CHAPTER II
The Prophecy
THE “that” which Fray José gave me to serve as an open sesame to the Mayan priest was a strange combination of the old and the new, of the pagan and the Christian. Upon a sheet of paper bearing the figure of the Cross, he had written a message in hieroglyphic symbols, and accompanying this, was a tiny bag of painted hide containing a medal of St. Christopher and a tiny golden image of a Mayan deity. Good Fray José was no narrow-minded bigot but was willing to recognize conditions as they were and to make necessary concessions to the occasions that arose. If the Indians were willing to please him by assuming the veneer of Christianity, he was quite willing to reciprocate by pleasing the Indians to the extent of employing pagan symbols and following pagan customs, though he had no more faith in them than the Indians had in his Church and its rites.
It is needless to describe the details of my trip to Totil or to narrate my experiences while I remained in the isolated little Indian village, studying the ancient Zutugil language under the tutelage of the painstaking patient Pedro, a dignified-looking Indian, who, being in charge of Fray José’s most outlying chapel, regarded himself as a dignitary of the Church of Rome and the most important and exalted personage in the district. But, being Indian, he was Indian to the core, and I was both interested and amused to discover that he had painted the images of all the saints a mahogany brown, and had painted the figure of Christ upon the crucifix inky-black.
“It is that the people may regard them with greater reverence,” he explained when I asked him about it. “How can one expect an Indian to adore the white Santos when they have received nothing but harm from those of white skin?” he asked. “And,” he added, “how can the white Santos or the white Cristo know what is good for the brown Indians?” Then, a bit hesitantly and shamefacedly, “and besides, the great God of our ancestors was black and with a black Cristo before them they feel that they are worshipping Ekah and are more devout. Does the Señor think I have done wrong?”
I assured him I did not. If, by painting the images, he won more converts or added to the sincerity of their devotions, I considered the means were justified by the end. But I felt quite sure that Pedro himself preferred a black Saviour and brown saints to those with white skins, for which I could not blame him much either.
But regardless of his religious idiosyncracies, Pedro was an excellent teacher of his native tongue, and at the end of six weeks in his village, he assured me that I had mastered enough of the Zutugil language to continue on my journey; although, he added: “No white man can learn the tongue of my people. Even Fray José speaks it always with the tongue of the white man.”
Accompanied by four Indians who acted as guides, porters and camp-boys, I started on what I believed at the time to be the last lap of my journey.
Truly my visit to that little shop in Vigo was leading me far afield. At Totil I left civilization behind. Beyond was wilderness; unknown, almost uninhabited country; vast forests, great mountains, wide plains; land seldom or never trod by white men, where even the old conquerors had not penetrated. For hundreds of miles there were no signs of human beings; along our route were only the occasional huts of half-savage Indians, or clusters of thatched homes of the tribesmen once--centuries before--under Mayan dominion, though now showing no traces of the culture of that wonderful race. But if no traces remained in the people, there were abundant evidences in the mute remains the Mayas had left behind. Time and again we came upon huge columns or stellae of sculptured stone in the forest, wonderful monoliths that under any other conditions I would have examined and studied with the most intense interest. Twice, too, we passed enormous ruined temples, great trees growing from their summits, tangled vines and tropical shrubs sprouting from the crevices between the stones, their wonderfully carved façades defaced by time and the elements; their interiors choked with débris, but still imposing in their majestic proportions; their beauty of design and the intricacy of their sculptured stone work. Once, too, we gazed from a hilltop upon the ruins of an immense city, upon a plain beside a river. But all was silent, deserted, forgotten.
* * * * *
FOR eleven days we traveled, sometimes following trails visible only to the eyes of my Indian guides, at other times hewing a way through the jungles, again following the rivers, ascending mountains, marching through great open forests. The way seemed endless; I began to fear my Indians had lost their way, when, issuing from the forest, we came to a cleared plain. Tilled fields of maize, cane, sweet potatoes and others plants covered many acres, and in the centre of the cultivated lands was a village of thatch-roofed houses gleaming like gold in the sun. That the modern village occupied the site of an ancient city was evident. Ruins of stone walls and buildings rose above the waving corn and banana trees. Towering above the village was a great pyramidal Kus[1] topped by a temple bearing an ornate roof-comb, and as we entered the village, we passed between two rows of sculptured stone columns. I gazed at them in amazement. They were gay with red, green and white paint; at their bases were flowers and fruits. There was no doubt of it. Here in this remote village, the old faiths still lived, the old gods were still worshipped. Very likely, the people still worshipped in the ancient temple. There, no doubt, the priest, Katchilcan, still officiated, though Fray José had not mentioned it.
[1] KUS--A mound, usually pyramidal--supporting a temple, a shrine or an altar used for religious or ceremonial purposes.
My thoughts were cut short as we reached the village and I glanced about at the inhabitants. Some scurried out of sight at our approach, others stared curiously at us, still others wore hostile expressions, while some smiled friendly greetings; but one and all were totally different from any Indians we had seen. I seemed to have stepped back five hundred years, to have dropped into a Mayan village of the time of the conquest. Living duplicates of Mayan sculptures were on every side. Here were the artificially distorted skulls, the heavy noses, the elaborately ornate costumes of the Mayan bas-reliefs. Not that every individual was of that type. The features of many were typically Indian, but in every case the costumes were those of the old Mayas. There was not a coat, a shirt, a pair of trousers or a hat in the entire village. Fray José had left much untold--perhaps he had wanted to give me a surprise; perhaps it was so familiar to him that he had forgotten to mention the details. Whatever the reason--with such people before me, with the great temple on its lofty Kus now rising above my head, it seemed perfectly natural that in this spot the old priest-cult of the Mayas should still survive and hold its power. And it spoke volumes for Fray José’s sympathy with the natives, for the Indians’ confidence and faith in the jolly Padre, that he had been allowed to visit this village, had become friendly with the priest, and that I also had been allowed to reach the place without molestation.
We had now passed through the village, had skirted the base of the temple-mound and had approached a low, ancient stone building with a sculptured frieze of jaguar heads and entwined serpents.
As we neared the building, a man stepped from the doorway, and instantly my Indians halted, stooped, and gathering handfuls of dust from the roadway, scattered it on their heads. That gesture of humbling themselves was enough to identify the man in the doorway as the high-priest of their ancient faith. I gazed at him with intense interest. He was very old. His hair was white, his brown face seamed, wrinkled, and creased until it resembled a withered, shrivelled sapodillo.[2] His cheek-bones seemed about to break through the tightly-drawn skin; his eyes were so sunken that they appeared mere pin points of light in the depths of the sockets, and between his eagle-beak nose and his sharp, bony chin his thin lips were like a gash among cavernous wrinkles. In his ears he wore huge plugs of carved jade; about his scrawny, turtle-like neck was a necklace of huge turquoises, garnets and crystal from which depended a gold disk representing the sun. About his head was a band of cotton woven in an elaborate geometrical pattern of red, white and green, and with two long tail feathers of the _Quetzal_ rising above his forehead. He was dressed in a single loose robe of black cotton ornamented with intricate designs in the sacred red, white and green of the ancient Mayas, and he leaned upon a polished staff of black wood elaborately carved and with the upper portion covered with turquoise mosaic work.
[2] A tropical tree bearing an edible fruit; its sap yields edible gum, now in demand for making chewing gum.
* * * * *
FOR a moment he peered at me in silence, and a frown deepened the wrinkles on his forehead. I stepped forward, greeted him in Zutugil, and handed him the letter and the little skin bag I had received from Fray José.
Instantly, as his claw-like hand grasped the token, his manner changed. The frown vanished, he nodded his head, and he welcomed me to his village. Such was my meeting with Katchilcan, high-priest of Tohil the Rumbler-god of the Kitche Maya, descendant of the royal line of the Great Snake of Mayapan. Fray José had spoken truly when he had said he would help me to step into the past, for Katchilcan was the past personified.
But though he was of the past, yet he was thoroughly aware of the present. How old he was no one--not even he--could say, and undoubtedly he exaggerated his age, when he declared that his parents had been killed by the soldiers of Tonatiuh (Alvarado) and that he could remember the Padre Landa. Yet who can say? Who can declare positively that an Indian may not live for three centuries or more? Be that as it may, the priest was very, very old--a centenarian beyond question--with all the wisdom of his years, a keen, alert brain, and steeped in the lore, the involved mythology, the legends, the customs and the history of his people.
Though he sedulously carried out the ceremonials and practices of his faith, though his people revered and respected him, yet he realized that his faith and his people were doomed. Never having come into contact with any Christian priest other than Fray José (unless his seemingly impossible tale were true and he _had_ known Bishop Landa in his youth) he regarded the good Padre as the head of both the Christian Church and the entire white race, and as such held the most profound respect and reverence for him, aside from his personal friendship and a deep gratitude for some service rendered him, but what it was he would not reveal. For these reasons he received me as the direct representative of Fray José and treated me as the Padre’s envoy. But I was far too familiar with Indian psychology to broach the purpose of my visit at once. Impatient as I was, I was forced to bide my time, to become acquainted with Katchilcan, to win his entire confidence, to lead the conversation by degrees to the myths and history of the Mayas, before I showed him the codex.
But when at last I felt the time was ripe and I spread the papyrus before him, I was wholly unprepared for the effect. With a strange, sharp cry he fell upon his knees, cast dust upon his head, and in his thin cracked voice began chanting in an unintelligible dialect. Then, rising, he reverently returned the codex to my hands.
“Blessed of the gods are you, my lord,” he cried in Zutugil. “I am an old man, my lord, but were I a youth in my strength, gladly would I give half my life to possess that book.”
I gasped. What secret, what import did the codex hold? What had caused the old priest to be so deeply affected by his first glance at it? Why would he have given “half his life” to have owned it? Eagerly I questioned him. For a time he was silent, motionless, thinking deeply. Then at last he spoke.
“My lord does not know?” he asked. “My lord knows not that he has the book of Kukulcan? That he holds in his hands the prophecy of him who was known to Mayapan as the ‘snake with feathers?’ That he holds the secret of that prophecy and its fulfillment, that he holds the symbols that no other has seen? Know you, then, my lord, that in the long ago, ere Kukulcan the ‘plumed serpent’ departed, he gave unto my people a prophecy. Great should the people of my race be, mighty their power and their conquests, but in the end they should wither and die. Those who builded the temples and carved the stones and placed the great images should vanish, and the gods should be forgotten, and those who remained should war one with another and should be scattered far and wide. And they should each speak with a different tongue and be divided among themselves, and should forget their greatness and their gods and their arts. But some few of the great ones should survive, and they should go far from their homes to a place called Mictolan and there they should remain and worship their old gods and have their temples and should abide, until, in the fullness of the allotted time, they should be called forth by their gods and should once more rule the land and be great again and should cast down the new gods. And that they might know when the gods called them forth, the wise Kukulcan caused to be made a book telling of the prophecy and of Mictolan, and of the hidden people, and bearing the symbol that would serve as a token to let the people know that the allotted time had passed when the book with the symbol was brought to them. And to you, my lord, has come that token, which borne to the people at Mictolan, shall call them forth to rule the land and be great once more and shall cast down the new gods. Blessed by the gods of my fathers is my lord. And that it should fall to a white man to bear the symbol and to fulfill the prophecy is not strange, for Kukulcan the Plumed Serpent was white of skin and was bearded, and it was said in the prophecy that a son of his sons’ sons should bear the book with the token of Kukulcan.”
* * * * *
I WAS utterly astounded at his words. But equally, of course, I did not take them literally. Much of what he said was the same well known ancient legend or myth. Much of the so-called prophecy I had heard before, for it was common to the Aztecs, the Mayas and even the Incas, and much of what had been foretold centuries before the conquest had occurred exactly as prophesied. Or perhaps, Indian like, the prophecy had been invented to fit the facts. Yet, over and over again, I, like many others, had heard the tale, the rumors of the remnants of the race dwelling in some remote, unknown, secret district, where they retained their ancient customs and religion. Was it not possible there might be truth in these stories; some foundation of fact? Such things had occurred before. There was that Aztec colony in the hidden valley in Mexico of which Professor Cervantes had told me. There was that isolated group of Incas in the interior of Peru, that had been discovered and described by Dr. Armand. And I could see no reason why, somewhere in the wild interior of Guatemala or southern Mexico, a similar colony of the Mayans might not also exist. For that matter, here was this village where I sat, where the old priest Katchilcan still held sway, where the ancient temple was still in daily use, where the sacred fires still burned continuously, where Tohil the Rumbler-god and Xibalba the Great Snake were still worshipped, where the people still lived in the past, and yet neither hidden nor secreted from the rest of the world. If such villages and people could survive almost unaltered, was there anything improbable in the idea of others, entirely cut off from the world, retaining even more of their ancient life? At any rate, of one thing I was convinced. My codex was the record of the prophecy of Kukulcan, it was Maya, and it was of the Old Empire. All I had journeyed so far to learn was now clear. I possessed a priceless document of the Mayas, a codex more valuable than any in existence, and if Katchilcan had not drawn upon his imagination, the actual work of that semi-mythical hero-god, the Plumed Serpent, Kukulcan, or as he was known to the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, himself. I was elated, overjoyed. But I wondered about that story of the isolated colony, and I wondered just how much old Katchilcan really knew, how much he had left unsaid.
“And did the prophecy fall out as told?” I asked. “Do the survivors of your race still worship their old gods and await the coming of the token? And where O, most Wise One, is this place called Mictolan?”
The old fellow’s eyes held a far away look, as though he were gazing into the past and seeing the glories of the civilization of his ancestors. But at my words he came back to earth and turned towards me, his deep-set eyes, like pin points of fire, seeming to pierce my innermost thoughts.
“That I cannot say, my lord,” he replied. “But being a prophecy of the mighty Kukulcan, of a surety it must have been fulfilled. Did not my people vanish? Did they not forget their gods? Are they not scattered? Do they not speak the Pipil, the Kitche, the Zutugil, the Katchiquel and other tongues? Why then should I doubt that they still dwell in Mictolan? But where that spot may be, I know not. Upon the book that my lord has, a part of the symbol is missing. But I can read that it is to the north and west.” He waved his skinny arm in a wide, all-embracing gesture towards the endless mountains. “And, my lord,” he continued, lowering his voice, “maybe of this I should not speak; mayhap I have said too much already. But to him who has the Master’s book, I feel I may speak freely. And my lord is not like other white men. To him has been given the token, and he must be the son of the sons of Kukulcan who also was bearded and white of skin. But even though my lord is not of the sons of the Master, yet all men, white or red, are brothers at heart, although some are bad and seek only to rob and destroy. But to you, my lord, may I speak with freedom, for you come with the pledge of the great priest of your people, of him whom I know and trust as a brother though we worship different gods.
“Though I cannot say where lies this place of Mictolan, yet in the book it is written that great bars were placed in the way and cleverly was it hidden, and magic surrounds it. To reach it one must pass through the Valley of Death, through the Tunnel of the Serpents, through the pit of the great Zotional (alligator); and even then one must cross the eight deserts with the raging whirlwind that cuts the solid rock, and must face the demon Ixputeque and the fiend Neztpehua in the realm of hot ashes and the two blazing mountains, and at last must enter the cave of bats and cross the bridge of life. Did I not say, my lord, that I would give half my life to possess the book of Kukulcan? And why, my lord? Ah, for it is foretold that to him who has the book and comes by it by honest means, the way to Mictolan shall be made easy, and he shall be welcomed as a great lord and shall gain great peace and happiness and shall abide forever with the gods. So, my lord, I was told by my father, who had it from his father and from his father’s father before him for many generations, aye, till one goes back even to those far-off days when all this land was of my people, and the old gods ruled and walked among men, and sacred fires burned before all the altars, and sons of the Plumed Serpent sat in their palaces.”
Very impressive were the old priest’s words. There was something indescribably convincing about his manner, perhaps something hypnotic. There, in the ancient room, with the ancient priest so like a Mayan sculptured figure, with the still more ancient codex--the Book of Kukulcan--in my hands, there seemed nothing improbable, nothing incongruous in his story. The prophecy seemed very real. Though under any other circumstances, among any other surroundings, I might have scoffed at it all, might have put the whole thing down as a fanciful myth, yet there, with the words of Katchilcan in my ears, somehow I felt a conviction that I was destined to find that hidden spot called Mictolan, that the whole chain of circumstances, from finding the codex in the book at Vigo to my coming to this village and meeting Katchilcan, seemed destiny and fate, and that I would fulfill that destiny.
Strange as it may appear now, at the time it never occurred to me that I might fail, that, having no definite knowledge of the site of Mictolan, if for that matter there was such a spot, I might never find it. And, quite as though I had planned to do so from the beginning, I at once set about making preparations to start on what, to me in my sober senses, would have appeared the wildest of wild goose chases, the most preposterous of adventures.
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