CHAPTER X

THE GREEKS OF THE WEST

We were in Cozumel four days. I saw nothing of it but the grassy streets of San Miguel, being cooped up in a rented room while I wrote accounts of our finds for the New York _Times_, which generously financed the expedition.

Everyone sent messages to relatives at home by the Mexican radio. Griscom engaged a score of small boys to hunt birds and already has established the fact that several of the eighteen or twenty species reported to be peculiar to this island do actually exist here.

Cozumel is like a sheep town at the end of the shearing season. Most of the _chicleros_ have come out of the bush, and San Miguel is the Mecca where they like to spend in a few weeks debaucheries the proceeds of months of toil.

McClurg and Whiting and I went to a _fiesta_ in the local movie house, bar-room and dance hall. Everyone in Cozumel who amounts to anything was there, except our friend, Adolfo Perez, the chicle magnate, who amounts to too much.

First they crowned a “Queen of Love and Beauty,” who had to sit on a throne beside the stage through the rest of the proceedings and look self-conscious, the only expression on her otherwise uninteresting face. They had probably picked her as a beauty because she was of lighter complexion than most of them, for the Mexicans, like the Japanese, seem to prefer blondes. When she had been selected a series of youths of local importance read long odes and prose poems which they had written in her honor. This tedious affair was succeeded by amateur theatricals which were quite well done and very amusing.

The audience was stiffly dressed, but was kindly in mien and frank in its manners.

Between the acts I felt a sudden warm dampness on my left shin, which I had stretched under the seat before me. The woman in that seat had brought a baby with her. I warned Whiting, who warned McClurg beyond him. McClurg’s mirth was so conspicuous that we became the object of many stares.

“What’s the matter with you?” I reproved, “remember you were once a baby, they happen in the best of families.”

“Yes,” he managed to say, between spasms of amusement, “but the baby is on the mother’s breast.”

We met a man in San Miguel named Ramon Coronado who said he could take us to two pyramidal temples in the interior of the island. From his description they do not seem to be among the ruins found by previous expeditions. The bush of Cozumel is so thick and undisturbed by man that it is quite possible there are “new” ruins here. But Adolfo Perez told us that he has heard Gann is coming down this coast soon in a schooner, exploring the edge of the mainland. We therefore decided to postpone Coronado’s temples until we had made an effort to find the ruins we have heard of at Xkaret, Paalmul, Acomal, and more recently, at Chakalal and Inah. A handsome fisherman with a piratical moustache whose name is Silverio Castillo, was engaged to pilot us along the mainland shore. We told him we wanted to go first to whichever of these places was most southerly, and then work northward.

“_Si_,” said he, “Paalmul.”

“Oh, then, Paalmul is south of Acomal? Yesterday you said it was the other way around.”

“No, Paalmul is most to the south.”

“And Xkaret is north of Acomal?”

“Xkaret is south of Paalmul.”

“Then, hombre, go to Xkaret first, of course.”

“_Si_,” said Silverio dutifully, and his handsome brown face resumed its usual expression of _ennui_. Either he knew nothing of any of the places we had engaged him to show us or he thought we were so crazy that it was hopeless for him to attempt to understand our wishes. Like the other mariners of this coast whom we have met he knows nothing of compass let alone barometer. He uses his eyes and his memory and generally arrives somewhere.

After pointing in a direction several degrees south of southwest and explaining that that was where Inah lay and that there we would go, he put the schooner on a course only one-half degree south of west and held that course till he was close to the mainland opposite San Miguel. When I was tactless enough to ask why he did this he explained it was to avoid the current which swept northward and which was stronger midway between Cozumel and the mainland than close to the latter.

But probably McClurg’s explanation of our pilot’s course was the right one.

“Don’t you see,” said McClurg, “he hasn’t the slightest idea where to go, and he thinks if he gets near enough to the mainland he may see something which will give him his bearings.”

Perhaps the native pilots used by the early Spanish discoverers were as uncertain as Silverio Castillo. At any rate, the accounts of the places those explorers visited on the east coast of Yucatan are maddeningly vague. But the references to towns opposite the island of Cozumel are so persistent that we were sailing in high hopes of finding something worth while.

Luck seemed to be with us in regard to weather. The wind was northerly again, and that meant that we should find a lee under the mainland, which takes quite a turn to the eastward here, and that our two small boats could land on the beach in comparative safety. The norther had been blowing long enough to kill the prevailing easterly swell and we were now close enough ashore to see that only a small surf was breaking on the short patches of white sand which relieved the monotonous hostility of jagged coastline (this shore is mostly the saw edge of a former coral reef, rising as abruptly as a Connecticut stone wall).

A little to the right of our bow were several thatch-roofed native houses. Castillo said this was the town of Playa Carmen, where an expedition of the Carnegie Institution had found ruins a few years ago. About a mile and a half south of this was a single native house.

“That’s Inah,” said our pilot, straightening his well made body under its simple covering of blue flannel shirt and white duck trousers. (Later he was to announce “Inah” again opposite a spot some four and a half miles south of this. We have never learned which place he ultimately decided should bear this name.) He swung our bow toward the lone hut. When we were within some three hundred yards of the shore he gave the wheel another twirl and kept the schooner parallel to the thin, white ribbon of surf.

This seemed an ideal time for Whiting to climb the mainmast with our most powerful binoculars strapped about him. Several wooded mounds along the shore looked worth inspecting. But, alas, the outline of trees on a natural knoll and the outline of trees growing from the roof of a ruin are annoyingly similar. Whiting soon descended from the maintop.

“Breakfast ready,” announced the cook’s assistant, who calls every meal breakfast. Then several things happened in rapid succession. I had taken the binoculars from Whiting, and about a mile ahead, and close to the water’s edge, I saw a small ruin. Three other pairs of glasses were brought to bear and verified my analysis. The engineer coaxed a few extra ounces of power from the twin motors, and soon with the naked eye it was evident that the ruin was a Maya temple, not large but well preserved. As the ship ran in closer to anchor the biggest barracuda which we have yet seen affixed himself to McClurg’s lucky green line which constantly trails behind the _Albert_. Our two San Blas Indians let out whoops of hysterical delight. A different whoop came from me standing on the roof of the house over the engine room. Spinden’s lizard had just dropped from the mainmast head to my foot.

Now the schooner was running into the wind with sails shivering and engines sputtering. Half of us were shouting advice to the two Indians engaged in landing the big barracuda and the rest of us were pursuing the lizard till a lucky kick tumbled him overboard--whence he swam ashore, no doubt the most traveled lizard in Central America.

We hurried through lunch, discussing the temple on the rocky shore. It may have been one of those coastal buildings apparently seen from a distance by Stephens on his way to or from Tulum about eighty-five years ago, but which a heavy sea prevented him from visiting. It may have been seen more recently by an expedition of the Carnegie Institution which adverse weather similarly kept from a first-hand examination of certain buildings sighted along the shore.

When we landed in our tenders we found the temple as well preserved as it had appeared at a distance. It was the smallish type of temple on a low raised platform so common on this east coast, being twenty-one feet four inches long, fifteen feet eight inches broad, and ten feet three inches high--all outside measurements. Three Indians who arrived just as we were beginning to measure it told us it was called “Kanakewik.” It proved to be important chiefly as an outpost of other buildings less than half a mile away in the bush. To these we were now conducted by the leader of the three Indians, a sturdy fellow with a decisive manner who announced in a robust voice that his name was Agapito Katzim.

While some of us went south along the beach with Katzim others followed by water in the two dinghies. Within perhaps three hundred yards we found a lovely little cove, a mere tuck in the rough shore with a native hut mirrored in the clear water at the upper end. A few feet beyond the end of this cove we came upon eight buildings arranged in a plaza formation. Most of them were well preserved and there were traces of painting around the characteristic inset lintels of nearly all of them. And projecting from the front wall of one was a somewhat damaged carved stone representing the head of a parrot or macaw. This was a realistic carving. What the bird represented other than a mere decoration we do not know. In the three Maya books or _codices_, which escaped the destructive bigotry of the Spanish priests, are pictured anthropomorphic birds, which may represent lesser deities. The Yucatan screech owl was aptly named the Moan Bird, and was associated with death in Maya art.

[Illustration: Behind this temple to some god of Maya sailors we found the walled town of Xkaret]

Realism played a comparatively small part in Maya art. Of course, all art is somewhat conventionalized, but the Maya variety is extremely so, for the sculptor and painter of ancient Central America generally was more concerned with registering an idea than with merely producing an imitation of the model. Of all ancient sculptors and painters in this Hemisphere the members of the race which built Copan, Tulum, and Muyil were the most original. The nations of Nahua stock, the Toltecs and especially the Aztecs, are better known, alas, to the modern world. But as Spinden points out in his masterly “Study of Maya Art,” which was given in the _Prix au Grand_ by the French Government, “Maya art was vital, original and constructive, while Nahua art was largely devoted to imitations and to derived forms.”

At the risk of appearing flippant, it may be said that the Mayas have never had a first-class press agent. While the works of Stephens found many readers, they were overshadowed by the publication of Prescott’s fascinating _Conquest of Mexico_. Prescott dwelt on the semi-barbaric culture of the Aztecs. He failed to stress the fact that the Mayas had an older and higher civilization, and to this day, if you speak of “ruined cities in Mexico,” the average layman will respond, “Oh, yes, you mean the Aztecs.” The fact is that the Mayas were far superior to the Aztecs in art, in science, in most of the refinements which make what we loosely call civilization.

Indeed the Mayas, Aztecs and Toltecs have been properly ranked for all time by Spinden in the following words (and would that every person interested in the splendid accomplishments of the first Americans would paste them in his hat!):

“A remarkably close analogy,” says Spinden, “may be drawn between the Mayas and Aztecs in the New World and the Greeks and Romans in the Old, as regards character, achievements, and relations one to the other. The Mayas, like the Greeks, were an artistic and intellectual people who developed sculpture, painting, architecture, astronomy and other arts and sciences to a high plane.... The Aztecs, like the Romans, were a brusque and warlike people who built upon the ruins of an earlier civilization that fell before the force of their arms and who made their most notable contributions to organization and government. The Toltecs stand just beyond the foreline of Aztecan history and may fitly be compared to the Etruscans. They were the possessors of a culture derived in part from their brilliant contemporaries that was magnified to true greatness by their ruder successors.”

Two of the buildings in this group of eight were very small, not so small as the tiny shrine at Chenchomac but nevertheless, very diminutive. To me the reason for this is extremely interesting:

“Very often,” says Spinden, “what was originally a small independent shrine later became the sanctuary of a temple built around it. If worship of the God to whom the shrine was erected proved profitable he was rewarded with a temple.”

Perhaps these small buildings of religious purpose were erected so slight a time before the arrival of the Spaniards that the Conquest prevented any enlargement of them. At any rate they are well made specimens of their type, a type represented by several of the buildings found by the Carnegie Institution at Xelha, a few miles south of here. And all the buildings in this group are well preserved--which may also indicate their late construction. Our elation at discovering them was not diminished when Katzim said that the name of this place was Xkaret.

The most easterly of these buildings was a temple characteristically raised on a low pyramid, and from here through the leaves one could see the ocean. But from the sea this temple and the others in the plaza group were invisible.

When we gave Agapito Katzim eight pesos and explained to him that such buildings were worth a _peso_ apiece to us he remarked that he could show us five more. He led us perhaps two hundred yards inland and a third of a mile north. But before we glimpsed the five buildings there located we came upon something even more interesting. This was a well made stone wall, which I roughly measured as six feet high and six feet broad. Katzim said it enclosed the city on three sides, running practically to the sea on the north and south of the ancient Indian town.

Undoubtedly this wall was defensive in character. Stephens found traces of a wall about Mayapan, but the only known cities besides Xkaret with walls standing today are Tulum and Xelha, and the wall at the latter place merely cuts across a peninsula, the major part of the city’s protection having been afforded by water.

[Illustration: McClurg took the first motor boat into Xkaret harbor, once filled with Maya trading canoes]

It will be noted that these three walled towns, Tulum, Xelha and Xkaret are all on the east coast of Yucatan, where the presence of water or cliff or both as a protection on at least one side of the city made the task of the Indian engineers easier.

The five buildings which Katzim led us to were built along the wall with the exception of the smallest, which stood some fifty feet outside it. The other four, which averaged larger than the other buildings of the city, were raised on pyramidal mounds whose bases apparently had been built either into the wall or just inside it. This question was hard to decide in the few minutes we remained at this spot for the wall here was practically demolished, was, in fact, a mere widely scattered mass of stone.

There were many traces of other walls, lower and slighter than the one which had been built to protect the city. It is quite possible that these marked the limits of private property.

The wind was showing a tendency to shift from north to east, which filled us with much concern. Only a few minutes of east wind here would raise a sea which would put a big strain on the _Albert’s_ anchor.

But Agapito Katzim was excited by the clink of our _pesos_, and he wanted to make the most of the good luck which had brought rich strangers to this almost deserted shore. Before we left he collected three more _pesos_ by showing us three more coastal temples. All are very much like Kanakewik, the first we had seen. One is north of that, just beyond the hut of Katzim, which is tucked in a fold of the rocky coast. The other two are south of the little cove. Katzim said that once when hunting for the _zapote_ trees which produce chicle he found a beautiful temple of the high, pyramidal type, a few miles behind these other ruins. He has since searched for it in vain, but he is sure he can find it within ten days. We have promised to return to Xkaret soon after the expiration of that period, and we have agreed to give him ten _pesos_ for the temple if it is as beautiful as he describes it.

Our promise means that we should return to Xkaret soon after February 18. Yet we have also promised Florencio Camera to be at Santa Cruz de Bravo on February 20 ready to start for the promised temple of Tabi. How can we keep both these promises, look for Ramon Coronado’s ruins on Cozumel and explore the coast north of here to _Mugeres_ Island? Our difficulty seems to spring not from a dearth of ruins, as I once feared it would, but from a superfluity of them!

Xkaret is a gem, however, and we are determined to return to it. Practically every one of the seventeen temples we found there has an altar with evidence that it once supported a stone or clay figurine. Merely by scratching around a little (not violating the spirit of the Mexican Government’s prohibition of excavation) we may be able to find some of these and learn whether the people of Xkaret worshipped some of the known deities of the Mayas or gods as yet unplaced in the pantheon of the highest civilization of ancient America.

Above all, though, it would be interesting to trace the course of that thick white wall. Such an exploration would probably bring to light other buildings than those Katzim showed us. Even McClurg is interested in doing this, he has begun to catch fire at last. That wall and the compact, well preserved white buildings of this old seaport have broken down his indifference to “musty ruins.”

There is not much doubt that Xkaret, with its snug little harbor for small boats, was known to the Spanish Conquerors. We have not taken actual measurements but Xkaret seems to be as near Cozumel as any place on the mainland with shelter for canoes. Very likely it was from there that Geronimo de Aguilar, one of the two survivors of a party of shipwrecked Spaniards who fell into the hands of the Indians in 1511, took a canoe in 1519 to join Cortez who had just reached Cozumel on his way to begin the subjugation of Mexico. And it may have been here that in 1527 there began a turn in the fortunes of Montejo, the conqueror of Yucatan. The historian, Oviedo, relates that with his small army decimated by sickness Montejo fell in with a _Cacique_ from Cozumel at a point on the mainland opposite that island. This chief was proceeding with 400 men (more than four times the Spanish force) to the marriage of his sister with a mainland nabob. He directed Montejo to a rich town called Mochi, where the Spaniards were well fed and restored to a strength which they later exerted to slaughter the countrymen of those who had succored them.

We reached the schooner to find Gough more than a little anxious about his anchor, which he was afraid would drag in the freshening easterly wind. As the _Albert_ got underway I looked back at the “little bay” which gave Xkaret its name and imagined the great canoes of the Cacique Ah Naum Pat paddling into this harbor laden with textiles, pottery and jewels for the wedding, and with natives in their gala attire of feathers and decorated cotton robes.

We ran south one mile and a half to a very slight indentation in the shore, which slight though it was gave us a little more protection than we should have had off Xkaret. Through ten feet of water we could see our anchor resting on coral sand. In the two tenders we landed on a white hard beach which will be removed bodily in scows if it is ever seen by Florida realtors. For an hour we thrashed through the bush, all armed till we must have looked like a party of treasure buriers. The reason for the distributed arsenal was the desire to get both fresh meat and rare birds for Griscom, who remained on board skinning those which he had shot at Xkaret. We saw no sign of a ruin, and only common birds, but acquired an appetite of a degree unusual even for this party.

One reason we half hoped for ruins here is that our pilot says this bend in the shore line is called Inah. The explorer Howe, in writing of his visit to Tulum some fifteen years ago, mentioned a report of ruins at Inah; but we are not at all sure that the locality of this shallow bay and beautiful beach is Inah, for Castillo applied the same name to a place nearly five miles north of here yesterday.

The maps and charts which we have brought, including the charts of the United States Government, seem to be more often wrong than right when it comes to putting down names above dots along this shore. We have been particularly anxious to locate Pole, which was an Indian port of importance somewhere opposite Cozumel in the time of the Spanish Conquest. It was here that the chiefs of Cozumel formally submitted to Montejo. Pole is indicated on several maps of this coast, but none of the natives we have asked about it has ever heard of such a place. Not even with any of the combinations and permutations of pronunciation which we have tried.

This morning at seven we left the second so-called Inah and with one of the _Albert’s_ engines helping the fair wind in her rather abbreviated sails we reached Paalmul at seven-fifty. We judge, therefore, that Paalmul is some five miles below our anchorage of last night.

Long before we were abreast of the mouth of the mile-wide bay on which this village of _chicleros_ is placed we sighted splotches of the familiar bleached thatch color which indicates native huts. A moment later Griscom, who enjoys glimpsing a ruin almost as much as a new species of humming bird, exclaimed:

“That gray peak to the left of those huts looks like a temple.”

It was a temple. And before the _Albert’s_ port anchor was in the sand again we could see enough through our glasses to feel reasonably certain that this was a ruin which we had been looking forward to with a good deal of interest. There is a picture of it on page 166 of that excellent _Archæological Study of the East Coast of Yucatan_ by S. K. Lothrop. On the same page the author tells how it was seen from a distance by an expedition of the Carnegie Institution in 1916.

“We had lost our bearings during the night and towards morning the lighthouse on Cozumel came into view. Our boat was consequently turned towards the mainland; we approached the shore shortly after sunrise and soon passed close enough to a pyramid temple to secure the photograph” ... (above mentioned).

A visit to this temple made complete its identification as the one shown in Lothrop’s photograph. Of the pyramidal mound on which the temple was placed a rather imposing heap of loose stones remains, but of the temple itself only the inner wall over a crumbled stairway is left. This is enough, however, to let us be certain of the interesting conclusion that here--as in the chief temple at Tulum--the Maya architects deliberately turned their backs on a magnificent view of sapphire sea and faced their building inland. Today one wonders what they faced it on, were there other edifices or at least a platform for religious pageantry where now are only guano palms and little hawks swooping for lazy lizards? Perhaps there was a road to the group of eleven other buildings which we found about a kilometer to the north, and which that expedition of 1916 might have found had it landed at Paalmul.

As a matter of fact this temple on the shore was the last of the Paalmul ruins we visited. When the schooner had anchored we went ashore in the _Imp_ through a passage in the reef too narrow to be safe for the schooner. The _Imp’s_ prow scratched the fine hard beach before a large building about which some thirty mules and horses were tethered. Ten or twelve _chicleros_ crowded to the water’s edge, intensely curious about our little outboard motor, as are all the natives. Within five minutes after we had made the usual preliminary offerings of cigarets we had heard that there were other ruins in addition to the temple on the shore and we had engaged as a guide to show them to us a man who seemed of importance among the chicle gatherers, one Anaclito Oc. He was little interested when Spinden told him his last name was the name of a Maya day. For the most part this lack of interest in ancestors far superior to themselves is characteristic of these modern natives of Yucatan. Their attitude toward the past is pretty perplexing. We are gathering conclusive evidence that to this day many of them use the old temples as places of worship, and that their race has done this almost continuously since the first effort of the Spanish priests to break down the native religion. In a ruined temple of Yaxchilan--on the border between Guatemala and Mexico--Spinden has found offerings of little figurines placed on the old altar by modern natives _who made them_. The latter fact is the more significant because these figurines are very similar to those which the ancient Mayas made. In northern Yucatan Spinden has seen the Indians putting out bowls of _posole_ (a drink made of corn) as offerings to the Wind God, _and over these bowls they hung the cross of Christ_!

[Illustration: This “lighthouse-temple” is the “broken pyramid” which gives the ruins behind it the name Paalmul]

Apparently the need of religion is strong in these Indians, so strong that they do not much care whether they get a pure brand or a diluted article. Toward the visible reminders of the great past of their own race many of them seem to have reverence without very intelligent interest.

Although we afterwards learned that the buildings to which Anaclito Oc led us were only a kilometer from the temple down the shore, they were two miles away over a rough trail from the spot where we landed. The piece of cleared land on which they all stand is perhaps two-thirds of a mile long and half as broad and some seasons ago was swept clean of forest to make a native _milpa_, or cornfield. For this reason, despite the fact that the buildings are somewhat scattered, there are several of them from which most of the others can be seen.

Oc led us first to a two-story temple. Buildings of more than one floor level are quite often found in other parts of the Maya area; but the second story is often set back of the first one on a foundation of solid masonry. Only toward the end of Maya history did architects dare put one stone building directly over another, as here. On the lower floor was the characteristic Maya sanctuary--really a little temple in itself--like the small ones at Xkaret and Chenchomac, with a gallery running around it on three sides. There were traces of several thicknesses of paint in several colors over the front door. The structure above had four doors, one on each side, the southern door opening directly onto an altar, upon which was seated a statue, or rather, a large fragment of a statue. Other pieces were scattered over the floor. We found enough of them to reconstruct most of the figure except the head, which was gone. The god, if such he were, had been seated in a niche on the raised altar, his left foreleg folded under his body, his right leg stretched forward. The body had been of hollow terra cotta painted red, white, and green. The whole figure had been perhaps three feet high.

[Illustration: On an altar in the upper story of this building at Paalmul we found the fragments of a terra cotta god]

Our guide said he could take us to a building nearby which contained another _bicho_, as he called the statuette (a word which my Spanish dictionary translates as “grub; insect; ridiculous person”). He said this one was in perfect condition when he saw it three months ago.

He led us past two buildings which we explored later, and kept losing his way in thickets of annoyingly thorny bushes.

“Maybe it’s a son of a _bicho_,” said Whiting in exasperation.

At last we reached a one-storied temple beside a mound where another had fallen.

“It’s in here,” said Oc.

But the _bicho_ was not there.

We reported this disappearance to the leader of the _chicleros_ encamped on the beach, in order to establish an alibi for ourselves. It is no uncommon thing for archæologists to be blamed by the Mexican Government for the looting of temples actually done by ignorant natives. The Indians are often superstitious about their idols, however, and it is possible that this statuette was removed only an hour or two before our arrival to save it from profanation at our hands.

We do not know what the statuette we found was made to represent. But it is similar to terra cotta figures which have been found in Tabasco, far west of here. And we are gathering an abundance of evidence that in Quintana Roo terra cotta figure sets of this style were put on table altars and in niches over the doors of shrines.

This sort of thing may seem unimportant. But it is just this way, picking up a piece of knowledge here and a piece there and fitting them together, it is just this way that science has been working out the Maya Riddle bit by bit. To me it is one of the most romantic exercises man has practised since intelligence first flickered up in his brute mind. Remember that most of the easy evidence was wiped out when the bigoted Spanish Bishop, Diego de Landa, deliberately destroyed the Maya books and records which the Indian priests brought to him.

Archæologists who first tackled the problem had to work in the dark. The task has been one of tremendous patience. The frequency of glyphs from all the known inscriptions has been counted, their variations studied, and sculpture, for example, such as we have found at Paalmul, has been compared with sculpture in another part of the Maya area, and both compared to surviving fragments of Aztec, Zapotecan or other early American art. Thanks to much arduous work of this sort the indelible ink of truth is beginning to shine through the scrawls made with the gaudy crayon of imagination.

Less than two hundred yards westward of the two-storied temple is a patio group of buildings, four pretty badly decayed and two reduced to mere mounds of stone covered with bush and vines. We spent little time here before going eastward some two hundred agonizing paces through thorny vines to the most interesting structure at Paalmul. This appeared at first a mere abrupt knoll of earth covered with dense shrubbery. Fifteen minutes hard work with the _machetes_ opened up a view of masonry, and half an hour more of hacking produced proof that the masonry had been in rising terraces. Near the top of the knoll of stonework we found a low door opening into a small sanctuary with altar at the back. Then it was time to return to the schooner, in fact we were two hours late to lunch.

The sun was well down the sky before we confirmed an exciting suspicion which we had been entertaining, namely, that this building is round. Only two other round buildings have ever been found, of Maya construction. One of these, which was at Mayapan, in northern Yucatan, was destroyed by lightning in 1867. The other is the so-called _Caracol_ at Chichen Itza which is believed to have been an astronomical observatory.

[Illustration: Front view of round building at Paalmul which was perhaps an astronomical observatory]

This Paalmul building is thirty-one feet eight inches high, but bigger than that measurement indicates, for it is roughly cone shaped and has a considerable diameter at the bottom. It has four different walls or belts of masonry, looking not unlike four turrets of a battleship, placed one above another, the smallest at the top. The only room which we could find was a small one in the uppermost “turret.” An altar at the back of this room had been broken, exposing crevices which ran down several feet. Cold air emerged from these perpendicular cracks, suggesting the possibility of hidden chambers, such as those Mr. E. H. Thompson found in the pyramidal structure at Chichen Itza called the Grave of the High Priest. In other words this building may be a tomb. Or it may have been associated with worship of Kukulcan, God of the Air, as is said to have been the function of the round building at Mayapan. But the possibility which suggests itself with most force to me is that this peculiar edifice like the Caracol at Chichen Itza was an astronomical observatory. Most of the thirty per cent of the Maya hieroglyphs which have been “translated” relate to the calendar and astronomy of the ancients, or to methods of counting. As an example of how advanced was the science of these first Americans consider the fact that in an old Maya book, the Dresden Codex, are computations involving nearly twelve and a half million days, or about thirty-four thousand years. In the same book 405 revolutions of the moon are set down, and Dr. Morley, of the Carnegie Institution says,

“so accurate are the calculations involved that although they cover a period of nearly 33 years the total number of days recorded (11,959) is only 89/100 of a day less than the true time computed by the best modern method--certainly a remarkable achievement for the aboriginal mind. It is probable that the revolutions of the planets Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Saturn are similarly recorded in the same manuscript.”

Among the Mayas art, science and religion marched together. Art was used almost entirely as a vehicle for the expression of the religious impulse. As for science, the Maya priests were the Maya scientists. They put up stone monuments to use as astronomical sighting lines for measuring the length of the year. Night after night they scanned the heavens, never fearing lest what they found should upset established religion! These “barbarians,” as the Spanish discoverers called them, would have considered barbarous a society in which a man would be persecuted as Galileo was persecuted for holding that the earth moved around the sun.

On the other hand a comparison with mediæval Europe helps us in reconstructing a picture of Maya social life. During the “dark ages” in Europe, painting, sculpture, and indeed most of the knowledge of reading and writing, was the very nearly exclusive property of the professionally religious. So it was with the Mayas, and this is one reason why knowledge of the meaning of the hieroglyphs was lost. When civil war, epidemic or other cause of which we are not yet certain, had wiped out the numerically small ruling priesthood of the Mayas there was left only men of the lower classes possessing very little tradition as to what the body of learning had been and no ability equal to the task of reconstructing such science and art.

Of all the buildings we have found yet perhaps none would be so interesting to excavate as this Caracol. And our interest in this structure is not lessened by recalling that Lothrop, who is recognized as an authority on East Coast architecture, has written that “it is probable that a circular building was beyond the powers of East Coast architects!”

[Illustration]