III.
The Mound-builders in Central America.
──────
While the Mayas of Yucatan and Central America spoke a different language from the Astecs, certain analogies in building and invention warrant us in considering them at this point. The oldest civilization in America was in Yucatan, Honduras and Guatemala, and, according to Bancroft, the oldest city in the western world is Copan, which was in ruins, deserted, and overgrown by a dense tropical forest, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, three hundred and sixty years ago.
The Mayas of Yucatan, according to their traditions, first arrived there 793 B.C. from “Tulapam.” We don’t know where “Tulapam” was; but they must have come by sea, because the natives of Yucatan to-day speak a language exactly similar to that spoken by the extinct aborigines of Cuba, Hayti and Jamaica, when the Spaniards first arrived there. North of Guatemala stand the ancient ruins of Palenque, the Mecca of Central America, whose facaded palaces and stuccoed temples are full of hieroglyphics and bas-reliefs, beautiful in ruins, telling the sad history of a vanished race who here offered sacrifice to Quetzalcohuatl, the nature god of the Mayas.
Nepenthe rules here supreme. A tropical forest has torn asunder her pyramids, while trees nine feet in diameter have shot up in the midst of her buildings, and nine feet of vegetable mold fill the inner courts above the pavement, where sacerdotal processions, possibly before the birth of Phœnician commerce, swung their censers and performed their mysterious rites.
A few words concerning Uxmal and its ruins will answer for the rest of Yucatan. The walls of this temple were nine feet thick, and the rich, sculptured facades are the finest in America. The sculptured portion covers twenty-four thousand square feet, while the terraced mound supporting the house contained over sixty thousand cubic yards of material; and we must remember that these people had neither metallic tools nor beasts of burden.
Nothing but the feeling of profoundest awe must fill the modern traveler, as he emerges from the depths and gloom of a tropical forest, and comes face to face with the massive walls of the pyramid of Copan, containing twenty-six million cubic feet of stone brought from a distant quarry, and whose base is six hundred and twenty-four feet by eight hundred and nine feet, with a tower one hundred and eighty-two feet, built of huge blocks of stone, surmounted by two huge trees rooted in its mold.
Within its ruins were found fourteen statues, the largest thirteen feet four inches tall, and all covered with bas-reliefs and hieroglyphics whose workmanship is equal to that on the Egyptian pyramids.
In front of the statues stand huge altars six feet square, divided into thirty-six tablets of hieroglyphics, which tell to the world their history; but they speak in an unknown tongue, so the traveler must surmise if these were the emblems of the Mayan pantheon, or the palace of a pre-Adamite man.
The curtain falls, the traveler returns, and the æons commence again their ceaseless cycles around mysterious Copan.