CHAPTER XIII

THE TEMPLES OF TABI AND THE HILL OF OKOP

If you shoot at a flying duck and seem to miss, it pays to watch the bird till he is out of sight.

We were nearly to Santa Cruz Chico when we turned back to get a duck which had fallen a mile behind us. I picked him and cleaned him while the two boys unloaded our baggage on a short sod covered stone dock which is one of the many reminders that Little Santa Cruz was quite a town before the feuds of Indians and Mexicans wiped out its population.

When the _Imp_ and _Delirium Tremens_ pushed off from the dock, above all when they swept out of sight around a distant point, I confess my heart sank. Whether it was malaria, quinine or sun, I was wabbly. The two hundred and twenty-five miles to Peto loomed up like twenty-five hundred. I flopped on the grass beneath a lemon tree while Spinden cooked dinner.

That was a lucky shot. The duck was a godsend. I revived enough to set up my cot, or McClurg’s cot, for which I have discarded my hammock. When I lay down on it the canvas broke.

The mules were not coming till night. I patched the cot with tape and safety pins and prayer. Spinden repacked our dunnage, especially mine, which was occupying an amount of space that could not be found on the back of two mules--and I am entitled to only one and a half.

Now that we are in the bush our positions are reversed. Spinden is at home here, and I am “at sea.”

It is going to be a great problem to get my bedding rolled up and stowed away each morning before the sun is up. For it means nothing to say that the sun is hot in this country. All you can say is that the sun is a blow, a hammering on your head and back.

You rise with the east gray and feel a pleasant vitality flooding your veins. You fold up your cot, fold blanket and “hangar” (_mosquitero_). Perspiration begins to pour down your face, down your chest, off your hands and into your boots. You start to strap your blanket roll, and--the first rays of the sun hit you. It is a physical blow. You reel, and the rest of the strapping-up process is torture.

But lemons are good. We had not gone a mile from Santa Cruz Chico when I began to wilt in the saddle. The first tart sting of a lemon made another mile seem possible--if the will were strong. Then a lemon a mile for several miles, and suddenly the saddle, the mule were parts of me. Ducking low to avoid the branches covered with thorns and stinging ants became second nature. This was not a trail, it was a tunnel through the brush, a succession of “low bridges.”

Here at last was a use for the silly pith helmet. It made a good buffer whenever a heavy branch hit the lowered head.

At four o’clock Spinden finds it more comfortable to walk. The mules are tired, chiefly by a half mile bog they floundered through, leg deep. But no walking for me, not today.

The head _arriero_ rides in the lead, dismounting occasionally to cut a new trail where the jealous bush has entirely filled the old one. That he does not lose the way is a miracle, the result of some sixth sense. He is a fine, lean, iron gray man, with a trooper’s straight back and thin flanks.

His assistant walks behind the train, throwing sticks and stones at lagging mules, cursing them constantly when he is not singing outrageous love songs. They are too obscene to quote, except one favorite refrain that he will excuse anything in a woman “so long as she is pretty, and has a little foot.”

This boy is fifteen, but old in a rough world. He has sailed the whole Caribbean as cook on a smuggling schooner, he knows the _cantinas_ and the brothels from Truxillo to Tampico, and he likes to air his knowledge. He could live in this bush indefinitely with no equipment but his _machete_, and he is as strong as a wrestler of twice his hundred and twenty pounds. When the mules were bogged we took off their packs. This boy trotted off with double the weight that Spinden or I could handle.

We have passed several mounds of probable Indian origin, but no ruins. That is not strange in this stony bushy desert, abandoned even by buzzards. It _is_ strange to see here and there rotting telephone poles, whose trailing wire now trips our mules, now threatens to cut our own throats. This is a relic of the last futile Mexican attempt to win back the jungle villages which the Indians sacked and burned in the terrible War of the Castes.

It is nearly sunset when the head _arriero_ raises the welcome shout of “Laguna!” It is the Lake of Nohbec.

Spinden flops to the ground beneath a big fig tree. He is completely in, as thoroughly done up as I was yesterday. By some generosity of God I am not “shot”; at least able to make supper while the _arrieros_ water and picket the mules.

What a blessing is tea. Yes, in the Tropics, hot tea. Ten, twelve cups of it, for unboiled water is dangerous to drink and boiled water is nauseous if unflavored. But tea is more than flavor, it is new life. And with sugar and lemon and a dash of rum, why there you have something better even than _grog Américain_--which won the Battle of Paris.

These big trees around the shallow, grassy lake are the only ones higher than thirty feet we have seen since leaving Santa Cruz Chico. There is no scenery here, just flat limestone plain, and scrubby bush.

The second day is the same thing, only samer. I shoot a _chachalaca_, a bird about the size of our ruffed grouse but with a longer neck. We eat it for breakfast and take lunch out of saddle bags--dried raisins, dried _tortillas_, and a can of peaches.

In the middle of the day it begins to rain, torrentially. So when we reach the town of Petacab we strike camp. But the word “town” won’t do. There are seven or eight thatched huts with upright log walls, or none at all. These miserable shacks lie within the embrace of one of those fine old military walls which tell how the Spanish Conquest came--and went.

Lieutenant Concepcion Put (Poot) of General May’s military Government, commands the emaciated villagers. He has a sick child and would like to buy for it a little of our sugar. The gift of a pound of this luxury wins his everlasting gratitude. We want ruins, do we? Well, he could take us to two cities of old Maya buildings, but he does not dare to. The rub is that “our people still use these places and General May might not approve. Get his permission and I’ll show them to you.”

These places are called Huntichmul (Prominent Pyramid) and Ichmul (Among The Pyramids). We have never heard of either before, and the Lieutenant’s casual description of them as Indian rallying points which no white man has seen throw us into a fever of eagerness to visit these secret places.

But no bribe can move Lieutenant Put. He is obviously very much afraid of General May’s displeasure, and quite convinced that he will earn it if he takes us to these old Maya towns without authorization.

Tabi is forgotten for a while. We must hurry to Santa Cruz de Bravo and ask May to let us see Huntichmul and Ichmul.

San Isidro is the site of our next camp after Petacab. The walls of the Spanish fortress, with a turret at each corner, are still in good condition. Spanish ruins are on every hand.

As we approach Santa Cruz de Bravo the trail widens overhead, but becomes no softer underfoot. A crematory should be a good investment in this country, where grave digging means cutting solid rock. Where there is a little powdered earth over the rock it is reddish with oxide of iron. A farmer who gets a living here deserves it. Small wonder that the natives are giving up their _milpas_ and importing food with the proceeds of their _chicle_. That commodity is to this region what henequen (which gives sisal fibre) is to northern Yucatan. Two of the most valuable vegetable products of the world, chicle and sisal fibre, are products of this God-forsaken waste of bushy limestone plain.

The last five miles to Santa Cruz are made an agony by the high sun. The same crowd of drunken _chicleros_ pulls at our stirrups as we ride through the plaza with its unkempt grass and untrimmed orange trees.

General May cannot see us this afternoon. “Sick” again.

A night’s sleep puts him in shape for social duties. He is dressed in his same white pyjamas, and receives us in the same chicle warehouse. To make a long story short, though we plead for half an hour he refuses politely but firmly to permit us to see Huntichmul and Ichmul. It is easy to lose his meaning through the interpretation of his diplomatic secretary, but it seems that one of the General’s chief objections to our going to these cities is the fact that their temples _are_ still used for worship. We give him many English cigarets and the best hunting knife made in the United States, but we cannot weaken his decision. He suggests many other places where we may go, sites of ruins, too, but outside his territory. Above all Huntichmul and Ichmul are forbidden.

Before the conference is over the General’s secretary and two other advisers present take an active part in it on their own account, and the whole course of our expedition up to this time is reviewed. These Indians are aware of every move that we have made, of every building we have entered. And at last it comes out that our visit to the subterranean temple at Muyil was particularly disliked, and that this has so strengthened the party which has always favored our ejection from the country that General May fears an open revolt might be the result of his giving us permission to visit Huntichmul and Ichmul. We observe that we have not injured any building or removed anything we found therein. The General remarks gravely that this has been noted in our favor. The way he says this makes me shudder, remembering how only Spinden’s earnest pleading dissuaded me from taking a fragment of old pottery from one of the altars of that sacred subterranean temple!

At the end this Indian potentate says:

“Every day my people are becoming more accustomed to the ways of the outside world which chews our chicle. They begin to understand that you archæologists come to our shrines in a spirit of reverence and not to steal. Perhaps if you come back next year”--he throws a covetous look at my hammerless double-barrelled shotgun, the first of its kind he has ever seen,--“perhaps if you come back next year I can let you see these cities you ask for.”

I hope to return next year with an _automatic_ shotgun!

This is not mere flippancy. The eagerness of these primitive people for some of the mechanical advantages the white man has developed is pitiful to see. In return for our shotguns and radio sets they can give us light on the wonders of their past, as they have begun to give us their mahogany and their chicle. Spinden does not exaggerate when he says that “American archæology is founded on chewing gum.” But for the introductions to these Indians which we were given by the privileged Chicle Development Company and its astute agents we might not have found half the buildings we have explored.

Chicle is rapidly breaking down the anti-foreign prejudices of the Indians. A few years ago General May went to Mexico City and got himself a French wife. When his people heard of this they made such an outcry that he wisely decided to leave her at Vigia Chico on his return to Quintana Roo while he went up to his capital and tried to soothe his outraged subjects. But he failed in this, called the marriage off, and sent the lady back to the more tolerant outer world. However, if he still wants her he will be able to bring her to his capital in a few years now, so rapidly are the old nationalistic prejudices of the Indians melting away. The sad part is that the Indians are melting away, too.

Forty Indians have just come into town to do their duty as a garrison. (Each of May’s villages takes its turn at providing a guard for the capital.) They are a sorry looking lot, anæmic, consumptive and watery-eyed. They crowd into the room which Martin has given us again, spitting incessantly and preventing our doing any work. (It is raining so hard that we cannot start for Tabi.) They are fascinated with my magnifying shaving mirror and the hammerless shotgun, for which they offer me considerably more money that it cost when new. But above all they marvel at the pneumatic mattress which Spinden bought from McClurg. He blows it up with his own lung power, and the Indians insist on repetitions of this performance till Spinden is blue in the face.

Most of them are still afraid of being photographed, and throughout the trip it has been almost impossible to get a Maya woman to pose. Four or five of these soldiers, however, have just come around and asked us to make a picture of them all at once, and they stand with ridiculous stiffness while it is done, obviously encouraged to face the feared kodak by each other’s moral support.

* * * * *

For four days we were cooped up at Santa Cruz de Bravo while the heavens deluged the earth. But as we set out on the fifth morning there was not a puddle on the trail. It had all been taken care of by the wonderful natural drainage of this limestone formation. There were holes as big round as buckets, dropping straight downward through the rock as far as the eye could see.

The first night out of Santa Cruz we reached Tabi, but before we arrived it was obvious that Camera is not the guide that he represented himself to be. He was constantly asking the way of his assistant _arriero_, a short, plump little fellow named Pancho. As we made supper at Tabi, within sight of Spanish walls, Spinden asked if the ruins Camera was “selling” us were like these.

“Oh, no,” he said, “the ruins are Maya. But we won’t reach them till tomorrow noon.”

This ought to have made us suspicious.

The following noon we saw ahead the tall _piche_ trees which invariably mark the site of an old Spanish or Mexican town. Camera had been losing patience under our frequent queries as to the proximity of the ruins. As we rode into a clearing bounded on two sides by remnants of a Spanish fortification Camera said:

“Here are the ruins, _Señor_.”

“What,” roared Spinden, “these are your temples of Tabi?”

“_Si, Señor._” The _arriero’s_ eyes were on the ground.

It was simply too disgusting, too cruel. Camera is not a fool. And we have spent hours explaining to him the difference between Spanish and Maya ruins, and have shown him dozens of photographs of the latter. It is just a cheap hoax, perpetrated apparently for the sole purpose of gaining a few days employment driving mules. A cheap contemptible fraud which costs us valuable time and not a few _pesos_.

I exploded into expletives, but what was the use. I sank on the ground and reveled in the denunciation of the despicable _arriero_ which flowed from Spinden’s lips. His just anger lent him an astonishing facility in Spanish invective, in the biting, scathing dialect the _arriero_ knows as none other.

The rest of that day--it was yesterday--was a dull gloom.

But anger has its uses. We rose this morning still in a rage at Camera. The mule driver’s delay in starting did not diminish Spinden’s choler. For this reason he marched straight through the remains of another Spanish town where the _arrieros_ wanted to stop for a bite and a drink, for it was noon.

Spinden was walking in the lead, and when he had plodded an hour or so longer under the broiling sun even he began to realize the necessity of refreshment. As he reached a point where the trail passes a lake filled with bulrushes he called back to Camera:

“You can stop here a few minutes.”

Except for Spinden’s anger at Camera we had not stopped here--but before this.

And when I walked down to the shallow water and looked across the green level of reeds I noticed a hill on the farther side. A little hill it is, yet unusually conspicuous for this flat country.

On the top of it I perceived a high excrescence, covered with growth but distinctly square and sharp in outline.

“That looks like a ruin,” I suggested.

“No, it’s just a natural hill, _Señor_,” said Camera, “I have seen it many times.”

“It does look like a ruin,” said Spinden with a black glance at the _arriero_, “we’ll have a look at it after lunch.”

[Illustration: A lucky halt for lunch led to the discovery of Okop]

* * * * *

We bolt a few sandwiches of dried _tortillas_ and canned beef and start up the trail, aiming to cut in at right angles to it as soon as we judge we have passed the end of the lake.

Camera leads through the brush, slashing right and left with his _machete_ and still muttering that the high mound we saw is just a “natural hill.” When we have gone perhaps three hundred yards I climb a tree. Ahead is a woody knoll. That may be it, and I direct Spinden to continue as he is going.

But in pulling my leg over a limb I have been straddling I look around, and there, towering over me, not one hundred yards away, is a thundering big Maya _castillo_! Its size takes my breath away, I hang in the tree, like a stunned bird, drinking in the majestic bulk and symmetry of the pyramid. For me this is the biggest moment of the whole trip.

At last I collect my wits, realize that Spinden and Camera are disappearing, and shout for them to turn at right angles. Spinden is skeptical of my directions, but heeds them, half convinced by the ring in my voice.

I slide down the tree, falling the last ten feet in my haste. Running over a small ruin I catch up to the other two, and slashing at the brush abreast we reach the foot of a great stairway. The trees hide the top of the temple, but there is no doubt in anyone any longer. This is no “natural hill” but a whale of a _castillo_!

We toil up the stairway, cutting away wild henequen, its sword-shaped leaves tipped with wicked black spikes. We clamber very gingerly, for many of the stones are ready to give way underfoot and crash down on the man behind.

A doorway yawns above and to the left. Like some of the lofty temples of Tikal this one is built into the top of the great mound instead of being raised upon its summit.

A clump of cactus bars the way to this chamber and we keep on to the top of the pyramid. Out of breath we crawl up to the flat top of the mound, a bush-covered plateau perhaps twenty-five feet square. If we had any breath this view would take it away. On every side is a flat expanse of forest like a great green ocean, melting off at the edges into the blue of the sky.

“God,” says Spinden at last, “this by itself is worth the whole journey.”

[Illustration: The great moment when Spinden reached the top of a pyramid at Okop, higher than any mound at Chichen Itza or Uxmal]

* * * * *

We found the remains of seventeen other buildings scattered through the ceremonial center of the ancient city, which center occupied an area of perhaps 800 by 1000 feet on the high land overlooking the lake. We were able to devote to their study only the two days we had planned to give to Tabi, for Julio Martin needed his mules and we had promised to keep them only these two days above the bare time required for them to make the round trip.

We have called the ruins Okop, using the native name for an abandoned Spanish settlement about a mile and a half north of them. But Okop is a Maya word and was probably never applied to their town by the Spaniards. It means “hollow land,” and may well refer to the bowl which holds the reedy lake beneath the hill tipped by the great pyramid.

For it is a great pyramid. We found it to be 94 feet high with a base 150 feet wide and 170 feet long. It is higher, therefore, than the highest pyramidal mounds of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, although the roofs of the temples atop those mounds are higher than the summit of this pyramid, which has its temple in it rather than on it as just explained. This is a single room, 19 feet by 7.

This hollowing out of the pyramid instead of building on top of it, suggests that Okop is of fairly early construction. There are other indications of the same thing, above all, the unusual thickness of walls and heaviness of all construction.

All the buildings at Okop average larger than the later period structures we found on the coast. Close on the southeast of the Pyramid-Temple is a remarkable ruin, consisting of four buildings on the four high sides of a mound 140 feet square, facing a tower rising from a low center. About 130 feet west of the Pyramid Temple is the massed stone remains of a building 110 feet by 130 feet by 45 feet high. What appears to be the subterranean chambers of this structure, probably lower rooms, are nearly buried by the caving in of the rooms on top.

“Okop is undoubtedly older than the cities on the east coast,” says Spinden, “with best indications of a connection with Labna, in Western Yucatan, and other cities flourishing about the time William the Conqueror entered England (1066 A.D.). It is reasonable to believe that the stone buildings in the ceremonial center we found were surrounded by many thatched huts. The place was not a center of art and learning, but a good, substantial city of industrialists, who took religion seriously and built heavy temples, wasting no time on flourishes and decoration and not believing in evolution. Briefly, good, substantial bourgeois fundamentalist Mayas built Okop.”

There is an interesting round stone altar at the foot of the stairs of the Okop _Castillo_, a stone perhaps five feet in diameter and two and a half feet thick, looking not unlike a great sundial. Also there are several traces of walls indicating the division of land. There is no doubt that excavation would be profitable, perhaps especially in the case of the great two or three story ruin lying west of the _Castillo_--a ruin which seems to have had a number of rooms and in some respects suggests the “Nunnery” of Chichen Itza.

The pleasure of finding this oldest of the seven cities we have discovered was much heightened by the fact that we came upon it entirely by virtue of our own efforts. After leading us to the false “temples of Tabi” the worse than worthless Camera did his best to keep us from visiting the important temples of Okop.

And with such lazy aid as he could give us about the ruins we were unable to clear a single building enough to get a good photograph of it. The trees are large here, doubtless because of the proximity of the lake, and several days hard labor would have been necessary for us four to clear the _Castillo_ alone. We used all our available time in measuring the buildings and taking notes on their architectural features. For if most of the hieroglyphs still baffle science Maya architecture is a fairly open book.

Not till we were very near Peto did Spinden and I find native villages, and when we completed the first archæological traverse of Quintana Roo and reached the railhead on March 22 we felt as if we had crossed the country of the dead.

We continued to find many marks of Spanish energy, fortresses and great deserted churches which would alone have been worth going this distance to see. Indeed, from the time we left the schooner till we reached Peto we saw on every hand traces of the three occupations of Quintana Roo prior to the three successive abandonments, first, the Maya; second, the Spanish, and third the Mexican. Now that the modern Indians seem to be decreasing a fourth desertion of the hot, silent bush impends.

The many evidences of the work of the Spanish conquerors prove them to have been a remarkable people. Undaunted by the bush, discouragingly thick, and the rocky, thorny trails varied by bogs in the southern part, they left remains of walled towns, turreted stone forts and moats and deep wells through the solid rock such as few people today have the energy to build. They did this under the almost constant menace of the natives and the piratical raids of other powers.

[Illustration: We found magnificent Spanish churches deserted to the hot, silent bush]

The hill fortress of Bacalar, overlooking the lake; the turreted ford of San Isidro, a small fort, moat-surrounded, a mile and a half north of Okop; the cathedrals of Bacalar, Santa Cruz de Bravo, Saban and Sakalaka are notable memorials of the Spanish occupation.

When we reached Merida almost the first person we met was Dr. A. V. Kidder, a colleague of Spinden’s in the Peabody Museum. He had just returned from the ruins of Coba.

It seems that Gann did not go down the east coast after all, but came to Merida and visited Coba with E. L. Crandall, photographer of the Carnegie Institution. Although its Mexican discoverer’s description of this city was published by Stephens in 1843, and although Teobert Maler, the Teutonic explorer, visited Coba and photographed it thirty years ago the place seems to have been under-appreciated. Kidder visited it with another representative of the Carnegie Institution a week after Gann, and each of these parties found buildings not previously described. But neither Gann nor Kidder found the mural paintings Stephens reported. Alas, they have perhaps vanished with crumbling walls. Here is the tragedy of the world’s neglect of the Mayas. Works of art and hieroglyphic inscriptions of inestimable value have been allowed to wear away in neglect while we moderns have perfected bridge whist and the cross word puzzle.

Before we separated Spinden and I went to Chichen Itza to look at the excavation of that rich site being done by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. With Mrs. W. M. James of Merida, Mr. O. O. Gilmore of Los Angeles and Mr. E. L. Crandall of the Carnegie Institution I amused myself exploring the caves which debouch on the _cenote_, or great natural sunken pool, from which the ancient inhabitants of Chichen got their drinking water. Mr. Edward Herbert Thompson, the owner of the ranch of Chichen Itza and the discoverer of the hollow pyramidal mound called the Grave of the High Priest, has made the exciting suggestion that there may once have been a connection between these caves and this tomb. The tomb lies 575 feet west 30° north from the _cenote_. Entering a cave on the west face of the steep circular cliff about the pool we found that a few yards in it forked. The right branch ran 241 feet west 65° north. The left branch ran 488 feet south 35° west. But the interesting thing was that both these tunnels had been blocked where our measurements stopped by partial cave-ins, and as we peeked through crevices in the piled up débris it seemed that both tunnels continued. Without shoring up the roof it would have been dangerous to clear out the fallen earth and rock, and we did not have the time for that. Thompson’s suggestion of a connection with the tomb does seem romantic, yet a complete excavation of this cave might be worth while. Both tunnels are of regular shape, about four feet high and six feet broad. They were considerably higher, but the rains of centuries have covered their floors with a thick layer of soil.

Meanwhile on one of the two square columns in the little temple back of the Temple of the Jaguars Spinden was finding a heretofore unnoticed low relief carving of Toltec goddesses, stripped to the waist. The latter feature is extraordinary, for the art of the ancient Mayas scrupulously avoided the nude and anything which carried sexual suggestion.

These stones were recently set up by the Mexican Government, and formerly only the bases were known. One side is fully clear and shows a female divinity carved in low relief, and nearly complete in detail. The other sides do not show the heads clearly. But all have women in narrow skirts decorated with crossbones. In one case there is a sacrificial knife stuck in the girdle. The heads were probably grinning skulls, and there are strong associations with death as in many other pieces at Chichen Itza. The upper parts of the body are bare except for a heavy necklace which partly conceals the breasts.

It is possible that these dead women represent the companions of dead warriors. The Toltecs and Aztecs had a peculiar belief that men who died in battle and women who died in childbirth went to a special heaven because of their sacrifices for the benefit of the State.

The return to Merida marked the end of our expedition. I took a steamer to the United States, leaving Spinden about to embark for Honduras to get some stone tables (articles of furniture, not tablets) which he had cached in the bush up the Plantain river on a previous expedition. These relics of the Chorotegan culture, which is related to the Maya but inferior to it, were wanted by the Peabody Museum.

On returning home I undertook to write a series of articles summarizing the results of our work. I had hardly begun this task when there came a letter from McClurg, in Chicago, commenting on his exploration of the head of Ascension Bay and the lagoons back of Boca de Paila, which proved that Allen Point is an island not a promontory.

Two days later I opened a morning newspaper to see that he had suddenly died.

[Illustration: The author was glad to reach “civilization,” at Chichen Itza]

For three days I sat about in a daze, unable to work, unable to believe this news. It still does not seem possible--six months after the event. Of the five Americans who sailed along the Maya coast in the _Albert_ he and Griscom seemed the healthiest, the least likely to crumple. How can such a vital personality as his be wiped out?

The answer is that it cannot, as I think Josiah Royce has proved. To a varying but palpable degree his influence lives in each of us four who survive him and from us will pass on to others in accordance with laws over which we have no control.

I remember that night in Belize that he said good-bye to Whiting on the porch of Miss Staine’s weather-beaten boarding house, then walked down the steps with me to the car which was waiting to take him to the dock. The car started; I remember the friendly wave of his white-sleeved arm, the flashing smile on that strong, tanned face, the last shouted, “Good-bye, old man.”

It may be my fortune to sail on many another cruise. But never with a finer shipmate than Ogden McClurg.

Perhaps it is needless to say that there was not a particle of truth in a newspaper story to the effect that in Yucatan McClurg had been ambushed by Indians with poisoned arrows, and suggesting that his death was the result of a “curse” cast upon him for disturbing the tombs of the Maya priests. If there were such a curse as superstition suggests it would have fallen upon McClurg last of all of us, for least of all of us had he to do with ruins. And it would have fallen long ago on archæologists of mature age like Saville, Tozzer, Morley and Spinden, who have spent their lives in what superstitious persons please to call the “profanation of Maya tombs.”

Now for that summary of what our expedition accomplished....

Our foremost goal was the discovery of a ruined city. We found the remains of seven cities, in order named Muyil, Xkaret, Paalmul, Chakalal, Acomal, Saint Tomas and Okop. Also several lesser sites, suburbs, you might say, for it should always be remembered that the Mayas were a city dwelling people as we of the United States of America are coming to be.

Maybe seven was our lucky number, for Griscom found a small fly-catcher on Cozumel which may prove new when specimens in Europe can be examined. A little blue-gray gnat-catcher from the same locality was his sixth new species. He established the existence of some 200 species on the mainland in Quintana Roo, the majority of which had never been recorded there. He also proved that there are on this peculiar island about a score of birds which live nowhere else in the world. Of this important achievement he announced to the New York _Times_ from the American Museum of Natural History:

“Cozumel Island has long been remarkable for possessing a number of peculiar species, which not only do not occur on the mainland, some twelve miles away, but are found nowhere else in the world. Mr. Mason afforded me full opportunity for my task of securing adequate series of these peculiar species and of determining that they do not occur on the adjacent mainland.

“The problem of the origin of these peculiar species is a question which has engaged the attention of scientists for a number of years. As a general rule islands lying within the continental shelf have a fauna which is closely related to that of the adjacent mainland, and Cozumel Island has always been one of the great exceptions to this rule. Not only are the peculiar species very distinct, but nearly half of them are related to birds in the West Indies instead of Central America. One of them, a thrasher, closely related to our brown thrasher of the Eastern United States, is the only tropical representative of its group, which does not occur nearer than the mountains of Southern Mexico, distant some 800 miles.

“The observer is also impressed by the remarkable fact that a considerable group of North American species which migrate South in Winter to the West Indies occur also on Cozumel Island (and on Great Key on Chinchorro Bank), although they are unknown in the mainland of Mexico and Central America. It is a reasonable inference that these birds cross the Caribbean from the West Indies to these islands every year. One also finds that these peculiar birds are by all odds the commonest on Cozumel, and that such mainland species as also occur are comparatively rare and local.

“One cannot avoid the inference from these facts that the peculiar birds of Cozumel got there first and that Cozumel must have been an island for a long time, and was perhaps in past geological time far nearer to the Greater Antilles than now.

“The fact that at least 100 species of land birds are found on the adjacent mainland which do not occur on Cozumel Island shows how sedentary many tropical species are.”

To return to archæology--the extent of Maya territory still to be explored has been greatly reduced as one result of our expedition. We discovered many interesting and important variations in Maya art forms, including a type of mural painting entirely different from anything heretofore found on the East Coast of Yucatan. This is the sort of find peculiarly gratifying to the student of the Maya past.

Many were the interesting features of architecture which we found, including proof that in several respects the directors of the last efflorescence of Maya culture were more skilled than archæologists have previously believed.

As we look back at this phase of the trip, the features that stand out most sharply are the extraordinary subterranean temple at Muyil, the mystifying round tower at Paalmul--once devoted to who knows what occult rites--the statues guarding temples on Cozumel Island with right hands raised as if forbidding entrance, the hidden City of Xkaret with its protecting wall and its lovely lagoon entrance, and the fine characteristically Maya pyramid temples of Muyil and Okop.

Knowledge which we gained largely through incidental and indirect evidence, however, gives us new light on the nature of the old Mayas and on their connections with the present world more significant than any mere recital of buildings found can convey. Walls borne down by the trunks and torn apart by the roots of _zapote_ and _ramon_ trees told us a tale as illuminating as any to be found in a volume of history.