ago over; and when you ask them how they know, they say, "Why,

Bravo says so!" It is very much indeed to Bravo's interest to say so. He

has made the Territory of Quintana Roo, as Eastern Yucatan has been

called since the war started, his pocket property. He has amassed there

since he took over the command a fortune of many millions of dollars,

and his methods can be guessed at from his own cynical confession that

he is "the sleeping partner of every merchant in the Territory." For him

everything is subordinated to £ s. d. A slight but very significant

instance of this was his reception of a proposal by an archæologist that

he should give his permission for the blowing up of old ruined Spanish

churches in the Rio Hondu district. The request was dictated by the hope

that in the foundations might be found, buried by the Franciscans, some

ancient writings of the Mayans which would assist in the deciphering of

the hieroglyphics. The General gave the characteristic answer that he

would permit the demolition of the churches on the understanding that

the "finds" were sold and he got half. Utterly unscrupulous, venal and

self-seeking, the last thing Ignacio Bravo desires is any direct

fighting which might lead to unfortunate defeats and eye-openers for the

Mexican people. Under his able management the war has been whittled down

to the occasional hanging of an Indian driven by starvation to

surrender, or the "potting" of them in the bush. From Cape Catoche to

Tuloom, he has no more authority than the man in the moon. We can give a

good proof of this. While we were there he received a warning from the

Indians that on the 16th of January they would attack and burn the

chicle woods around Puerto Morelos. What did Bravo do? He feebly sends

up a message to Puerto Morelos saying "The Indians will probably attack

you on the 16th." As a matter of fact the Indians came that night, fired

the woods, and we ourselves saw them burning for two nights. No! Bravo

has given it up. He shirks all open fighting, and in his lifetime at

least the subjection of the Indians will never be an accomplished fact.

He skunks at Bacalar or Santa Cruz in the south, or, surrounded by a

battalion of troops, gallops from Bacalar to Peto and travels thence by

rail to Merida.

To this method of campaigning is due the disastrous state of the

Territory, through a part of which we passed. The Mexican Government,

presumably for economy's sake, sends the criminals from the Mexican

gaols to fight the Indians. While we were in the islands a shipload of

eighty of the worst specimens of half-bred Spanish gaol-birds passed on

their way in a Government transport to Bravo's headquarters. Many of

these men desert, and the forests around are infested thus with fellows

who will murder you for a dollar. With these Mexican cut-throats come

gangs of women, the most degraded and miserable manufactures of Mexican

debauchery. The conditions of life in the barracks at Santa Cruz and

Ascension Bay are such as literally defy description. The barracks are

mere filthy sheds; the half-starved soldiers, their toes rotting off

from jigger fleas, their skins foul with disease and vermin, and their

miserable women companions, some dying of malaria or venereal disease,

some far advanced in pregnancy, some mere girls not far in their 'teens,

sleeping on sloping boarded benches all huddled together. There are no

attempts at sanitary arrangements, and the details of the lives of these

wretched men and women are really unfit for publication. Such men are

not worthy of the name of troops; but they serve the Mexican purpose of

hired slaughtermen in the Indian shambles which Mexico has created in

Yucatan.

Starvation and starvation alone will bring about the absolute subjection

of the Indians of the east coast. The Federal Government has been lavish

with its concessions; but they are not worth the printer's ink expended

on their gazetting in the official newspapers of Mexico City. One land

company has smashed, and La Compañía Colonisidora is living simply on

credit. So large a sum as 400,000 dollars has, it is said, been advanced

by the National Bank of Mexico to keep it going. The deduction from this

is obvious. The Government, having made worthless concessions, must take

steps to hoodwink the shareholders by squandering the revenues. As we

have said, we have it on the authority of the officials on the spot that

out of the 4,000 square miles of their concession, they were at the time

of our visit working but 15 square miles, and there was little hope of

materially increasing this profitable area. The "war" is now as far as

possible restricted to the occasional "potting" of an Indian and the

burning of his _milpas_ or maize-fields. In the extreme north-east, as we

have stated in Chapter VII., the Indians have for the time being

asserted their independence and are left in peace. The Mexican

Government have no effective control of Eastern Yucatan, and they can

never have save by a policy of merciless extermination unworthy of a

Government which calls itself civilised.

And while this ruthless extermination of a noble race is being enacted

in the extreme east of the Mexican territories, General Diaz's

Government is disgracing itself by its cruel treatment of the Yaquis, a

tribe of brave Indians in the State of Sonora. As lending complete

corroboration to the story of horrors we have related, we think it worth

while to quote the long and admirable account of this infamous campaign

from a recent issue of a United States newspaper. It runs:

"Americans in Mexico have made a formal protest to President Diaz

against the wholesale massacre of Yaqui Indians. They back this protest

with affidavits asserting that shiploads of the unfortunate Indians,

men, women and children, who are supposed to be deported are actually

dumped into the sea as a means of riddance. In the present age of

much-vaunted civilisation this seems incredible, but there is

corroboration. Señor Rapael de Zayas Enrigues, a well-informed resident

of Mexico, tells a story that bears the stamp of straightforward truth,

and it is well worth perusal. It is evident he has deep feelings on this

subject, for he exclaims: 'Poor Yaquis! poor race of heroes!'

"On the far north-west of the Mexican Republic is the State of Sonora;

in the extreme south-east is the peninsula of Yucatan. There still exist

in Yucatan the diminishing remnants of the most civilised nation of the

pre-Columbian epoch of our continent. They are the Mayans, who for more

than half a century have been forced to take up arms to defend

themselves against the tyranny of the whites. In Sonora, in the small

region lying between the Ihayo and Yaqui rivers, exists another race of

Indians, the Yaquis, who have not builded magnificent monuments as have

the Mayas, but who are intelligent, industrious, faithful, vigorous, and

courageous.

"The Yaquis had always lived peacefully and submitted to the Mexican

authorities, but without fusing with the whites. They conserved all

their racial characteristics under the direct leadership of their own

caciques. Both races, the Mayans and the Yaquis, are distinguished by

their insuperable love for the small region they call fatherland, which

has been from very ancient times their own, which they have defended

against the invasion of other tribes and against the whites, to whom at

last they submitted, retaining, however, always possession of the land.

The Yaquis are a strong, useful, and industrious race. They furnish

nearly all the 'peones' or land workers to the farmers of Sonora and

Sinaloa. After the harvest these peones returned to their land and

devoted the rest of the year to the cultivation of their own soil.

"The Yaqui region is favourably situated, well irrigated, and the soil

is extremely fruitful. The white men coveted the region and tried to

despoil the Yaquis of what they had owned for centuries. The red men

naturally became angry, enraged, and finally they rose, not in

rebellion, but to defend and safeguard their homes, property, and

families. Thus the origin of the Yaquis' struggle--a real struggle for

life--was a despoliation perpetrated by the white people.

"A few years ago President Diaz wanted to put an end to the long

warfare, and he accomplished his purpose. A pact was signed with the

Yaqui chiefs by which their properties were returned to them, with the

guarantee that they should never more be molested or deported. Peace was

re-established; but it was of short duration, being more a truce than a

permanent peace, and it was so not because the Yaquis did not fulfil

their obligations, but because the white men wanted to work their

nefarious schemes again. With this end in view, they dexterously got rid

of the chief Indian leaders and took every necessary measure to destroy

the whole Yaqui race at the first sign of trouble. The Indians scented

the plot a little late, but still in time to avoid being exterminated.

They took the field again, forced to do so by the treachery of the

whites.

"The above is an epitome of the history of the Yaqui war, and it will be

seen that justice and right are on the side of the Indians. The world

does not know how the merciless war is carried on; but to give an idea

of the ways and means used it will be enough to say that all the

barbarous methods of the Spanish Captain-General Weyler during the last

Cuban insurrection are civilised compared to what is being done to the

Yaquis. There is no cruelty, torture, infamy, to which they are not

subjected. Prisoners are condemned to a fearful martyrdom, and they

suffer it with the sublime stoicism characteristic of their race.

"Men, women, and children are sacrificed with the same cruelty. To

prevent non-combatants from becoming hostiles, the Mexicans seize them

and transport them from their fertile soil and benign climate to the

death-breeding climate of Yucatan, where they are delivered as slaves

to the landlords, who buy them at so much a head. The men who commit

this crime make the public believe that they are performing an act of

mercy, that these non-combatants are prisoners of war whom they forgive

and send to work as free men, intending to civilise and protect them.

"These wretched beings, far away from wife and children, from their soil

and sky, in slavery, ignorant of the language of their masters who speak

Spanish, and the language of the natives themselves who speak Maya,

become homesick and die or run away, forgetting in their longing for

freedom the immense distance of thousands of miles that separate Yucatan

from Sonora. Homeward they flee, to perish in the lonesome woods from

hunger, thirst or fevers, or to be devoured by the wild beasts that

swarm in those regions.

"History does not register anything superior to the heroism of this

race. Not even in the glorious times of Sparta were enacted scenes of

intrepidity or deeds of self-sacrifice that surpass those of the Yaquis.

One of the chiefs of the tribe was once pursued by a detachment of

Rurales, a special body of cavalry very similar to our Rough Riders. The

Indian chief was an excellent sharpshooter, as all the Yaquis are. He

fired from behind a rock, killing one of his enemies with each shot. In

the end he was surrounded by the Rurales. Then when a mounted officer of

the detachment rushed at him, sabre in hand, he parried the thrust,

jumped upon the back of the horse, pinioned the arms of his adversary

and spurred with his heels the flanks of the horse, making it gallop at

full speed towards a precipice near by. When the horse reached the edge

of the abyss, it stopped suddenly, but the Indian plunged his knife into

the animal's haunch. Neighing with pain, the animal cast itself headlong

over the precipice, carrying with it the two men. Two cries were heard,

one of terror shrieked by the Rurale, another of triumph emitted by the

Yaqui.

"For what are these patriots fighting? To retain their small fatherland

within the great fatherland: to live on the soil where they were born

and where their ancestors are buried: to have the right of living in

peace. They have not denied the rights of the Government: they have not

rebelled against the local authorities. The Government has denied their

rights: the local authorities have persecuted them.

"At present they are living in the mountains, constantly fighting. They

are outcasts, pariahs, less than pariahs. They are treated as wild

beasts; tracked and killed, hanged on the trees to be the food of the

carnivorous birds and a warning to their fellows. Really, these corpses

hanged on the trees are the shame of a society that boasts of being

civilised.

"Poor Yaquis! poor race of heroes! destroyed by the infamous and

unpatriotic ambition of a group at whose service is a nation of braves

indifferent to what they are doing with their brothers of Sonora."

We hold no brief for the independent Indians, whether they be Yaquis or

Mayans. They have many bad traits. The Mayans certainly are cruel, and

they have become crafty and treacherous by long centuries of brutality

and persecution. They have been guilty, too, of bloody reprisals; but

mark that word! The story of the Spanish domination of the whole of

Yucatan is a story of bloodshed, of basest cruelty, of the most hideous

lust. In the name of Christ, the white race has ground down the rightful

owners of the soil; evicted them, robbed them, murdered them, beaten

them, defiled their women and even their children. Are not reprisals,

then, fair? In a later chapter we raise the corner of the curtain on as

black a story of slavery as the world has ever known, the blacker

because of its cowardice and hypocrisy--the slavery of so-called

civilised Yucatan. For that great cancer "Surgeon" Diaz is said to be

sharpening his operating knife. And in this far-eastern portion of

Yucatan, because might is right, the last pure descendants of those who

had attained a great and (if Spanish historians are to be trusted) a

noble civilisation are to be brutally crushed out. If Mexico values a

fair name, if she wishes to be reckoned a civilised Power, she will yet

turn back. She will refuse to write the last chapters of that story of

blood of which the Spanish wrote the first four centuries ago.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] A Central News telegram recently published in the London

papers read as follows: "A surprise attack by a band of Maya Indians was

made on Mexican troops encamped in their district. A sharp fight ensued,

and as the Indians were superior in numbers, great difficulty was

experienced in driving them off. A Mexican lieutenant and eight men were

killed."

CHAPTER X

IN SEARCH OF THE MAYAN MECCA

The island of Cozumel lies twelve miles from the easternmost shore of

Yucatan in the Caribbean Sea between 20° and 21° north lat. and 86° and

87° west long. Its name in Mayan means "Isle of Swallows," in allusion,

tradition relates, to a Mayan deity _Tel Cuzaan_ (the swallow-legged)

who was here chiefly worshipped. But the history of the island

contradicts this tradition, for Tel Cuzaan appears to have been quite a

minor god in the Mayan Olympus; while a religious importance, exceeding

that of any other spot in the Mayan countries of Central America, seems

to have attached to this island.

According to the earliest Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest it was

_Isla Sagrada_, the Sacred Isle of the Mayan race. To it four centuries

back the tribes from the mainland of Yucatan, from Tabasco and Chiapas,

from Guatemala and what is to-day British Honduras, made yearly

pilgrimage. In its centre rose--say the Spanish annalists of the

sixteenth century--a grand temple, the Mecca of the Mayan race. Towards

Cozumel we had always eagerly looked because of this undoubted ancient

sanctity, and because we hoped that deep in her impenetrable forests,

this Holy of Holies might still exist. Cortes, in 1519 (Bernal Dias is

the chronicler), destroyed a towered temple, and threw down the idols;

but it is more than likely that this was not Mecca, for the Spanish

account does not admit of doubt that the shrines so destroyed stood upon

the beach, and there is some evidence for our belief that the Mayan

Mecca was in the heart of the island. Moreover our hopes of a "find"

were strengthened by the knowledge that the Spaniards never thoroughly

explored the island; that to this day it has never been explored. Four

centuries back it was practically what it is now--one vast dense virgin

forest, through the gloomy tangle of which even Indians could scarce

find their way.

On our return to Isla de Mujeres from our explorations of Cancun and the

adjoining coast, misfortune overtook one of us in the shape of a sharp

attack of malaria, doubtless contracted as a result of our combats with

mosquitoes in Cancun. Mujeres was about the most unfortunate place in

the world for such an illness, as it was absolutely barren of all fruits

or fresh food, and our dietary consisted of tea, biscuits, and rice. But

we had to make the best of a week or more's delay, till the fever

abated, when, giving up all idea of covering the fifty-four miles of

open sea, which lay between us and Cozumel, in the small open boat we

had so far used, we hired a 25-ton schooner for the voyage. The hold of

this vessel was fitted up with a bed for the invalid, and early one

morning we made a start.

The communication between these islands of the Caribbean Sea is very

erratic. A regular postal system does not exist, and any passing boat is

pressed into the service of the Post Office and made to carry any

letters or papers which may be waiting delivery. On our voyage from

Holboch we had been raised to the dignity of mail-carriers; and now we

learnt that our little schooner was to be coolly used as a general

passenger boat. For when we got on board we found in addition to our

crew that the Jefe had calmly saddled us with four passengers in

addition to the mails. But if he had tried to make an excursion steamer

of us, we really should not have objected, for it was such an intense

relief to see the last of Mujeres. Our enforced sojourn there had been a

real martyrdom. Napoleon at Elba was really not in it with us. Perched

up on our rocky-terraced hut with a westward view of the coast around El

Meco, we had been literally like rats in a trap; no books, no papers,

nothing to see, nowhere to go; sand and fan-palms, rocks and more sand.

The Israelites never longed for the Promised Land, for the Canaan of

milk and honey fame, as we had for Cozumel and our escape from the Isle

of Women. Thus when we found that only four Yucatecans were to be made

happy by getting something for nothing (the Ultima Thule of all the

devout of their race), viz.: a passage at our expense--our only feeling

was really one of wonder at the Jefe's moderation.

With a fair wind Cozumel can be reached in twelve hours from Mujeres;

but the trade winds hereabouts seem to drop as the sun gets high, and

midday saw us lying idly by, our sails flapping gently as the boom

swung backwards and forwards in time with the rocking of the vessel on

the long, slow underswell which was scarcely noticeable on the almost

oily-still surface of the water. The blistering heat was so intense that

it seemed to draw from the water a mist-like steaming vapour. For hours

we lay

"As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean."

But with the afternoon, sure enough, there came a gentle gusty breeze,

rising from nowhere. The brown sails for a moment belly out like

well-filled corn-sacks. The boom swings over with a creaking, jerky,

grating noise. The dark, clear, oily blue water breaks up into little

gentle ripples at our bow, and we are once more moving. As darkness

falls and the clear azure of the sea turns to a leaden grey, we run past

Cancun, this time to seaward, at five or six knots. But it is dawn

before we see the coast of Cozumel, which is what sailors call "raw" and

is not one to be approached at night time if it can be avoided. So we

stand off until the morning; for if one cannot describe the island's

shore as one "whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tide," it is

true enough that that "foot" is fearsomely shod with coral. As you make

your way into the little natural bay and peer down through fathoms of

water clear as crystal, you see those ghastly spikes, those evil-looking

spires and towers, rising from the bottom, their blackness in the clear

water suggestive of their murderous meaning for mariners. As we anchor

some five hundred yards from the shore the little island town of San

Miguel rings the bay. A few palm-thatched huts, a wooden store, an open

space, a custom house with a flagstaff, a few small boat-shelters of

palm-leaves to save boats from cracking in the sun, and a jetty, three

feet wide, running out into water waist-deep. Northward a grove of palm

trees; southward stretches, as far as the eye can see, the rocky coral

beach.

At the end of the eighteenth century Cozumel, desolate, uninhabited, was

the headquarters of the pirate Molas, terror of the Carib Sea; and its

rock-and reef-bound coast, broken here and there by tiny land-locked

inlets, the water at the entrances discoloured by the sunken corals,

looked the ideal shelter for a pirate horde. We were not long in

starting for the rocky bay of San Miguel in the crazy dug-out which

served as longboat for our schooner. A quarter of a mile lay between us

and the shore: and it looked certain we should be swamped, for, with two

Indians, our packing-cases and guns made a top-heavy cargo. But these

islanders are born sailors, and the way they manœuvred us over the

swell towards the small landing-stage was extraordinary. As we neared

the beach the swell broke up into rollers, and once or twice it was

nearly all up with us. A shark, grasping the situation, swam in after

us, showing his ugly eyes above the green water; but he lost his

breakfast.

Cozumel is a veritable Garden of the Hesperides--an Eden without the

serpent, for curiously enough the snakes, so plentiful on the mainland

and on the other islands, have died off here. It has a beauty quite of

its own; not the bewilderingly sweet, exotic charm, the impatient

luxuriance, of the damp-hot Antilles. Rather are you impressed with the

serenity of Nature, her queenly quietude. A great peace lies on the

forest, and on the sunkissed paths which girdle the island's coastline.

Sixty years back, when the American traveller Stephens landed, the

island was uninhabited. Now there are but two villages, San Miguel and,

ten miles southward, El Cedral; and only around these and along the

western coast is the land cultivated. There gardens and ranches are rich

with oranges and limes, pineapples and sugar-cane, bananas and

banana-apples, grape-fruit and the delicious soapy-fleshed guanabana,

with groves of cocoanut palms, with figs, with the white starry flowers

of tobacco, with the fluffy bursting pods of cotton, and vari-coloured

spicebushes. If Cozumel could be cleared in all her fifty miles length

and fifteen breadth, what a garden of the gods she would become!

To bargain well one must be a good actor. We were eager to unearth some

of the treasures of the island, and eager to find some one whose

services as guide in our search would be worth hiring. Avarice is the

besetting sin of all Yucatecans, and we knew that if we were to get any

native help at anything like reasonable rates we must pretend an

indifference which we did not feel. The Yucatecans do not understand

archæology; they think it a cloak for less innocent treasure-hunting.

Molas was not the only pirate in the eighteenth century who resorted to

Cozumel, and there is no doubt that many a goodly pile of doubloons, of

silver ingots, and perchance bags of Brazilian diamonds, are buried on

its shores. Some few years back a band of enterprising Americans did

actually unearth such a treasure, enclosed in an iron-bound box, and

buried in the woods surrounding an ideally piratical cove half-way

between San Miguel and El Cedral. Thus suspicion attached to us at once,

and nothing we could say would persuade the islanders that a couple of

apparently sane men would take the trouble to hire schooners and make

long journeys for the sole purpose of measuring old stone walls and

digging up beads and broken potsherds. We met this mistrust by hiring a

hut and settling down to quiet housekeeping and a survey of the island's

coast, confident that we should hear something sooner or later as to the

existence of the traditional temple we were seeking.

We did not have to wait long. The Yucatecan will do anything for money,

and the report that we were ruin-hunters soon brought to our hut

Yucatecans "on the make." There were not many whose tales were worth

hearing. Nobody knew anything definite; perhaps half a dozen of the

inhabitants had crossed to the eastern coast. Finally we did unearth an

old ranchero who was said to have declared that, when a lad out hunting

in the forest, he and his brother had come across a temple on a pyramid

approached by steps, and decorated with blue and red wall paintings. We

expected the holiest of Mayan shrines to be thus simple, and unadorned

with carvings or figures. Was this Mecca? It was fortunate for us that

the old fellow was away on his ranchito near El Cedral, for in our first

excitement at getting what looked like a corroboration of our belief

that the Mayan Mecca actually still exists, we might have shown such

eagerness as would have sent up his price to a truly tropical figure. As

it was we greeted the informant with a carefully simulated indifference,

and promised that when we were over at El Cedral we would look Don Luis

up and hear the story from his own lips. Meanwhile we had ample work

before us in first examining the immediate neighbourhood of San Miguel

and then making a tour of the island coastline.

Of the buildings which were found around San Miguel by the Spaniards

under Grijalva in 1518, not one stone remains on another. The itinerary

kept by Grijalva runs: "On the 4th of March we saw upon a promontory a

white house.... It was in the form of a small tower, and appeared to be

eight palms in length and the height of a man. The fleet came to anchor

about six miles from the coast.... The next morning we set sail to

reconnoitre a cape which we saw at a distance, and which the pilot told

us was the island of Yucatan. Between it and the point of Cucuniel we

found a gulf into which we entered, and came near the shore of

_Cuzamil_, which we coasted. Besides the tower which we had seen we

discovered fourteen others of the same form." The Spaniards landed 100

armed men, and came to the chief tower, where they found no one. "The

ascent to this tower was by eighteen steps; the base was very massive,

180 feet in circumference. At the top rose a small tower of the height

of two men placed one above the other. Within were figures, bones, and

idols which they adored.... The village was paved with concave stone.

The streets, elevated at the sides, descended, inclining towards the

middle, which was paved with large stones. The houses are constructed of

stone from the foundation to half the height of the wall and covered

with straw. To judge by the edifices and houses these Indians appear to

be very ingenious."

Of these temples not a trace now remains around San Miguel save at the

north end, where a path through a plantation of cocoanuts leads to such

a scene of vandalism as might be calculated to rouse the indignation of

even the Conservator of Monuments, if he remained awake long enough to

reach the spot. Here what had obviously been a minor temple has been

broken up and converted into a quarry. Heaps of stones, broken past

recognition, lie in a confused heap with smashed Indian pottery. The

largest stones have been carted into the village, and formed a pathetic

hotchpotch in a garden close to our hut. One of these was a remarkable

carving representing a figure of a god seated cross-legged, in true

Buddhist attitude, in a niche.

Stephens in 1842 merely landed in the bay of San Miguel, and made no

attempt at any survey of the island, and states its length quite

incorrectly as thirty miles. Cozumel is roughly rhomboidal in shape, and

from its extreme north-east to its extreme south-west is as near as can

be fifty-four miles. Its breadth varies, but on an average is about

fifteen miles. At each corner of the island there are ruins, those on

the north-east being the best preserved. The group consists of two

buildings still intact, one practically on the beach and the second a

few yards in the bush. They are but small, and might easily answer

Grijalva's description, being simply one-storeyed, unornamented with

hieroglyphics or figures. These ruined structures at each corner of the

island certainly suggest that in the years long past the coasts were

sacred and all landing was challenged.

At El Cedral we were told that there were ruins intact, and we made

arrangements at once to ride over there. The road is just the winding

coast-path which girdles the island. At no part more than a yard or two

wide, it leads at first over the flattened ledges of coral which divide

the beach from the woods. Then as the woods thicken to the water edge,

you ride through tunnels of greenery, where the road traverses the

wooded bases of the triangles of coral which at intervals jut out from

the shore like the spikes on a dog's collar, to emerge again on to level

stretches of golden sand, the palms bending rustlingly over its

glittering surface. Here and there, where the coral promontories lay

close together, were quiet bays, the trees growing far out on the little

capes making horseshoe-shaped green frames for the sapphire-blue water

lying almost pond-like in its stillness.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty of this sunny ocean-path,

playing, in its long arbours of woodland, hide-and-seek with the sun and

the sea. The long stretches of sand are everywhere rich with perhaps the

most beautiful shell in the world, that giant gasteropod technically

called _Strombus_ but commonly known as fountain-shell. It is the

largest gasteropod known,--the shell sometimes weighing four or five

pounds,--and the much expanded outer lip, which earns it the popular

nickname of "wing-shell," is coloured the richest rose pink, shading off

towards the inner curve of the shell into an exquisite and delicate

salmon tint. These shells are so lovely that it is hard to believe their

inhabitants feed on dead and decaying animal matter. On this Cozumel

shore they are not numbered by twos or threes or half dozens, but are

literally scattered in myriad profusion. The natives break up the shells

with machetes and eat the fish. In the little coral coves it is nothing

unusual to see the whole surface of the rocks littered with this

wonderful rose-pink debris.

Don Luis Villanueva, whose name had been mentioned to us in reference to

his alleged discovery of a temple in the bush, owns the little rancho of

San Francisco, some six miles north of El Cedral. We arrived there about

midday, very hot and very hungry. Don Luis proved to be a wiry little

sallow-faced man, small-featured, with keen small eyes, short grizzled

hair, drooping straggly moustache, and one long tuft of grey growing

from the extreme end of his chin like the beard of a billygoat. His

farmhouse was simplicity itself, formed of wood-stake palisading

thatched with palm-leaves. Within, the only furniture were string

hammocks, two or three low raw-hide-seated stools, a trestle-like table

formed of unhewn poles bound together, raft fashion, with lianas,

supported on four small unbarked tree trunks. The floor was just the

natural earth, and in one corner of the hut a fire burnt. Every

Yucatecan builds his fire on the floor inside his house in this way,

with no arrangements for chimney, and the wonder is the huts are not

oftener burnt down.

In the further corner were piled bales of tobacco-leaf and sacks of

rough cotton. From the rafters hung open baskets filled with tortillas,

green and red peppers, onions and fruits, and here and there hung a

bunch of bananas ripening. Don Luis is a widower and his housekeeping

was done by his daughter, a pretty brown-skinned girl of about twenty,

whose single thin garment of cotton only accentuated the plump

attractiveness of her figure. As all Yucatecan women always are, she was

at the _metate_ or tortilla-tray when we entered, but left her work and

came forward prettily to greet us. The other inhabitants of the hut were

Don Luis's two grandsons, healthy, black-eyed, intelligent-looking

little rascals, and a host of terribly emaciated dogs and puppies,

melancholy half-fed brindled cats, so thin that they looked as if they

had not got a purr in them, and the inevitable chickens and pigs.

After we had had some food, Don Luis saddled his horse and led the way

through the woods to El Cedral. He made a picturesque figure ahead of

us, the quaint little wiry brown-legged form in its loose cottons and

big soup-plate straw hat, his bare feet deep in the Mexican stirrups,

his right hand eternally swinging the loose end of the lassoo rope

fastened on the saddlebows. Yucatecan horses are good goers, but they

want understanding. It's a case of spare the rope and spoil the horse.

Every Yucatecan rider swings his lassoo rope the whole time. The horse

does not want to be beaten; it's enough that he sees the rope going

round, and then he keeps going. We reached the village while the sun was

still blazing high. A cluster of palm-thatched huts grouped round a

square of wiry grass--these Yucatecan hamlets are as like as peas in a

pod. The male villagers streamed out to welcome us with a cordiality

which was quite overwhelming. We really thought that at last we had

found the exception which proved the rule of Yucatecan avarice and

inhospitality. El Cedral received us with open arms. El Cedral walked

behind us in its fifties, applauding our attempts at Spanish civilities,

laughing when we laughed, grave when we were grave. El Cedral begged us

to stay with it; indeed would take no refusal. El Cedral insisted that

to us should be paid the meed of honour due to such distinguished

visitors, namely that our hammocks should be slung for the night in the

_Casa Municipal_, the village town hall; a distinction much as if

London's Lord Mayor gave you leave to sling your hammocks in the

Guildhall between Gog and Magog. And El Cedral developed an inordinate

interest in procuring for supper just what might tickle our palates. But

we were doomed to disillusionment.

First, we started to inspect the ruins. They were singularly

disappointing. The chief one was a two-roomed house standing on a mound

some 20 feet square. There were no statues, no bas-reliefs, no

hieroglyphics. It was desolate enough, but it had had, we learnt, its

modern uses; for five years back when a terrible hurricane had swept the

island the whole village had been blown away, and this Indian ruin was

for days the only shelter of the disconsolate villagers. Next, an almost

violent discussion occurred among our score or so of self-appointed

guides. It seemed on the point of developing into civil war, when we

luckily gathered that our old friends the garrapatas were the cause of

all the trouble. The villagers wanted to show us another ruin, but they

were so distressed at the thought that we should get covered with the

insects in our walk thither. It took some minutes to persuade them that

we were quite accustomed to this etcetera of travel in their country,

and then, with half a dozen men and boys whipping with twigs the bushes

on each side, and sweeping the path before us, we made our way through

the bush to a fine arched doorway hopelessly overgrown. Another such had

stood some yards away, relics evidently of a once considerable building.

There was nothing much worth seeing now, but we concealed our

disappointment as well as we could, for the El Cedralites were really so

friendly that we were ashamed to let them think that we viewed our

journey as a fiasco. As we returned into the village a little lad, after

a shy consultation with his father, sidled up to one of us and picked a

garrapatas off our shoulder, blushing at his boldness.

We supped in an Indian hut, and then in the moonlight sat out on the

village green, talking astronomy, of all things. Despite linguistic

disabilities, we prevailed upon the Yucatecan villagers to believe that

the glorious moonlight was borrowed. But the children did not care about

solar or lunar problems, and they romped round us with the dogs,

tumbling over one another in the ecstasy of their play, content that

they were young and happy, and that chubby brown legs were made to run

with. It was quite Arcadian--this little village, with the homely lights

streaming out from the white-faced huts, the merry laughter of the

youngsters, the caressing warmth of the night air, and the blackness of

the rustling trees flashing into a myriad ever-shifting points of light

as the fireflies flew from bough to bough. We slept well in the town

hall, the village clock of large American make, brightest jewel in the

municipal crown, ticking in homely fashion behind us. But with the dawn

we were disillusioned as to the hospitality of Arcady, for we found we

had to "foot" quite a large bill for our entertainment. This is really

one of the most difficult problems in Yucatan. You never know whether

you are a paying guest or not. The head of a village orders your meals,

accompanies you to them, and sees that you lack for nothing. You

naturally regard him as your host; but if he is a Yucatecan this is the

last thing he intends. The difficulty lies in the fact that the true

Spaniard is hospitable, and would never forgive the insult of money

offered for a meal, and you never quite feel safe in assuming that the

half-bred don expects you to pay. He may just have Spanish blood enough

to resent the offer of money.

Our ride back to San Miguel was uneventful. Before leaving Don Luis we

cross-examined him as to the ruin he had seen forty years back, and

arranged that he should come on in a day or two to help in the search.

He described it as being approached by some fifteen steps, about a foot

wide each; as having two doors, ceiling of stone, floor of cement or

stone; no seats or ornaments within, no figures, carvings or

hieroglyphics, but the inner walls painted in blue scrollwork. From the

eastern doorway he remembered seeing the sea plainly over many miles of

woodland. As we were dismounting outside our headquarters at San Miguel

a terrific to-do occurred in the village street. There were cries of "El

toro! el toro!" and the women rushed out from the huts to gather the

children together and take them into shelter. We thought at least a wild

bull had come down from the woods and was disembowelling the Jefe. A

minute more and, to our surprise, there came round the corner an

undersized black steer, one man in front hauling on a rope round its

horns, and another behind with a long pole. It was just such a youthful

bullock as an English country lout would have spanked out of his way in

the farmyard. Gallant Yucatecans!

We spent the next few days arranging our plan of campaign for the search

for Mecca. It was quite astonishing how little anybody knew of the

topography of the island. They were all content to live on year after

year and never venture more than three or four miles into the forest.

Don Luis knew more than any one, and, having stumbled, quite by accident

in pursuit of a pig, over a remarkable ruin, he had been content to let

forty years pass without attempting to revisit the spot. Roughly Cozumel

is divided into three half circles; a belt, on the west coast, of

cultivated ground; an inner belt, but a few miles wide, of woodland in

which cattle roam, more or less intersected by Indian trails; and then

the forest. In the work before us horses were no good; every foot of

ground must be won from the relentless vegetation by axe and machete. We

arranged that Don Luis and his four sons should hunt Mecca on his clue.

Avarice is the besetting sin of all Yucatecans, so we agreed to pay him

a daily wage, and tempted him into assiduity by the promise of a large

lump sum if he found the temple. It was worth anything to us if we

succeeded; but we did not let the shrewd-eyed knave know that. Our own

search party consisted of our two selves and an excellent Indian, whose

knowledge of the forest seemed "extensive and peculiar." We drew a map

of the island, marking a "probable area" whereabouts tradition suggested

Mecca lay, and then we plunged, compass in hand, into the bowels of

Cozumel.

We steered first to the east coast. An Indian trail leads thither to

where, some few miles from the beach, is a spring of fresh water and the

relics of an Indian town. Attracted by the water supply, an attempt had

been made in recent years to clear the ground there. But vegetation in

Cozumel is luxuriant, and the space cleared one season is by the next

four feet high in undergrowth. This well was known as San Benito. We

rechristened it San Mosquito, for the fury of the Cancun insects paled

before the winged inhabitants of this spot which we chose for our

headquarters for the next three weeks.

The man of science will tell you that there are two types of mosquitoes.

There is the one which, out of the pure high spirits generated by

getting at you, stands on its head and waves its hind legs in the air

before it samples your gore. This is the _Anopheles_, which "travels in"

malaria and elephantiasis. And then there is the more sedate

self-controlled type which keeps, one might say, an even keel on

alighting. This is the _Culex_, which makes a "special line" in yellow

fever. We should like to venture on an entirely new and strictly

psychological division of these midget fiends, and class them as "the

Dervish mosquito" and "the philosopher mosquito."

When one gets several thousand miles away from mosquitoes, it is quite

curious how sympathetically one can reflect upon the disappointment

their life must often be to them. Their life is very brief--a week or

so; and their normal diet is insipid in the extreme--a drop or two of

the juice or moisture of fruit. Now a mosquito yearns for blood as an

old maid does after a husband, and for Nature to condemn it to a week or

two of life sustained on the moisture of plants is like feeding a lion

on bread and milk. One's sympathies are all with the mosquito so far.

There is no hell like unsatisfied longings; and if one good long drink

of blood means one more mosquito happy, only a churl would grudge it.

What one does feel that one has a right to demand is that mosquitoes

should study to have "a good bedside manner." This is just what they

lack. One would find it hard to forgive a dentist who, forceps in hand,

danced a wild cancan before you as you writhed in anticipation in his

chair. Yet this, in effect, is just what the Dervish mosquito does. It

comes at you with the speed of a rocket, with the whizz and whirr of a

racing motor. It hurls itself at you with the rage and energy of a

fanatic. It bustles and flusters you, when it really ought to soothe you

by its gentle approach, so that your better nature might get the mastery

and incline you to say "drink, pretty creature, drink." This is all very

shortsighted of the mosquito. One feels as did the French general at

Balaclava, as he watched the charge of the Light Brigade, that "it is

magnificent but it is not--'cricket.'"

But the mosquito cannot help all this. It is a sublime enthusiast. It

chucks good manners and caution to the wind. Think of its damp and

dreary past, its blighted life in a dank forest, nourished on the

moisture of plants! And then, like a bolt from the blue, comes a human

being! Along the serried ranks of mosquitoes the signal runs, "Blood!"

The mosquitoes "see blood." They are metamorphosed into fanatics as

wholehearted as the Dervishes who, spear in hand, see the joys of

Paradise and its black-eyed houris before them. If a mosquito was not a

fanatic, it would not make such a noise. A fanatic always dies

shrieking. There is nothing which prevents the Dervish-mosquito from

alighting quietly and getting to work long before you knew it was there.

The philosopher-mosquito does. It lights on you with such elastic tread

that the most sensitive skin would not feel it; and then it gets to work

with the cold, calm, cynical assurance of a practised dissector. But

this has its drawbacks too. The philosopher-mosquito is in danger by

reason of its own absorption. Concentrated upon its long drink, it gets

killed in a humiliating way, like a man on whom a five-ton chunk of

stone falls from a steam crane while he has his nose in a can of beer.

The Dervish-mosquito, on the other hand, falls fighting, brandishing its

spear, its wild battle-cry on its lips. One cannot help admiring the

Dervish-mosquito the most.

There were two or three old palm-thatched huts at San Benito, and we

slung our hammocks in the best-preserved one. If we lived a century we

should never forget our nights there. It is ridiculous to call them

nights. They were not nights at all; they were orgies of blood and

death. The mosquitoes flew at us, shrieking like rockets; and we

hammered them to death on one cheek or wiped them off from the other.

The persistence of those insects was truly appalling. We tried

everything. We had heard that if you let mosquitoes alone they are

content with one bite. Either there is nothing in this theory or the

insects of San Benito were the exceptions which proved the rule. With a

patience worthy of a racked Galileo we lay quite still and invited them

to become "free fooders." We prayed them to "bid us good-bye and go."

But they would not go. They found parting such sweet sorrow. Never did

Mary Jane's young man linger with such persistence in the hall over his

adieus as did those insects. They were not content with "one stroke and

divide." They flew off to the woods--at least a few of them did--and

brought a lot more. From free fooders they turned into whole-hoggers.

They had no gratitude, these winged gluttons. They were overdoing it. It

was not really kind, we felt, to encourage them in thus laying up the

seeds of disease for their old age. So we "called time" and started on

new tactics.

We had no nets; but we covered ourselves up with our blankets, and for

a few pleasant moments we cynically enjoyed listening to the shrieks of

the Dervishes as they threw themselves upon the wool. Then there was a

lull and silence; and after a time, as it was stifling hot, we had to

put our heads out to breathe, and then ... oh, Lord! then we realised

the persistence of the mosquito. It is the "bitter beast, which bides

its time and bites." It did bide its time. It mounted guard like a

policeman on point duty, and when we appeared it seemed to shriek, "Now

I've got you!" as it hurled itself forward. The reckless courage of

those insects simply compelled admiration. They did not care about

death, they did not care how heavy your hand was, they did not care if

in their eagerness they got inside your hammock and you rolled on them.

They only wanted blood; your blood, and they died happy, drinking it.

Death was sweet to them if they could reach you. Like the bees of whom

Virgil sings, "_Animasque in vulnere ponunt_," they joyfully left their

lives in the wound. We blasphemed so shockingly that we lost all respect

for each other. As the tropic night wore on our language wore out. We

racked our memories for the foulest words, the most blood-curdling oaths

we had ever heard, until at last we reached such a point of desperation

that we felt like leaping from our hammocks, firing a feu-de-douleur

from all six chambers of our revolvers, and then committing suicide by

hurling ourselves down the well. Seriously though, during all the days

we spent at San Benito we never got a good night's rest; and with the

dreary diet of tortillas, rice, and eggs, one has to be a very

enthusiastic ruin-hunter not to get thoroughly sick of the work.

To those who ramble at will through the sunlit forests of England,

France, or the Tyrol, who know no other, no real conception of the task

before us is possible. Byron in _Childe Harold_ sings: "There is a

pleasure in the pathless woods." Aye, and there is a terror--not the

terror of hunger or of cold, not the terror of thirst or death, but a

terror which strikes you dumb, which makes you cringe before the awful

majesty of Nature. As we broke into the dread stillness of those woods

through which no white foot had ever passed, there came upon us an

inexpressible dread, not of physical dangers, for there were none; of

something, we knew not what, as of haunted men. As we hacked our way

foot by foot, a darkness not of night but of a dim, shadowy world,

peopled by the fantastic shapes of trees, which had tortured each other

into twist and gnarl in their fight for light, came on us. Work!

Heavens, how we worked! It was our only refuge from the dread. We worked

like the proverbial niggers; and the sweat poured down our faces,

dribbled into eyes and ears, marked great stains on our khaki, and

moistened the handles of our axes till it was hard to hold them firm.

Outside a myriad birds chorused in the blaze of sunshine we had left.

From bush to bush the glorious cardinal bird, red from beak-point to

tail-feathers, flashed its miracle of colour; green parrots circled and

screamed; red-headed woodpeckers beat their insistent beats on the

hollowed tree-trunk; the tchels, plump bodies electric blue, heads and

wings ebon, clustered in chattering groups amid the sugar-cane; and

humming-birds of purple, green, and russet, winged lightning flight

around the blossoms. Within for us was stillness--the majestic, awful

stillness of God's woodland. No creature moved, no sound broke the

silence, no ray of sunlight filtered in upon us through the black canopy

of leaf. Only--weirdest of all--day after day there fluttered round us

wherever we went a butterfly, a monster of exquisite blue, five inches

at least from wing-point to wing-point, dancing in the gloom from

tree-trunk to tree-trunk like some mascot. It pleased us to imagine that

it was the same butterfly, that it was a mascot dancing before us to

show us the way to Mecca. It was a pleasant conceit, but it led to

nothing. The butterfly had not any right to be out of the sun in a

pitch-black wood; and for us at least he never "cut any ice." He simply

fluttered round us and did no good, for as far as Mecca was concerned

our almost savage efforts to find it were abortive.

For weeks we searched. Our only way of retracing our path was to notch

the trees as we cut. Night by night we crept, wearied and blistered and

torn, out of the forest. Day by day we started again cutting and

recutting, crossing and recrossing, east to west, north to south, at

every half-mile sending the Indian up some tree to spy the land.

Meanwhile, our little friend Don Luis and his four sons had joined in

the chase, and they worked hard too. They came over to San Benito with a

pony loaded with tortillas, and encamped in the other hut, whence at

dawn they started each day with a dozen dogs to ransack that part of the

forest where Don Luis declared the temple was. But, expert woodmen as

they were, it was all no good. Some five years back a terrific hurricane

swept over Cozumel, and this, Don Luis declared, had changed the whole

face of the forest. He found himself a very tyro at woodmanship in this

great black eight-hundred-square-mile patch of woodland, its undergrowth

fenced and littered with the trunks of fallen trees, now veritable

snares for the unwary, buried in dense shrub. Don Luis richly earned his

daily pay. He did not care about temples, but he did care immensely

about the lump sum which, as the carrots in front of the donkey, we had

dangled in front of his Yucatecan avarice. We would have trebled that

sum if he could have succeeded; though we did not tell him so, when,

with almost tears in his cunning eyes, he formally confessed failure,

because to have told him so might have really driven him to suicide.

[Illustration: FIRST GROUP: COZUMEL RUINS.]

He had hunted in a set area, and we had wandered at will over the forest

in all directions and explored Cozumel as it had never been explored

before. Thus it would have been a marvel if we had not found something.

We did. We found a ruined city lying at equal distance from San Miguel

and San Benito towards the northern end of the island. The ruins were in

two groups about three-quarters of a mile apart, and suggestive of a

once quite considerable town. The first group consisted of two buildings

standing a few yards apart on small terraces about 8 feet high and

facing south-east. Both two-roomed, they each measured 40 feet by 27, a

small platform extending towards the south-east making each terrace a

solid block of 40 feet square. On the outside they are both

unornamented, but the inside walls of the one on the north-east are

ornamented from the floor to where the roof commences with that curious

decoration which is met with again and again in so many Mayan

buildings--the red hand. It was the best preserved of this kind of

decoration we had seen in the islands or on the mainland, and by the

curious formation of some of the marks it is certain that they were not,

as is supposed, impressions made by dipping the hand in colour or in

blood and then stamping it on the wall. They seem rather to have been

made with a straight five-toothed instrument like a painter's

graining-comb. Around this whole colouring was a scrollwork pattern of

the same tint, giving it the appearance of a frame.

Fifty yards in front of these two buildings stood a third facing west

and measuring 80 feet by 30 and consisting of a small one-roomed house

and a pillared temple, the roofs of which had both fallen. Here, as at

Cancun, we were struck by the prevalence of the rounded pillars.

Half-way between the first and the second ruins were the remains of two

more buildings, but these were so shattered as to defy any attempts at a

suggestion of what they had been like. At the back of the first set,

standing isolated in the bush, was a remarkable monolithic rounded

pillar close on 9 feet high.

[Illustration: SECOND GROUP: COZUMEL RUINS.]

The second group of ruins stands away some three-quarters of a mile

through the woods to the westward. We were attracted thither by the

appearance of a gigantic clump of trees towering up above the others as

if marking the spot of some ancient mounds. On arrival there we found

that it did not consist of one mound but three, all joining at their

base and of rough unhewn stone. They averaged about 40 feet in height.

On the ground-level at the side of them stood a small one-roomed house,

probably the home of a priest or custodian whose duty was to watch over

these pyramids. These mounds were remarkable not only by the fact of

their queer juxtaposition but for the fact that on careful examination

we found no trace of a building of any sort upon the top of them. That

they were artificial there can be no shadow of doubt. That they were

look-outs like the mounds examined by us on the coast is impossible, for

in the heart of the island they could have served no such purpose. What

we would suggest is that Cozumel formed at one time a Mayan Valhalla

where, by reason of the intense sanctity of the soil, the bodies of the

greatest caciques and the most revered of priests were brought from the

mainland to be buried in the sacred isle. Thus these three mounds we

believe to be simply sepulchral, the excavation of which--a gigantic

task--would probably prove of the greatest interest. We had heard a

rumour of the existence in the northern woods of a large stone and

cemented dome-shaped building, doorless and sealed all round. We tried

to find this but failed. This, too, was probably a tomb.

About a hundred yards to the north-east of this trio of mounds stood a

castillo on a pyramid, the two-roomed building on the top being reached

by a stairway on the south-west. The temple was unadorned by any

paintings, ornaments or hieroglyphics, but was remarkable for the

extraordinary smallness of the apertures which apparently served for

doorways. The ground-plans of this ruined city which are reproduced will

give some idea of its size.

Again and again in the woods we encountered the remnants of what

appeared to be a series of concentric walls. They were certainly

artificial, and their building must have entailed immense labour, for

the stones were often very large. These wall fragments resemble nothing

so much as a breastwork or hastily improvised fortification. We have two

theories about them. Either the island was originally very carefully

apportioned and the Holy of Holies was surrounded by a series of

complete walls, at distances from one another of about a mile and a

half, which served as a series of milestones for the pilgrims making

their way to the shrine from all the coasts of the island; or, on the

first alarm of the Spanish invasion, stone fortifications were roughly

improvised around Mecca so that, if the foreigner ventured into the

forests, each wall could be defended, thus delaying, if not actually

preventing, his reaching the temple. The first theory gains a certain

support from the fact that in some places we found suggestions of a

small ruined house attached to the wall, which might have been a kind of

tollhouse where the pilgrims paid a tribute to the Mayan hierarchy for

permission to pass.

The little finds we made in the shape of stone axes, pottery, beads, and

so on, were no solace to us for our disappointment. We had sought Mecca

in vain. We had spared neither money nor energy; and we had just this

comfort, that we had done more in the exploration of the island than

anybody before us. Still it was as beaten men that we returned after our

mosquito-ridden semi-starvation sojourn in the forest to San Miguel.

There the carnival was at its height. Little the Yucatecans recked of

ruined temples and Mayan problems. It was enough for them that the sun

shone, that they had habanero and anise to drink, and that there were

girls to dance with and make love to. Tin-tray music and a charivari of

drum and horn fought for mastery over wild whistlings and cat-callings

and the "loud laugh which spoke the vacant mind." The few horses of the

island had been requisitioned to carry ludicrously drunk Yucatecans in

paper caps and masks up and down the beach and round the plaza. Those

who could not ride found satisfaction sufficient for their senseless

mirth in running behind and shouting. We were hungry to escape from this

very unsatisfying gaiety, and we wanted to cross to the mainland where,

exactly opposite Cozumel, lie the ruins of Tuloom. But this proved

absolutely impracticable. As we have said in the previous chapter, the

Indians are encamped there, and, thanks to the brutal treatment they

have received, they shoot white men at sight. No boatman could be found

to cross to the shore, even though we offered such record prices as a

hundred dollars for the ten miles. We had sent a message down to

Ascension Bay to General Bravo telling him of our wish to land on the

coast hereabouts, and asking for the escort which had been promised us

by the officials in Mexico City. The General's answer was a polite

shuffle. He did not want us to visit his headquarters, and he knew that

if he gave us an escort not a man of it would survive to return to

Ascension Bay. He delayed answering our letter until he felt certain

that our patience was exhausted, and that we should have started on our

return journey for the north coast. As a matter of fact his letter

followed us to Merida, and was such a tissue of prevarication as proved

how anxiously he guards the secrets of his ineffective campaigning.

In truth, his position was a difficult one, for the dangers to which we

asked permission to expose ourselves and demanded that he should expose

his escort are very real indeed. An attempt to explore this portion of

the eastern littoral would be about as safe as jumping in front of an

express train travelling at sixty miles an hour. Should an enthusiastic

archæologist endeavour to traverse the country, there is little

uncertainty as to what would be his fate. Committed to impenetrable

forests, trackless, waterless save for pools in the limestone rock,

hidden under matted leaves and undergrowth, defying better eyes than his

to find, he would stumble on, tripped up by lianas, wounded by thorns,

through an arboreal darkness and thickness too complete for his eyes to

see ten yards. But every inch of his halting progress would be watched.

Not for a moment would he escape the eyes of his enemies. The end would

soon come; it might be in days; it probably would be only hours. Most

likely while, wearied out, he rested on a fallen tree-trunk (for

centuries of Spanish bigotry and cruelty and the mercilessness of

latter-day Mexicans have robbed the Indian of all claims to be called

"noble savage"; to-day he is no sportsman, but shoots his game sitting),

a shot, fired twenty-five feet from him in the bush, would be the last

sound he would ever hear. His body, rifled, perchance mutilated, would

be left to rot where it lay--food for the myriad cleanly ants and

earth-beetles which swarm the matted, tangled bed of a tropical forest.

CHAPTER XI

ON THE SOUTHERN SIERRAS

Carriage exercise in Yucatan is no joke. It is not the gentle fiction,

the make-believe of exertion played at by indolent women and invalids,

to which we are accustomed. The doctor who ordered it would lie under

the grave suspicion of being in league with the local undertaker. The

invalid who took it would need nothing further save a shelter in the

nearest cemetery. The most inveterate Oliver Twist would not "ask for

more." It is all the fault of the roads and natural selection. The roads

are unspeakable, and they have evolved an unspeakable vehicle. None but

a carriage which has lost all respect for itself and its passengers

could survive an hour on a Yucatecan road. The Yucatecan road is not

meant for carriages. It is meant for chamois goats and those black ants

which have plenty of time on their hands, and consider that the only way

round a blade of grass is to climb up one side and down the other.

Time is really what you want on a Yucatecan road. You have got to take

it quietly and pick your way. But this is not the programme of the

Yucatecan carriage. It is always in a hurry. It is a hurry-skurrying,

give-you-no-time-for-repentance desperado of a conveyance. It takes you

in and does for you. It blacks your eyes, breaks your ribs, bruises you.

It gives you "bloody noses and cracked crowns." It does not care. It has

nothing to lose. It is made of huge wheels, stout poles and rough cord,

with a rabbit-hutch on top swinging on the cords. You go inside the

rabbit-hutch and you try to stop inside. The carriage tries to get you

out. That's the game. You can play it as long as you like, as long as

you have a bone unbroken or a breath in your body. The carriage does not

mind. It is always there, and the rocks in the roads are always there;

and the two-inch long thorns on the hedges are always there to scratch

your eyes out. So that all day long you can play at carriage exercise

in Yucatan until you are reduced to a bruised and bleeding mass.

This demon vehicle is called a _volan coche_ (flying coach). It is quite

indigenous and home-grown. It is not even known in Mexico, where the

roads are bad but have not reached that pitch of villainy to which the

Yucatecan roads have attained. It is drawn by three mules abreast, the

centre one in the shafts. When they come to a very large boulder and the

wheels stick, they pull, pull all they know, and very slowly the wheel

of the volan climbs that boulder, reaches the summit, tips you to an

angle of forty-five degrees on the non-boulder side, and then comes down

with a sickening thud over the precipice edge of the boulder and, if you

are not careful, shoots you through the rabbit-hutch side. Nobody need

suffer from liver in Yucatan. A little carriage exercise, and the most

rebellious liver which ever made a hell on earth for a mortal would

"come to heel."

We tried volan riding. We had to. On our return to the mainland there

was no other way for us to cross the country except by buying fresh

horses. Our volan was a nice volan as volans go. It had a mattress in

it; a tempting-looking soft mattress which persuaded you that, once

inside the rabbit-hutch, you would really be quite comfortable. But

alas! it was a delusion and a snare. That mattress was in league with

the volan. It was the piece of toasted cheese in the volan mousetrap.

You could not lie on that mattress, or squat on it, or kneel on it, or

sit cross-legged on it, or indeed sit anyhow on it. You had to tie

yourself up like those rubbery contortionists at the music halls, and

you had to hold on to the iron stanchions which support the rabbit-hutch

roof or you would not have had a whole rib left.

In our "Little Ease" we started from Tizimin on our return journey to

Merida by a western road which traversed a portion of civilised Yucatan

new to us. This is the Espita district. Espita is a prosperous little

town, the centre of a quite considerable tobacco industry. Thence we

entered once more the henequen country, steering for the village of

Xuilub (pronounced Schweeloo), where the women came to the hut-doors

dressed, or rather undressed, as we had seen them nowhere else. Nothing

on but a short kilt from waist to knee. It was a long ride, and it is

sad to think that we swore the whole way. Fortunately the Yucatecan

driver suffered no moral damage. He did not understand a syllable of our

blasphemy. He probably thought we were talking about ruins, and that

archæologists were habitually excitable and shouted and screamed when

they talked about ruins. It is a melancholy fact that we really did not

care about ruins any longer. We were far too absorbed in our attempts to

stop inside the rabbit-hutch and in our collation of all the swear-words

we could remember. Finally we did arrive at Merida very tired, very

dusty, and in stained khaki suits which we felt to be a positive

disgrace in that spick-and-span town. We were veritable Rip Van Winkles.

We had been away from Merida close on four months. During that time no

letter or paper had been able to reach us. It was quite a queer feeling,

and there was news in plenty--some of it, alas! sad enough--awaiting us

in the foot-deep pile of letters which our good friend Señor Primitivo

Molina of the Banco Yucateco handed us.

We had accomplished our purpose, that of exploring the hitherto unmapped

and untraversed north-eastern portions of Yucatan and her eastern

islands. Negative results are very often quite as valuable as positive

results. As we shall later show, a great deal hangs, as far as our

explanations of the origin of the Mayan civilisation are concerned, upon

the question, until now undecided but raised by Stephens more than sixty

years ago, of how high a degree of perfection the buildings in

North-East Yucatan had attained. Our tour has satisfied us that we have

once and for all an answer to that question. Our results are negative.

We have proved that students of the Mayan problem need waste no time in

expeditions to the north-east. Ruins there are, without doubt, which

time and the denseness of the vegetation prevented us from discovering;

but those ruins, if found and carefully studied, would not add an iota

of value to the mass of evidence for and against the theories which have

been advanced in explanation of the Mayan problem. For the future, work

must be concentrated, if it is to be of any value, upon the extreme

southern districts of Yucatan and the Guatemalan border. The troubled

state of that country, the hostility of the tribes which range it, its

physical difficulties, must for some years to come render investigations

extremely hazardous and unsatisfactory. But when eventually the

districts south of Lake Peten are opened to archæology, immense progress

may be expected. Under the ægis of Mexico the opening up of this country

cannot, we venture to believe, ever become an accomplished fact. But

when the relations between the governing class and the Indian tribes

have assumed that fitting aspect of benevolence and mutual good-feeling

which they will assume so soon as Central America forms a portion of the

United States, the whole of that archæologically rich district will

yield up its secrets--probably to American students, who are already

showing that they grasp the importance of Southern Yucatan.

We had always intended, if time permitted, to travel to the south of

Merida and view for ourselves the wonderful group of ruins of which the

chief are Uxmal, Labna, Kabah, and Sayil. Thus, after a day or two's

rest and before we threw off our uniform of khaki and returned to the

normal collar-and-tie state of civilisation, we started out for Ticul.

This is the most important town on the southern branch of Yucatan's

railways. In the very heart of cultivated Southern Yucatan, it lies

under the northern slope of that chain of limestone hills or sierras

which runs across Yucatan from Maxcanu in the north-west to Tekax in the

south-east. Some ten miles after leaving the southern suburbs of Merida

is the pueblo of Acanceh, near which are the remains of an Indian city.

Here an elaborately carved wall has been discovered.

Then the railway passes through the desolate plains of Mayapan. For some

miles vegetation is sparse or nonexistent, and as far as the eye can see

is a desert of grey stone, here and there broken by small treeless

hillocks, the obvious sites of Indian buildings. If tradition is to be

credited, the city of Mayapan was the most important of all the Indian

cities at or about the middle of the fifteenth century, and its

overthrowal by a confederation of caciques (about 1462) forms the most

important certain fact of Mayan history in the century immediately

preceding the Spanish invasion. Professor Eduard Seler has laboured to

show that the name "Mayapan" is Mexican, though he is obliged to confess

that "pan" in Maya means flag or standard. But he puts aside this very

simple etymology, and wants to find a purely Mexican origin for the word

he translates "among the Mayas." This is hair-splitting. Mayapan was the

"flag" city, the chief city of the Mayans, just as the flagship of a

fleet is its chief vessel; and it seems to us that the name itself

affords the fullest proof that Mayapan was what tradition declares it to

have been, the headquarters of the predominant cacique at the end of the

fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. Stephens, who

made a fairly careful survey of the ruins in 1842, discovered a mound 60

feet high and 100 feet square at the base. Four staircases, each 25

feet wide, ascended to an esplanade within 6 feet of the top. This

esplanade was 6 feet wide, and on each side a smaller staircase led to

the top. The summit was a plain stone platform 15 feet square. There

were no signs of building on it. Stephens somewhat rashly assumes that

this was its normal condition. It is far more probable that there was a

building on the top, precisely like that of the castillo at Chichen; and

either by the Mayans themselves at the destruction of the city or by the

Spaniards, it was thrown down. The latter are the most likely offenders.

Mayapan is but ten leagues south of Merida, and the fact that around the

base of the mound Stephens found mutilated stone figures of men and

animals with diabolically distorted faces, obviously idols, suggests

that Catholic vandals had been at work.

Beyond the plain of Mayapan the rail runs through a rich henequen

country, the towns and villages of which are connected by good

roads--for Yucatan--and ringed with neat gardens of orange, lemon, and

banana trees. Here and there at the wayside stations tiny sets of

metals, on which stand small open tramcars of green, yellow, and red

painted slatted wood--each drawn by a mule--branch off to haciendas of

which the white walls and lofty arched gateways, flanked with

substantial stone pillars, suggest the entry to a Spanish abbey grounds

rather than to a money-making house and factory. The approach of the hot

season and the fact that we are travelling practically due south are

evidenced by the far larger number of naked children seen, and at one

hut-door a little maid of seven or eight stands quietly, as naked as she

was born, to watch the train's progress. The men, too, who work in the

gardens or drive the henequen wagons wear nothing but the breech-cloth

and soup-plate straw hats.

Ticul, which we reach in about three hours, is architecturally as

uninteresting as are all these Yucatecan towns. It has an air of

considerable prosperity, the majority of the houses being of stone, the

flat-faced, flat-roofed type which is so monotonous in Spanish America.

Its centre is a great plaza, a rambling square of grass, one side of

which is occupied by the church and monastery. The church is a fine one

as far as size goes, and is in good preservation. It is connected with

the monastery by a corridor from which opens that portion of the latter

which is now used as the padre's house. It is quite possible to believe

the reports that reached us of this ecclesiastic's prosperity, for his

residence approached nearer than anything we had seen in the country to

the comfort and substantial neatness of an English rectory. Stephens

described the monastery as "grand." We were disappointed. A rambling

square of stucco, terraced and arcaded round three sides and approached

from the street by a narrow flight of a dozen steps, the building, even

in the added dignity of its ruined condition, is nothing but a plastered

monstrosity, as typical of the execrable architectural taste of the

Franciscans as of the ugliness and arrogance of their religion.

The inhospitality of these Yucatecan towns to the "stranger that is

within their gates" really beggars expression. We knew nobody at Ticul,

but we wanted shelter for the night and food, and the possibility of

arranging for the hire of horses for the morrow. But the Yucatecan does

not care what you want. His one idea is what money have you got which he

can wrest from you. That is what he wants. If you look dusty and

travel-worn, he concludes that you will not be a good payer, and any

inchoate interest which the arrival of a foreigner-fly in the immediate

neighbourhood of his web may have aroused dies down, and the Yucatecan

spider returns to his hammock. Thus it was that we found ourselves as

the night fell wandering through the streets of Ticul, almost as

mendicants, begging for bread from door to door. Nobody was going to

take the bother to prepare a meal for a fair price or to give shelter

for the night to two foreign madmen who were demented enough to be

interested in "old walls" and obstinate enough not to wish to be

"plucked." Finally a Yucatecan woman, with an almost intolerable

condescension, agreed to supply our humble wants. We were dead-beat, and

our wanderings among the hospitable Indians had somewhat lulled us into

forgetfulness of the golden rule that in Yucatan you must bargain with

every robber before you enter his cave. We did indeed ask how much the

supper would cost; but the woman's reply, that prices at Ticul were not

exorbitant like those at Merida, was given with such artless guile that

we dropped the subject. When the meal came, it was ill-made coffee, a

worse-cooked omelette, a chicken stew and rice, and the price demanded

was about that of a first-class dinner at a London restaurant. But we

had had enough of this sort of thing, and had not spent so long in the

country without having reached that point of exasperation at which the

long-suffering worm found his proverbial patience exhausted. So we

placed a half of the price demanded on the table, and giving our hostess

to understand that this was equivalent to the price in Merida, shook the

dust of her inhospitable dwelling off our feet.

Riding horses proved, curiously enough, unprocurable, and we had had

more than enough of volans, so we determined to make a walking tour of

our exploration of the Southern Sierras. Ticul is a town of gardens, and

it would be difficult to imagine anything fairer than our tramp the next

morning through its long straggling suburbs of neat mestizo huts, each

framed deep in its setting of the rich green of orange tree, palm and

laurel, interspersed with the red of roses, with the scarlet

trumpet-shaped tulipan blossom, and the purples, pinks, and whites of

the climbing convolvuluses. The road we followed was the main road to

Peto, broad enough and dusty enough to deserve the title "highroad," and

rock-strewn enough to be thoroughly Yucatecan. But the country had

altered. We were in a very different Yucatan from that through which for

months past we had travelled. Here was no dead level of dense

forest-land where views were at a premium, but a wooded undulating

country over which you could see for miles as you slowly climbed towards

the range of limestone bluffs shining white in the sun, each tufted with

clumps of trees, the landscape looking for all the world like a piece of

Aberdeenshire. On each side the road ran roughly built grey stone walls,

and you felt that you had only to peer over these to see a frothing

brown stream leaping down over the boulders. But there the delusion

stopped, for the Southern Sierras of Yucatan are as deadly dry as the

northern plains of the Peninsula; and though the climb was perhaps not

more than six or seven hundred feet, the blaze of the sun made the white

dust of the road almost intolerable. Our walk lay for twelve long miles

to the village of Tabi, where we had been told that food would be

procurable. Having started our walk on the not very generous diet of

black coffee and tortillas, we were desperately hungry by the time we

saw signs of the village ahead of us. But our hunger was nothing in

comparison with our thirst. It was a five-dollar one, and a jaded toper

living a dipsomaniacal city life would have probably made us a "sporting

offer" of three times that amount for it.

Our bodily needs led to a most characteristic exhibition of the vivid

contrast between the Indian and Yucatecan natures. At the very first hut

in the village we sent our Indian servant to ask for what we needed

most--water. A gentle-looking Indian mother, two or three brown toddlers

hanging on to her huipil, came to the door, and then smilingly

disappeared, to reappear in a second with water in a calabash, the dried

rind of a large gourd which throughout Yucatan is used by the Indians as

water-dipper and drinking-cup. Had it been that "draught of vintage,

that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth" of which John

Keats so eloquently sings, the clear, cool limestone water "with beaded

bubbles winking at the brim" in that earthy-smelling gourd could not

have tasted more like nectar. We must have almost drunk away the good

wife's day's supply, for the gourd held close on a pint, and we each

drank three, and our servant drank two. Yet when we offered a few

centavos in return for our splendid drink, the Indian woman shook her

head and would not take them. We insisted, but she was obdurate until we

suggested that at least she would let us give them to the black-eyed

_chiquitos_ who peeped shyly at us from behind the shelter of her cotton

robe.

From her hut we walked on to the village store, the usual filthy

earth-floored warehouse; its stained wooden counter crowded with

habanero and anise bottles; its roof garlanded with strings of onions,

green and red peppers, and tortillas; its floors littered with sacks of

maize, rice, pepper, and black beans. Here presided a fat Yucatecan, who

to our inquiries as to whether he could prepare us a meal made the reply

which with a maddening reiteration one hears all over Yucatan: "_No hay;

no hay_" ("There is not"). But we were too hungry to take "no" for an

answer, and we urged that surely he could cook us some eggs, make

coffee, and boil us some rice. At first he demurred even to this, but we

injudiciously showed such eagerness that he presently did retire into

the inner shop, whence, after a consultation with a woman, he emerged to

tell us that eggs, rice, and coffee could be served. The man looked such

a blackguard that we thought it only wise to ask what the price of this

sumptuous meal would be. To this question at first he would give no

answer. At last, with a surly shrug of his shoulders, he said, "_Quien

sabe?_" ("Who knows?")

"Who knows?" indeed! Who does not know what eggs, rice, and coffee will

cost? The impertinent frankness of the rascal's intentions was too much

for us. If he could have only got us to have eaten the food, he meant to

charge us about five times its value. With a curse at the limitless

dishonesty of Yucatecans, we left his filthy store, preferring hunger to

such a host. We walked fifty yards down the village, and then, as we

came to a likely looking Indian hut, we knocked at the door and asked

the woman, who came from the washing-tray to answer us, whether she

could give us any food. With a gentle apologetic smile she said she had

very little, but we were welcome to all that. She invited us in, gave us

the seats of honour in the hammocks. In a minute or two a pot of coffee

was steaming on the embers, she had made up the fire, had sent a child

out to the garden where the hens were to find an egg or two, and with

rice and tortillas served us a meal which, to our sharpened appetites,

was as tasty as a Guildhall banquet. When we had done and were leaving,

with many a shy smile and gesture of distaste for charging anything, she

asked ... twenty-five centavos--sixpence!

Here you have in epitome the Indian and the Yucatecan. The Indian woman

at the beginning of the village, who had toiled at dawn to bring from

the village well her household's daily supply of drinking-water, glad to

give all we asked for nothing. In the centre of the village the great

coarse, unwieldy Yucatecan shopman, the "snubnosed rogue" whose dirty,

mean mind was centred upon the wretched gains of his cheating life. And

then this kindly Indian hostess who gave us her all and asked but a

pittance in return for the clearing of her larders. Savages and slaves!

If we wrote ten thousand words they would surely not be so convincing as

this eloquent incident at Tabi.

From Tabi the distance to the ruins of Labna is some twelve miles. At

Tabi you have reached the top of the first range of those sierras which

command the vast valley lands around Ticul, stretching northward toward

Merida. The road leads for the first few miles between luxuriant hedges

to the hacienda of San Francisco (where we stayed the night); and thence

it plunges into a really beautiful wooded, hilly country, the thick

foliage climbing up the sides of the bluffs which range each side of the

roadway, rearing their bare limestone crowns above the trees. It is a

forest world, very different from the desolate and dark woods of the

north-east, and as the underwood crackles beneath our feet, deer break

away from the coverts at the roadsides and bound up the wooded slopes.

At the seventh mile from the hacienda a ruin shows on a hill to the

right. It looks worth a climb, and with axe and machete we make our way

to it. It had been a two-storeyed building, but the upper portion was in

hopeless ruin. The lower storey consisted of six rooms entered by six

doorways, the front ornamented by a now much broken row of pilasters

half rounded, their attachment to the building being on the flat side.

Above these was a second row of smaller pilasters about a foot long, and

above them a coping as edging for the platform, once smooth stone, now

hopeless earth-tangle and débris, upon which the upper building stood.

Between the third and fourth doorway a flying arch still supported the

remnants of a staircase some 10 feet wide which led up to the upper

building.

Two miles further on through the woodland and the country opens out on

the right into a large clearing locked in on all sides by high limestone

hills, just the ideal site for the fine city Labna must have been. The

ruins form a scene of complete but grand desolation. The north side of

what was once the great city square, now a tangle of jungle undergrowth,

is occupied by the ruins of a superb palace. Standing on a terrace 400

feet long and 150 feet deep, the building is of such a bizarre shape

that it looks as if its builders had been playing a gigantic game of

dominoes with stone and mortar. Beginning at the eastern end of the

building, for about 200 feet it faces south. At this point the front

turns at right angles and runs back some 90 to 100 feet, facing west.

Another angle is formed here, the building once more facing south for

some 200 feet, almost at the end of which a narrow block projects in a

line with the first corner turning, forming a three-sided courtyard, the

fourth--the south--side being open. This gigantic building is divided

into a series of low narrow rooms, the doors an equal distance from one

another, and the whole front alternately formed of flat-hewn stones and

pillars, the latter, like half tree-trunks, mortared flat upon the

building, slightly barrel-shaped and never monolithic: many of them

broken into two columns by two or three small rounds of stone. This

curious façade, the like of which we had not met with in the north-east,

was crowned by an entablature some 3 feet deep running the whole length

of the building, the architrave elaborately carved in rectangular

designs interspersed with rosettes, leaves, lozenges, and diamonds, the

corners ornamented with gaping alligator jaws in which are carved human

heads.

The upper storey of this extraordinary building was reached by a

central staircase now in ruins, and stood far back upon a terrace. All

two-storeyed Mayan buildings have this peculiarity: the upper storey

never forms one sheer face of stone with the lower as in ordinary

house-building, but always stands back on a platform more or less wide.

Here at Labna this platform was some 25 feet wide, and had once been

stone-paved throughout its whole length. At about the middle of it was a

circular hole between 2 and 3 feet in diameter. This led to a vault-like

chamber about 4 feet deep with parallel walls and triangular arched

ceiling, a doorless replica, in fact, of the other rooms of the palace.

This subterranean room was built in the solid part of the terrace which

formed the roof of the first storey.

Stephens mentions that the Indians of his day were very superstitious

about the hole and believed it haunted. This is not surprising, for even

to-day, after sixty years' further contact with civilisation, weird

stories are associated with most of the buildings. There are other of

these secret rooms with entrances from the top both at Labna, Uxmal, and

elsewhere. The ancient use of these _chultunes_, as the Mayans call

them, has been much discussed, and Stephens, we think quite rightly,

rejected the idea that they were reservoirs for the storing of water. It

is far more probable that they were storerooms for grain or other

eatables, or possibly treasure-houses; though we incline to the belief

that they may have been prisons; a suggestion which we think we are the

first to advance.

Standing at right angles to the eastern end of the palace, facing

westward, is a second building, one-storeyed, divided into eleven rooms.

It is a solid structure in fair preservation, and in singular contrast

with the palace in being almost entirely devoid of decoration or

carving. But the most remarkable building at Labna stands on a mound

about 50 feet high, its slopes now a mass of shrub and débris. It

consists of a two-roomed structure which, by reason of the perpendicular

wall that rises up some 30 feet above the roof-level, is one of the most

extraordinary in Yucatan. Most curious is the effect of the isolated

position of this wall, which towers above the ruined rooms of the south

side. It is slotted with narrow perpendicular apertures like the window

openings so often seen in a Norman castle wall. It is elaborately carved

with designs in deep relief, now so ruined that it is next to

impossible, at the distance at which one is obliged to stand from the

wall, to follow the original scheme of ornamentation. Along the top was

once a row of death's-heads. Beneath were two lines of human figures, of

which only arms and legs now appear. Over what was the centre doorway

are the remains of a colossal figure with beneath it what certainly

looked to us like a phallic emblem. The whole of the wall still bears

trace of the colours with which its extraordinary carvings were once

painted. There can be little doubt that, like the Castillo at Chichen,

this building was of a religious nature, and it is one more proof of the

extraordinary versatility of the ancient Mayan architects.

Right below this mound to the westward stands the most beautiful of all

the ruins at Labna, an arched gateway, our photograph of which we

reproduce. This archway is remarkable as being the nearest approach so

far discovered in Central America to the classic archways; but as will

be seen by our illustration it is still distinctly Mayan with its narrow

roofstone. Through this archway you pass into what formed once a

quadrangle. Each side of the arch and all round, doorways lead into

chambers 12 feet by 8. Over each doorway had been a square recess in

which were the relics of a carved ornament which, as Stephens says,

looks like the representation of a rayed sun. Right and left of this

archway the building of which it formed a grand entrance ran out for

some distance, and when complete it must have been a striking example of

architectural majesty and grace.

The distance as the crow flies from Labna to Sayil (our next

destination) is but a few miles. But the cross-country journey, the

whole district studded with limestone hills, is an impossible one, and

thus we had to return to Tabi, whence it is some sixteen miles, taking

the hacienda of Santa Anna on the way. In many ways Sayil is a replica

of Labna, but on a grander scale. We should almost despair of giving any

adequate idea of the majesty of what must have been the palace of Sayil

if we were not able to reproduce on the plate opposite our photograph of

it. The building is immense, sublime in its immensity. Even in its

ruined state it strikes one dumb with wonder. To-day no less than

eighty-seven rooms can be counted, and there once were probably upwards

of one hundred and fifty. What it must have been like when its triple

terraces were perfect, and its three columned storeys, carved and

decorated, housed their ancient inhabitants, one must leave to the

imagination. In the centre of the building was a grand staircase 32

feet wide which ascended to the top of the structure. This staircase and

the right-hand portion of the building are in hopeless ruins, but enough

remains to prove the grandeur of the conception of these wonderful

Indian architects who, working without metals or tools of precision,

were able to plan and raise a pile which in its majesty and size is

fitting to rank with the architectural wonders of the world.

[Illustration: ARCHED GATEWAY, LABNA.]

[Illustration: THE PALACE, SAYIL.]

The palace measures on the ground-floor 265 feet in frontage and 120

feet in depth. The second storey was 220 feet long and 60 feet deep. The

third storey is 150 feet long and 18 feet deep. The general design of

the façades, those of the lower two having been columnar, as seen

clearly in the second, was identical. The façade of the upper terrace

was plain. The entablatures of the first and second were elaborately

decorated with carvings, among which the most remarkable is the figure

of a man supporting himself on his hands with his legs bent wide apart

at right angles to his body in an attitude which certainly cannot be

said to err on the side of delicacy. The building is to the rear much

what it is in the front, though the platforms of the back terraces are

narrower. The rooms vary in length from 23 feet to 10. In the second

range to the northward there were ten doorways sealed up with masonry

like those we had earlier found in the Nunnery building at Chichen.

Stephens in 1842 broke into these and discovered that there were ten

rooms, 220 feet long altogether, each 10 feet deep, filled with solid

masses of mortar and stone. The most extraordinary fact disclosed by him

is that the filling up of the rooms must have been done in the course of

the erection of the building; for as the stone fillings rose above the

top of the doorways the workmen could not have entered the apartments

through the doors to complete the work of filling in.

The only way of explaining the means by which these rooms could have

been thus made solid is to assume that the work was done from the top

before the ceilings of the rooms were superimposed. Stephens is at a

loss to explain this feature of the building, for, as he says, if the

filling up of these ten rooms was necessary to strengthen the supports

of the third terrace, "it would seem to have been much easier to erect a

solid structure at once, without any division into apartments." We think

he missed the simplest explanation of all. It is quite possible that the

palace as first designed was to be two-storeyed. Indeed this is most

probable, as this marvellous palace at Sayil is one of the few Mayan

buildings which have three habitable storeys. When the building

operations had reached the second terrace the cacique, impressed with

the grandeur of his work, determined to give the building the added

glory of a third storey. But the master architect had his doubts as to

whether the foundation work would bear this added weight, and to guard

against any "settling" stayed the completion of the rooms in the rear

and filled up these ten before the roofs were put on. Surely this is a

very natural and very simple explanation of what is otherwise

inexplicable.

From the terraces of the palace towards the north-west we see a high

wooded hill surmounted by a building. The densest wood covers the

intervening space of about a quarter of a mile, and the "going" was of

the hardest. But the actual climb of the hill was really the most

difficult job; and slipping and sliding, with bleeding hands and torn

clothes (for the whole surface is spread with cactus and acacia-like

shrubs with thorns two or three inches long and a quarter of an inch

wide), we deserve to reach a remarkable building. We do not get our

deserts, for it proves to be a much ruined three-roomed house, the only

remarkable feature being a carved face of life size over the centre

door, and within the print of the red hand. From the terrace the view

into the valley below, with the mighty palace breaking the endless

woodland, evoked our enthusiasm despite our breathlessness.

At a distance of about half a mile to the south of the palace stand the

ruins of a building like that described by us at Labna. On a mound an

ordinary building 40 feet wide and flat-roofed is surmounted by a

perpendicular wall some 30 feet high and 2 feet thick. This had the same

oblong openings like small castle windows which we had seen at Labna,

and bore on it the remnants of carved human figures and varied

ornamentation. To the S.S.W. of this Stephens discovered yet another

remarkable building 117 feet long, 84 feet deep, and divided into

sixteen rooms. This stood upon what he describes as probably the largest

terrace in Yucatan, from north to south at least 1,500 feet in length.

With only one Indian we had to give up the idea of piercing the woods in

this direction; but we had seen enough to feel satisfied that Sayil was

once a city of first-rate importance. The immense palace alone must have

entailed a continuous labour of thousands of workmen for some years.

Three miles from the hacienda of Santa Anna, where we stayed, are the

ruins of Kabah. There is every reason to believe that these ruins

represent the remains of what was once, though probably only for a short

period, a large and powerful city. As far as it is possible to piece

together from traditional history the records of this group of cities of

the Southern Sierras, it would seem to be fairly certain that the ruins

we find to-day represent a vigorous recrudescence of building

immediately after, and as a result of, the destruction of Mayapan by the

confederation of caciques. Doubtless Labna, Sayil, and Kabah existed as

cities before this great victory. But just as the downfall of the

overlord of Mayapan was, we believe, the signal for that temporary

supremacy of the Itzas, what we might call "the golden age" of Chichen,

so it heralded in a period short of a century during which this group of

Southern Sierra cities enjoyed an hitherto unknown prosperity. We shall

later try to show what exact connection we believe existed between the

art of these sierra towns, of fifteenth-century Chichen, and Copan and

Palenque.

This architectural period, which is perhaps best of all represented in

Kabah, is essentially florid and, though highly adroit in its intricacy,

distinctly barbaric. The most notable feature at Kabah, as at most of

the ruined cities of Yucatan, is the huge mound or teocalli some 80 feet

high, now a mountain of loose stone rubbish and overgrowth, though once

stepped all round and crowned by a building. North-eastward on a terrace

200 feet wide by 142 deep (these are Stephens's measurements) stands one

of the only two buildings of Kabah which are in any sort of

preservation. The structure had a frontage of upwards of 150 feet, and

its façade is so remarkable for its ornamentation that we reproduce at

page 318 Stephens's drawing, which will give a far better idea of the

design than any description. Over the doorways had been a cornice of

which remnants remain, and which, as Stephens says, "tried by the

severest rules of art recognised among us, would embellish the

architecture of any known era." This building had been surmounted by a

sort of elaborate stone combing extending the full length of the front

and reaching a height of about 15 feet. The interior was planned on the

usual arrangement of rooms found in these Mayan cities, each doorway

admitting to a front room which in turn gives admission to an inner

chamber raised a foot or two above the ground-level of the first and

reached by a step. In the centre apartment at Kabah this usually simple

step had been replaced by two stone steps carved out of a single block,

the lower step being in the form of a scroll. The sides of the steps

were carved, as was also the wall under the doorway.

To the north-east stands a second palace, three-storeyed, which must

once have been a smaller replica of the majestic building at Sayil.

Although hopelessly ruined and silted over with débris, the plan of the

building was obviously the same in all particulars, even to the

staircase by which ascent was made to the topmost range of apartments.

To the westward of these ruins, Stephens, in 1842, found two buildings

erected on a great terrace some 800 feet long and 100 feet wide. The

first of these houses, with a 217-foot frontage, has seven doorways,

each opening to single apartments, except the centre one, which led into

two. The doorways had had wooden lintels, which had disappeared. The

other house, with a 143-foot frontage and 31 feet deep, was

two-storeyed, with a wide staircase in the centre leading to the topmost

range. Here Stephens discovered a wonderful carved lintel consisting of

two beams, the outer one split in two lengthwise. This constitutes the

best example so far discovered of Central American wood-carving.

Tradition relates that this city of Kabah was contemporaneous with the

most prosperous days of Uxmal (pronounced Ooshmal), which city we shall

now shortly describe. Between the two ran, says tradition, a great paved

way of pure white stone, serving as a highroad of communication for the

two allied chiefs, upon which their messengers passed bearing letters

written on leaves and the bark of trees. Uxmal, at once the largest and

the best preserved of all the ruined cities of the Southern Sierras, is

between fifty and sixty miles to the south-west of Merida, and stands on

the hacienda of Don Augusto Peon, who, however, has not visited it, he

told us, more than two or three times during the past nine years,

because of its extreme unhealthiness as a place of residence owing to

the malaria-breeding swamps. The ruins cover about half a square mile,

and consist of five principal buildings. These are the pyramid temple, a

castillo such as that at Chichen; a quadrangular edifice which

archæologists have agreed to call the Nunnery; the House of Turtles,

named from the nature of some of the decorations; the House of Pigeons,

from the high, pierced combing which has some likeness to the front of a

long dovecote; and the Governor's Palace.

The latter-day names of Mayan ruined buildings are usually

unsatisfactory, and perhaps those of Uxmal are the most unsatisfactory

of any. Taking the pyramid first, as being at once the largest and the

most prominent feature of the ruined group, we find it to consist of a

mound upwards of 80 feet high, 240 feet at the base and 160 feet wide.

The platform-top of the pyramid measures about 23 feet by 80. The

pyramid is built of rough stone and rubble, and was faced with stones

flat-hewn, some of which are still in position. On the east side a

stairway, steeper than that of Chichen, ascends to the top. The pyramid

is crowned with a temple which measures some 70 feet by 12 and is

three-roomed. This castillo at Uxmal is distinguished from those at

Chichen and elsewhere by a unique feature, namely the building-out of a

small edifice or temple some 20 feet below the level of the platform

summit of the mound, and having its roof level with it. This building

stands on a projecting platform of its own, on the west side of the

pyramid, and originally communicated with the ground by a stairway 24

feet wide. It has one doorway, and its façade is more richly ornamented

than that of any other building in the group, notable being the colossal

"snouted mask" over the doorway. This rests upon a pedestal with two

jaguar heads looking each way. The door lintels are sapota beams, which

are to-day still in their places, as they were when Stephens visited the

city in 1842.

Separated from the pyramid by what appears to have been a small

courtyard, is the Nunnery, a group of four buildings roughly forming a

quadrangle, with passage-way at the corners; really four distinct

buildings forming the sides of a large courtyard. Three of these

edifices present a solid front externally, while that on the south, 279

feet long, has as its centre a gateway spanned by an arch, 10 feet 8

inches wide and some 15 feet high. The whole four buildings, though on

slightly different levels, may be roughly said to stand on a terrace

some 300 feet square. All the buildings have the walls plain and the

entablature elaborately sculptured. That on the east had a centrepiece

above the cornice; while that on the north was adorned with a false

front, consisting of a series of triangular gables. In the scheme of

decoration, the most notable features are the so-called snouted mask,

which we found at Chichen, and the feathered serpent design. Between the

Nunnery and the Castillo Stephens found what he called the House of

Birds, because of its exterior being ornamented with rude

representations of feathers and birds. To the south of the Nunnery

quadrangle still stand the ruined walls of what was a tennis-court, such

as we have described and illustrated at Chichen. Still further south

stands the Governor's Palace, about 300 feet long, 40 feet wide, and

some 25 feet high. It has eleven doorways in front and one at each end.

The interior is longitudinally divided into two corridors which are in

turn partitioned off into oblong-shaped rooms, the chief of which, in

the centre of the building, are 60 feet long. There is nothing notable

in the actual building of this palace, which conforms to the designs

common at Chichen and elsewhere. The rear of the building is unbroken by

doorways, but has two arches towards each end let into the building. The

full length of the entablature is elaborately carved in a lattice-work

pattern, with ornamentation superimposed, in which the snouted mask is a

leading feature. Over the doorways the ordinary design is broken by

specially elaborate carvings which usually take the form of a V shape

bordered with a lattice pattern and small projecting squares. To the

north-west of this palace is the so-called House of Turtles, which gains

its name from the curious frieze on which turtles are the chief

ornamentation. It has a frontage of 94 feet and is about 30 feet deep.

The east and west ends are much ruined, and portions of the roof have

fallen. It is remarkable as entirely lacking the profuse ornamentation

of the Governor's Palace and the Nunnery.