CHAPTER XV

WHAT FORBIDDEN CITIES MAY TELL

Itzamna, Ahpuch, and Kukulcan, Where are you now, that were loved of man! The gentle son of an Eastern Jew Has made but forgotten names of you.

On ruined palace and crumbling wall The fat and sleepy iguanas crawl; No temple bell for sacrifice rings But only the lonely moan bird wings.

Under the jungle of Yucatan Lies the mystery of Mayapan; Did these who worshipped the sun and rain Choose rather death than the Cross of Spain?

This question has stirred historians and philosophers since the first report that there were great white cities in the jungles of Central America filtered out to the scientific world. What was the fate of that high early American civilization?

There is no longer much reason to doubt that the present so-called Maya Indians are of the same race as the people the Spaniards found occupying the cities conspicuous for their “tall towers” and “very large houses well built of stone and plaster.” Therefore, if those natives who were occupying some of the limestone cities in 1517 were of the same race as the builders, we may say with assurance that the Indians of present Yucatan are descended from the great architects.

“Why has there ever been any reason to doubt this?” you may ask, with a rather natural impatience.

The doubt arose and the doubt has continued to live in many minds, first, because of the great discrepancy between the high culture evidenced by the ruins and the low intelligence of contemporary natives, and second, because from 1517 to the present time the Indians of Yucatan have appeared to possess no traditions of a high past, no ability to explain the origin of vestiges of high attainment in art and science which lie about their country on every hand.

For instance, an account of the ruined city of Uxmal, given in 1586 by a companion of Alonzo Ponce, a Franciscan delegate, says:

“The Indians do not know surely who built these buildings nor when they were built, though some of them did their best in trying to explain the matter, but in doing so showed foolish fancies and dreams, and nothing fitted into the facts or was satisfactory.”

In short there was much material at hand for the construction of the theory that the Indians met by Cordoba and Grijalva were members of collateral tribes which had occupied the stone cities after the builders had disappeared.

But gradually this tenet has lost weight, and an alternative has gained increasing credibility. This is the postulate that the Yucatan Indians of the early sixteenth century were direct descendants of the city builders, but degenerate descendants. In short, that the culture of the Mayas had already received its death blow and that only the dregs still lived when the Spaniards came.

The acceptance of this alternate theory is made easier by a constantly increasing body of proof that even if the modern Indians have no articulate traditions of the men who built the temples they have an inherited reverence for these shrines and they still use forms of ritual identical with or very similar to ceremonies of the First Americans.

Of course, examples of ritualistic survivals may be attributable to instinctive imitation which need not imply any understanding of the ancient theology or any knowledge of the men who founded it. But the existence of such old rites today does strongly suggest that the Indians of the modern bush are of the stock of the old astronomers.

Examples of such continuance of ancient rites have been found in recent years by such leaders among the men who are solving the riddle of the Mayas as Professor A. M. Tozzer of Harvard, Professor Marshall H. Saville of the Heye Foundation and Dr. Sylvanus G. Morley of the Carnegie Institution.

Mr. Edward Herbert Thompson, who owns the land around the ruins of Chichen Itza, tells me he recently saw Maya Indians in that region performing rites to the God of Rain. The British explorer, Dr. Thomas Gann, says that in 1924 or ’25 he bought from an Indian boy in British Honduras an entire outfit of masks, costumes and musical instruments for the Maya “devil dance,” all this weird paraphernalia “made locally from ancient models handed down from father to son for generations.”

I have already told how on the southern border of Mexico Dr. Spinden found figurines placed on an old Maya altar by modern natives who had made the figurines themselves. And how in northern Yucatan he found Indians putting out bowls of _posole_ as offerings to the Wind God with little wooden crosses similar to those we found in crumbling temples throughout the wide area covered by our expedition.

In spite of the mixture of Catholic ritual these Indians have not really accepted Christianity. On the contrary many of them hate its very name. In the heart of the thick bush of Quintana Roo Spinden and I found magnificent Spanish cathedrals tenanted only by bats and buzzards while within a few miles copal was burning in Maya temples, albeit the hands that brought the offerings had lost the skill that built these structures centuries ago.

Of course, the mere hostility to outsiders, which the independent Indians of Quintana Roo have shown for many years, does not necessarily prove the continuation of ancient customs and a jealousy for old holy places. Much of this animosity was due to commercial motives. For years the Indians were struggling against Mexican taxation and trade exploitation and fired at all unidentified outsiders without waiting to learn their motives. But there can be no doubt, in view of our recent experiences, that they are also extremely suspicious of foreign interest in their altars.

[Illustration: Small wooden crosses put by modern Indians on altars of ancient temples--combining a little Christianity with old rites]

Our discovery that there are in the heart of the Quintana Roo bush two forbidden cities, that the Indians “still use,” holds important and exciting possibilities. Since the first European and American explorers began to penetrate the Maya country there have been rumors of cities in which a remnant of the old civilization lives on, undisturbed by outside change. As recently as 1842 (and that is very recent from an archæologist’s point of view), John L. Stephens, the explorer, was told by a Spanish padre of such a thing in the wild district of Vera Paz, Guatemala.

“The thing that roused us,” said Stephens, “was the padre’s assertion that four days on the road to Mexico, on the other side of the great sierra, was a living city, large and populous, occupied by Indians, precisely in the same state as before the discovery of America. He had heard of it many years before at the village of Chajul, and was told by the villagers that from the topmost ridge of the sierra this city was distinctly visible.

“He was then young, and with much labor climbed to the naked summit of the sierra, from which, at a height of ten or twelve thousand feet, he looked over an immense plain extending to Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and saw at a great distance a large city spread over a great space, and with turrets white and glittering in the sun. The traditionary account of the Indians of Chajul is that no white man has ever reached this city; that the inhabitants speak the Maya language, are aware that a race of strangers has conquered the whole country around, and murder any white man who attempts to enter their territory.”

Even if there was such an occupied Maya city in Stephens’ time, it may well be deserted now, although that part of mountainous Guatemala is still far from railroads and other agents of modern civilization. But the fact that this great American archæologist believed possible the survival of a sort of “island” of ancient Maya civilization stimulates the imagination when we wonder what is to be found in Huntichmul and Ichmul.

The Maya Lieutenant’s remark that these cities are “still being used” may mean simply that the natives are making offerings in temples there, as we found them doing at other places all over the eastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula. But the fact that we were permitted to visit the other spots and forbidden to go to Huntichmul and Ichmul suggests that these latter places have some special importance in native eyes. What it is science would give a good deal to know.

Granting that the present Indians are descended from the old architects I have never been able to accept the argument that Spanish oppression alone could have killed all tribal memory of the past--if it is true that there are no surviving traditions among the modern natives. Without a doubt the efforts of the Europeans to stamp out the native patriotism and religion were extremely rigorous, stopping not even at torture and massacre. But one has only to look at the cases of other conquered peoples like the Poles, Finns, and Armenians to realize the weakness of the argument that early Spanish oppression was alone responsible for native ignorance of the great past. For these other examples show that the more you oppress a people the more they cling to memories of the proud days before their conquerors had come. And a knowledge of writing is not necessary to keep such brave national traditions alive.

In previous chapters I have referred to some of the causes which have been suggested as causing the demoralization of Maya civilization which almost certainly occurred before the first Spanish caravel came. We have seen that one of these causes was the civil wars which broke out among the Mayas of northern Yucatan about the year 1200 A.D., and which were fostered and utilized selfishly by invading Toltecs from the highlands of Mexico. Probably another very potent cause of the collapse was a pestilence which came in the wake of the civil strife and which was very likely what we call yellow fever. Diego de Landa, Sanchez de Aguilar, Cogolludo and other early Spanish commentators mention native traditions of great epidemics before the arrival of the white men.

Moreover, as Spinden has shown,[2] several documents written in Spanish characters but in the Maya tongue, and doubtless based upon earlier records in hieroglyphs, mention a terrible pestilence which broke out sometime during the twenty-year period called Katun 4 Ahau in the Maya calendar. This period extended from 1477 to 1497 by our count. In the Chronicle of Tizimin for this period and for Katun 2 Ahau (1497 to 1517) are these entries:

[2] “Yellow Fever--First and Last,” by Herbert Joseph Spinden: _World’s Work_, December, 1921.

_Can Ahau-uchi mayacimlal ocnalcuchil ich paa. Cabil Ahau-uchci nohkakil._

The translation of these is:

“Four Ahau, the pestilence, the general death, took place in the fortress. “Two Ahau, the small-pox took place.”

Now here is a distinction between the small-pox and what is called “the general death.” Dr. Spinden has shown that the latter was yellow fever. There is not space here for the evidence on which he bases this highly important conclusion. Suffice it to mention the existence of other old native documents referring to a pestilence of which one symptom was _xe kik_, blood vomit, and the existence of early Indian drawings showing men vomiting blood. The vomiting of blood is one of the characteristic marks of yellow fever.

Now does not the invisible ink in which the mystery was written begin to become legible? Among the Mayas a knowledge of the arts and sciences was never held by any but a privileged, educated minority. If civil war, Toltec invasion, yellow fever and, finally, Spanish tyranny wiped out the flower of Maya population the descendants of the slaves who piled the limestone blocks of palace walls might well have no more articulate tradition of the great past than is possessed today by General May’s tattered hunters and _chicleros_.

The first period in Maya research is ending. There is still much surface exploration to be done, but it must be accompanied by more intensive study if we are to solve the riddle of the Mayas before all the evidence has been destroyed by time and nature, which work fast in the tropics. The more hieroglyphs we have on record or the more repetitions of the same glyphs the more hope is there of learning the meaning of most or all of them.

Therefore, one of the most pressing needs is more excavation. At present the work of the Carnegie Institution at Chichen Itza is the only piece of excavation which foreign archæologists are permitted to do in Mexican territory--and, with all respect to the Mexicans, 99 per cent. of the piecing together of the Maya puzzle has been done by foreigners.

A visit to Chichen Itza is a revelation of the possibilities of the spade. What was a mere mound of stone and earth covered with bushes and trees when I was there four years ago stands out now in the beauty of the carved white limestone pillars and walls of the magnificent Temple of the Warriors. Thanks to the intelligent labors of Dr. Morley, Mr. Morris, and the other members of the Carnegie Institution Chichen Itza Project, most of this splendid metropolis at least will be saved for the world.

There is no doubt that under many of the Maya buildings are tombs such as that discovered by Edward Herbert Thompson under a temple at Chichen. It is here that one may hope to find more _codices_, more ancient books of record. A fragment of a _codex_ was found in the ruins of a building in another city of northern Yucatan by Professor Saville, but it had been too much exposed to weather by the decay of the building to be legible. There are still plenty of _codices_ to be found, although they are doubtless in an advanced state of decay, which will necessitate extreme care in handling them. If an enlightened international public opinion could bring the Mexican Government to lift its unfortunate ban on excavation immediately a huge step would have been taken toward the recovery of the complete story of the first families of America. Twenty years from now, even ten years from now, it may be too late.

While work on the stone inscriptions and the discovered _codices_ continues the last fragment of the nearly pure Maya race must be studied in retreats like Huntichmul and Ichmul before it is extinguished--as it surely will be soon. All races have their day, and the Maya fire is nearly out. Although most of the glyphs are ideographic some are phonetic. There is an opportunity to recover these phonetic glyphs by an intensive study of Maya as spoken today.

The future belongs to the ethnologist as much as to the archæologist. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in the field of Maya research is that which is open to the young scientist willing to cast in his lot with these people virtually for life--willing to settle among these Indians and share their primitive standards until their confidence has been so won that he will be admitted to the very thoughts which they have when they worship in the temples of such cities as the two in Quintana Roo that our expedition was forbidden even to look upon from a distance.

[Illustration]

Transcriber’s Notes

- Italics represented with surrounding _underscores_.

- Small caps converted to All Caps.

- Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.

- Variations in hyphenation and spelling kept as in the original.

- Illustrations relocated to nearest full paragraph break.

- Footnotes renumbered consecutively and relocated below the relevant paragraph.