But there is no rain in Mexico all the winter long and all odors that come on the air are warm. Trees with scarlet flowers bend over us. The pomegranate hangs its rosy fruit, the coffee berries ripen on the shrubs, and trees that know no fall, no nakedness of limb, hang everlasting canopies of green. We ride gayly over plowed cornfields and along the borders of plantations where sugar canes chatter with the wind.
Then anon towards noon we descry a settlement veiled in verdure, and like a green knoll rising above it the vast upper story of a mighty tree. There is no need to ask. It must be Tule and its tree. And we ride by narrow shady lanes between banana palms, date palms, and flowering shrubs, crisscross from the highway to the tree.
Behold a great cliff of wood, gray like a willow or an ash, with an underbark of nut-fiber color, going upward in a grand sweep to the branches. At the five bays of the tree one might build five fair-sized houses.
All is silent, all is beautiful round about it. A beggar only is sitting under the tree. The large white church behind it reflects a blaze of sunshine. A bougainvillæa, twenty feet high, is one mass of crimson bloom all attended by bees and wasps. The solid white wall which runs round with blockhouse at one corner is unimpaired. On the white façade of the high broad church are painted tall Moorish decorations in an intense royal blue, tall slender mosques of gleaming blue, and big, red, empty niches for saints beside them.
The tree lifts its voluminous green bulk higher than the church, but all its branches, all its stems and leaves, hang as it were in reverence to the high-placed figure of the Virgin. It is plume-leaved, and the tree is held sacred by many tribes as the tree of mourning. It has the grand dignity of sorrow for the dead.
What a tree! A hundred horses could stand under it. Halfway up, in the midst of the giant growth, starts straight and bolt upright, a new tree, larger itself than any King Charles' Oak, larger even than that tree in Palestine under which the Greek monks tell you Abraham and Sarah entertained their Lord. The German Baron Humboldt, famous traveler in his day, scratched his name on it in the year 1802, the only name, the only vandalism which has been permitted. It is a perfect tree in full maturity, the same species of cypress as the Tree of the Dreadful Night at Mexico City, but in incomparably better condition and much larger and older. If it could tell its story, the lingering of Cortes and his men in its shade would be but a page. For it must ever have attracted the attention of whoever passed that way. The old cities like Mitla, twenty miles away, are choked in dust. But with the freshness of spring the tree lives on.
Outside the walled churchyard which holds the tree is the town plaza swarming with wasps but without gardens or bandstand or any of the common adornments of such places, not even a statue of Juarez. But there is an old portal and one shut shop bearing the curious name of La Vuelta al Mundo, the Return to the World. But they have all gone their way, those who sat under the tree in ages past, and none return to tell us how it was in their day.
So—we to our horses once more, leaving, like the others, the Tree behind like old Time itself.
Mitla is the American Luxor, and in the quieter days of Diaz' rule in Mexico many were the travelers who went there, to gaze and wonder. The ruins are those of some great city of a bygone civilization but what civilization, whose civilization, none can tell. History does not work for them as for the ruins of ancient Athens or Thebes—for they are entirely without record and their story, whatever it may be, interweaves in no way with the story of mankind as we know it. How rash the Outline of History seems when we look at the broken outlines of what is called Mitla! And the biblical traditions can hardly be felt to have any reference to Mitla either, unless, as some archeologists have believed, the country was originally settled by one of the lost tribes of Israel.
The greater part of the North American continent is without ruins, unless one thinks of the evidences of primitive man living there for ages. The mounds on the high banks of the Mississippi and the cliff dwellings of New Mexico tell not of a romantic past but of the uncouth savagery of the Stone Age. But away south, in the latitude of what is now British Honduras, are evidences of a way of living not unlike that of Greeks and Romans, or of Egyptians. In fact the dumbfounding truth is that the ruins are of a convincing resemblance to the ruins of the East. Whoever lived there prized gold and gems as did humanity in the Old World, and there is evidence enough that they lived for Empire as did Persians and Babylonians. But they also built as humanity built in ages past, in Egypt, in the East. The ruins of Mitla would not be supremely remarkable in the vicinity of Athens or Tyre or on the Nile. They would be almost in place. It is not merely because of the pyramids. The principal site of pyramids in Mexico is two hundred and more miles to the north, and though of course one is tempted to link the Mexican pyramids with those of Egypt the likeness is less startling than at first appears.
It is common in peoples to imitate in their architecture the natural contours of their surroundings, and I think the Mexican pyramids with their truncated tops are imitations in stone of the altarlike pyramidal mountains, the little mesas so characteristic of the Anahuac plateau. First, victims were offered for sacrifice on sacred mountains, and then as a stage of progress on stone piles shaped like mountains.
But Mitla, and again Palenque in a similar latitude two hundred and fifty miles east, are not imitations of anything in Nature, but rather triumphs over ordinary life in vast untamed wildernesses. Their buildings have tradition and style. Whoever lived at Mitla lived sumptuously there.
I traveled to the little mining town of Tlacolula where the high road hastens downward to Tehuantepec and the Pacific, and then took horses from the Zapotecs. Here all the inhabitants are either Zapotec or Mixtec Indians. And I spent a dusty day at Mitla. Riding up a strange valley betwixt cavernous rock walls marked by splurges of ancient color I thought of an immemorial road and slaves with pots on their heads and princes in chariots drawn by men. I thought of wars, invasions, and the massacre and destruction in what must have been the last days of that Mitla Empire when some barbarous race which cared not for Art swept in upon the people and destroyed them.
There is a Zapotec village now. There were Kings of Zapotec when Cortes came and he made nothing of their kingship, though the greatest ruler that the Mexican people now acknowledge was a Zapotec, the famous and beloved President, Benito Juarez.
Behind the village, scorched and sunbleached, lie the heaps of what was Empire, of what was ancient wreckage in the days when the Spaniards came. Some of it lies in shapeless ruin—perhaps the homes of the poor. Zapotec houses of adobe have added to the heaps. There were Zapotec buildings which the Spaniards sacked; there were tombs of Zapotec Kings or the mummies of Kings, stored with gold and gems in the ancient vaults of stone. Mitla figured for long in the quest for El Dorado. And still to-day it is believed by the Indians that vast sacred treasures are here stored away. They guard the place with superstitious horror still, and a grand work of excavation leading to the discovery of subterranean temples and mausoleums might credibly lead to an uprising.
But I stood there undisturbed and looked at the great monoliths and halls, the stamps of classic pillars, the great walls with their conventional carvings and crosses. I went underground into an atmosphere hot and close as the interior of a pyramid—into mysterious chambers. I crept, candle in hand, into an abyss of darkness, as it were into the hidden past of the dead. And with relief I returned to the tropic blaze of light outside.
There stand long, low, white walls with fretted battlements, and there are hieroglyphics which tell no story, and there in the dust lie the footmarks of barefooted Indians. What does it all mean? Who has the book of the words? There is no answer. I write my name in a register which an Indian workman keeps—"Year 1923, Nationality British." I came and I passed. I have a signature, but Mitla has none. That is not even its name. But fitly might one read—
The story of gold commences in Genesis when of a certain country we are told "The gold of that land is good." It does not say for what or for whom it was good. It was just good. Gold is good: that was in the beginning.
Primitive man held gold in his hand as children do bright pebbles and he was pleased with it, as God the Creator Himself was reputed to be pleased with the world when He had made it. Man in the earliest days kept the gold which he picked up, made a possession of it, fought to keep it, fought also to get other men's gold. Or he stole it and was sued at law for its return.
He burnished his gold, he cut it, he melted it, he cast it as personal adornment, he recast it as idols, he saw that fire had no power to destroy it, he put its power above the power of the Sun, he worshiped it.
No animal prizes gold, not even the ape. Desire for it is a human passion.
After gold the greatest possession was in brides who were bought and sold for a weight of gold somewhat less than their own weight of flesh. And after men's wives their cattle were most precious and sold also for gold. Primitive man worshiped the idea of the perfect bride in a goddess of gold and he worshiped his herds in the golden calf and golden bulls.
Judah's gods were largely gold and sex. Moses gave, however, their vital revelation. His creative spirit distilled the idea of Jehovah, invisible lawgiver and controller set above all visible creation. Still the weakness of the Israelites has remained until this day—a passion for sex and gold.
Gold in itself has nothing of evil in it. It is as innocent as iron or tin. If we call gold fine and lead base it is because we ascribe to them our human ideas about them. Gold at best was prized for its beauty and its scarcity. It could fittingly adorn a bride, it could fittingly be devoted to Jehovah, as in the building of the Temple; but once it had been used to make a golden calf it had been defouled and could not be worn again or devoted to the True God. Moses made the children of Israel eat that disgraced gold—after the calf which they made of their Egyptian spoils had been consumed by fire.
It is, however, possible that much of the gold of the Egyptians is worn and used by men and women to-day. Gold does not easily perish and yet is not easily recognizable. It exists from age to age, cast and recast in ever new forms, gilding ever new superstitions, glories, and ambitions. The gold of Darius was the gold of Alexander, and the gold of Alexander was gold in the triumphs of the Romans. In turn it adorned the rude limbs of Hans and Goths and Franks and Saracens. It glittered in the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was part of the treasure of the Popes—but why labor the point? Gold has not been allowed to disappear. Tombs are rifled for it. Ocean's bottom is dredged for it. Every man who digs the soil is ready to identify it.
The gold of the New World proved a marvelous accession and drew men to it more than did the Cross of our religion. The Wise Men fixed their eyes on the East, seeking to lay aside their pride and bow to the spiritual new birth. But the young men of our era set their eyes upon the West, saying, "Gold—we will go there for gold." And the older men looked there also, asking for Power, of which gold is the index.
Ah, it has been and is the great desideratum, gold, pockets full, coffers full, bank full, heart full—to be finished with the practical problem of life and to have at our disposal all that gold can command.
With their gold the rich gild temples as of old, forgetting the lesson that our God "preferreth above all temples the upright heart and pure." The cynics and the buffoons and the rabble make also their golden calves which in turn some spiritual Moses will cast down.
But where is the poetry of the quest of El Dorado? Surely always in the quest and never in the attainment. If ever in life you find what you are seeking you have gone wrong. Finding, you lose. The whole of life is balanced betwixt the aching heart and the golden dream.
When the quest is transmuted to music, which at its highest strives to express the inexpressible, the ineffable, the unqualified x of life, gold is represented in deep notes and remote superterrestrial harmonies suggesting a golden age, a golden dream, all that we have missed, the pathos of mortality, the forever lost, the infinitely precious past. There were beautiful women, myriads of them, each distinct and lovely, in far-off other times, centuries, ages ago, Queens of Sheba, Helens. They sleep like the daughter of Pharaoh beside a lotus flower, gone to dust, going to dust, to infinite fineness. Your eyes never saw them; they lifted their faces in the morning, at sunrise in the valleys, or on the mountains, far away, in other times. We look back to them from the afternoon, from the evening, from a later time; we cannot see them. They are hidden forever, like the heart of the world.
"Seek and ye shall find" means "Seek forever and ye shall find." "Knock, and it shall be opened" means "Knock forever and it shall be opened." How can we in our mortality find the gold? We cannot. The true El Doradoist, hammer in hand, is knocking and tapping forever, seeking veins of gold, seeking hollow chambers, seeking and opening tombs, climbing westward after a vision which forsakes him every day of his life.
But whither have we led our thoughts, into what starlit unreality? This volume, the like of which was no doubt burned at Alexandria thousands of years ago, is a study of reality, is it not?—the study of the quest of an everlasting substance by those who cannot last. It concerns largely the five last centuries of the second millennium after Christ, and certain peoples called Spanish, Indian, Anglo-Saxon. The Spanish people obtained a great hold on the gold, but it has fallen from their grasp. Americans now are foremost on the track of El Dorado, a super-race who seek gold, it is true, but seek more the Power of which gold is the index. They will take gold by machinery; power giving gold and gold giving power. They have seen in the mirage a golden dream and called it Pan-America.
There, most fittingly, closes this volume of the study of the Quest of El Dorado. A thought, however, comes to me while looking at the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan—When America has consolidated Pan-America from Alaska to Panama she may build a great imperial memorial, a pyramid greater than all other pyramids, a massive work of stone on which Time can play but little havoc. And ultimately that pyramid alone will survive her. In the long night of history it will stand, in the starlit unreality of forgotten Time. Others, somewhere afar, will be seeking still.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.