[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."
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 today 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
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 dugout 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 hotch-potch 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 northeast 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 sun-lit 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.
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.
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.
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.