TIKÁL AND MENCHÉ.
[Illustration: SACLUC (LA LIBERTAD).]
Before closing the notes on my wanderings a few words must be said
about two other ruins, Tikál, which I visited both in 1881 and 1882,
and Menché, which I visited in the latter year only. On both occasions
I started from Coban and travelled northward for ten days through
the then almost uninhabited forest to the Paso Real on the Rio de la
Pasion, where the Government maintains a ferryman and serviceable
canoes for the passage of the river, and thence to Sacluc, a village
standing in the savannah land about fifteen miles north of the river.
Sacluc, which had risen into notice as the headquarters of the
mahogany-cutters, had only recently become the residence of the Jefe
Político of the department of Peten, and had been euphemistically
renamed "La Libertad," possibly to hide the fact that a condition not
very far removed from slavery was more noticeable there than in other
parts of the Republic. All labourers' wages are paid in advance, and as
the wood-cutters are a thriftless folk, any cash they may receive is
soon dissipated, and then before returning to work an additional charge
must be incurred for tools and the necessary stores for sustenance
during many months' absence in the forest. In theory the long score
against a workman in the patron's books will be wiped out by the
product of a season's work, but in practice it only increases until
the debt has reached the limit of value which is placed on the man's
services. Then, if the patron is in luck, he may find a purchaser for
his workman; that is to say, he may sell the debt to another employer
and the man's services pass with it, for the law compels him to
serve his new master until the debt is paid. Of course it is vastly
immoral, but the system does not seem to work so badly after all; for
if the patrones are too harsh, which did not seem to be the case, the
frontiers of Mexico and British Honduras are not far distant, and a
man could always take a few days' walk through the forest and leave
his debts behind him. Such migrations are not at all uncommon, and
many Mexicans from Tabasco, Campeche, and Yucatan, as well as some
runaway negroes from the British West India regiments, were numbered in
the population of Sacluc. As a last resort, if a man has made Mexico,
Guatemala, and Belize all too hot to hold him there is yet left a
refuge in the no-man's land held by the Santa Cruz Indians, and he may
add to the mongrel and turbulent population of Xaxe Venic or some of
the other frontier villages. Naturally such a mixed community as that
which inhabits the isolated province of Peten would be likely sometimes
to give trouble to the officials sent to rule over it; the last Jefe
Político had paid with his life for some effort to enforce the orders
of the Central Government, and a custom-house officer had been murdered
shortly before my arrival and his murderer was confined in the room
next to that in which I slept. But although the Peteneros resent too
much interference on the part of Government officials, and have a
natural prejudice against a high customs tariff, I don't think they can
be called a disorderly people, and I have never heard of them causing
any annoyance to travellers.
A woodcutter is indeed to be pitied who has to seek recreation in such
a hot, dull, dreary place as Sacluc; the condition of the water alone
would justify his preference for aguardiente, as all the drinking water
for the supply of the village is brought from small shallow unfenced
ponds in the savannah, in which the women wash clothes, and where
horses, cattle, and pigs wallow in the mud.
Soon after my arrival I received a visit from an elderly Englishman,
who told me he resided there "because the climate suited him"; he was
an eccentric waif who had at one time served with the British army, in
what capacity I could not discover, although he gave me many unavailing
hints that it was as a commissioned officer, and he was fond of
talking about his "little place" in Somersetshire. The poor fellow
earned an occasional dollar by taking very imperfect photographs, and
his visit to me was in order to learn my intentions, as he had heard
that I also was a "retratista" and was sadly afraid I would cut him out
of his business. He told me that some years earlier when on the road to
Peten he had lost his way in the forest and nearly died of starvation,
and that some Peteneros who found him had carried him to their village
and treated him with the greatest kindness during the illness which
followed from the hardships he had gone through, although they knew
he had nothing with which to repay them. His long residence in Peten
had not enabled him to speak Spanish; but this did not interfere with
his efforts to increase his income by giving lessons in English,
and I greatly regret that I have lost the copy of a notice to that
effect which he had written in Spanish and nailed on his door; it was
certainly a masterpiece of "Spanish as she is spoke." As he put it to
me "Spanish is a very curious language; you may know lots of words, but
somehow or other they won't go together." I met the poor old fellow
another year when he was in broken health and almost penniless, and was
able to help him on his way to Guatemala, where the foreign residents
got him into the Infirmary and he passed quietly away.
A day's ride to the north-east of Sacluc brings one to the lake of
Peten-Itzá with its island town of Flores, known in ancient times
as Tayasal[7]. Flores is a small island not more than a third of
a mile across, lying close to the southern shore of the lake, and
its population (probably including some hamlets on the neighbouring
mainland) is said to number twelve hundred. After a day passed in
hunting up a crew, we spent the night, when the wind usually falls
light, in paddling up to El Remate, at the other end of the lake,
whence a walk of about thirty miles through the forest brought us to
the ruins of Tikál.
[Illustration: TIKÁL, VIEW FROM THE GREAT TEMPLE.]
[Illustration: ROUGH PLAN OF THE RUINS OF TIKÁL.]
The whole site of the ancient town was so completely covered over with
forest that it took us some time to discover the position of the more
important buildings and clear away the trees which covered them. As
neither of my visits was over a week in length the plan of the ruins
here given is very imperfect; it merely indicates the shape and size
of the principal group of stone buildings near the house in which I
took up my quarters, and gives approximately the position of the five
great pyramidal temple mounds. The lintels over the doorways of the
houses had apparently in all cases been formed of three or four squared
beams of hard wood, probably the wood of the chico-sapote tree,
and some of them are still in a perfectly sound condition; the greater
number, however, have slowly rotted away, and buildings can be seen
in every state of decay, many of them reduced to shapeless masses of
hewn stone. The lofty foundation mounds of the principal temples are
terraced and faced with well-wrought stone arranged in panels, somewhat
in the same manner as that shown in the photograph of the Castillo at
Chichén Itzá. At Tikál, however, access to the temple is gained by a
single stairway only, instead of by four stairways, one on each side of
the mound, as is usual at Chichén. The accompanying woodcuts show the
plan of the mound and Temple marked A (of which a photograph is also
given on the following page), and a ground-plan and section of Temple
B. The Temple marked C on the plan is somewhat larger than A or B, the
base of the oblong foundation mound measuring 184 feet by 168 feet, and
the stairway is 38 feet across. The height of the front slope (measured
on the slope, which is very steep) is 112 feet. The base of the temple
itself measures roughly 41 feet by 28 feet, and the height must be over
50 feet, but I was not able to measure it. The temples are all built on
much the same plan; the thickness of the walls is very remarkable, as
is also the method by which the length of axis is secured, by cutting
across the parallel stone vaulted chambers and connecting them by
square-headed doorways with wooden lintels, the thickness of the walls
through which the doorways pass far exceeding the width of the vaulted
chambers. Of the Temple D I took no measurements and have merely
guessed at the size. Temple E is by far the largest, the foundation
mound measuring 280 feet in length and 160 feet on the slope from the
door of the temple to the ground, and the extraordinary thickness of
the walls is shown in the woodcut. One might almost suppose that the
people had originally worshipped in caves in the natural hills, and had
in process of time learnt how to build their caves in artificial hills,
but, unfortunately for any such theory, no Maya cave temples are known
to have existed.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
There is, however, no other group of temples in Central America which
offers such support to the theory that the position and form of the
buildings is due to astronomical considerations. The lofty elevation
so as to secure a clear view, the evident desire to gain length of
axis, and the fact that all the temples may be roughly said to face the
cardinal points favour this theory, and it may be that we can trace the
sequence of the structures by their position. For instance, the temples
B, C, and E, facing the rising sun, would follow one another in order
of time, C would have been built when the erection of A had impeded the
fairway of B, and E would have been built when the fairway of C had
been obscured by the large group of buildings to the east of it; and it
will be observed that this sequence follows the order of size, C being
larger than B, and E than C. The fairway of A, which faces the setting
sun, is still unimpeded, and there is therefore no larger temple facing
in that direction. Unfortunately at the time of my visits to these
ruins I did not pay any particular attention to the orientation of
the temples beyond what was sufficient to fix their positions in the
general sketch-plan; indeed I was not provided with instruments for an
accurate survey, even if I had had time to use them. I now especially
regret that I did not more carefully examine the smaller mounds in the
neighbourhood of A and B, for I am inclined to think that we might
trace an earlier northern temple in the mound marked _f_, which, when
its fairway was interrupted, was superseded by the large temple D,
whose foundation mound stands on higher ground and still commands a
clear view.
[Illustration: A TEMPLE AT TIKÁL. (Marked A on the Plan.)]
[Illustration: CAMP IN THE FOREST, TIKÁL.]
Tikál is not rich in carved stone monuments; there are a few small
monoliths and circular altars in the plaza between temples A and
B ornamented with figures and inscriptions, but they are all much
weather-worn. The most important inscriptions, and they are amongst the
best examples of Maya art, were found in the carved wooden beams which
spanned the doorways of the temples. Many of these beams have decayed,
but the best specimens were removed at the instance of Dr. Bernoulli,
who visited the ruins about 1877, and are now preserved in the museum
at Basle, and two small fragments are to be seen in the British Museum.
The greatest discomfort in exploring the ruins of Tikál is due to the
want of a good supply of water. Every drop of water we used had to
be brought the distance of a mile and a half from an overgrown muddy
lagoon not more than 150 yards wide, and it was so thick and dirty
that I never dared to drink it until it had first been boiled and then
filtered, and my Indian workmen who refused to take any precautions
suffered considerably from fever. The Indians seldom drink cold water
when they are at work, and during a journey they will make frequent
halts by the roadside to light fires and prepare warm drinks; but
notwithstanding this prevalent habit, when we were encamped in places
where the water was indubitably bad, I was never able to persuade my
mozos that any advantage would be gained by actually bringing the water
to the boil and then allowing it to stand and cool.
A few years before the date of my visit to Tikál a party of Indians
from the borders of the lake had attempted to form a settlement in
the neighbourhood of the ruins. The solitary survivor of this party
accompanied me as a guide, all the others having died of fever. This
man told me that the small lagoon was the only source of water-supply,
and that the nearest running stream was a branch of the Rio Hondo
some miles distant. The ancient inhabitants probably stored water in
"chaltunes," the underground cisterns which are found in such large
numbers amongst the ruins in the north of Yucatan; I discovered two
such cisterns beneath the floor of the plaza, but had not time to clear
them out.
I must now ask my reader to return with me, by way of Flores and
Sacluc, to the Paso Real, on the Rio de la Pasion, whence, on the 14th
of March, 1882, I started, in company with Mr. Schulte, the manager
of Jamet & Sastre's mahogany cuttings, on an expedition down the
river, my object being to explore the ruins of Menché. I had heard of
these ruins from Professor Rockstroh, of the Instituto Nacional in
Guatemala, who had visited them the year before, and was, I believe,
the first European to write any description of them. At the Paso Real
I was fortunately able to secure as guide one of the canoemen who had
accompanied Prof. Rockstroh on his expedition.
Three days later I parted company with Mr. Schulte near the mouth of
the Rio Lacandon, where he was about to establish a new "Monteria."
The banks of the river here begin to lose their monotonous appearance,
and for the first time since leaving the Paso Real we caught sight of
some hills in the distance. At midday we entered a gorge about a league
in length, where the river flows between high rocky and wooded banks
and in some places the stream narrowed to a width of forty feet. The
current was not very swift, but the surface of the water moved in great
oily-looking swirls which seemed to indicate a great depth. Below the
narrows the river widens very considerably and the current becomes much
more rapid, and great care had to be taken in guiding the canoes so
as to avoid the numerous rocks and snags. This day we travelled about
thirty miles below the Boca del Cerro and then camped for the night.
Several times during the day we had seen traces of the Lacandones,
"Jicaques" or "Caribes" as my men called them (the untamed Indians who
inhabit the forests between Chiapas and Peten), and while stopping to
examine one of their canoes, which we found hauled up on a sand-spit,
its owner, accompanied by a woman and child, came out of the forest to
meet us. The man was an uncouth-looking fellow, with sturdy limbs, long
black hair, very strongly-marked features, prominent nose, thick lips,
and complexion about the tint of that of my half-caste canoemen. He
was clothed in a single long brown garment of roughly-woven material,
which looked like sacking, splashed over with blots of some red dye.
The man showed no signs of fear and readily entered into conversation
with one of my men who spoke the Maya language; but the woman kept at a
distance, and I could not get a good look at her.
Later in the day we landed to visit a "caribal," or Indian village,
which my guide told me stood somewhere near the river-bank. There was
no trace of it, however, near the river, so we followed a narrow path
into the forest marked by two jaguars' skulls stuck on poles, and here
and there by some sticks laid across the track, over which the Indians
had probably dragged their small canoes. About two miles distant
from the river we found three houses standing in a clearing near the
bank of a small stream. A woman came out to meet us, and received us
most courteously, asking us to rest in a small shed. Her dress was a
single sack-like garment similar to that worn by the man whom we had
met earlier in the day; her straight black hair fell loose over her
shoulders, and round her neck hung strings of brown seeds interspersed
with beads and silver coins, dollars and half-dollars, which she said
were obtained in Tabasco. Two other women came out of their houses
to greet us, and they told us that all the men were away hunting
for wild cacao in the forest and would not return for five days. The
walls of the houses were very low, but in other respects they resembled
the ordinary ranchos of the civilized Indians. I asked if I might look
into one of them, but my mozos strongly advised me not to make the
attempt, as the numerous howling dogs shut up inside were very savage,
and were sure to attack me.
[Illustration: LACANDONES.]
[Illustration: THE RIO USUMACINTA AT MENCHÉ.]
The clearing round the houses was planted with maize, plantains,
chillies, tobacco, gourds, tomatoes, calabash-trees, and cotton.
We exchanged a little salt for some plantains, yams, and tomatoes
without any haggling, and the women agreed to make me some totoposte,
which I was to send for in a few days, and one of them, pointing to a
silver dollar on her necklace, said that they wanted a coin like that
in payment. I was surprised to find the women so pleasant-mannered
and free from the dull shyness which characterizes the civilized
Indians. On my return up the river some days later I again visited
this "caribal," and was received with equal courtesy by the men, who
had then returned from the forest, to whom I repeated my request to
see the inside of one of their houses; however, a very rapid glance
was sufficient to satisfy my curiosity, for as soon as I showed myself
at the half-open door seven or eight dogs tied to the wall-posts
nearly brought down the house in their efforts to get at me, and two
of them were with difficulty prevented by the women from breaking the
cords which held them. Some especial significance must attach to the
wearing of the brown-seed necklaces, for no offers which I could make
would induce either man or woman to part with one of them. I was much
impressed by the striking likeness which the features of the elder man,
who appeared to be the leader of the village, bore to those carved in
stone at Palenque and Menché. The extremely sloping forehead was not
quite so noticeable in the younger men, and it may be that the custom
of binding back the forehead in infancy, which undoubtedly obtained
amongst the ancients, is being now abandoned. These people still use
bows and stone-tipped arrows, which they carry with them wrapped in a
sheet of bark.
To return to my journey to Menché. After visiting the "caribal" we
continued our course down-stream and camped for the night on the right
bank of the river; the next morning an hour's paddle with the very
rapid current brought us in sight of a mound of stones piled up on
the left bank of the river, which we had been told marked the site
of the ruins. On the 18th March, the day of my arrival, the water
in the river was so low that the mound stood high and dry; but from
the colour and marks on the stones it appears as though the average
height of the water were two or three feet from the top of the mound.
We soon scrambled up the rough river-bank, and began to cut our way
through the undergrowth in search of the ancient buildings, which we
found to be raised on a succession of terraces to a height of over 250
feet, with slopes faced with well-laid masonry or formed into flights
of steps. Those buildings marked in the plan with definite outlines
are still in a fair state of preservation, but where the outlines are
left indefinite the houses have fallen and become mere heaps of broken
masonry. The plan must not be regarded as more than a rough sketch,
as I had no instrument with me for measuring vertical angles, and the
distances were judged by pacing, and checked by the occasional use of a
tape measure.
[Illustration]
The house or temple which I chose for a dwelling-place (marked A on
the plan) is a long narrow structure, measuring on the outside 73
feet long by 17 feet broad. There are three doorways giving access to
the single chamber, which is divided up into a number of recesses by
interior buttress-walls. In the middle recess we found a cross-legged
figure of heroic size, reminding me of the seated figure on the great
Turtle of Quirigua; the head with its headdress of grotesque masks and
feather-work was broken off and lying beside it. There appears to have
been some sort of canopy of ornamental plaster-work above the recess,
which had fallen down and lay in a confused heap of dust and fragments
around the figure. When I first entered the house there must have been
over a hundred pieces of rough pottery, similar to those here figured,
strewn on the floor and clustered around the stone figure. Many of
these pots contained half-burnt copal, and from the positions in which
we found them it is evident that they must have been placed in the
house within recent years, probably by the Lacandones, who still, I am
told, hold the place in reverence. In this house, and in most of the
other buildings still standing, stone lintels span the doorways, many
of them elaborately carved on the underside.
On the outside of the house the lower wall surface is flat, and it
seems probable that it had formerly been decorated in colours, as
slight traces of colour can still be found where the plaster coating
has adhered to the underside of the lower cornice. Between the lower
and upper cornice is a broad frieze marked with three large and eight
small niches; these niches have held seated figures and other ornaments
modelled in stucco, of which only a few small fragments now remain in
position. Above the upper cornice rises a light stone superstructure
similar to that on the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, but here also
all the ornament which it was built to support has fallen away.
However, in the middle is a large niche in which a sort of skeleton
of a seated figure of giant proportions can still be traced. The bulk
of the body, the bench on which it was seated, and one long stone
representing a leg can be made out in the photograph, and a close
inspection enables one to trace the outline of the head and to note the
prominent stone which marks the position of the nose; but the stucco
which clothed this skeleton and made it a work of art has been pierced
with the thousand roots of the clinging vegetation and washed away with
hundreds of years of tropical rains.
[Illustration: MENCHÉ, TEMPLE A.]
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE RUINS OF MENCHÉ TINAMIT.]
Many if not all of the other houses and temples had been similarly
decorated, and, although the area covered by them is not of great
extent, there can be little doubt the groups of highly ornamented and
richly-coloured buildings raised above the rushing waters of the river
on gleaming slopes of stucco-covered masonry must have formed a picture
both beautiful and strikingly impressive.
When we had been some days at work at the ruins I sent three of
my men in a canoe up-stream to the "caribal" to get the supply of
totoposte I had ordered from the Lacandones; they returned the next
day without much food, but handed me something they had brought with
them, carefully wrapped up in paper, which, much to my surprise, proved
to be a card from M. Desiré Charnay, the head of a Franco-American
scientific exploring expedition, who for two years had been at work
examining the antiquities of Mexico and Yucatan. M. Charnay had come
up the Usumacinta from Frontera to the head of the navigable water at
Tenosique, and had thence ridden through the forest to a spot on the
river-bank within a short distance of the "caribal" described earlier
in this chapter, known to the canoemen as the Paso de Yalchilan.
Having no canoes in which to convey his party down the river he had
been brought to a halt and was making arrangements for the passage
of himself and his secretary in two small cayucos borrowed from the
Lacandones, when to his great surprise my canoe appeared on the scene.
The next day I sent my canoes back for him, and leaving his men camped
at Yalchilan, he arrived with his secretary at the ruins and occupied
a house which had been cleared for him, and he very kindly added his
ample supply of provisions to my somewhat meagre stock.
M. Charnay has published an interesting account of his journeys in
a book entitled 'Les Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde,' and the
collection of casts made from moulds taken during his two years'
wanderings, which is now exhibited at the Trocadero Museum in Paris,
and in other museums in Europe and America, has formed the basis of
much modern research.
In one of the half-ruined buildings we found a beautifully carved
lintel, fallen from its place and resting face downwards against the
side of the doorway. This excellent example of Maya art I determined
to carry home with me, and at once set my men to work to reduce the
weight of the stone, which must have exceeded half a ton, by cutting
off the undecorated ends of the slab and reducing it in thickness. This
was no easy matter, as we had not come provided with tools for such
work, but shift was made with the end of a broken pickaxe and some
carpenter's chisels; by keeping mozos at work at it, three at a time,
in continual rotation, at the end of a week the weight of the stone had
been reduced by half, and we were able to move it to the river-bank and
pack it in the bottom of our largest canoe.
On the 26th March we struck our camp and all started up the river
together, and on the following day, at the Paso de Yalchilan, I lost
the pleasant companionship of M. Charnay, who here rejoined his men
and returned direct to Tenosique. It was very hard work hauling the
canoe, heavily laden with the stone lintel, against the swift current
of the river, and we were four days getting as far as the mouth of the
Rio Lacandon. On the 30th March we reached the first inhabited rancho
at Santa Rosa, and next day I met Mr. Schulte at the mouth of the Rio
Salinas and accepted a passage in his canoe to the Paso Real, leaving
the mozos and my heavily-laden canoes to follow more slowly. On the
way up-stream we landed on the left bank of the river not far from
the mouth of the Rio Salinas, and passed a few hours in examining the
ruins of a town of considerable extent. I could find no stone houses
standing, but there were several fragments of sculptured stones bearing
hieroglyphic inscriptions lying amongst the numerous foundation mounds,
and the whole site would probably repay careful exploration.
From the Paso Real the stone lintel was carried by Indians to Sacluc,
where I purchased a saw from one of the wood-cutters and was again able
slightly to reduce the weight of the stone. From Sacluc it was hauled
across the savannah to the neighbourhood of Flores on a solid-wheeled
ox-cart, the solitary wheeled vehicle then existing in the province of
Peten; then it was again slung on a strong pole and carried by sixteen
Indian mozos through the forest to the British frontier village of El
Cayo, where it was again packed in the bottom of a canoe and sent down
the river to Belize; it now rests at Bloomsbury in the British Museum.
[Illustration: MENCHÉ, FRAGMENT OF A STONE LINTEL.]
At the time of my visit Menché was supposed to lie within the
Guatemalan frontier, and a few years later leave was obtained for
me from the Government of that Republic to remove some other carved
lintels from the ruins. Gorgonio Lopez and his brothers were sent
down the river for this purpose, and after making careful moulds of
all the carved lintels still in position in the houses, they removed
some others from those houses which had fallen into ruin; these they
packed in the canoes and hauled up the Usumacinta to the mouth
of the Rio Salinas. That stream was then ascended to a point above
the Nueve Cerros where canoe-navigation ceases, and the stones were
thence carried overland to Coban, where they were carefully packed
and sent in carts to the port of Panzos, on the Rio Polichic, for
shipment to England. I presented these sculptures also to the National
Collection, and they are now to be seen at the British Museum. By a
recent treaty Menché and the valley of the Lacandon River have passed
into the possession of Mexico. Since the date of my visit a party of
mahogany-cutters formed a camp on the site of the ruins, but at the
end of two years the "monteria" was abandoned, and the ancient city is
again left in the solitude of the forest.
[Illustration: FLORES.]