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El Castillo—a pyramid temple at Muyil

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

- GREEN GOLD OF YUCATAN
- SILVER CITIES OF YUCATAN

[i]

# SILVER CITIES OF
YUCATAN

BY

GREGORY MASON

With a Preface by

DR. HERBERT J. SPINDEN

Assistant Curator of Mexican Archæology and Ethnology, Peabody Museum of Harvard. Illustrated with Drawings by Dr. Spinden and with Photographs

WITH 32 ILLUSTRATIONS
AND A MAP

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK—LONDON

1927

[ii]

Copyright, 1927
by
Gregory Mason

Made in the United States of America

[iii]

Dedicated

TO

HERBERT JOSEPH SPINDEN, LUDLOW GRISCOM,
FRANCIS WHITING

And to the Memory of
OGDEN TREVOR McCLURG

[v]

## ACKNOWLEDGMENT

My thanks are due first of all to the New York Times, which financed the Mason-Spinden Expedition; then to the Mexican Government, which permitted the Expedition to enter territory where foreigners are not commonly welcomed; third, to Mr. George Palmer Putnam, the United Fruit Company and the Chicle Development Company for advice in organization and—in the case of the last two,—for the use of invaluable facilities in the field. Finally, I am again indebted to the New York Times—and to World’s Work and Motor Boating—for permission to use here in revised form certain material which has already been printed in the pages of those journals.

Gregory Mason.

[vii]

## PREFACE

Eastern Yucatan is a coast of adventure where the trade winds of the tropics pile surf on coral reefs and where white temples of the ancient Mayas serve as landmarks for ships that wisely stand off. There is memorable beauty in the outer islands with slender palms leaning out from dunes of wave-broken coral. The shore line of the mainland appears low and monotonous but on closer inspection vast shallow bays are revealed with mangrove mazes which once offered hidden harbors to the buccaneers. The level unbroken forests of the Mexican territory of Quintana Roo are guarded by vigilant Mayas who still cherish in these wilds crumbling buildings of their ancestors. For generations these Indians have fought to stave off modern commercial civilization that on the raw edges of its expanding front shows anything but a pleasing parade of virtues.

There is glamour and mystery enough in a quest of ancient cities in Central America, yet the finest part of the adventure is intellectual rather than physical. The thrill of breaking through the frontiers [viii] of history into an unknown age is much deeper and more satisfying than that of merely entering closed territory at a slight risk of life and limb. After all, the chances of violent death are probably greater in modern cities than in the most backward lands. Eastern Yucatan will remain in my memory, not as a region where thorns scratch, insects bite, and boats capsize, but as a region where crumbling temples bear the unmistakable stamp of one of the New World’s greatest personalities.

Quetzalcoatl, emperor of the Toltecs, and conqueror of the Mayas—priest, scientist and architect in one commanding individual—was a contemporary of Henry II and Richard the Lion Hearted. He died in far off days before a reluctant King John signed the Magna Charta of English liberties. His holdings in Mexico and Central America were several times more extensive than the holdings of those puissant monarchs of the Angevin line in France and the British Isles, his philosophy of life was richer and his contributions to the general history of civilization were greater than theirs. Old stone walls in eastern Yucatan are mute evidence of the commerce, religion and art that Quetzalcoatl built up as the expression of his practical and ideal State. He encouraged trade that reached from Colombia to New Mexico, he preached a faith of abnegation [ix] and high ethics which later led speculative churchmen to identify him with St. Thomas, and in sculpture and architecture he formed a new and vital compound of the previous achievements of two distinct peoples, the Toltecs of the arid Mexican highlands and the Mayas of the humid lowlands. We can restate three of Quetzalcoatl’s personal triumphs in astronomical science corresponding to the years 1168, 1195 and 1208. We know that he conquered the great city of Chichen Itza in 1191 and erected therein a lofty temple which still bears his name and a round tower which is still an instrument for exact observation of the sun and moon. We know that Quetzalcoatl set up a benign system of local self government among conquered tribes of Guatemala which made those peoples relate his praises in song and story. We know that after his death he was made a god because during his life he had been “a great republican.”

The archæology of eastern Yucatan belongs for the most part to the three centuries which intervened between the reign of Quetzalcoatl and the coming of the Spaniards. The buildings of Chichen Itza are copied at Paalmul and Muyil, settlements which pretty clearly grew up along one of the important trade routes from Chichen Itza to the far south. To be sure there are some vestiges in the [x] region of the much older First Empire of the Mayas, several monuments having been discovered in recent years which bear dates in the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ. But the cultural facts of the splendid First Empire are already known from a score of magnificent ruins on the plains of Peten, and in the valleys of the Usumacinta and Motagua rivers. Science was really in greater need of evidence on the last phases of Mayan civilization and this evidence we found in the territory we visited.

There is a more tragic story not without interest to the student of the rise and fall of civilizations, namely, the narrative of a clash between two races, the American Indian and the white man of Europe. In eastern Yucatan the unequal contest of brown breasts against bullets has waged since 1519. Some persons may see in the broken men who survive in little independent communities of rebellious Mayas only degradation and inferiority. Yet over and over again the Spanish colonists, for all their coercive engines, were driven out of this territory which was the first part of Mexico on which they set foot.

The terrible War of the Castes devastated Yucatan some eighty years ago, one of the causes, according to a scholarly work recently published in Merida, being the exportation of Maya Indians to Cuba as slaves. The eastern portion of the peninsula has [xi] not been reconquered since that time. One encounters in the darkening forest Christian churches which are no less ruinous than the more ancient temples of the Indians. It seems that Father Time is impartial when the figures of European saints and the grotesque faces of pagan gods fall beneath the weight of his hand.

Although the Indios sublevados of Quintana Roo have managed to maintain their independent status their numbers have pitifully diminished. Under President Díaz a vigorous campaign was waged against them for twenty years but the recalcitrant natives allowed the Mexican generals to hold precariously only the town of Santa Cruz and a few lines of communication. Then, as political strife developed in the Mexican capital itself, the garrisons were withdrawn. In 1918, the aboriginal population found a still more deadly enemy in the world epidemic of influenza. Recently American silver has been more successful over this renegade people than Mexican lead. The insistent demand for chewing gum among the children and salesladies of the United States has brought about a benevolent penetration into Quintana Roo of hand mirrors, glass pearls and alcohol flavored with anis seeds.

When offered the opportunity of joining with Mr. Gregory Mason and several others in an exploring [xii] expedition to Cozumel Island and the adjacent mainland, I gladly accepted, first because the region was difficult of access and offered great promise of finding unknown ruins of the ancient civilization, secondly, because the narrative of adventures and discoveries would direct public attention to the grandiose archæology of the Mayas. I shall let Mr. Mason tell what we found.

In preparing the book that is before us—which is directed to the general public whose support archæology needs—Mr. Mason has had the coöperation and good wishes of his fellow adventurers.

Herbert J. Spinden.

Peabody Museum,

Cambridge, Mass.,

January 27, 1927.

[xiii]

## CONTENTS

[xv]

## ILLUSTRATIONS

| FACING PAGE
--- | ---
El Castillo—a Pyramid Temple at Muyil | Frontispiece
Map Showing the Route of the Expedition and the New Archæological Sites Discovered | 16
A Good Sea and Mud Boat was the H. S. Albert | 28
A Rare Moment when Both Spinden and Mason Were Silent | 32
Griscom’s Fortune at Ascension Bay | 102
Some of the Drunken Mayas of Santa Cruz de Bravo | 132
We Hung McClurg’s Shark from Our Bow—A Warning to his Kind | 146
Spinden and Mason Before Remains of a Fisherman’s Shrine | 150
We Find an Outpost of the Commercial City of Muyil | 160
From this High Building Canoes Approaching Muyil Were Sighted Before they Could See the City | 166
[xvi] |
Vigia del Lago (“The Watch on the Lake”) | 184
The Chief Temple of Tulum | 206
The Ear-Ringed Chief of the Tulum Indians, “General” Paulino Caamal | 210
Tulum’s Temple of the Frescoes | 214
Behind this Temple to Some God of Maya Sailors we Found the Walled Town of Xkaret | 224
McClurg Took the First Motor Boat into Xkaret Harbor | 228
This “Lighthouse-Temple” is the “Broken Pyramid” which Gives the Ruins Behind it the Name Paalmul | 236
On an Altar in the Upper Story of this Building at Paalmul we Found the Fragments of a Terra Cotta God | 238
Front View of Round Building at Paalmul which Was Perhaps an Astronomical Observatory | 242
Back View of Round Paalmul “Observatory” | 248
This Building on the Harbor of Chakalal Contains Murals of a Style Never Found Before in East-coast Art | 252
Wall Paintings Found in a Temple at Chakalal | 256
[xvii] |
The Laborers who Built the Stone Temples Probably Lived in Huts Like These of the Modern Indians of Acomal | 260
Temple Found at Acomal with Curious Pineapple Shaped Object on Outdoor Altar Before it | 268
McClurg, Spinden, Mason, Whiting, Griscom | 272
Though Cozumel Island is Small, Spinden Found Ruins the Thick Bush had Hidden from Previous Explorers | 276
The “Lighthouse-Temple” on Cozumel Island | 280
Buildings at Acomal Showed an Interesting Use of Stucco Faces | 284
A Lucky Halt for Lunch Led to the Discovery of Okop | 298
The Great Moment when Spinden Reached the Top of a Pyramid at Okop | 300
We Found Magnificent Spanish Churches Deserted to the Hot, Silent Bush | 304
The Author was Glad to Reach “Civilization” at Chichen Itza | 308
Small Wooden Crosses Put by Modern Indians on Altars of Ancient Temples | 332

[1]

Silver Cities of Yucatan

[3]

## CHAPTER I
THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA

Deep in the thick jungles of Central America are dozens of splendid stone cities, abandoned centuries ago. Of the mysterious race which built them there remain only a few thousand Indians, ignorant of their glorious past.

The lovely architecture of these desolate palaces, the faded paintings on crumbling temple walls, the grace and symmetry of sculpture found on monuments buried under the matted undergrowth of who knows how many years, all stamp the builders of these cities as the creators of the highest civilization that flourished in the New World before the coming of Europeans. “New World?” Outstanding facts in the history of these first Americans have now been traced back to the ancient days when Thales was founding Greek philosophy.

Whence came these people, whom we call the [4] Mayas? What was the catastrophe that wiped out their civilization so suddenly that no tradition of them has been found among the Indians who today inhabit their territory? When we enter their deserted cities we feel the poignantly tantalizing quality of the mystery that surrounds a magnificent ship discovered in mid-ocean with sails set, gear in order and not a soul on board.

Why was this great ship, bearing no outward sign of wreck or misfortune, so abruptly abandoned? Why were these temples, palaces and astronomical observatories of cunningly carved white limestone suddenly left to the bats, the lizards and the sinister little owls the later Indians called “moan birds” and associated with death? It is conceivable that any race might forget its humble beginnings in the dawn of history. But how came legend to be so silent about the collapse of a cultivated nation, some of whose greatest cities were inhabited as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Christian era—perhaps later? One reiterates the query, one gropes for an answer, till the imagination aches.

The expedition which Dr. Herbert J. Spinden of the Peabody Museum of Harvard and I are leading through Eastern Yucatan will diligently seek data to piece out the dim record of these vanished builders. At present the earliest date in that record is August [5] 6, 613 B.C. Harvard has just announced Spinden’s proof that that was when these ancient Americans began to give each day its consecutive number and to keep a close tabulation of celestial events.

We should be particularly pleased to throw light on the abrupt downfall and disappearance of this mysterious people. Human interest, after all, is the fundamental appeal in this riddle, and one cannot stop wondering what became of the sailors who abandoned a full-rigged, seaworthy ship in mid-journey.

The information the world now has is subject to revision in the light of future discoveries, and even in its entirety is sufficient merely to whet the appetite to know more. There is no more fascinating hobby for the layman of a romantic and imaginative turn than to follow the attempts of scientists to find a satisfactory answer to this conundrum. And if he has been lucky, as I have, and has once seen a white temple rising through the green of tropical foliage, or has stood on an old pyramid awed by the silence of a whole city silver in the moonlight...! What puzzle can compete for fascination with inscrutable hieroglyphs which contain now only secrets, although carved to proclaim facts?

It was a widespread civilization as well as a high one, for it left the ornate façades of its urban centers [6] over what is today British Honduras, Southeastern Mexico, two-thirds of Guatemala and part of “Spanish Honduras.” To this oldest American civilization archæologists have agreed to give the name Maya (pronounce the first three letters like the pronoun my). This is a name of uncertain origin, connected with a late Yucatan capital called Mayapan. It has been extended to cover a great nation which once numbered many millions.

It seems fair to give the Mayas the palm for culture existing in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. Of course, the over-advertised Aztecs never reached the level of the Mayas. A comparison with the Incas presents some difficulties, but as Dr. Spinden points out, “The Peruvians had no system of hieroglyphic writing and no carefully elaborated calendar.” They were thus unable to conserve intellectual gains. But the Mayas had a well developed system of hieroglyphs, mostly ideographic, that is, consisting of abbreviated pictures of the thing intended or of an object associated with it.

Understanding of this writing was probably confined to an educated minority, mainly the priests, who probably formed the ruling caste. We are able to read some 30 per cent of their hieroglyphs, but our knowledge is confined chiefly to numerals, astronomical [7] symbols and signs for natural phenomena.

Their calendar is now an open book and can be proved more accurate than the Julian Calendar of the Spanish conquerors—the same calendar that Greece and Russia abandoned only a few years ago. Moreover, the extraordinary astronomical science of the Mayas seems to have been built up without telescopes. Astronomical sighting lines marked with monuments were used to measure the true length of the year.

Of the Maya proficiency in painting, Spinden says, “In foreshortening they greatly excelled the Egyptians and Assyrians.”

One of the most interesting things about these first Americans is that they were very religious. All their arts seem to have sprung from the religious impulse or to have been developed in interpreting it. Their gods and culture heroes had the physical attributes of reptiles, birds or lower mammals, although they were often somewhat partly humanized, like the beast gods of Egypt.

Archæology really is not dry and dull. It is fascinating, intensely exciting. But, alas, the real romance of the search for knowledge about the first families of America, the Mayas, is often neglected by laymen in their eagerness to embrace flimsy myths and hifalutin fancies.

[8]

These fancies are mostly concerned with the assumption that the wonderful antiquities of the New World were the work of emigrants from Egypt, Burma, China or some other part of the Old World, real or imaginary. The emotional associations with the Old World which the Bible has given us are a factor in our predilection for attributing the origin of everything to the other hemisphere.

Thus, even to this day bobs up Lord Kingsborough’s thin theory that the stone ruins in Central America were the handiwork of the Lost Tribes of Israel. However, the most persistent of all the myths is that the people we call Mayas were a colony of the lost continent of Atlantis, which Plato said Egyptian priests had told Solon had sunk beneath the western ocean in prehistoric times.

Of this long-lived theory one can only say that not a particle of proof has been offered. Indeed for the Atlantis myth itself, irrespective of alleged American connections, about the most that a careful critic can say is expressed by the Encyclopædia Britannica as follows:

“It is impossible to decide how far this legend is due to Plato’s invention, and how far it is based on facts of which no record remains.”

Most attempts to link up this extinct Central American culture with Old World origins are based [9] on fortuitous traces of slight similarities in customs. But it should be remembered that two peoples, occupying wide apart portions of the globe, under similar conditions of living will be likely to develop similar institutions. If the climate is hot and there is straw, straw hats are apt to be devised by both nations.

Because some stone figurines found in Yucatan have teeth filed in a manner still practised by certain tribes of Africa, it has been suggested that the stone cities of Central America were built by negroes.

Some of the earliest explorers were entirely misled by the huge noses jutting from “mask panels” which adorn the façades of many a limestone temple. Failing to recognize the other features in the highly conventionalized faces containing these noses, these early explorers dubbed the stone snouts “elephant trunks.” As there are no elephants in the Americas, this mistake in identification led to the wild conjecture that these temples must have been built by emigrants from a country of elephants, that is, India or Africa!

Pretty certainly the truth is that these snouts belonged to Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, whose nose was commonly elongated in conventionalized Maya art.

Some of the modern natives of Yucatan, who are [10] called the Maya Indians, although their degree of relationship to the Great Builders is uncertain, wear at various times a short apron from waist to knees and a sort of towel wound around the head, with the ends hanging down the back. Garments similar to these may be found in bas-reliefs from Egypt, a fact which has been the basis for many a vigorous smoking-room argument that the ruins of Yucatan must have been built by Egyptians. It is astonishing how little proof satisfies the amateur scientist. There are among the Mayas, as there are among many other Indian tribes of Mexico, a good many persons with long, narrow eyes like the eyes of Orientals. This fact and the fact that some Chinese laundrymen in Merida learn Maya more easily than they learn Spanish has convinced not a few theorists that the stone palaces in the jungle were constructed by Chinese.

In China I met an apparently reliable American who said he had found a reference in early Chinese history to a voyage made by a Chinese missionary three or four centuries after Christ. This earnest preacher of Buddhism seemed to have crossed the Pacific, coasted along what is now California and the west coast of America until he reached Central America. There, according to my friend’s translation of Chinese history, he remained several years.

[11]

But if such a voyage was made by a Buddhist missionary he was too late to found civilization in Central America. And it is just as likely that careless early voyagers were blown from the so-called New World to the Old, as vice versa.

It is surprising how many men seem to resent letting America have an early history of her own. A refreshing exception to monotonous dreams of Old World origins for the Mayas was provided by that indefatigable, though over-imaginative, French-American, Le Plongeon. This gentleman, whose active work in the field was as valuable as his subsequent theorizing was useless, presented the world with the creed that Central America had been the cradle of the human race, and that the civilization of Europe, Asia, and Africa had been founded by emigrants from the isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Charmed by his originality, if nothing more, many of our fathers in the age of the bicycle flocked to the support of this garrulous Gaul.

The leading archæologists of the world are agreed that the Mayas were an indigenous American race, that their early leaders neither sailed to Yucatan from China nor walked there from Atlantis across a “land bridge” of which there is no trace. Of course, we may some day learn that man originated [12] in one definite, small area of the globe. But apart from such possible common origin of all races in the very remote past the Mayas can be confidently assigned beginnings in the western hemisphere. It is believed by the experts that this race started on the highlands of Mexico. Up there are archæological remains three thousand years old. There, too, are traces of legends about a great tribe which emigrated from the shadow of Popocatepetl to Central America. And similarities in religion, art and social organization all strengthen the link between that advanced culture which flourished in Middle America and the lesser civilizations which belonged to the so-called Nahua stock of upland Mexico—which included the Aztecs, whose fame is relatively greater than their accomplishments warranted.

The oldest inscribed date of the Mayas yet found corresponds to 98 B.C. in our count. Between that first date in stone and the putting into operation of the Venus calendar which Spinden has recently proved was done in the sixth century B.C. there is a mysterious gap of more than four hundred years. Before history was written on stone there was almost certainly an earlier civilization, when records were put down on skin and wood. And it is quite possible that stone monuments considerably older than any now known will be found. The most [13] ardent skeptic of the great antiquity of Maya culture would have a hard time proving that before the oldest known city was built other cities had not crumbled away.

Remember, these temples are all built of limestone, a soft, friable material quick to disintegrate before the unchecked vegetable growth of the tropics. But somewhere, under favorable conditions, a very old stone relic may have escaped destruction.

This is the sort of reflection which makes us chew our nails in impatience as our schooner, the H.S. Albert, fights a head wind in the shallow waters off British Honduras. Our course will be generally northward as we retrace the track of the clumsy high-pooped vessels of the first Spanish Discoverers in the effort to find a ruined city unknown to archæology.

Columbus, on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, just missed becoming the discoverer of Yucatan when he failed to follow a canoe believed to have been filled with Yucatecans, which he met off the coast of what is now Honduras.

In 1517, another Spaniard, Cordoba, touched the east coast of Yucatan, near Cape Catoche and Mujeres Island, and saw “a large town standing back from the coast about two leagues.” Juan de Grijalva a year later sailed from Cuba to the Island [14] of Cozumel. After claiming that land for his sovereign with the usual blithe arrogance of his age, Grijalva crossed to the visible eastern shore of Yucatan, where his historian describes sighting “three large towns separated from each other by about two miles.”

Perhaps unfortunately for present knowledge, Grijalva decided not to land.

Then, in 1519, came Cortez, who stopped in Yucatan only long enough to pick up the shipwrecked Spanish priest, Jeronimo de Aguilar, before proceeding along the coast to Vera Cruz, whence he marched inland. The discovery of great wealth in upland Mexico, and later in Peru, turned the attentions of the Spanish conquistadores from Yucatan, where little gold was to be had. The conquest of the hot lowlands, inhabited by the valiant Indians, was long delayed. The natives have never given up the struggle for independence and in the eastern part of the Yucatan peninsula, called Quintana Roo, they have retained a practical independence.

Some of the priests, and especially Landa, the second Bishop of Yucatan, left accounts of the old Indian life, but their writings were locked up in archives and escaped attention.

The first real awakening of outside curiosity toward the mysterious stone cities in Yucatan and [15] Guatemala came with the reports from the American explorer, John L. Stephens, and his companion, the English artist, Francis Catherwood. Between 1839 and 1842 these two men visited and, with admirable exactitude, described “forty-four ruined cities or places in which remains or vestiges of ancient populations were found.”

Nearly all our present information has been gained since Stephens’s time, that is, within the last ninety years. And most of our knowledge of the glyphs has been hammered out within the past thirty years by arduous study of the inscriptions on monuments and of the texts of three Maya books, or “codices,” as the experts call them, which fortunately escaped the Spanish zeal for destroying what were considered “writings of the devil.”

No Rosetta Stone has been discovered to make the decipherment easier by permitting comparison of the hieroglyphs with another language. Nor is it likely that such an aid to interpretation will be found, although it is quite possible that more codices will be discovered.

Hunting for ruined cities in the unmapped jungle is somewhat like hunting for a needle in a haystack. The chances of success are increased because of the fact that the country was more thickly populated than most countries of our modern world. The [16] civilization of the Mayas was built up on an abundant reservoir of man power supported by the fertile vegetable growth of the tropics. Our admiration for them must increase when we reflect that their magnificent temples of worship were probably made with man power alone, man power wielding tools of stone.

Within a hundred years or so after the birth of Christ the Mayas were building these splendid stone cities in territory now included in the southern parts of the Mexican States of Chiapas and Tabasco, and in Guatemala and along the western edge of Honduras. In this region are the lofty temples and broad plazas of Copan, Tikal and Palenque. This period is comparable to the classic period in Greek art, and is noted for the best sculpture the Mayas ever produced. We call it their “Age of Sculpture.” The last date which has been found in this area corresponds to 630 A.D.

In other words, these magnificent cities of what scientists call the “First Empire” of the Mayas were abandoned about the beginning of our seventh century. The cause of their abandonment has been the source of many an archæological controversy.

The heavy black line shows the route of the Mason-Spinden Expedition and the black stars mark the new archæological sites which the Expedition discovered.

By the year 1000 A.D., however, the Mayas had found themselves again. Then there began their renaissance, their “second blooming.” This occurred in Yucatan and Quintana Roo. Here appeared [17] new cities of stone, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Mayapan, Labna, Zayil, and dozens of others. In this period perhaps the painting and certainly the sculpture of the Mayas never reached quite the high level of that earlier blooming in the southern area, but the architecture was the finest the race ever produced. Hence this age is called the “Age of Architecture.” It is also called the “Period of the League of Mayapan” as distinguished from that earlier “First Empire.” We do not know much about the details of Maya political structure. But apparently government followed the opposite course of that it has taken in our United States and tended to become less and less centralized. The Mayas were ruled by Priest-Kings, for religion and government went hand in hand. And toward the last days of the Mayas individual sacerdotal monarchs took more and more independence upon themselves. Each city-state was nearly sufficient unto itself. But the religion and the racial stock and the language of the various groups was the same and they maintained alliances for the purpose of common defence. For a very rough illustration of the relations between these city-states of Yucatan we may look at the famous Hanseatic League of European cities, although the ties between the old Central American towns were much closer.

[18]

The leaders in this era of flourishing city-states were the great cities of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Mayapan. Jealousy between the last two ushered in the civil wars which hastened the end of this Maya renaissance. Some commentators imply that a woman was the cause of the war which Hunnac Ceel, monarch of Mayapan, waged upon Chac Xib Chac, ruler of the “City of the Itzas at the Mouth of the Well”—as Chichen Itza means in English. At any rate Mayapan sought the aid of the Toltecs, who were just giving way to the Aztecs in the highlands around where now stands Mexico City.

The calling in of outside mercenaries was a step fatal to Maya civilization. The Toltecs found that even though their culture had had its day they could fight better than the Mayas, and they soon over-ran northern Yucatan as the Romans over-ran Greece.

Things seem to have gone from bad to worse until many Maya nobles banded together about the middle of the fifteenth century and sacked Mayapan, whose ruler apparently had been oppressing other cities with the aid of his Toltec allies. When the Spaniards came in 1517 they found a weakened and degenerate people occupying the seats of former splendor.

I am reciting Maya history with a positiveness perhaps not entirely warranted, yet there can be [19] little doubt that civil dissensions were a contributing cause of the abrupt breakdown of civilization in Yucatan. But why is it that more traditions have not been left, that more details of the debacle are not known? The Spaniards are strangely silent about the Maya hieroglyphs. Did they come in contact with no natives who could read them?

The puzzle implicit in these and similar questions, the enigma presented by the swift and silent disappearance of the flower of Maya culture, has convinced scientists that civil war was not the only and perhaps not the chief cause of the vanishing of that great early American civilization. Other causes suggested, by men whose word carries weight, are climatic change in Central America, exhaustion of the soil and the outbreak of epidemics, especially Yellow Fever. Spinden believes that this disease which the ancients called “Black Vomit” may have been a large factor both in the abandonment of the cities of the “First Empire” and in the final breakdown of civilization in Northern Yucatan.

Life in ancient Yucatan was a matter of delicate articulation as in our own city civilization of today. Suppose, for example, shortage of food and water made it necessary to evacuate New York almost over night and set up a new city in a rural district. A million persons might conceivably die in the transfer. [20] And if meanwhile yellow fever or smallpox broke out....

To me the final, abrupt collapse of this great civilization just before the Spaniards arrived is the most fascinating part of the whole Maya riddle. Isn’t the mystery which enshrouds the ruins more poignant than it would be if they were ten times older?

Spinden and I have chosen the eastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula as the field for this expedition partly because it is one of the least known sections of the whole Maya area, but partly, too, because it was here that Europeans first came to grips with the broken remnants of the first families of America.

It is said that when one sense is crippled the others become sharper. Perhaps it is due to their inability to make much of the hieroglyphs that scientists have been able to put together so much information about the Mayas from the evidence of sculpture and architecture. The discovery of a ruined city may mean much more to us than a mere count of so many buildings added to the list of those already known. It may give us important information about the nature of the people who built it, the sort of lives they led, the activities which interested them. And if we can only get some light on the connection between the modern natives and the dead builders ... find some survival of an ancient custom....

[21]

Just now a modern Indian is crossing our bow in a fishing boat propelled by a gasoline engine. It seems a far cry from this Indian with his noisy, smelly motor to the brown skinned warriors who stood up against Spanish cannon with flint tipped spears and shields of tortoiseshell!

[22]

## CHAPTER II
WE HEAR OF A RUINED CITY

It’s a great hour, it’s a grand hour
When your anchor slams down,
When the old yawl lets her wings fall
And you land on the town.
It’s a great hour, it’s a grand hour
But the best hour I know,
Is the morning, grayly dawning,
When you make sail—and go!

Not even the premonitory gray of dawn was in the sky, however, when I was wakened by the rattle of the windlass as the Albert pulled up her left bower.

Buttoning my sweater and lighting a corn cob I reached the deck to hear Spinden moan through three blankets and an overcoat:

“I’ve got a longitudinal crease in my foot!”

“Is that why you kept it in my face all night?” came from under the greasy tarpaulin with which Whiting had reinforced his swathings.

The port engine coughed, sputtered, began to flare through the exhaust like a machine gun. Into the eastern sky crept hints of lemon, violet and apricot. [23] The trade was rising with the sun—a favorable wind, thank God! Jib, staysail and foresail were helping the motor. The starboard engine was idle—there were certain shallow spots ahead which the Captain did not want to reach till the tide had lifted a little.

“Breakfas’ ready,” announced one of the two moon-faced San Blas Indian boys in our crew, which numbers six, beside pilot and Captain.

Our dining table is the engine room top. Spinden, Whiting and McClurg crouched on it like Turkish tailors, half encircling the food which the cook put on the table all at once from bananas to bacon. Griscom balanced on the bulge of a water barrel abaft the engine room. I sat on an upturned pail just in front of the wheel. These are our permanent seats, said the steward, ebony Jake who has been with Captain George Gough since the Albert was built.

Spinden and McClurg, each 46, are the senior members of the expedition. They have ten years on me and I shade Griscom a scant twelve-month. Whiting, at 21, is the kid of the party, as he is frequently reminded by Spinden. The latter, who talks even more than I (as I see it) and has twice as much to say, is the leader in the free-for-all, Donnybrook Fair of badinage, personal animadversion [24] and “ragging” which has kept up with no intermission except for sleep since we assembled at New Orleans. This worried me a bit at first, I was afraid some soft spots might be found and seeds of trouble sown. That no soft spots seem to exist speaks well for the crowd.

To find a ruined city is not the only objective of the Mason-Spinden expedition. Most of the country ahead of us has never been visited by an ornithologist and we have good reason to hope Griscom’s work will be very useful to science. With wise modesty he refrains from predicting that he will discover a new species, although there is a splendid chance that he will. He was lent to the expedition by the American Museum of Natural History chiefly to study the fauna of Cozumel Island and the adjacent mainland, for previous scientists to visit Cozumel have made the astonishing report that on that small island are several kinds of birds not recorded anywhere else in the world—not even on the Mexican mainland some twelve miles away!

Ruined cities and rare birds: a good program, but we have yet another aim, namely, general exploration with the emphasis on coastal and hydrographic observation. The Navy Department has asked McClurg (a full-fledged Commander in the Naval Reserve) to check up the positions of certain lights and [25] other landmarks of value to mariners which seem to be of a migratory species to judge by conflicting reports of their whereabouts which reach the men who make charts.

Cozumel Island is on the route of steamers from Galveston, New Orleans and Mobile to Central America, yet our Government’s only chart of Cozumel is based on a British survey made no more recently than 1831. Opposite a large lagoon near the south end of the island a legend on the chart reads: “There is a channel into this lagoon but it was not seen by Captain Owen.” Which is better than no information to a mariner in a storm, but it might well be expanded. On the same chart the heads of Ascension and Espiritu Santo Bays are drawn in the fascinating broken lines which indicate doubt—unexplored territory. We hope to investigate the uncharted parts of at least one of these great bays. The very meagre soundings shown for both these bodies of water were made by a British war vessel in 1839. Yet Ascension Bay was described by its Spanish discoverer as large enough to hold the navies of the world. Terminating in Allen Point at the northern side of Ascension Bay is a long sliver of land which our Navy Chart shows as a peninsula. But we were told by a fisherman in Belize it is an island.

[26]

From Labrador to Tierra del Fuego it would not be easy to find a piece of coast so little known to white men as this. Yet the coastal places I have just mentioned are only from 150 to 250 miles distant from the western tip of Cuba.

In the whole Maya territory it would be hard to find a piece of land so nearly terra incognita to the archæologist as the narrow strip of hinterland between the coast of the Mexican Territory of Quintana Roo (formerly part of the State of Yucatan) and a parallel line drawn through the end of the Yucatan railroad system at Valladolid, about seventy-five miles away.

We are as certain that there are in this strip undiscovered birds and important Maya ruins unknown to archæologists as men can be certain of things they have not seen.

Breakfast was interrupted by a check to the schooner’s progress so sudden that the coffee pot waltzed into Whiting’s lap.

Our Skipper dropped the fish line he was unsnarling and jabbed at the bottom with a fifteen foot pole which takes the place of a sounding lead on this “good sea and mud boat,” as McClurg calls her.

“Start da starboard engine, Nelson,” he yelled to the young engineer below, “an’ go ahead on both. Hey, Matchee an’ Jawn, get up da main.”

[27]

The obstacle impeding our advance was a bar which blocked most of a narrow channel between two pieces of Hicks’ Key. Engrossed with the repartee of the breakfast table the helmsman had not noticed that the wind had been blowing us far to loo’ard—indeed with the centerboard raised on account of the shallows the old schooner had been sliding sideways like a dishpan.

In raising the mainsail and going ahead on both engines the Captain thought to plough through the obstacle. But the bar stood its ground, or mud. The only result of Gough’s manœuvre was to imbed the schooner so deeply that it seemed she might stay there forever.

“There’s only about a foot rise of tide here, and it’s more than half up already,” McClurg observed pleasantly. “A three or four inch lift may take us off—and it may not, after the way we’ve dug into the bar.”

The sails were dropped. Both engines raced full speed astern, but the only result was two streams of mud whose speed away from us emphasized the solid and stationary nature of our position.

Seeing the futility of this effort the Captain launched the crazy half-dory we call Delirium Tremens and carried an anchor off to port of the Albert’s bow. Hauling on the cable the men tried to turn the [28] schooner’s head, while the port engine backed and the starboard motor went ahead to help the turning operation. But the vessel wouldn’t budge her nose, for with all the drums of gasoline and kerosene that had been stowed forward she was down by the head and the bar had got a good grip on her bow.

We now tried shifting cargo. Meanwhile one of the two San Blas boys—who look like twins but are not related—dove for the anchor, which seemed to have acquired the schooner’s intention of cleaving to this bottom indefinitely. Each time the Indian came up he was a splendid sight with his nude muscular body glistening in the sun. After several futile attempts he loosened the anchor from the clinging marl, and the dory carried the big iron hook out astern of the schooner.

The dusky manpower of our crew was applied to the cable again while both motors heaved hard astern. Sulphurous oaths in English, Spanish and San Blas came from the sweating crew, and choking blue fumes poured out of the engine room.

“She moves,” yelled the Skipper, “yah, she’s movin’!”

He pointed to a nine-foot oar jabbed perpendicularly into the bottom with its shaft brushing the counter of the Albert.

A good sea and mud boat was the H. S. Albert

“An inch a minute,” agreed Whiting. It was [29] hardly much faster at first, a motion comparable to the movement of the minute hand on a Grandfather clock. As the encouraged seamen threw every ounce they had on the hawser and the fervent incantations of Chief Engineer, Nelson, coaxed a little more power from the two 24-horse-power Lathrops the Albert’s rearward speed increased to six inches a minute, a foot a minute. Her stern approached the anchor, which had not been carried very far behind us. As if resenting her release she rushed at the hook with sudden savagery and struck it with her port propeller.

“Stawp her, stawp her,” shouted Gough, and the punishment of the anchor was stopped. Everyone thought the port propeller must be a ruin. But the naked San Blas went overboard to look and came up with a dripping grin. Just a little nick in one blade, “no bigger’n a sardine could nibble,” explained Gough. He has a miraculous way of understanding the jargon of these San Blas Indians, who are his pets among the crew. They are built like short, stocky men of 25, but neither is yet 16. The Captain calls them Matchee indiscriminately, which adds to our difficulty in distinguishing them. It seems that matchee means “boy” or something like that in San Blas, and that they really have proper names, one being Joe and the other John.

[30]

The nick in the propeller blade was not serious, but the port engine had inhaled mud to the capacity of its cylinders, and the nick was the final insult. The engine quit.

The starboard one was stopped by order in five minutes when Griscom sighted a fishhawk’s nest on the key we were passing. He, Whiting, Spinden and I let ourselves very gingerly into Delirium Tremens. With cumbersome nine-foot oars delicately handled we rowed this damnably unbalanced craft into the squdgy grass which fringed the mangrove bog that was the key. Floundering through the morass three of us made still pictures of the nest and movies of the parent birds in the air, while Spinden from the rear snapshotted our flounderings.

Griscom was elated. This was a new “farthest south” for nesting fishhawks. This was the second time our ornithologist had scored, for he had already seen a herring gull in Belize harbor—a “farthest south” record for that species.

We are delighted with our schooner, which I chartered at Belize, Capital of British Honduras, through the good offices of Spinden’s friends in the United Fruit Company. She is comfortable and the most strongly built vessel of her size I have ever seen.

Certainly, though, she is no beauty with her [31] patched sails, and with the two frame structures which loom up on her stern with all the grace of the little building which dogs the rear of every good, old-fashioned New England farmhouse. That is just what one of them is. The other is the galley.

The Albert has been used as a combination passenger and cargo carrier, like many small schooners and big yawls in Central America where the sun has not yet set on the day of the old style, freelance trading vessel. She has just had an interesting operation by which a forty-seven-foot yawl became a sixty-five-foot schooner, mainly through the simple process of having a chunk inserted in her middle. One result of her visit to the ship hospital is that she is clean—so clean that she is a moving contrast to the fears we had of what she might be.

The great centerboard box divides the after part of the hold, and in the rear of these compartments, piled against the bulkhead between us and the engines, are dozens of crates and boxes of provisions. A steep companionway enters the starboard hold, and a ladder gives other egress to the deck through a hatch over the wide, open part of the hold just forward of the centerboard box. Forward of this again, under the lower, foremost deck which would be the fo’c’s’le head if she had a fo’c’s’le are stowed her chains, spare anchors and cable, two hundred [32] pounds of ham and bacon, the axes, pickaxe and shovel of our archæological outfit, and four fifty-gallon drums of fuel. The remaining six hundred gallons is stored on deck in cases. At the most there is five feet ten inches of headroom, not enough for Spinden and me.

Hinged against the Albert’s sides and suspended from her deck beams above by galvanized chains are six planks, six swinging bunks, three on a side. Spinden and McClurg have taken port bunks, the junior trio berths to starboard. The berths are short and Whiting, Griscom and I cannot occupy our beds simultaneously without the feet of at least one man being on another’s face. But Griscom, Whiting and Spinden announce that to escape the heat and the odor of fuel here they prefer to sleep on deck in the folding cots they have brought for the bush. Which suits McClurg and me perfectly.

Already we are all keen about George Gough. Only one request of ours has he unfulfilled. That was to get the permission of the British authorities to insert the letter M between the H and S of the Albert’s name. Never sailed schooner on romantic quest with more prosaic title. “H. S. Albert!” It sounds like the name of a coal barge. However, with the ridiculous frame shacks on the poop, and the roof with rolled up carriage curtains raised on [33] uprights over the engine house the good vessel resembles an East River floating home for tuberculous children.

A rare moment when both Spinden and Mason were silent

But her name bothers me less now that I know the explanation. It seems that Gough is only one of three owners of the little ship. Like his partners he is a parent, and the schooner is named for a child of each of them—Harold Stella Albert, I think it is.

George F. Bevans is the name of our old negro pilot. He goes forward to peer at the shoals and relay back directions through the two shouting San Blas Indians to the Skipper, who takes the wheel. Now the light glints on a long, tanned face—humor and initiative in the strong mouth and straight eyes—the face of a man in whom leadership is so instinctive that he never feels the responsibilities of command.

It is late afternoon. With the wind nearly abeam we are hot. It must be a stifling day in the bush, out of the breeze. McClurg and I have finished opening and sorting the stores, and we have all rigged racks for guns and towels beneath our bunks, and nailed boxes there to hold toilet articles, tobacco and books. Griscom has overhauled his shining cutlery for skinning birds and his arsenic and cornmeal for curing the skins. His belongings and Whiting’s are well arranged, but McClurg’s are put [34] out in the apple pie order of the Navy. What a contrast to the careless aspect of my quarters! As for Spinden’s dunnage, a great mixed mass of papers, books, cigar boxes, photographic material, hunting knives, candy jars, boots, medicine bottles, ink bottles, blankets, and disordered clothing buries not only his bunk—which he does not sleep in—but the spare bunk between his and McClurg’s as well. He has made several attempts to reduce this mountainous chaos to an orderly plain, but while the engines are running the poor fellow cannot stay below two minutes before he begins to turn green.

Spinden and McClurg—already firm friends, are a delicious contrast. When he can forget the internal torment created even by this slight roll of the schooner the archæologist puts off the manner of a pathetic child lost in the dark for a sudden smile of winsome friendliness. His fund of information is amazingly vast, ranging from thermo-dynamics to bar-room ballads. McClurg talks little, but always to the point. His charm is in his crisp dependability, his way of putting his head a little on one side with a quick smile. He says frankly he hasn’t the slightest interest in ruined temples or old frescoes. He vows he will never go far ashore and his curiosity about the land we plan to visit is confined to reefs [35] and islands. He hopes we will travel fast, in order that he may see as much of the coast as possible before his business calls him home in about a month. McClurg’s ruling passion is the sea and ships, two things which are poison to Spinden. The latter sharpens his machete and longs to endure the bugs and thorns of the bush for a glimpse of the faces of old gods. Sharing the pet enthusiasm of each of these men to a lesser degree, I find the conflict of hobbies vastly entertaining. Spinden and McClurg have given up trying to win the other’s interest to ruined cities and ships, respectively, and have found neutral ground in conversations on astronomy and cooking, subjects on which knowledge is essential both to archæologists and navigators.

The water in the starboard butt is tinctured with tar. The flavor in the port barrel is gasoline. Whiting has solved the thirst problem for today at least by adding to a bucket of the tarry fluid generous quantities of sugar, limejuice and rum.

The dull masts of our schooner are great gold pencils in the generous sun. From her maintop the five-starred flag of Honduras snaps and crackles in the breeze—a fair wind to the coasts of the unknown. Now, at last, I really believe we are going up the buccaneer coast of Yucatan in a schooner, looking for an old, ruined city of the Mayas. [36] We are bound first to Payo Obispo, capital of Quintana Roo, to get permission from the Mexican Governor to explore his Territory. Thereafter our plan is to use the schooner as a houseboat, a base from which to sally into the interior. The coastal jungle which we want to explore is more easily reached by water than by land. We are urged to hasten by a rumor that the British explorer, Dr. Thomas Gann, whom we left in Belize yesterday, January 16, 1926, is going to Cozumel Island or Progreso, Yucatan, to get a boat to bring him southward along the same piece of coast which we are aiming to reach by northerly sailing.

“Stawp her,” yells the Skipper.

Anchor chain rattles. The schooner’s head comes up into the trade wind, warm, strong, steady as a fine friendship. A light gleams out astern. “Payo Obispo,” says the Captain. But we cannot land tonight, the Customs House has closed.

Since the sun rose over Saint George Key we have nearly crossed Chetumal Bay, which separates British Honduras from Mexico. When Montejo, conqueror of Yucatan, came up here in 1529 his caravel must have been of very slight draft. In large areas the wide bay is of insufficient depth to drown a Maya Indian, and the Mayas are short. As McClurg has just said:

[37]

“There’s a lot of water here, but it’s spread on thin.”

The Assistant Engineer, the Pilot and the Cook are already playing cards by a lantern under the canopy over the engine room. Spinden, Griscom and Whiting stumble over each other and the folding cots they are opening in the brief spaces between water barrels and fuel cases.

McClurg has already turned in below. I follow the beam of my flashlight down there, kick off sneakers and thrust a leg up to my swinging berth. Grasping the chains which hold it I pull myself up like a man coming over a high wall. But I cannot sleep. The reality of the dream I am living is too sharp to be suspended by physical weariness.

My body gropes for the hard plank through the thin mattress. My hand grips the four by six timber overhead. They are real. This is not a dream any longer, this schooner off the coast of the old Mayas.

The mind races ahead to places I know by heart though I have never seen them. It might pay to take a look at that long lagoon back of that thin piece of land where Morley, Gann and Held found the ruins of Chacmool—that ought to be explored. I reach down to a box I have nailed under my berth and pull up Hydrographic Office Chart Number [38] 1380. An examination with a flashlight confirms the impression that it gave no depths for this lagoon. Very shallow, doubtless, but perhaps we could get in there with the Delirium Tremens.

Chart Number 966 comes up, bearing the thumb marks and pencillings of three years of study. In the northeast corner of Yucatan a cross and a question mark show where it may be possible to find remains of the great city of Choaca, which seems to have impressed greatly the Spaniards who sacked it. Further south, roughly opposite the southern end of Cozumel Island, I have pencilled in a cross and the words: “Acomal—Lothrop thinks ruins here.” The exact words of Lothrop in his fascinating “Archæological Study of the East Coast of Yucatan” come to me: “From these ... Indians of the small village of Acomal ... we learned of the ruins of Xelha, and they also stated that near their own village were remains of equal importance.”

But someone else may get to these places ahead of us; Gann is up to something I am sure.

And what if all these stories of ruins are fairy stories and we should find nothing, not one solitary little shrine! I shiver. The leadership of the expedition is shared by Spinden, but responsibility for complete failure would be mine alone. This trip originated in my mind, it was my dream. I sold [39] it, and if we find not a single building, not even one solitary little shrine!

Groping for consolation my mind turns to memory of a conference in the Peabody Museum of Harvard in November, when Dr. Tozzer of that distinguished institution agreed to lend the expedition not only the services of Spinden but the Museum’s warm moral support. A number of men who know the conditions we are likely to meet went over our proposed itinerary with us.

“You are bound to find something worth while,” Tozzer said at the conclusion of the conference, and Morley of the Carnegie Institution and Lothrop of the Heye Foundation nodded emphatic assent. “The bush is full of good stuff,” declared Morley, who has found many ruins by his own efforts and some by virtue of his standing offer—widely advertised among the Indians of the chicle camps—“veinte cinco pesos para un ciudad real” (“twenty-five pesos for a royal city”).

Well, I’ll offer a hundred pesos, no a hundred dollars gold. Two hundred silver pesos, more silver than an Indian could carry in his cat-skin pouch. A pile of silver, a pyramid. There rises before me a typical Maya pyramid, four-sided, with ascending terraces and a wide stairway of limestone which shines like silver under the moon. And on its top [40] a temple—the grinning stone face of a Maya god at each corner, a temple no archæologist has yet seen. An old Maya temple waiting for us to find it, silvery in the moonlight.

Another dawn, this one not so cold. McClurg’s test shows the water is virtually fresh. Rid of the fear of sharks and barracuda we swim, hurried by the fragrance of bacon and coffee.

Payo Obispo presents a pleasant front of white stucco houses with grey or red roofs. There’s a glimpse of humbler thatched huts in the rear. We anchor near a chicle schooner in a bevy of sloops and nondescript launches.

Governor Candelario Garza is very cordial. He has had instructions from Mexico City to treat us well, and the only request he denies is that he pose for his photograph. He asks to be excused because he has not shaved today. Spinden, who is much more practical than archæologists are commonly supposed to be, delights Governor Garza by arguing that the development of a port and railroad in Northern Quintana Roo on the track of the steamers from New Orleans to Central America would make a hustling commercial state of what is now a wilderness inhabited by a few Indians who exist by hunting turkeys and chicle.

“I understand you are looking for ruins,” says [41] the Governor. “I do not know of any which are not known to the world, but I suggest you go and talk to Señor Enriquez. He’s in charge of our forestry work in Quintana Roo and has been all through the bush. He may be able to help you.”

We thank the Governor and walk out of his office and through wide streets in which the grass is indifferently kept down by the bare feet of the inhabitants. We walk abreast, we five and tall, handsome young Señor Fidencio Arguelles, the Governor’s Chief Clerk. Burros, pigs, goats, and children trail us.

Ingeniero Raymundo E. Enriquez is the seventh Mexican we have this morning asked:

“Do you know of any Maya ruins?”

“I do,” he says confidently, “at Chunyaxché, back of Boca de Paila. I was there looking for chicle once. You cross the bar at Boca de Paila, cross a lagoon, go up a river, and just before you reach a lake you’ll see one ruin.”

“What’s it like?” asks Spinden, suspicious from long experience.

“It is a one story building with a rather flat roof. It has three doors with a decoration over them carved in the limestone.”

“Yes; are there any others?”

“Yes, you go on, cross this lake to a sort of canal connecting with a second lake. On the farther side [42] of that second lake is a chicle camp. Right close by are several more ruins.”

“What are they like?” pursues Spinden.

“I didn’t pay much attention to them, for ruins are not my business. But I remember a temple on a pyramid like El Castillo at Chichen Itza.”

Spinden’s eyes glisten. “It sounds like the real thing!” he whispers to me, while Señor Enriquez reaches for cigarets in his linen coat hanging from a nail.

We pull out our maps. Boca de Paila is shown, but there is no indication of the river and the two lakes. Confidently Enriquez sketches them in with a pencil.

“Can we get a practico—a pilot?”

“I think you can at Boca de Paila. I think the chicleros are still there, or else up at the camp on the lake, the place called Chunyaxché. But if I were you I’d stop at Ascension Bay first. It’s right on your way—and there you won’t fail to get a guide.”

We thank him profusely. Will he come on board for lunch? Many, many thanks, but he is “muy occupado” today.

We go out walking on air. This sounds like a real clue. And it comes “the first crack out of the box.”

It is an everyday occurrence for explorers in this country to be told of ruins by chicleros, muleteers [43] and other ramblers of the jungle. Nine times out of ten these men cannot take you to the temples they have glimpsed months or perhaps years before in the roadless bush. In other cases their ruins prove to be an old Spanish church or even a stone-walled coral, as chicleros and muleteers generally have little appreciation of the features which characterize Maya architecture. However, Señor Enriquez seems so intelligent, and gives such a convincing description of what he has seen, that even the cautious Spinden is giving free rein to the most sanguine hopes.

No ruins in such a location as Enriquez describes are on any archæological map. The fact that Enriquez has seen the ruins will not deprive us of the right to call ourselves the discoverers of the old City of Chunyaxché if we reach it. All the ruined Maya cities now on scientific maps were known to natives before they were “discovered” by explorers. America was known to thousands of Indians inhabiting it when Columbus arrived, but the civilized world calls Columbus “the discoverer of America.” It is the accepted usage to say that an explorer or archæologist is the “discoverer” of an ancient building if he is the first to report it to the modern scientific world for study.

This day drags like the last day of convalescence [44] in a hospital, or the day before a long awaited vacation. We itch to make sail and go! Even Spinden is yearning for the vibration of the Albert’s motors and the gas fumes which will make him sick again.

But we must wait for valuable letters of introduction which the Governor has promised to deliver this afternoon.

Arguelles and the Chief Customs Officer come to luncheon. Both are pleasant chaps, but I fear we are all absentminded hosts. We are full of the desire to be alone to think over the great news given us by Enriquez, to make our plans and paw over our maps for the thousandth time. The strain of maintaining a conversation in Spanish makes us want to scream. Good chaps that they are, our guests probably sense our condition, for they do not linger after the cigars.

“Egad, it’s good to speak English again, fellah!” exclaims Griscom with a thump on my back. “I never took my linguistic responsibilities so hard before. Wish I were like Whiting and McClurg and couldn’t be expected to do anything but smile and murmur ‘Gracias’ ten times a minute!”

It is six o’clock before the papers are given to Spinden and me at the Governor’s office. After enthusiastic thanks we run to the dock.

[45]

The two “matchees” give way with a will, Delirium Tremens caroms along with a bone in her teeth.

Our impatient crew has set foresail and mainsail already. The windlass creaks, the engines bark, and the schooner swings off toward Chunyaxché and the vindication of a dream.

[46]

## CHAPTER III
RARE BIRDS

Twenty hours later—in early afternoon—we were anchoring off the fishing village of San Pedro, which is on Ambergris Key. This sizable island acknowledges the rule of British Honduras but is virtually the Czardom of two Englishmen who bought it and converted it into a vast coconut grove. The trees are laid out with the regularity of those in a Delaware peach orchard.

Spinden rowed to the village with Gough and Pilot Bevans, who was to leave us here for his home on nearby Key Corker. McClurg, Griscom, Whiting and I unboxed one of the outboard motors and screwed it to the stern of the Imp, our larger tender. We armed ourselves with shotguns and gamegetters. The gamegetter is a very useful little implement, consisting of a folding, skeleton stock and two barrels, the larger 41 or 44 caliber and the smaller 22. Without the stock it is a pistol. With the stock it is either rifle or shotgun, for either ball or shot can be used in both barrels. Griscom says he has brought [47] down game as heavy as large hawks with a gamegetter and he expects to bag most of his specimens with this tool.

At McClurg’s second pull on the cord the little motor started. He pointed the Imp’s bow for a distant promontory beyond the planted area where the negro Customs man said we might find birds.

To eastward the reef was a white ribbon of foam, here and there dotted darkly where a coral head rose above water. Within this barrier, the ocean could do no more than rock us on a gently heaving surface so smooth that every detail of the bottom was visible through eight or ten feet of water. Little black and gold fishes, and larger ones as blue as pieces of twilight sky, darted over the creamy bottom.

Three times we vainly tried to land through the belt of sea grass which fringed the shore. The Imp’s foot of draft was too much. The fourth time we poled her into a tiny ditch a native had dug through this grass-covered mud bank and pulled her out on the beach before his one-roomed hut. The man was out fishing, and when his wife saw us she ran into the woods with one child in her arms and another clinging to her hand.

“You see, Griscom, you really ought to shave,” observed McClurg.

[48]

“Let’s shave Griscom with an oyster shell,” suggested Whiting, picking a shell from the sand.

Griscom and I sprinted up the narrow beach with Whiting and McClurg in pursuit.

A pelican was soaring down the narrow beach toward us. In his effortless flight his wings made a perfect cupid’s bow. I took a snap shot, missed with the right barrel, then loosed the left as he passed overhead.

McClurg and Whiting did not see him till a great projectile came hurtling through a palm with a crashing of branches which warned them to jump aside just in time.

“Laugh that off!” shouted Griscom, chuckling at the dismay with which our pursuers were appreciating the bulk and nature of the missile which had missed them by inches only. “Better lay off us hombres. Next time we’ll drop an eagle on you—or a roc.”

As if really daunted Whiting and McClurg sat down beside the carcase of the great pelican, and began to smoke to drive away the mosquitoes which swarmed out of the low palm scrub.

Three times my companion and I penetrated this strip of bush only to find a swamp within two hundred yards of the sea. At last we came upon a tiny path which indicated that the marsh had fallen back a little. The path led into a clearing [49] where a melon patch was guarded by a fence of dilapidated fishnet hung on sticks. In a lone tree nearby was a platform, possibly used against marauding birds and animals by the owner of the melons. Griscom followed the northern side of the clearing, I the southern.

I pursued a woodpecker he wanted, but could not come within range. The damp sandy soil was marked by the feet of peccary, deer and a cat smaller than a jaguar—perhaps a kind of ocelot. Apparently it had been hunting the peccary, which had been hunting the melons.

At the end of the clearing water again glistened between the dark trunks of mangroves. I heard three small reports from Griscom’s gamegetter. A grayish bird flitted out of a guano palm and the twelve gauge roared. Even by number tens the bird was too torn to make a good specimen.

It was a Central American mockingbird, said Griscom, who potted one like it just before we met again by the tree with the lookout platform. He had also shot the red-headed woodpecker I had lost—or its brother.

“But here’s something that makes our little shore adventure worth while, fellah,” exclaimed the ornithologist, reaching carefully into a big pocket of his hunting coat. He pulled out an oriole.

[50]

“I can’t be sure till I get back to the museum and check up, but I’ll bet you a season subscription to the opera that that’s a new subspecies!”

“It’s beautifully shot.” There was hardly a stain on the smooth golden feathers. “What’s that between its beak?” I asked, leaning over the bird.

“A dried leaf to keep it from soiling itself.” He snatched the prize back suddenly. “Good Lord, man, don’t drip on it—your face is covered with blood.”

“So’s your forehead. But no self-respecting mosquito would even prospect around in that beard of yours.”

We walked quickly back to the boat, swinging our arms against the swarming insects. We launched the boat, walking far out, but still they harried us. They could not lower our spirits, however. In his first three birds Griscom had got a new species. The more he examined the oriole the more confident he was of this.

Tremendous luck, in a way. Yet it must be remembered that this country is terra nova to ornithology, and it was almost certain that something new was to be found here. The luck is that we have found a new species so soon. (With characteristic generosity Griscom has named the oriole for me.)

Our high spirits increased when Spinden reported [51] meeting a man in San Pedro who had been told by a chiclero of Maya ruins at Chunyaxché. We were exulting over this confirmation after supper, when Whiting, who had been reading, slid out of his bunk with my copy of Gann’s In an Unknown Land.

Whiting pointed out a passage which I had marked a year ago and forgotten. After describing the abundant fish and waterfowl he saw at Boca de Paila Gann alludes casually to the “stone-walled ruins of ... dwellings” of the ancestors of some Chunyancha Indians whose village he did not visit but who he was told lived by the side of a lake connected with the sea by “a little creek navigable only for small canoes.”

This tallied with the description of the approach to Chunyaxché given us at Payo Obispo by Señor Enriquez. If there was truth in the rumor we heard that Gann was planning exploration of the territory ahead of us he may be even now on his way to Cozumel to charter a sloop to take him to Boca de Paila. There is good reason for us to hurry on to Chunyaxché.

However, not a soul aboard the Albert has ever visited the dangerous coast between here and Boca de Paila. Captain Gough thinks that under these circumstances it would be dangerous to run by night or even to enter any of these unknown ports [52] except under favorable conditions. This phrase means with the sun behind us, or at least overhead. When the sun is ahead of a boat her lookout cannot see rocks and bars in time to avoid them, says Gough. This is the identical advice given us by Morley, Lothrop, Ricketson, of the Carnegie Institution, and John Held, Jr. To fly in the face of such a unanimity of expert opinion seems like asking for trouble.

Captain Gough has suggested making two stops before Boca de Paila, namely Chinchorro Bank and Ascension Bay. I have never heard of an archæologist visiting Chinchorro Bank, but there is so little terra firma there that ruins are unlikely. However, when Gough mentioned Chinchorro Bank I saw Griscom puff vigorously on his omnipresent pipe—a sure sign of suppressed excitement. Ever since I first told Griscom about Chinchorro when we passed it in the night on the steamer from New Orleans to Belize he has wanted to visit this God-forsaken obstacle in the track of sailing ships from Belize to Europe. He believes that the Big Key near the center of the great elliptical ring of reef may have land birds very interesting for him to study. A good place to look for a new species, he thinks, particularly as Cozumel Island, which is rather similarly situated, is said to have a number [53] of birds not found anywhere else in the world. What’s more, he has reminded us that Chinchorro’s islets have the characteristic ring formation of the typical Pacific Ocean atoll.

“It would be sport to visit a South Sea Island without going to the South Seas—What!” he exclaimed. He has a very contagious enthusiasm for unusual and desolate places. The wilder and more forbidding they are the better he likes them. McClurg is keen for Chinchorro, too. He thinks the reefs and currents warrant closer study than they have ever had.

The chart shows good anchorage near both the southern and northern ends of the Bank, albeit the number of coral heads and shoals indicated on the paper is forbidding. But Gough is confident he can “negotiate” the anchorage. Griscom’s success with the oriole makes me want to strain a point in his favor, and the truth is I am eager to see this mass of reefs and atolls myself. So are all of us. What is it in every man which makes him leap to the invitation to step ashore on soil which perhaps no other human being has ever trod?

Chinchorro! The name cries of lonely cruelty and iron desolation. Chinchorro! Page Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson.

So we are on our way to Chinchorro now.

[54]

Before he left us Bevans imparted minute information about the way to sail through the reef off San Pedro, and Gough accomplished the feat in defiance of his rule about the sun, which was less than an hour high in the east. The Albert put-putted straight into its low rays.

I was sorting ammunition below when the good schooner raised up on her tail, like a rearing mare. I got to the top of the ladder just in time to be spilled into the fore shrouds as the vessel stood on her head. About us was a sight for Gods and Poets.

We were on the bar where great rollers from the blue depths beyond all but broke. Not more than seventy-five yards from us on each side the end of a reef was converting mountains of luscious green into geysers of foamy white. I went up the mainmast a few feet, after Whiting. From there these two natural seawalls stretched off for miles like great crouched monsters, thundering in rage at this terrible buffeting and spewing hissing white water as the largest, angriest whales in the world could never spout.

Perhaps our schooner stood on her ends for one minute, perhaps for two. Spinden moaned that she reminded him of some mules he had ridden, “You think you’re going fast but if you analyze the motion it’s mostly up and down.”

The poor fellow had hardly said this when his [55] cargo became as uneasy as the Albert’s. But the schooner kept hers.

We were in blue water now, blue with white patches where the wind whipped the caps off the heads of the big bold seas. Off to port as far as we could see was the thin white thread of reef, then beyond the green shallows the thinner white thread of beach holding back the press of grass-green palms, stunted guano palms and tall twisted coco palms, leaning toward the ocean they loved despite the droning remonstrance of the trades.

The Albert was proving herself a good sea boat. She took her huge rollers as surely as a duck would take them.

“God, I wish we would sail,” said Whiting. “It’s a crime to waste gas on a day like this.”

Gough put all sail on her. She carried her rags as easily as the Hotel Plaza carries its awnings, although it was blowing a good four point breeze on the Beaufort scale, almost a five I thought.

Poor Spinden lay lengthwise on deck. At every large ninth wave he rolled between the Imp and the wooden cowl over the companionway.

“Hang it, you’ll break our best dinghy,” said McClurg, and he wedged the archæologist against the Imp with the two boxes which had held the Johnson motors.

[56]

“What’s that vile stuff you’re smoking?” I asked Whiting.

“Griscom’s Edgworth,” he answered, “have some?”

“It was my favorite tobacco an hour ago,” I answered, in the slow sad realization that all was not well with me.

The rest of the morning I sat in various spots on the roof of the “Porch” chewing lemons and trying to avoid the tobacco smoke which Whiting and McClurg playfully emitted from windward positions.

Griscom was below skinning birds and fumigating himself the while with his great curved tobacco burner. After half an hour he rushed top side, with his face a sicklier hue than any visage I have ever seen outside of a moving picture studio.

His recovery was remarkable. He avoided the technical loss of sea health even while he was greenest, and within fifteen minutes he was smoking again. But he did no more skinning below decks. And he made no objections when Belize John, his apprentice in the art, announced he guessed he’d “quit skinnin’ birds till the table’s steadier.”

About noon the Captain began to pinch the Albert into the wind, saying he feared we would pass out of sight of the low keys which are our destination unless he did so. But the result was to make the [57] schooner luff so that McClurg and I thought the sails were holding her back instead of helping her forward. Because the leaches drew a little every now and then the skipper stoutly maintained that the canvas was helping her. McClurg says he knows a lot of fishing schooner captains with the same quaint notion, which is not much exaggerated in suggesting that the flags on an excursion steamer help her on a windward course. However, we did not argue the point, for we have discovered that there is never very much of the heel and lilt of real sailing in the sensations which come when the Albert’s rags are drawing. Her sixteen-foot beam is not exceptional for a boat of her other dimensions, but it is enough to keep her deck comparatively level in even a stiff blow. She is hardly more inclined to capsize than a floating drydock. We were not worried about her hindering sails, for her engines were being aided by a three mile current, which sets into the mainland shore south of Chinchorro Bank somewhere and sweeps northward all the way to Cape Catoche. It is really the beginning of the Gulf Stream.

We held on the starboard tack. Fearful that we might pass Chinchorro the Captain kept going aloft to take a squint eastward. His method of ascent was admirably facile. Like the crew he is constantly barefoot while afloat, and his soles are as [58] tough as a Japanese firewalker’s. He seizes the wire shroud between the big toe and second toe of each pedal extremity, and proceeds aloft hand over hand and foot over foot with the ease of a monkey.

Just a few minutes ago he sighted land. He put the Albert about immediately.

We can see a faint blur of trees from the deck already—Cayo Grande, the biggest key of Chinchorro. It is now a few minutes past three. After the first thrill of glimpsing our coral island we go about sundry tasks below in preparation for landing. I return to the deck shortly and am surprised to see the whole long shore of the island, with sharp details like dead trees and patches of beach grass. We are very near the bright green where the shallows begin. Gough is at the maintop. He has said he would take the northern entrance through the reef and I wonder why he doesn’t tack. Probably he wants to parallel the reef closely, learning all he can of it for possible future visits.

The reef is not breaking, for it is under the lee of Big Key. Every second I expect the order to tack, yet we hold on toward the dangerous light green. This is becoming uncomfortable. I step to the companionway.

“McClurg, come up here quick, will you?” (He is on deck in three bounds.) “What the devil is [59] his idea? Do you suppose he knows an opening not shown on the chart?”

“If he doesn’t we’re in for it,” grins McClurg.

We are fairly in the green shallows now. It’s appalling how shallow they are.

The Captain slides down the mainmast with the speed of a fireman, bounds past McClurg and me into the foreshrouds, shouting orders as he goes.

“Put her off, Jawny, off dis way, quick starboard! Joe, Matchee, drop dem sails.”

McClurg and I help the seamen, joined by Whiting. In the confusion of fluttering canvas and stumbling, swearing men I am conscious of a wicked coral head, only a foot below water. The clumsy schooner is swinging to starboard slowly. Will she turn soon enough, I wonder in some cool recess of my brain, while all the rest of me pants and perspires at a downhaul?

Yes, she’s missing the coral head to port by four feet, grazing a wickeder one to starboard by half that distance.

“Stawp one engine,” bawls Gough.

Thank God the sails are down.

One engine stops. “Half speed on da odda,” directs our Skipper. Through five or six other voices the order reaches the engine room, yet we are still rushing at reddish brown coral heads with horrible [60] speed. The white bottom is peppered with them, every one near enough the surface to tear out the boat’s vitals.

The miserable curtains on the “Porch” over the engine room are half down, and the Skipper’s traffic cop signals from the starboard fore shrouds are invisible to Belize John at the wheel. One of the faithful “Matchees” stands below and behind the Skipper imitating his gestures. But excited men keep running between this Indian and the wheel so I crouch just forward of the “Porch” and in turn relay the Captain’s signals aft. Since he clings to the shrouds with his left hand only his right is free. A slow extension of the whole arm means turn to starboard slowly, a sharp stab means turn quickly. Curving forward sweeps of the arm, like the motorist’s “Pass me—I’m going to turn out” signal, means go to port hard or easy according to the degree of agitation of the arm. Never was a vessel so conned.

Griscom is standing by the upturned Imp emitting great clouds of smoke. McClurg by the foremast foot looks alternately ahead and up at the Skipper, quiet amused amazement on his face, a sort of “I wonder what he’ll do next look.”

The boat twists like a snake, but a slower snake now, thank Heaven.

[61]

“Stawp da engine,” yells Gough, pushing back the flat of his hand. He drops to the deck, snatches the fifteen foot sounding pole and jabs furiously at the bottom.

A sand bar is the obstacle now.

“Six feet, hold her steady Jawn, fahve an’ a half.” We hold our breath as the water shoals to five feet—a scant six inches more than we draw.

“If we strike it’s abandon ship I guess,” Spinden is saying beside me. “We never can turn her here, the rocks are too close.”

The pole is probing furiously for a little more depth. The schooner has bare steerage way. In a moment the wind on our port bow will begin to drive her to a lurking ledge, its sharp brown horns pricking through the green water thirty feet to starboard.

“Fahve feet, fahve feet,” jab, jab, jab,—he has no breath to repeat that ominous depth. Then a triumphant shout:

“Fahve an’ a half, fahve an’ a half. Six, seven, eight—start da engine.”

We’re over! We are inside the reef now, and menaced by only a scattering of coral heads, each visible long before we reach it as the water smoothens under the increasing protection of the key.

One dark patch is straight in our path. I shudder [62] as we plough for it, full speed on one engine. But the Captain’s judgment of depths is uncanny, there’s at least eight feet over that ledge. Darker patches he recognizes at once as weed, not coral. Temperamental his actions may be and nerve-racking to us, but he is an artist in his work, no mistake about that.

“Stawp her,” comes the command again. Followed by, “Let her go, Matchee.”

Down goes our sand anchor to a white bottom in ten feet of water, matchlessly clear.

“Do we have to do that again, Captain?” asks Spinden as Gough shambles aft.

“Why, look who’s here,” laughs McClurg. “Spinden when did you come back?”

“One reef is better for the stomach than a crate of lemons,” I observe.

“You ought to know, fellah,” Griscom chuckles. “Lord, I never saw a man look so seedy without letting go.”

Gough seems a little embarrassed.

“Ah give da order to tack,” he says, “but da helmsman was too slow. Den ah seen a little channel tru da reef an’ decided to fawlah her.”

“You won’t have to patent your discovery,” remarks McClurg, “I don’t think there’ll be any great rush to use your private entrance to the Bank.”

[63]

If the Captain gave the order to tack Belize John may not have heard it. It was inaudible to me at the foot of the mainmast. Certainly it was obvious that we were getting too close to the reef before I called McClurg on deck. The chart gives no hint of any entrance where we came in. I am beginning to suspect the Captain of a fondness for tight places.

Anyway, here we are, about a mile north of the southwest point of the key and not more than a quarter-mile from shore, which Griscom is studying with his Zeiss field glasses.

“Egad, fellah, this is the place,” he exclaims, putting up the glasses, “it’s rotten with life, every kind of life except human. I have a hunch there are rails here, and they might be a new species. There might be a new mangrove warbler, too. Let’s have a look at it before supper.”

We five Americans get into the Imp and row the short distance to shore. Three of the crew follow in the other dinghy to get dead wood for the galley stove. A hurricane which swept this coast a few years ago killed many of the trees on the island.

We land at the mouth of a little creek. Its sandy bottom is scoured by the swift ebb tide which bears with it furtive crabs and swift prowling sharks. We glimpse a big shallow lagoon beyond the rim of solid sand where the trees grow. Stumps and [64] sharks’ fins project from the water. It is a repellant place, yet fascinating in its sinister desolation.

But already we are late for supper. Eager as we are for Chunyaxché we decide to stay here tomorrow, dedicating the day to a gigantic bird hunt for Griscom’s benefit.

The hot core of the sun has dropped from the flaming west. The trade wind sings in the rigging, sings of shoals and souls of bygone sailors.

Moonlight sifts to the clear cool sea bed of shifting sand, the sand which clutches ships, then mercifully buries them. Soft and bright is the moon, clean and strong the great friendly trade wind.

We strip off our clothes to feel the wind on our bodies. We step to the rail. Here on this wide white sea bed are no lurking furtive things like those that prowl that foul lagoon. Arms up for a dive, bodies balancing—

What’s that off there—that curving twelve foot shadow? a strip of seaweed? But it moves—in a stealthy circle—upward, too. Swish, a black triangular thing glistens and is gone—the ugly back fin.

[65]

## CHAPTER IV
AND COMMON CROCODILES

Griscom and I were to take the smaller boat to the nearest beach and hunt birds all morning. Whiting and McClurg with gamegetters, Gough and Nelson with Griscom’s two sixteen gauge shotguns, were to take the larger boat to the farther side of the island, exploring the coast and trolling for barracuda on their way.

Griscom and I asked Spinden if he would like to come with us. He said he thought he would not. But just as we were shoving away from the Albert’s side he looked down at us and said gently, wistfully.

“I guess I’ll come.”

A suggestion of something eerie and ominous hangs over this desert key. Perhaps our narrow escape from the teeth of the reef put us in a mood to feel this with particular poignancy. Certainly with coral heads and sandbars on all sides the mariner must feel uneasy here. But it was more than that. The island did not like us.

[66]

A fringe of sea grass seems to surround the whole key out to a distance of fifty feet. And this grows from a bank of soft mud near enough the water’s surface to stop all but the very shallowest skiff. When we stepped overboard to drag our dory through it we sank over our boot tops. Struggling on we were confronted by the pointed branches of dead trees, which here seem always to fall outward in protection of the key—a secondary line of defense. Almost as many of the standing trees are dead as alive, and the sharp gestures of the long ash colored limbs only add to the weird feeling the place gives one. All the dead trees are inhabited by ants, which stung promptly when we let the branches touch us.

The solid land where the trees grow is a mere rim—here thirty yards wide, there perhaps a hundred. The center of the island seems to be one lagoon, or a series of connected lagoons. But the word is misleading, here is no deep clear pool over sparkling, sandy bottom such as our imaginations had visualized. Rather there is a vast forbidding swamp, filled with putrefying vegetation, except near the little channel from the sea where the tide sweeps it clean. The water is too shallow to hide the zigzagging dorsal fins of hunting sharks and the sinister ripples where thick bodied crocodiles and alligators prowl.

[67]

Griscom particularly wanted a rail. We heard these shy birds calling on every side but could not see one. Finally he said to me in desperation:

“If you see anything slinking through a thicket near the water, take a chance and blaze away at it.”

There was not much danger to ourselves in this, for there were only two directions to go. We turned our backs to each other and began to slip through the brush. Spinden followed me.

The two of us made a crackling such as would warn any sensible bird to fly before we were in range. There was not room for two to hunt here anyway. I threw Spinden an impatient glance, and said:

“I’m going off by myself.”

He gave me that appealing, wistful look, somehow doubly affecting in a man of his size and attainments. I managed to drag the Delirium Tremens through the clinging mud and rowed north half a mile beyond what I judged would be a fair limit to Griscom’s beat. I was sorry I had been impatient with Spinden, felt ashamed of my meanness.

The guardian mud bank was nearer the land here, and green bushes mingled with the dead trees to the very water’s edge. I poled with one oar, thinking I might see more game by this quiet skirting of the brush than if I landed.

[68]

A two foot lizard dropped out of a tree and ran along a big log. I fired as he reached the shrouded end of it. A small yellowish bird flew up at the noise and I let go the other barrel.

I dragged Delirium Tremens over the mud and made her fast to a mangrove.

No sign of Mr. Lizard. But there was the bird, a handful of crumpled feathers. I had the guilty sensation I had not felt since a barbarous boy’s air-rifle potted his last Cedarwaxwing in Tucker’s Woods. It was “for science” I did this, I told myself. But I could feel the old savage hunt lust warming somewhere within me.

I pushed through clinging, thorny brush into grass growing waist high out of hollow, lumpy soil which gave way and dropped me a foot at every other step. There was the serpentine hissing sound of scuttling crabs. Then more bushes and I came out on a whole maze of natural ditches, between banks of mud which grass lent a false air of solidity. Something moved in the sedge near the water forty feet away. I took a chance and blazed away, hoping for a rail. Pshaw, a little green heron.

But the report brought crying, squawking life from the swamp brooding in the heat. Frightened by the first gunshot they had ever heard marsh fowl of a dozen kinds betrayed their hiding places.

[69]

From the invisible farther side of the great bog a flock of big whitish birds, their wings set far back like ducks, came flapping my way. The exciting first glimpse of birds I had never seen before sent me down into the veiling grass, groping for number fours—“heavy duck load.” Where had I put them? Excited by the hope that here was a new kind of water fowl—Chinchorro’s gift to ornithology, I jammed a pair of number sixes into the gun just as the stunning big birds came into doubtful range and began to swing away on silver wings. Perhaps there was a chance with the choked left barrel.

At the shot the marsh broke into pandemonium again. The main flock of the mysterious white birds winged back to the far side of the marsh. But the one I had aimed at turned a flip-flop, caught himself, flapped unsteadily a hundred yards up this side of the swamp and took a nose dive beyond a clump of mangroves.

I tried to pick out distinguishing features of that clump, but it looked just like a dozen other clumps. I began a detour to avoid the deeper mud, but with a sinking heart realized there was precious little chance of finding the lovely mysterious white bird which so piqued my curiosity.

When it seemed I had gone far enough north I turned and struck into the thick mangrove. The [70] footing was surprisingly solid here and I could have made rapid progress, but went slowly—on the qui vive for another shot. Through the dark laced growth came the weird guttural of herons—so out of proportion to the size of the birds which experience told me uttered it that I could well believe the sound came from great monsters wallowing in the mud. There was another noise—a shrill half-human wailing and cackling—which made my skin prickle and my hair rise. It suggested women in hysterics, or a quarrel of witches.

It ceased abruptly, with the croaking of herons. I had been seen, or heard. Yet I heard no wing whir, saw no feather stir.

The thicket grew lighter. I reached the edge of this little table of firm ground and parted branches to look out on a wide shallow lagoon. It was obviously shallow, for stranded logs lay all about.

I crouched silently. Something splashed. There was my white bird struggling feebly in the water, two hundred feet away near a bunch of mangroves. As I was estimating the thin possibility of my reaching that thicket by another detour, a long dark snout reached out of the water, absorbed my bird, and disappeared with hardly a ripple.

Crocodile! Then I looked at the stranded logs closely. It was hard to tell which were logs and [71] which were basking imitations—crocodiles or alligators. There are both in this country.

I went back to the boat, through grass whispering with crabs, across sand sibilant with streaking lizards.

As I paddled the skiff along the shore again there was a sharp smack in the water behind me. Startled, I turned to see only a widening ring on the smooth sea. “The flip of a shark’s tail did that,” I told myself. But when it happened a second time and a third without my getting a glimpse of the fish I began to dislike it.

I moved into shallower water and paddled very gently. Gradually there came over me the unpleasant feeling of being watched. Turning quickly I saw the yellow, snake-like head of a big turtle pulled under water. I picked up the gun and waited for turtle soup. I waited in vain. But I had hardly exchanged the gun for an oar when that same creepy feeling came over me and I turned just in time to see the turtle go down.

This place was getting on my nerves. Life was everywhere—but furtive, hostile life. It lurked in the lagoons with their harmless-seeming logs, in the mangrove clumps guttural with invisible herons and shrill with that blood-curdling witch-cackle of I knew not what bird or reptile. It rustled in the [72] high grass of sod which gave way under foot and it stirred along dead sticks on the open sand where loathsome lizards sunned. Now it stalked me and mocked me behind the placid face of the sea.

I was glad to hear Griscom and Spinden hailing me up the shore.

They were covered with mud and sweat and the carcasses of mosquitoes, but their bearing was triumphant. For Griscom could cut another notch in the upper barrel of his gamegetter, he had shot another bird new to the catalog of ornithology. It was a flycatcher of obscure coloration. It was the first or second bird he had shot. All morning he had looked vainly for another specimen. He says it is possible that this species has been reduced to the verge of extermination owing to the killing of the big trees by the hurricane. It may be that he got this lone specimen in the nick of time.

We found the Albert looking like a hunting camp. The Captain, Nelson, Whiting and McClurg had burned enough powder for a battle.

Birds of many sizes, hues and peculiarities of shape were arranged in rows on the sloping top of the engine room—just forward of that part of it which serves as our dinner table. Griscom went over them quickly.

“Good work men,” he said, in his ever cheerful, [73] slightly clipped way of speaking. “There’s nothing new here, but there are several birds which are interesting because they’re migrants from the United States belonging to species which are usually found wintering in the Antilles, a long way east of here. In other words bird life on this island resembles the far off West Indies more than the mainland over there. That’s the same peculiarity which they say Cozumel has. Your shooting has proved something well worth while.”

The mainland is only fourteen or fifteen miles west of here. Strange that that narrow strip of water should set apart two such distinct types of fauna.

The birds were in the shade and in the breeze, but already flies were at them. Spinden sat down to lunch with a grimace at the trophies.

“As the sun gets hotter the birds get rotter,” he chanted.

Griscom let out a whoop of delight as he saw the soup which the cook set on the table. Twice a day we had been eating asparagus soup, and already we were sick of it. I scolded Joe this morning and told him not to select his soup from the same crate each time. The result was that we now had before each of us a tin bowl of mock turtle.

How absurd though, to be eating mock turtle [74] soup in the home of the turtle! Chinchorro means turtle net. The men who visited the southeast side of the island this morning saw there two or three tiny thatched huts, put up by the turtle fishermen who were probably the key’s only human visitors until we arrived. They come for a few days each year.

All afternoon Griscom skinned birds. So did Belize John, who seems to have a natural bent for this art. We others hunted again, but without getting another specimen of Griscom’s fly-catcher or one of the rails he desired above everything.

With the tide high McClurg and I took the Delirium Tremens through the little opening from the sea and explored the big lagoon.

Chinchorro is the sort of place a twelve year old boy would adore. This swamp reminds me of the big Cape Cod marsh where my brother and I hunted blue crabs and yellowlegs from our home-made punt. Beyond the expanse of water where the sharks pursue their prey and the crocodiles ambush theirs is a maze of narrow twisting channels, screened by high marsh grass or overhanging mangrove.

Even though it was the hottest hour of the day the place teemed with herons, egrets, and white ibis—for such is the mysterious white bird which I thought I was discovering this morning, says Griscom. [75] It is a lovely, sheening, shy thing. Egyptians showed a taste for fine things when they selected the ibis to worship.

McClurg shot a five-foot shark with a ball from the larger barrel of his gamegetter. I bagged three stilts, well named shore birds of elongated legs and black and white plumage. We’ll have them for breakfast tomorrow with two the Captain shot this morning. This fresh meat will be welcome. The beef we bought at Payo Obispo provided much exercise but little taste or nourishment. Mexicans don’t know how to cure beef.

Our never-idle Skipper and Whiting circumnavigated the key this afternoon, finding it a “circle of sameness,” says the latter. But they caught two barracuda and a weird fish which looks like our northern sea-robin. They put Spinden off at the southern end of the island and he came back with an exciting story of a crocodile slide. This was a sloping mud bank which the great lizards were using as small boys use the well sung cellar door.

He wants to take McClurg and me there tomorrow morning to try for moving pictures of the saurian playground. Griscom is anxious for one more chance at a rail, and dawn is the best time for these birds, he thinks. So we decide not to leave this anchorage until late tomorrow morning.

[76]

We will risk letting Chunyaxché wait another day. For whether or not we find the ruined temples we are prayerfully hoping to find Griscom’s work has already made the expedition worth while. Two new birds in his first two forays into the bush is a mark beyond our fondest expectations.

The alarm clock watch which was Xoch’s parting gift buzzed in my ear at half past four. Griscom and Whiting and I dressed quickly, drank our coffee and rowed softly toward the inlet. Even from the schooner the rails could be heard calling. Surely we’d get one this time.

But we did not. The sun came up and burned off the miasma which had lent that swamp a deeper air of mystery than ever. Still the rails called from mangrove islet to mangrove islet—yet not a feather to fire at.

We rowed back to the schooner hot, hungry, disgusted and more than ever impressed with the haunting, evasive quality of this island. The feeling we all had was expressed by Whiting with a shudder:

“I felt all the time as if the birds were laughing at me.”

After breakfast Spinden, McClurg, Griscom and I embarked our cameras in the Imp for a crocodile [77] hunt. We left Whiting and the Captain as a committee on Ways and Means of catching a fifteen-foot shark which hung about the schooner, disdaining all ordinary baits and possessed of a charm against rifle bullets.

When we rounded the southwestern point of the island we encountered a little swell. But the Imp is a very good sea boat, even if we have to step gingerly on her bottom, which, in spots is as soft as blotting paper. Fortunately her gratings transfer nearly all the strain to side boards which do not have the canvas-like flexibility of two or three strips along her shallow keel.

Indeed, whenever we take to a dinghy it is a choice between the risk of sinking and the risk of capsizing. We have all decided we prefer the former, it is less violent anyway. So we take the Imp as often as possible and leave Delirium Tremens to the crew.

Moreover, I think there is some appeal to our flair for scientific observation in the state of the Imp’s bottom. It is in a very interesting state of rot indeed. Each time one of the narrow planks is bent by an over eager wave we reach down and mold it into place like putty.

Whenever possible we avoid risking contact with even the softest beach. Thus we anchored the little [78] boat when Spinden sighted a clump of trees he had memorized to mark the crocodile slide—trees of dark, shiny, leafage and squat shapes like live oaks.

We stepped overboard in two feet of water, which was a slight obstacle compared with the mud bank beyond. At every step we sank to mid thigh. Keeping balance would have been hard enough even had we not been burdened with guns and cameras. Fortunately one of the ubiquitous dead trees had fallen far outward. I reached the security of this bridge in time to make a movie of the flounderings of the others.

Spinden had carefully marked an approach to the crocodile slide which he thought would permit us to come within camera range undetected. But when, after laborious crawling through grass and brush, we parted the last branches, not a saurian was in sight. Perhaps they had heard us, or perhaps this was only an afternoon playground.

Intensely disappointed we separated on minor hunts. Griscom strolled eastward with an eye to birds. Spinden, determined to get some kind of a lizard anyway, began shooting the six inch variety which infested the dead trees along the beach. He said he had a colleague at Harvard who would be delighted with a jar of pickled lizards.

McClurg and I managed to flounder back to the [79]Imp without leaving anything in the mud but holes. We reconnoitered eastward a mile or two. Turning back we saw Spinden wave from the beach. We anchored, while Spinden shouted that Griscom was watching some stilts which he wanted me to shoot for the larder, as they were out of range of gamegetters. The mud being worse than ever here I encumbered myself only with shotgun and a few cartridges.

After squirming through fifty yards of the most tangled brush we had yet seen I found Griscom crouching behind a dead tree at the edge of a mud flat. He pointed out four stilts, a hundred yards east of us and too far from the nearest cover to give him any certainty of a kill with his tiny weapon. At best he might get one of the birds, with luck I might get them all.

I started to crawl on hands and knees, but had to inch along on my stomach like an Indian the last ten yards where there was nothing between me and the game higher than the trunk of a prostrate tree. When I reached this I was barely within range, but the long-legged black and white birds were showing signs of uneasiness and I dared not try to approach nearer. Not till afterwards did I fully realize that the alarm of the birds seemed directed beyond them rather than in my direction.

[80]

After waiting two or three seconds to regain a little breath and wipe the sweat out of my eyes I fired the right barrel. The cartridge was loaded with number ten shot and black powder—the only explosive that I could get in Belize. For an instant I could see nothing. Then through the dark smoke I saw one bird flying, and gave him the left barrel. He fell on the far side of the little mud flat. I now perceived that I had bagged the other three birds with my first shot.

But at the attempt to reach them I sank over my hip rubber boots in mud as soft as oatmeal and as sticky as flypaper. When I pulled up my left leg the straps fastening the boot-top to my belt broke and the boot remained in the mud. By the time I had dug it out with the branch of a tree I was covered with mud from head to foot and perspiration was making little channels through the bog on my face. No use trying to reach the birds this way.

Griscom now pointed out that by making a detour over reasonably solid ground I could reach a chain of mangrove clumps which ran out to within twenty feet of where the three bunched birds lay. The trunk of a dead palm would make a bridge between these small islands of safety.

I got a piece of dead palm fifteen feet long and [81] holding a smaller stick to balance with crossed it like a man going over a tight rope. Pulling in the log I threw it ahead over the next morass. When I reached the third little island I found the space between it and the last one was almost short enough to jump. This was unnecessary, however, for in the water between these two mangrove clumps lay a large log. It looked solid, and a bit of the upper side with a knot in it was out of water. I had raised my right foot to step down, but had not yet let go of the slim mangrove trunk in my left hand, when I noticed something queer about that knot. The horrifying truth shot through me just in time to prevent my stepping on a large crocodile!

I slipped to the shore side of the mangrove clump and in a tense voice called:

“Griscom, for God’s sake, throw out my gun quick. Crocodile!”

With admirable speed and quiet Griscom got my shotgun and another palm tree bridge. He passed me the gun, butt first. In my trouser pocket were two buckshot shells, always carried on shore parties for such emergencies. At this range probably number tens would have settled Mr. Crocodile. But the awful thought of what I had nearly done still covered me with goose flesh, and I meant to take no more chances.

[82]

With the loaded and cocked gun pointed ahead of me I slipped to the other side of the hummock.

He had not moved, he did not even flicker his eye now as I stared at him. No wonder I had been deceived. His resemblance to a rough-barked tree trunk stranded in the stagnant puddle was superb. It was only a slight liquidity about that eye which had saved me; except for this slight moistness it was still for all the world a knot hole in the log of his body. Now that I studied it however it seemed to have a dull but unmistakable expression, an air of cold diabolical confidence. Though he is describing crocodiles in a zoo Llewellyn Powys has caught this look exactly when he speaks of,

> “... those curious reptiles who spend their captivity immobile as stones; and yet have that in their eye suggestive of a sly knowledge that they and their kind will have little or no difficulty in outliving the terrible régime of men.”

At a range of five feet I aimed carefully at that sly, cold eye, and fired. There was a tremendous commotion, I was showered with mud and water. Half expecting the monster to come up the bank after me I sprang back into the mangrove. As the beast’s struggles subsided somewhat I stepped forward. Catching a glimpse of the lower part of the [83] hideous scaly body I fired at the back just behind a point over the rear legs. That finished him.

My hand must have been shaking when I fired the first shot, which had struck well over the target of the eye. Through an egg sized hole in his back bluish white intestines protruded.

By vigorous use of our voices and Griscom’s police whistle we managed at last to get the attention of Spinden, and sent him back to ask McClurg to bring the movie cameras from the Imp. Meanwhile we hauled and rolled the great lizard out of the shade for his photograph. When the cameras came we pried apart his jaws with the muzzle of Griscom’s gamegetter and posed him so that his teeth would show. Four of them were more than an inch long. And the triangular, sharp upright scales on his muscular tail were equally gruesome weapons.

What would he have done if I had stepped on his eye? My inability to say may be a loss to science but I shall be satisfied never to know.

Now I recalled that the alarm of the stilts had seemed to be directed toward the neighborhood occupied by the crocodile rather than toward my proximity when I shot. No doubt he had been stalking them from one side while I approached from the other. Later had he turned his attention to stalking me?

[84]

With the help of the palm logs I gathered in three of the shore birds, but could not have reached the fourth without a hydroplane.

Spinden had gathered a dozen big coconuts, and what with cameras, guns, birds and coconuts we feared we should sink to our necks instead of our thighs in returning to the Imp. But Spinden had the happy inspiration of tying the birds around my neck, as one ties a chicken to a dog to break him of roost robbing. Then the archæologist waited till we others had crossed the ooziest mud and tossed us the coconuts. We caught deftly and he hurled with brilliant aim till the last one, which fell short and spattered Griscom like a bomb.

The little motor purred energetically and we reached the schooner tired but satisfied—above all satisfied to see no more of Cayo Grande.

The Captain and Whiting had not caught the big shark, but at least had shown their contempt for him. While he hung sluggishly alongside the Albert the Captain had jumped fairly upon his back. Never was a shark so startled, said Whiting. However, after swimming off one hundred feet he returned. Whereupon this extraordinary man Gough had repeated his audacious performance. This time the big fish moved off only fifty feet and was close beside the schooner by the time the Captain had [85] scrambled out of the water. Whiting had dissuaded the Skipper from a third try at marine bareback riding. “He respects you now,” Whiting said. “Don’t rub it in.”

Eventually the shark moved away. When we returned in the Imp, Whiting was diving from the schooner with no concern for finny marauders. No one of the crew knows of an authentic case of a shark attacking a man, although tales of mutilations by barracuda seem well verified.

The tide was lower than it had been since we arrived here, and two unsuspected coral heads were awash only fifty yards from the Albert’s stern.

We got our anchor, and one engine pushed us cautiously northward. Griscom took advantage of the smooth water to skin the rest of his birds. He has secured an interesting series of mangrove warblers in addition to his new fly-catcher, and is well pleased.

At the northern end of Chinchorro Bank are two smaller keys. We planned to anchor east of the most northern one. The chart shows enough water for us here, but we found a bar had made out, so we ran through a break in the reef east of the key and reëntered protected water through a reef channel to northwest of the island. It was pleasant to fly out of smooth water into the boisterous, tumbling [86] blue of ocean again, the wind whistling through our hair, and sea birds heightening the excitement of the scene, flinging themselves into the brine and screaming with anger when they missed their prey.

During the few minutes that we ran outside the reef the two Matchees caught several barracuda, a yellowtail and a rockfish—a stocky creature of perhaps twenty pounds, brown with darker dapplings. Both these last fish were taken on McClurg’s green line, which the crew is beginning to credit with “white man’s magic,” so does it out-catch the Captain’s white line. The San Blas boys are thrown into half-delirious joy every time there is a strike. They were a sight which I hope the movie camera has recorded as they danced on the high swaying “porch roof,” pulling in fish simultaneously and grinning and grimacing in an absolute abandon of primitive triumph.

At the north tip of the northernmost of Chinchorro’s three keys is the loneliest lighthouse I have ever seen. It was not visible from the Big Key. It is visited by the Mexican supply boat only once every two months, but the light keeper’s assistant complains bitterly that he has to punch a time clock every two hours. I used to think that the job of lighthouse keeper would be a perfect one for the impecunious chap who would be content with a [87] position which gave him a bare living so long as it left him leisure to write poetry or some magnum opus on the side, but the time clock has changed all that.

In a last attempt to get a rail Griscom, McClurg and I visited the uninhabited twin of this key. We saw white egrets and the white young of the little blue heron. I shot a catbird, and a flycatcher which I could not find, and made a peregrine falcon turn a somersault, from which he righted himself out of range to my disgust and Griscom’s, who, unknown to me, was watching from the farther end of this island’s central lagoon. The sweet smell of gunpowder is in my nostrils continually, and the small boy in me is coming to the top. I bagged a two-foot iguana which the crew ate for supper with relish. And again a grass-shrouded heron died because it might have been a rail. But when we left the island the rails still mocked us from secret security.

We fished going back to the Albert; got four strikes and McClurg landed a small barracuda.

These northern atolls are higher than the Big Key, have broader cleaner beaches and less of that grim desolation. With fine fishing and some shooting they would make a vacation paradise for yachtsmen with time for sport. But Chinchorro Bank will always mean Cayo Grande to us, the sort of vivid [88] half unpleasant place you are glad to have seen but glad to have left behind.

There is madness in the air of Cayo Grande. Madness and Caliban cruelty. Two weeks there would make a solitary man a lunatic. Yet we would not have missed it for anything. I am certain we shall look back on our forty hours there as on certain experiences every man has, which he thinks of always with a shudder, and yet which he knows gave him something invaluable, if it is no more than an appreciation of a snug chair or a warm bed on nights when hail bombards the roof and wind shakes the rafters.

Chinchorro! Years from now a chance glance at a map, or some sailor’s casual tale of wreck, and it will all live before me again as vividly as John Silver throwing his crutch, and the surf thundering on Stacpoole’s Kerguellen. I shall see those stranded logs where death lurks, hear the whisper of crabs through the grass, the slap of a shark’s tail on the water, and feel the creepiness of being watched by great turtles I cannot see and mocked by some invisible creature of the sinister swamp with horrid witch-cackle.

From Chinchorro may well have come such tales of fiendish sea monsters and haunted islands as frightened the sailors of Columbus.

[89]

But now we have other things to think of. At the first sign of dawn we shall start for Ascension Bay. There we hope to meet our first Indians of the tribe which guards the ruins, and much depends upon their reception. Their hostility is the chief reason why Maya temples exist on this coast still unseen by white men. The Indians turned back the Allison V. Armour expedition at Tulum and the Howe expedition a few years later. More recently they surrounded the party of Morley, who thinks that his possession of a small phonograph is what persuaded them to let him live.

We have a phonograph and all kinds of records from the latest jazz to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We have boxes full of calico, perfume, cigarets, hunting knives and Woolworth jewelry. But our best asset with the natives is probably the friendship of the chicle companies, which have given us credentials to native chiefs and which have already sent word through their agents that we are coming with good-will—and pesos. The Governor’s letter is useful with Mexicans like this lighthouse keeper but we shall hide it when we meet the natives, who in four hundred years of contact with men who speak Spanish have learned only to hate those tainted with the blood of the Conquerors. (Indeed, the fact that none of us can speak Spanish like a Mexican [90] can be counted as a thing which will help us.)

We must not bank too heavily even on the good offices of the Chicle Development Company, for the business alliance between white chicle bosses and native chicle gatherers is subject to many vicissitudes. Only three or four months ago there was a slight flare-up against the chicle operators.

In the last analysis we shall have to depend on our own tact—and luck.

Simply by donning our uncomfortable British pith helmets when we enter the bush we can at least make certain that no sniper will mistake us for Mexicans. This is the sole reason we have brought this cumbersome type of headgear, which properly belongs only to stage explorers. Down here a pith helmet means a Britisher, and such slight regard as the Indians of Quintana Roo have for foreigners is mainly bestowed on subjects of His Majesty, King George V. Well—we shall see.

[91]

## CHAPTER V
LOST IN “DELIRIUM TREMENS”

Gough did not wait for signs of dawn. He sailed at two o’clock while we could see the shining head of every nail which held up the blue roof of night.

The sun came up as a fiery frame for the dark silhouette of a graceful barkentine. I chanted:

“If he had seen a barkentine
Beating off a blowy head,
Or, all a-sheen, a brigantine,
Full and free by trade-wind sped,
How could Fulton have dared to dream of steam?”

“Or anyone of gasoline,” Spinden tailed onto my song. “’Tis hard enough to roll, I ween, but pois’ning me with kerosene is ultimate insult marine.”

At six o’clock we passed the light on Punta Herrero, at the south side of the entrance to Bahia Espiritu Santo. It is ten and a half miles from there to Fupar Point, the northern tip of Holy Spirit Bay.

There was nothing spiritual in the manner of our attack on the grape fruit, oatmeal and fried stilts which Jake set on the see-sawing house top. Spinden [92] confined himself to oatmeal and coffee, some of the stomachic rehabilitation which he had found at Chinchorro having left him already in the rhythmical lurch of the trading schooner. But with the low coast of Yucatan creeping out on the westward blue like a joyous green snake he kept his morale, and when McClurg and Griscom tried to shake it with insalubrious inquiries too graphically phrased he withered them with his penetrating refrain:

“As the sun gets hotter, the birds get rotter—As the sun gets hotter, the birds get rotter.”

At ten o’clock we anchored half a mile south of the lighthouse on Allen Point. This guards the northern and deeper entrance to Ascension Bay, the mouth of this desolate expanse of water being blocked in the middle by a cluster of islands called Culebra Keys.

By an oversight the authorities of Payo Obispo had neglected to list this bay as one of the places we were entitled to enter en route to Cozumel Island. The light keeper insisted courteously but firmly that he could not permit us to linger here nor to land in the bay’s one “port.” This is Vigia Chico, whose distinguishing clump of tall marine pines we could just distinguish to westward with the most powerful binoculars Zeiss makes.

In an old brief case—for lack of any more suitable [93] covering—I had brought ashore a bottle of rum. When this was opened the manner of the light keeper changed. If we would swear that we had been forced into Ascension Bay by engine trouble and dire need of water he would see what he could do. He would have a paper ready for us to sign by five o’clock. Meanwhile in one of the small boats he would permit us to visit Vigia Chico, the present population of which he put at two. One of these was Pedro Moguel, who spoke English fluently, had just returned from chicle work at Boca de Paila and would know how to guide us to possible ruins in that neighborhood if anyone would. (He himself had never heard of any there, he said discouragingly.) Meanwhile we must leave the ship’s papers here. “Hasta luego” (“See you later”).

As we motored back to the Albert McClurg fumed at the ways of Mexico. Who ever heard of a lighthouse man having power to seize a ship’s papers, particularly when she was virtually a yacht and when the light was a big lantern hoisted by a cable to the top of a steel upright which looked like a bone out of the side of an American skyscraper?

“Costumbre del pais”—“Custom of the country,” Spinden soothed.

“I don’t believe it. He’s just holding us up for a little graft.”

[94]

“Well, he’s got it,” I pointed out, “and if he wants more we can spare another bottle.”

McClurg said he thought my “alcoholic diplomacy” was very undignified.

“It’s blamed poor policy to sprinkle rum on these people,” offered Spinden with impressive conviction.

“You may be right. All I know is that my skin has been saved more than once in this country by a timely use of aguardiente.”

“Good for tick-bites, is it?” asked Spinden. “Seriously, I see now why your writings are so colorful.”

The discussion continued, developing three varying points of view found among Americans in Mexico.

McClurg’s attitude is that of most American Army and Navy officers. It is natural and proper in a man who has had to look at many foreign countries down a six inch gun.

Spinden, on the other hand, is disinclined to any bearing suggestive of an assumption of racial superiority. Such an assumption may be well founded, but it may lead to trouble if cherished too conspicuously by men who have landed not from a battleship, but from a homely little schooner armed with gamegetters.

As for my donations of rum, McClurg disapproves [95] of them because he thinks the rum too good for the recipients, Spinden because he thinks it will demoralize them. I am less particular than the Navigator, less considerate than the Archæologist.

Of course, we drifted to the threadbare question as to whether or not it pays to carry a weapon in this sort of country. And if a gun is “toted” should it be worn openly or kept out of sight?

Although having little facility with a pistol I have been persuaded that the open possession of a formidable one sometimes saves the wearer from attack. And certainly the secret hardness of a tiny automatic in a coat pocket enables the naturally timid to meet some difficulties with a desirable degree of assurance.

McClurg sympathizes mildly with these feelings but he seems to regard the question of armament as of little importance. It is chiefly a matter of “custom of the country”—etiquette. The real weapon is the eye.

“More especially the brain and the heart,” says Spinden. “If you look for trouble you’ll find it. If you mind your own business, bear yourself with friendly modesty, few men will bother you. I never carry a gun. If I meet a bandit—well, a robber may not shoot an unarmed man, but when his prey is a man with a gun he’ll shoot before he robs. [96] And I’ve never seen a bandit who could not outshoot me.”

I’m inclined to think Spinden is right. Wearing a bit of hardware on the hip is generally a romantic gesture down here, like wearing a carnation in the buttonhole at home. A gesture aimed at the girls. And if protection against bandits is the motive the man who packs a .45 in Mexico ought to trundle a field piece in New York.

We stopped at the schooner’s side only long enough to take aboard a five gallon can of fuel. When we pointed the Imp’s bow toward Vigia Chico we were turning our backs to the breeze, which was so slow now that at our six-mile clip we felt it not at all. It soon expired entirely and the water became as smooth as polished jade.

Spinden had brought his colored spectacles, but the rest of us squinted like men facing the blast of a foundry. We were all soggy with sleep—the effect of the early start from Chinchorro. Gough, Spinden and I dozed, our heads slumped between our shoulders like three buzzards. Occasionally we emerged from coma to dash brine over our heads, drink tepid water from the canvas bag or examine the shore through marine glasses. Northwest of us were several humpy knolls which may be ruined buildings covered with trees, but are more probably [97] sand dunes or rocky little hills. McClurg repeatedly refused to be relieved at the steering lever though his hand must have grown numb with its vibration.

Under the conspicuous bunch of pines gaunt houses became visible, even with the naked eye. A sort of dock ran out to southward of the town. Suddenly Spinden woke up and exclaimed:

“Here comes half the population without his hat.” Two boys ran out of a building like a warehouse and pursued the bareheaded man down the dock.

“Here come the third and fourth quarters,” said McClurg.

But the lighthouse keeper had libelled Vigia Chico. It now boasts about a dozen human inhabitants of both sexes in addition to chickens, dogs and pigs in generous proportion.

The bareheaded man was Pedro Moguel, the practico or pilot we wanted. This very affable hunter, fisherman, chiclero and parent of locally renowned hunters, fishermen and chicleros is a middle-aged Belize negro who has lived in Mexico a dozen years. If what he and his townsmen say is true few men know the Turtle Coast northward from here to Cape Catoche as he knows it.

Of course our first eager questions were about Chunyaché—but carefully phrased, for if you indicate [98] to a native what answer you hope to get he will give it to you, kindness being esteemed above truth in this amiable country. Moguel’s information was tremendously reassuring. There are “old stone buildings” at Chunyaché although he has never looked at them closely. His carelessness in this seemed criminal to us. But, said he, we ought to run up to Santa Cruz de Bravo first and see General May and Señor Julio Martin. General May (pronounced My), who is growing rich from the chicle trade, is recognized as supreme military chief by the Indians of the Chunyaché region and it will be an important stroke of diplomacy to earn his favor before we meet his savage subjects. Señor Martin (Marteen it’s pronounced of course) is the chief chicle buyer in this region, and our letters from the President of the American Chicle Company and the General Manager of the Chicle Development Company will enlist his good offices—perhaps in ways very vital to us, suggests the astute Moguel. His advice seems well put, and we have decided to accept it, though the prospect of a further delay before reaching our coveted ruins is very irritating.

The rusty tracks of a narrow gauge railroad run back from the dock and through what was a booming seaport some twenty years ago when General Bravo was leading his expensive and vain effort to [99] reconquer the Indians of this territory. The tracks end thirty-eight miles inland at the town which is Santa Cruz de Bravo on maps of Mexico but Santa Cruz de May to the modern Indians and Chan Santa Cruz (Big Santa Cruz) to the brown nonagenarians who remember how the Mexican yoke was broken in the bloody rebellion of 1848.

Recently a Fotingo (Ford tractor) has supplanted the mules which formerly drew two or three tiny cars over this narrow road two or three times a week. Vigia Chico is modern—oh yes. Moguel telephoned to Señor Martin and asked him to send the tractor down for us at once. It would come down this same afternoon, said Moguel, and we could go up to Santa Cruz de Bravo in the cool of the morning.

This arranged, the affable African chopped the ends off three coconuts and proffered each of us a drink. He would go back with us to the schooner, he declared, and help fix things with the lighthouse keeper.

Fair enough. But when Moguel stepped aboard the Imp he was promptly followed by two other natives. Fearful for the delicate bottom of the little craft we protested forcefully that we were not licensed for passenger service. Moguel, who evidently regarded the two intruders with respect, contended in [100] ingratiating English whispers that they were very important men and must not be insulted.

“They’d better be insulted than drowned,” said McClurg, “the boat won’t hold so many, tell them to get out—vamoose.”

A compromise was possible when the younger of the two intruders stepped ashore with stolid dignity. The other refused to budge. He was a weathered, oldish man who said he was in charge of Customs here and would have to board the Albert before she could move. He didn’t weigh much anyhow. But Moguel is a husky citizen and the water was perilously close to our gunwales as we started. It was also seeping through the rotten bottom with ominous celerity. Had the wind whipped up suddenly as it might well have done the Imp would not have reached the Albert.

We gave ourselves the luxury of allowing Moguel and the Collector of Customs to wield coconut shell bailers all the way home.

Now the troublesome lighthouse keeper refused to give us back our amended papers until every member of our crew had signed the “Protest”—as Gough kept calling it, that is, the affirmation that head winds, engine trouble and failing water had forced us to enter Ascension Bay against our wishes.

Dusk was falling like soft gray snow when at last [101] these annoying formalities were concluded. But Griscom, Whiting and Nelson had not yet returned from an exploration of Culebra Keys undertaken in Delirium Tremens. An east wind was freshening, and to reach our present anchorage they would have to cross a rather tumultuous piece of water invaded by the ocean rollers which had slipped between the outer reefs which guard the gate of Ascension. Therefore, we ran toward the keys to reduce the trip for our dory. When we had gone a mile we saw her slide out from a little opening between the long westernmost key and a small one which hangs on its heels.

Nelson, who was running the Johnson, killed his motor too soon and missed his landing by thirty feet. As Griscom or Whiting half stood up in the dark to get out the oars the crazy boat wabbled, lurched sideways into a wave, and took aboard two hundred pounds of water. One more blow like that and they would have been swimming. But they clutched a line which Gough threw and were hauled aboard, bringing a dozen large birds, much mud and good humor as products of their hunt. The birds were boobies, cormorants, curious boat-billed herons—which are accurately named, lovely roseate spoonbills and reddish egrets with delicate pink-gray plumes.

[102]

Griscom believes this is a “farthest south” for reddish egrets. Moreover, he thinks his two specimens of this feathery tribe may prove to belong to a new sub-species, as they are unusually pale. He has also ventured the opinion that his boat-billed heron will prove to be a new variety. Knowing well now how conservative his nature and professional training make his scientific judgments I am delighted to think that we can count four new species to Griscom’s credit already. It is only a week today since we sailed from Belize.

Several of these big birds were brought down in mid flight at ranges he thought were impossible, Griscom says. Whiting justly remarks that both for the tiny gun and the man behind it this was “some shooting.”

Moguel had the schooner’s wheel as we ran to Vigia. He says that eight feet of water can be carried safely to the spot where we anchored—about five hundred yards south of the dock. On the whole the chart of Ascension Bay is surprisingly accurate considering that it is based on soundings made in 1839. Where the chart errs it is generally on the side of caution; we have found that several spots have a little more water than is shown on paper. Certainly I should not have supposed that an eight-foot vessel could be taken up to within [103] less than half a mile of Vigia Chico, for depths of only eight and nine feet are indicated a full mile offshore. Several of the boats I rejected for this expedition on account of their depth could have come here, the yawl Tigress, for instance, and the schooner of adventurous George Woodward, Jr., which he was crazy to have me take when I was contemplating the romantic stunt of sailing all the way to Yucatan from New York.

Griscom’s fortune at Ascension Bay; the two birds at right are a new sub-species of reddish egret, and the third from right is a new sub-species of boat-billed heron

The buoys which are sprinkled rather generously on the chart are today non-existent, and the “Fishing Huts (large and conspicuous)” which the chart offers as a landmark north of Vigia Chico seem to have crumbled away.

Moguel and the Collector of the Port lingered long with us after supper, as if loth to return to the weather colored board sheds with tin roofs which constitute Vigia Chico. Vigia means “lookout” or “watch.” Being a feminine noun the adjective should agree with it. But it just doesn’t, that’s all. We argued the point with Moguel and the Collector but couldn’t excite them at all. They say the maps are right, the name has always been Vigia Chico, never Vigia Chica, so that’s that.

In the morning there was no sign of the promised tractor. When the Captain and Whiting went ashore to inquire about it they conceived the bright [104] idea of hunting up a laundress. The Collector’s wife was indicated as such, but she hinted that she would not give up her Sunday leisure to wash for a barefooted sailor and a roustabout in a flannel shirt, soiled khaki trousers and dirty white sneakers.

“But these men are scientists,” said her husband, “and very distinguished.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the stubborn lady, “I saw a scientist once at a fiesta at Vera Cruz. He wore boots.”

Just then Spinden happened along with his soiled clothes rolled up in a shirt. The good woman glanced at his pith helmet and his brown knee boots.

“Here is a gentleman and a scientist,” she snapped at her husband. “He is distinguished, very distinguished (muy distinguido). I will wash for him.”

When the Fotingo had not arrived at noon we knew there would be no trip to Santa Cruz de Bravo that day, for it is customary to allow the train crew three or four hours to unload their chicle and rest before starting them on their return voyage. This delay was maddening to us impatient gringos. But after all, perhaps in the United States punctuality is over-worshipped. Procrastination is a jolly fat god and his ritual is suited to the lands of the sun. Worrying and fussing fill more tropical graves than malaria.

Griscom planned to spend the afternoon at the [105] great rookeries he had discovered on Culebra Keys—or rather, the keys are rookeries, and nothing else. McClurg, Whiting and I elected to accompany the bird man, leaving Spinden deep in the ramifications of Maya astronomy. We were obliged to take the detested Delirium Tremens, that dervish of a boat. The good old Imp, stable if sponge-like, was being used to carry water (no pun intended). Before many hours we were to regret this from the bottom of our hearts.

This is how it happened. We laid a course from the schooner for the westernmost key, a low blue blotch from the schooner’s deck but invisible from the dinghy till we had putted along a mile or more. Whiting, who steered, was surrounded by too much racket to converse, but Griscom excited McClurg and me with descriptions of the vastness of the rookeries, the tameness of the birds and their enormous numbers. For more than a mile on the biggest island, the trees were not green, but white—with guano, said he.

When we had been running an hour the big west key was clear of the horizon. Within another half hour we began to meet bird outposts, chiefly cormorants, which were sunning themselves in the water. Griscom put McClurg and me in the bow to give our movie cameras full play.

[106]

A sand bar running toward us from this key was black with cormorants. They got up like heavy smoke before we could come within good camera range. We ran down the north side of the island. The branches were bent with the weight of cormorants arrayed in clusters, like great dark fruit, and the more conspicuous for the foliage they had whitewashed about them.

Between this key and the next one is an expanse of mud and lime sand (the insoluble form of lime). This flat stretches seaward some two hundred yards north and south from a line between the islands. It was now partly uncovered and partly submerged at a depth insufficient for Delirium Tremens. When we stepped overboard we promptly sank to our knees in the clinging bottom. We floundered a few yards to make long range pictures of reddish egrets, which have a village on this key although their metropolis is on the next islet southeast of it. Being heavier than my fellow flounderers and longer-legged I sank in farther. Soon the bog pulled off my hip rubber boots, quite a feat of strength on the bog’s part, for they clung so—being wet inside, that I had just tried in vain to get them off by my own efforts.

Our particular objective was the colony of roseate spoonbills, of which Griscom wanted more specimens. These birds were beyond the little group of egret [107] nests, that is, they were protected against man by the very softest and stickiest piece of the morass. Griscom and McClurg were wisely trying to find a detour, but I labored straight ahead with Whiting following far behind. Suddenly I was in to mid thigh, and in spite of my utmost efforts could free neither leg. My struggles only made me sink deeper. The situation had lost all its humor. Things I had read about the relentless purpose of quicksands flashed through my mind. By the time that the soft ooze had reached my waist I was on the verge of losing my nerve.

Whiting was approaching by frantic effort, but of course his progress was slow. I shouted a warning to him. He could not help me by getting caught himself, and I pointed to where my last visible leg hole marked the verge of safe territory. It was just out of reach of my hand. I had managed to twist about on first stepping into this soft spot, and at least I was facing safety. By lying forward I managed to work my feet up and backward.

I threw Whiting my two cameras.

“Pass your gun,” he ordered, “but hold the other end.”

I went flat on my face extending the gun, though I confess it was with many misgivings that I presented my whole body to the bog. But the principle [108] was right—it was the principle of the snowshoe.

Whiting got both hands on the gun butt. I clung to the barrels with my right hand and made swimming motions with my left.

My companion put on the power gradually. The ooze began to lose me, with reluctant, sucking noises.

“I’m moving—a steady pull now!”

Slowly gaining speed like a ship gliding down the ways I shot into firmer mud, leaving one stocking behind me.

This was too big a price for pictures of birds. I reached the Imp with utterances of unbounded admiration for professional movie camera men.

We four clustered around the boat, pushing and pulling till we reached deeper water, under the shade of mangroves east of the bog. A young cormorant, apparently unable to fly, dove and swam under water faster than we could pursue it.

We rowed around the key to its southern point, where the boat-billed herons were holding a caucus in the thick mangrove. McClurg shot one which fell where branches interlaced over the dark eerie water. Pulling on some branches and severing others with our machetes we worked the boat into the swamp till McClurg could fish the bird alongside with an oar.

[109]

There were roseate spoonbills west of the boat-billed herons on this same side of the key, but quicksands protected them here as on the side where I had left my stocking. However, only a fifty foot channel separated this islet from the next one southeast of it, which was the site of the main colony of reddish egrets.

These birds are the tamest of the several varieties on Culebra Keys. No doubt their fatal blend of loveliness and stupidity is one cause of the rarity of reddish egrets in a world overrun by man and his destructive inventions. Fortunately the reefs and shoals and quicksands of Ascension Bay will probably protect this colony for many years, irrespective of what may happen to reddish egrets in more accessible rookeries.

We paddled our boat within ten yards of mother birds, regarding us from their nests with mild surprise.

In the group was a white bird. Griscom explained that the color was a mere idiosyncracy. The bird was an albino form of the reddish egret, being in size between the two varieties of genuine white egrets—those lovely birds which were butchered for their plumes until a law barely saved them from extermination. The tragedy of the egret is that nature has taught it to wear its magnificent gala dress only during the nesting season. The death of [110] every mother at the hands of plume hunters means the loss of its babies as well.

When we had taken all the photographs we wanted Griscom said he would like to get one more skin. Now, although these birds were almost near enough to be killed with stones, they were perched over the very thickest part of the mangrove.

“Push around into the little bay and see if we can’t pot a straggler where we won’t lose him,” directed the ornithologist.

“We’ve lost an oar,” exclaimed Whiting.

“We may need it,” I said, “pole her back the way we came.”

“We’ve got an engine,” urged McClurg, “now that we’re here let’s get the bird and then go after the oar. It may be way around the island.”

“No, I bet we lost it right over there where you shot this heron,” said the junior member of the expedition.

“Yes, let’s look for it now,” said Griscom, “we may need it yet.”

Just as we had crossed the shoal channel and were pushing our bow through the thick branches, I saw an egret alighting on an outer branch of the clump we had left. If shot there he ought to fall where we could easily reach him.

“Look out, fellows,” I cried, and shot, like an [111] utter fool, with the end of my gun not two feet from Griscom’s right ear.

The poor chap thought that his ear drum had been broken. He said he could hear nothing on that side. I was plunged into depths of dejection at my criminal stupidity, realizing that the “I-didn’t-know-it-was-loaded” jackass was only one degree worse than I, realizing how futile was my regret. McClurg and Whiting cursed me for the idiot I was, then we sat there in the gloom for an awful minute, while Griscom held his head in his hands.

At last he raised his head and said through his teeth:

“Let’s get the oar.”

We pushed and pulled a few feet further, and McClurg sighted it. Luckily the mangroves had prevented the slow current carrying it away.

Whiting said that the egret which had offered the occasion for my asininity to be exercised at Griscom’s expense had used its last strength to flop into the heart of the maze of bow-legged mangrove roots.

But Griscom jumped overboard and gave an extraordinary exhibition of retrieving. After splashing through water and mud to his waist he climbed a mangrove and went from tree to tree like an ape till we lost sight of him. To our surprise he returned immediately—with the egret.

[112]

It was now quarter past six—fifteen minutes after supper time on the Albert, which was eleven miles away.

I refilled the fuel tank, wrapped the cord around the nickel top of the motor, and gave a sharp pull. No start. A dozen repetitions, with the spark indicator in different positions, gave no livelier result. The little float showed the carburetor was full, everything was in order so far as I could see. After struggling vainly for ten minutes I let Whiting try it, for he had been running the little outboards more than the rest of us.

I took up the oars, to save what time I could. Whiting tried various experiments without improving on my failures.

“How’s your ear, old man?” I asked Griscom.

“Pretty bad, I can’t hear the engine.”

Whiting removed a spark plug and began cleaning it with his handkerchief.

I had rowed perhaps half a mile. The sun had set, and already Whiting’s face was dim under his wide sombrero.

Suddenly he uttered a groan, and looked over the side. He had dropped the spark plug!

“Back her,” he pleaded, “back her quick and I’ll dive.”

“No use,” said McClurg cheerfully, “you haven’t [113] a chance. We’d just lose precious time. We must get clear of this key before the last glimmer has gone.”

We all knew that he meant it would be easy to lose our way on this wide eerie bay with a current of unknown strength setting toward its unexplored head, toward the region of those wavy lines on the chart which had fascinated me a hundred times at home. Much depended on reaching the end of the veiling key and getting a landmark before night made that impossible. It was a race between oars and darkness.

“Let me spell you, Mason,” offered Griscom, sitting on the floor between me and Whiting.

“Wait till he’s pulled out,” said McClurg, “we’ll need all your muscle before we reach our rice and beans.”

Whiting had been slumped dejectedly in the stern since his accident with the spark plug. We were all sorry for him, especially I, whose blundering shot at that egret had been a thousand times less excusable than his error. Now, however, he sat up to direct the steering.

We kept her close to the island, as the shortest course. I peeked over my shoulder occasionally, and a dozen times a vague little promontory dashed my hopes that it was the last one.

But we were clear finally, and just in time. Of [114] course we could not see the schooner or the buildings of Vigia Chico. But we did distinguish the faint blur of that bunch of high marine palms which make the location of Vigia the most conspicuous spot on the lonely shores of this bay except for the lighthouse on Allen Point, somewhere northeast of us. That we could not see at all. But Griscom and I were pretty sure of that clump of pines.

McClurg spotted a few stars to steer by, the most conspicuous one behind us.

“Keep her stern under that,” he directed, “of course it will move, but keep it dead astern now.”

Neglecting what was ahead of us in our attention on that star we ran aground. We were on the long bar where we had seen the cormorants this afternoon. We stepped overboard and dragged the dory into deeper water. When I took up the oars again the star had disappeared. In a few minutes the clouds which were sailing in from the east would cover the whole sky.

I suggested that we go ashore and build a big fire on the west point of this key where there was a piece of solid ground a few feet above the sea level. The men on the schooner might see our fire and come to pick us up. If not we could camp here till morning. It would be uncomfortable, for though we had water we had no food, and the key was cloudy with mosquitoes. [115] But it would avoid the risk of spending the night in a cranky open boat, no slight risk now that the stars were gone and that current pulling us toward the remote head of the bay.

But the others were for pushing on, and pride kept me from pressing the point. I did not want to seem more timid than my shipmates. Yet I confess to a qualm of regret when the utmost effort of my eyes could no longer distinguish the dark bulk of the island behind us and we had nothing to steer by but instinct.

When I had rowed an hour I changed places with Griscom. He crawled forward on the bottom, then lay still while I crawled over his back. The others crouched low and held their breath. Even so there were two horrid lurches which brought our hearts into our mouths.

Now I am enjoying the warmth of my sweater and pipe. My feet are under Griscom’s seat, my head against Whiting’s knees.

We shall very likely miss the schooner on one side or the other. All agree it would be better to make too much allowance for the current and find ourselves eventually to northward of the Albert, rather than to be carried up to the mysterious head of the bay. For if we come out north of the schooner we [116] shall be between Vigia Chico and the lighthouse, and with any luck by daylight can reach food before we are too weak to row.

The real danger lies in the crankiness of this damnable dervish of boats. McClurg mistrusts the dory more than any of us because his wider experience with dinghies enables him to realize more acutely than we just how untrustworthy this one is. Each time one of us makes but the slightest sudden move—a quick reach for matches in a side pocket, Delirium Tremens gives way on that side as if a ton of rock had fallen on her gunwale. We throw our weight to the other side and she careens that way with greater haste—and further.

The bay is very still now, but it is an unnatural stillness. And those clouds look like wind. We all know that even a moderate wind would kick up a sea in which the survival of this cranky and overloaded coracle would be entirely subject to the whim of fate. Rowing would be out of the question, it would be a case of all hugging the bottom of the boat to reduce her instability as much as we could while each man prayed to whatever God he worships.

This is the chief danger. That each of us knows it is not inconsiderable the avoidance of open allusion to it testifies eloquently.

For the first time the expedition is face to face [117] with peril. And it is a pleasure to watch the unanimous reaction. The men joke and they sing, but there is nothing forced about it, no nugatory strained quality. Each is relishing the spice of insecurity and offering silent thanks that he has been given companions who can share the rare sharp taste. It takes no psychologist or sensitive adept in human relationships to realize that bonds are forming which will endure though we live fifty years and separate tonight. No matter what the years may do—or petty circumstances of more immediate days, between any two of us there will be something—call it reciprocal respect or what you like, but a stable, foundational something which did not exist two hours ago for all our joshing amity together. Indeed the upgrowth of hatreds would only throw into greater relief this tested thing. “He’s a pig,” one may say (or a cad or what-you-will), “but that night on Ascension Bay he came through with the Stuff, he showed he Had It.”

Unmistakably the gentle zephyr of a few minutes ago has become a breeze. But overhead it skims away one patch of scummy cloud and shows the bright pan of the sky.

“Cap’n,” Griscom addresses McClurg, “Cap’n, Suh, dis nigger an’ me has done passed dat star you give us, could you pick us out anodda, Suh?”

[118]

“There she is,” says McClurg, as the sky breaks out behind also. “She’s a little south of your stern now, but that’s all right, she’s moved a bit and we’ve got to allow plenty for this current.”

The breeze keeps freshening. A sizable wave rolling by us pulls down the port oar, Griscom misses with the starboard one and as he falls back against McClurg’s knees Delirium Tremens drops her starboard gunwale and takes a two gallon bite out of the following wave. I bail with a gourd in one hand and a sponge in the other. Griscom recovers himself and rows very warily.

“Let me row,” begs Whiting, for the fifteenth time seeking a chance to make amends for that spark plug. And for the fifteenth time his proposal is voted down, three to one. For the man in the stern to change places with the man on the center seat would be taking too great a risk with the boat’s unstable temperament.

There is irony in the fact that the water is nowhere more than eight to twelve feet deep. Just enough to drown.

“If she sinks at least two of us can keep above water by standing on the other fellows’ shoulders,” grins Griscom, pausing in his labors to wipe the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “We might draw lots now to see who’ll be the foundations.”

[119]

“Mason’s the tallest,” chuckles McClurg, “we’ll unanimously elect him to one of the bottom positions.”

“I can float for an hour,” remarks Whiting.

“With me on your chest?” asks Griscom.

“You can hang on to the engine.”

“Thanks, you can have the anchor.”

“That leaves us an oar apiece, Mason,” observes McClurg. “Say, finding that oar was what you might call luck.”

“Yeh, without it we’d be feeding mosquitoes back there on the key now.” Privately I am half wishing we were back on that key. Mosquitoes and crocodiles are easier to deal with than this rising sea.

“Spinden knew a man on the Mosquito Coast who traded a woman for an oar,” relates Griscom.

“On Ascension Bay he’d throw in his children for good measure”—Whiting.

“If the Queen of Sheba tried to board us now what would you do?”—McClurg.

“I’d give her the oar—the butt of it”—Griscom.

“I’d give a harem for a spark plug”—Whiting.

“Your hour’s up Griscom, my turn now,” says McClurg.

But McClurg has a bad hand, which was operated on just before he left Chicago. For this reason we have forbidden him to do any rowing. He insists, [120] however, that he can row one oar, which will make it easier for me than pulling both of them again.

“Which oar did you row at New York Athletic Club?”

“Port, which did you row at Yale?”

“Starboard; you see it’s just right, and we’ll make much better time that way,” argues the Navigator.

So we try the change. For now it is a race between us and the rising wind, as before it was a race between us and descending night.

The gray scummy clouds have covered the whole sky again. There is nothing to steer by but the feel of the wind. But we are making better time. We should have rowed double like this all along.

McClurg is applying most of his strength through the good hand, using the weak one to help guide the long sweep—both oars are too long for the narrow boat. In spite of his handicap every time I relax vigilance—as when I peer over my shoulder in the hope of seeing a light—he pulls the bow around against me. It is obvious that he rowed in a Yale Varsity eight—even though that was twenty-five years ago.

“Light on the starboard beam,” shouts Griscom.

“It’s the lighthouse, if you really see it,” says the Navigator, whose eyes are not so sharp as the ornithologist’s.

[121]

“Yes, I see it,” I put in, “good, that means we’re keeping up against the current!”

We row with new energy. Now McClurg sees the light, too. But in a few minutes the night thickens and we all lose it. However, even that glimpse of it is great encouragement. At least, we are not being taken sideways up the bay where there is no hope of familiar landmarks. Now if we can just keep away from those seas which curl angrily up to our starboard quarter! Oh, if we had only rowed double from the beginning! Such a little mistake may make all the difference between our eating barracuda tonight and being eaten by them.

Warily now we row, spurting when a particularly threatening wave throws its white crest forward with a hiss.

“What do you suppose they’re doing on the schooner?” asks Griscom.

“Studying my library,” suggests McClurg, who brought with him a good deal of reading matter which appeals to Gough and the literate part of the crew.

“I hope they called for my laundry today,” remarks Whiting, “that washerwoman’s husband cast a greedy eye on my shirts.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll take Spinden’s, yours are not distinguished enough,” says McClurg.

[122]

“Or vivid enough,” adds Griscom, “he’ll like those blues and pinks.”

The eastern sky is darker than the rest, an ominous sooty black.

“They may be looking for us in the Imp,” I suggest, “we might fire a gun.”

“No harm in trying,” says McClurg.

“Where are your cartridges?” asks Griscom.

“In that musette, under Whiting’s feet.”

“Right in the water then. Well, we’ll test ’em.”

Griscom loads my gun, closes the breach with a snap.

“Look out how you take that recoil, Delirium Tremens won’t like it!”

“Here’s where I even up and deafen you, fellah.” Griscom sits up on the floor boards, pointing the gun to starboard and slightly ahead to make the full flash show in that direction.

To avoid the concussion as much as possible I crane my head over my right shoulder.

“Light ahead—on the port bow!” I yell.

“Yes, Sir, I see it! Listen fellahs,” urges Griscom.

Faint, but unmistakable, the even whirr of an engine reaches our grateful ears. Sounds like the other Johnson in the Imp.

Forgetting my own advice about taking the recoil I snatch the gun from Griscom, hold it at arm’s [123] length, pull both triggers in quick succession. The gun leaps twice against my right hand, the trigger guard tearing the skin on the middle finger.

Delirium Tremens wobbles, ships another gallon on Griscom’s shoulder.

We fall to the oars with a will.

“How far off are they, do you think?” asks Whiting.

“Bet we reach them in five hundred strokes.” I begin to count aloud, then to myself.

“If it’s the Imp she’d better scoot for the schooner,” laughs McClurg, “look at the east.”

That black wall of cloud is towering up, covering half the ascent of the eastern sky. Perhaps we could transfer one man to the Imp with great care. That would help a little.

“It’ll be something to have companionship in misery, anyway,” jests the bird man. “How many now, Mason?”

“Two hundred and thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,” I count the sweeps of the long white oar, slippery in my tiring grip.

“Want me to spell you, fellah?”

“Hell, can’t shift now,” sings out McClurg—“lift her.”

We lift her, and escape all but the foam of a chief of waves.

[124]

I don’t dare take my eyes off those angry rows of white sea horses, running us down as knights would ride down a pedestrian. It’s a case of let ’em come, then jump from the big ones—lift her.

But if McClurg and I don’t dare look at the light Whiting and Griscom give frequent bulletins, like coxswains encouraging their spent crews.

“Dead ahead—that’s right—steady now—they’re coming fast.”

Indeed the noise of that engine grows louder every second. Griscom can hear it. Thank Heaven, his ear is all right.

“Hell,” sings out Whiting, and his voice has a sudden jubilation, “if that’s a Johnson I’m Mussolini. That’s a pair of Lathrops!”

“You’re right, it’s the schooner!” yells Griscom, “see there are two lights now, one lower down. She’s a long way off yet, though, or we’d have seen that lower light before. Funny how that racket carries against the wind.”

“No, she’s not so far, they just put up that lower light,” argues Whiting. “Good thing they put that first light in the rigging. Somebody used his bean.”

I venture a quick peek over my shoulder. Good old Albert!—the whole blot of her shape is plain now, and the hump on her stern—those absurd shacks.

[125]

“Watch it now, Mason, wait till that big one’s past, then pull like hell,” coaches McClurg. The big one sweeps under our lifted stern with the last hiss of the cheated sea. I pull like hell while McClurg eases. Our bow comes around, we run into the chop now—safely.

We row with diminishing force as we range under the schooner’s lee. Eager hands grasp our gunwale, others pull us aboard while one matchee secures our painter and the other leaps into Delirium Tremens to pass out our dunnage.

Spinden used his bean. Gough said we were all right, and the Captain had no light showing except the lantern on the engine room top. Spinden insisted on hoisting it, then insisted on running out to look for us.

We praise his headwork and pour out a round of rum, stripping off our steaming clothes in the cosy hold. We praise it with renewed fervor as the east looses its threat at last.

Outside the wind is a battle.

McClurg looks through a porthole.

“What price Delirium Tremens in that mess!” He chuckles—the unexcitable one.

The schooner is anchoring as we sit down to hot tomato soup, fried barracuda, canned beef stew, yams, rice, beans, cherry tarts and coffee. The [126] curtains laced down the sides of the “Porch” flap and whirr in the wind.

“No wonder da engine wouldn’t run,” says Gough, who has been looking over our Johnson. “Spark plug made no difference—she wouldn’t a run anyhow.”

“Why?”

“Da fuel tank is full o’ kerosene!”

[127]

## CHAPTER VI
A SHRINE OF ANCIENT FISHERMEN

At breakfast time the tractor had still not come. I felt like throwing up the trip to Santa Cruz de Bravo in spite of the importance to the expedition of gaining the good graces of General May.

Spinden urged us to be patient. He dwelt upon the folly of expecting Latin-Americans to hurry, illustrating his point with an anecdote of a Costa Rican editor, who said:

“The Americans have a funny saying—‘Time is money’!”

When we turned in last night it was only after a long hunt for a lizard, which Spinden captured alive on Chinchorro Bank. The creature escaped from its box yesterday and has been terrorizing the schooner ever since. The cook found it in the flour barrel yesterday afternoon, and when McClurg went to his bunk last night the lizard was perched on his pillow. A lantern, two bottles of beer and [128] the crystal of my watch were broken in the pursuit, which was vain. Spinden is temporarily very unpopular.

The sailors seem really afraid of the lizard, although the reptile is not over a foot long.

At half past nine we saw the long awaited diminutive train enter the town at a pace a boy could walk. We immediately went ashore. Because they seemed to be sorry for having kept us waiting the four attractive young Mexicans who run the train unloaded their bales of chicle with all speed and were ready to start in an hour.

The chicle is the sap of the Zapote tree, hardened after a boiling process similar to that by which maple sugar is made from maple sap. These bales are blocks of chicle wrapped in sacking to make a package about eighteen inches deep, eighteen inches wide and three feet long. Chicle is an essential element in the composition of chewing gum, and has no other commercial use.

The locomotive of the Vigia Chico—Santa Cruz de Bravo Limited is a car looking not unlike a station wagon with a top over only the driver’s seat, the rest of the vehicle being a mere flat car. Behind it were two other wheeled contraptions, one the sort of small flat car the Mexicans call a plataforma, the other a similar body provided with [129] a carriage top, side curtains and three or four cross benches for passengers.

By hand the “locomotive” was pushed to a small turn table where it was turned, also by hand.

One of the cars fell off the track; we two passengers assisted the train crew to lift it back bodily.

Two of the train crew crowded onto the seat beside the driver. One of them had a gun, not for bandits but for wild turkeys. Yucatan is sometimes called “The land of the Turkey and the Deer.” The beautiful bronzy ocellated turkey is perhaps the prize item in the peninsula’s fauna.

Formerly so many delays in the railroad service were caused by the pursuit of game on the part of the train crew that an ordinance was issued forbidding the engineer to stop the train for any chachalacca, curassow, peccary, deer or even the coveted turkey. It is whispered, however, that laxity in the observance of the rule is winked at. Moreover, it is possible for the letter of the law to be observed in many cases without the loss of game which God has put in the way of the sporting conductor or brakeman. When the brakeman shoots a bird he jumps off the engine, which slows down, allowing him to catch the rear car as it trails by. The law has not been broken, for the train has not [130] been stopped. Nevertheless, the turkey goes into the pot.

When we had run half a mile and were in the midst of the swamp which is behind the town it was discovered that a can of gasoline had been forgotten. The train backed a few feet, stopped, and a boy continued the quest of the needed fuel on foot. The psychology of this is beyond me. The train could have backed into town and returned in a quarter of the time it took the youth to fetch the gasoline. But in Mexico one soon ceases to wonder about such matters. Spinden and I profited by the example of the engineer and employed the interlude to eat oranges and drink coconut milk.

Soon we were out of the marsh and gradually rising over the typical flat limestone plain of Yucatan, covered with scrubby trees. A space barely wide enough for the passage of the train had been kept clear, and we were constantly lowering our heads to avoid branches which switched into the car in spite of its carriage top.

Perhaps two hundred Indians inhabit the less crumbled of the once pretentious stone buildings of Santa Cruz de Bravo, which boasted a population of 4,000 in 1902 when General Bravo was making it his headquarters in his unsuccessful attempt to reconquer the Indians of Quintana Roo.

[131]

Señor Julio Martin, a handsome and affable chicle broker, and his hospitable family offered us a room where Spinden put up his folding cot and I swung my hammock of sisal fiber.

These simple operations were impeded by the unsought attentions of several intoxicated Indians who had followed us from the train, which was left for the night on the rails in front of Señor Martin’s house. For we learned at once that we could not hope to see General May and return to Vigia this same day. General May was “sick”—in short he was in the condition of the aforesaid Indians who followed us into our room—which was in a separate building opposite the stucco dwelling of the Martins.

Indeed, Santa Cruz de Bravo is the drunkenest town it has ever been my lot to stay sober in. The retention of our sobriety, by the way, was something of a feat, for as we walked about the ruined town to see the sights and record them on film we were followed by a steadily growing army of inebriates—each man waving a bottle of vicious, colorless “rum” in our faces and urging—nay almost insisting, that we partake. Many of them grew angry when we declined, and as all wore the conventional machete—an implement both of agriculture and murder much like a pirate’s cutlass—our situation rapidly became uncomfortable. We fled to our room, locked ourselves [132] in, and remained there until Señor Martin’s charming and cultivated Uncle came to announce supper. For although we had brought food the Martins insisted on having us at their board—and right well did we fare there. In fact I was ashamed of the sustained ferocity of my attack on the delicious viands the ladies of the family put before us men—for according to native custom the women did not eat till the favored males had finished. Mexican cooking has no such extensive range as the culinary art of the French, for instance. But within that range Mexican cooking at its best is second to none in the world except the Gallic.

In the morning General May was able to see us. We were received in a warehouse half full of the chicle which May’s Indians had gathered for their chief to sell to Señor Martin—who ships it to the great gum manufacturers of the United States. The price which Martin and other brokers elsewhere in May’s territory pay for the solidified sap is divided between the General and his Indians. No doubt the chief keeps a substantial share, for he is said to be enormously rich according to native standards, and chicle is virtually his only source of revenue.

Some of the drunken Mayas of Santa Cruz de Bravo

Francisco May is a well set up chap of perhaps five feet six, which is rather above the average for the men of his nation. He is well into the middle [133] years of life, but does not look it. He was in the formal dress of his people, which is a suit of white cotton, with bell-mouthed trousers and a frill on each breast. Except for these embellishments his suit looked like simple white pyjamas. His head and feet were bare.

He sat on a bale of chicle, accepted our English cigarets without any word but with a friendly bow. When we had seated ourselves on other bales Spinden put questions in Spanish to Señor Martin who translated into Maya, the only language the General will permit to be used to him, although it is said he has a fair understanding of the language of the Mexicans whom he regards as usurpers.

He said he felt gratitude for our flattering interest in the temples of his ancestors. He had no objection to our studying any we might find, but he could not suggest the whereabouts of any for us to visit except those at Tulum, Chichen Itza and other well known sites.

When Spinden asked how he had won the rank of General he said:

“I was born a General. The title passes from father to oldest son in my family. But I do not care for war. I prefer the chicle business. It is better for the stomach.”

In short, the interview was interesting but not [134] very helpful to our designs. May at least offered no obstacle to our proposed exploration, but neither did he offer to aid us with information about ruins unknown to archæologists which are known to him and his people. There can be no doubt that such ruins exist. When we asked about Chunyaxché May merely grunted, and seemed bored.

Señor Martin thinks that the General would be glad to help us on his own part but that he fears the disapproval of a large element in his nation. This element, knowing less of the outer world than May and certainly profiting less than he by commercial contact with it, clings stubbornly to the prejudice against all outsiders which was born under Spanish tyranny. When General Bravo’s army of occupation was driven out by Indian guerrillas a treaty was wisely made by Mexico in which the virtual independence of the Indians was recognized in return for a promise by their Chief that he would keep the peace, maintain order, and pay certain Federal taxes.

At lunch Señor Martin recalled that there were one or two mounds a few kilometers down the railroad which he believed to be of Maya origin. At his urging we abandoned the idea of returning to the schooner immediately and set off in the train to look for these mounds under the guidance of the same youthful railroad men. Three of them eat [135] at Señor Martin’s table and are his relatives—but the exact relationships of his large family I have not yet mastered.

At Kilometer Fifty—that is six kilometers toward Vigia Chico from Santa Cruz—there was in General Bravo’s time a town called Laguna. Here, on the edge of a pretty pond, we were shown a mound which may well have been of Indian origin, although probably later built over by Spaniards or Mexicans. Without excavation we could learn nothing of value from it as there is no building standing on it today. By the terms of our agreement with the Mexican Government we are subjected to Mexico’s blanket prohibition of excavation by foreign archæologists. (There has been an exception to this rule made in favor of the Carnegie Institution’s work in the ruins of Chichen Itza.) Hence we did not linger at this mound when one of the trainmen said he knew a chiclero living down the tracks who had told him of seeing “a stone building in the bush.”

We found the chiclero boiling chicle in a great black pot. On the subject of the building he had seen he was most unsatisfactory. First he denied seeing it. Then, being cornered, he admitted he had told the young Mexican with us—named Pinto—of having seen it but said that he could not possibly find it again. A little later he said we could [136] easily find it if we would go “in there”—pointing vaguely south, “about two kilometers.”

The truth was that he did not want to leave his chicle. Finally he said that a neighbor who was weaving a new palm leaf roof on his shack across the railroad tracks would show us the way. But this Indian was just as obdurate as the first. I offered each of them five pesos to lead us, but neither would budge. From their description of the building it was one of those small, low shrines built in the last period of Maya sway, that is roughly between 1200 A.D. and the coming of the Spaniards. We were not missing much in all probability, and yet we should have liked to have seen it. For it would have been a start—“first blood,” archæologically speaking.

It is possible that in the refusal of these Indians to guide us we had encountered some taboo, some form of the anti-foreign prejudice which has made the bush of Quintana Roo inaccessible to archæologists until recently. Or it may be that their unwillingness to help us was mere individual stubbornness—the result of temperament, laziness, call what you will the mood in which Mexican Indians will often refuse to raise a finger to pick up a few pesos within reach.

In disappointment we returned to Santa Cruz, to be besieged on the streets by the usual press of [137] Indians intent on pouring down their throats as quickly as possible the proceeds of a season of chicle-bleeding. Señor Martin happened along and rescued us. His method of handling these earnest proffers of vile white rum without hurting the feelings of the Indians or becoming as intoxicated as they was to touch each bottle quickly to his lips, which he then wiped on his hand with a “gracias” as profound as if he had drunk deeply. This seemed to satisfy the bibulous ones. But they were so dirty, and so many of them had sore lips, that we could not drive ourselves even to this diplomatic subterfuge. All we could do was to press English cigarets on them—which they accepted greedily—and plead acute stomach trouble at each hospitable flourish of their bottles, meanwhile edging fearfully toward our own quarters. Once near enough for a dash we fled incontinently and bolted the door behind us.

Again the hospitable Martins insisted that they would feel insulted if we cooked our own supper on the little raised stone fireplace in our room. So while Señora Martin was performing the last rites preliminary to the offering of another excellent meal we sipped Señor Martin’s good Habanera and listened to dramatic stories of his difficulties on coming to Santa Cruz ten years ago, when his life [138] was often not worth a centavo to the Indians—which is perhaps why they spared him.

As the Fotingo was to leave for Vigia Chico before sunrise we did not linger with the Martins after one round of Don Julio’s excellent Vera Cruz “Reina Britannicas” had been smoked.

I was in my hammock and Spinden was about to blow out our candle when a thin, weak-looking Indian with a wide, loose-lipped mouth entered our room without knocking.

Were we interested in “ruinas de los antiguos”? (ruins of the ancient people) he asked.

We certainly were (we had been asking every likely looking native we had met in Santa Cruz if he knew of ruins, till now without result).

“Well, I am Florencio Camera, mule driver. In the season of chicle I work for Don Julio. I know where there are some ruins. If you like I can show you.”

Thus far he had been speaking Spanish. Now he remarked, “I speaks Eengleesh,” and with obvious pride in his erudition attempted to continue the conversation in our language. But his English was as poor as my Spanish, or worse, if possible. We did not get any further for a minute or two, or until Spinden had persuaded him to return to Spanish.

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Then, to condense to thirty words a half hour’s conversation, Camera said that he knew of ruins at Tabi, on the trail from Santa Cruz to Peto, which is the end of the railroad in Yucatan and some hundred and twenty-five miles northwest of General May’s capital. He also knew of ruins at Taro. But that was further away, almost to Peto, and the ruins at Tabi were the better ones anyway. He had seen two temples at Tabi, but thought there were more.

It is a common experience for explorers to be misled by arrieros and chicleros, whose knowledge of architecture is often insufficient to enable them to distinguish between a Maya building and walls which mark the early occupation of the Spaniards. But Camera seemed to know what he was talking about. Of his own accord he said these temples were on pyramids. That would certainly be Maya. We showed him pictures of temples in Lothrop’s book about Tulum. Yes, the Tabi buildings were just like those, said the mule driver.

Excited by the conviction that here was a lead well worth following we dressed, and took Camera across the street to the Martin house. Don Julio was finishing a last cigar.

It developed that there were hardly enough mules available for the trip to Tabi, which Camera had said would take nine days of our time, going, coming [140] and allowing two or three days for clearing the ruins of brush and studying them. The arriero is still engaged in bringing chicle out of the bush for Don Julio. But in two or three weeks the last, straggling chiclero will be out of the bush, plenty of mules will be idle, and Camera will be at our service for three and a half pesos a day and about a similar amount for each mule.

Spinden and I did some quick figuring. We think we can do Chunyaxché, put Griscom ashore at Cozumel Island for his work and return to Santa Cruz in about three weeks. So we have engaged Camera and six mules to be ready for us on February 20. And I have promised the arriero one hundred pesos as a bonus if Tabi turns out to be all that he says it is, and further bonuses in proportion for such other ruins as he may get wind of before our return, and be able then to show us.

The husky young engineer of the Ford train called us before there was any sign of light in the east. By the time we had finished pretty Señora Martin’s sugared buns and delicious chocolate the eastern sky was lemon and saffron and the rising trade was stirring the leaves of the heavily laden orange trees.

Although the brakeman did get one futile shot at a majestic turkey, this time the progress of the train was delayed more by domesticated animals [141] than by creatures of the wild. As we left the gray ruined walls of dismal, dilapidated Santa Cruz a calf chose to run ahead of the Fotingo. Before we could overtake it both calf and train had entered the long narrow corridor through the bush outside “civilization.” It was too late for the calf to leap aside from the tracks. The thick, thorny bush prevented that. Yet the creature would not, could not maintain a speed adequate to the train schedule. There was nothing to do but catch it and deposit it carefully behind us with its head pointed for Santa Cruz. But the calf had no desire to be caught. And if it could not run as fast as the Fotingo it could run faster than any of the train crew. So we had a succession of ridiculous, vain pursuits. The Fotingo would rush up to the calf’s heels and stop, while conductor and brakemen would leap off to pursue the young lady cow on foot. Winded after two or three hundred yards, they would signal for the train to pick them up, whereupon the absurd spectacle would be repeated.

After four or five miles of this the beast’s strength began to fail. With the conductor’s hand all but on its tail the animal leaped sideways into a natural pit in the limestone beside the tracks—a perpendicular drop of at least eight feet.

We thought the brute had certainly broken a [142] leg, but not at all. It was a prisoner in the pit, however, and was promptly caught, dragged up to the tracks and headed for home.

Later, at Central, a “town” consisting of one tin roofed shed formerly used as a barracks by soldiers of General Bravo, the dog belonging to an Indian family sharing the passengers’ car with us jumped off the train and refused to return. Of course, it would not do to proceed without the dog, which was the dear pet of the two children in this family. Half an hour dragged out before the creature was caught.

Four kilometers from Vigia we slowed down to pick up Pedro Moguel. Not till we had gone another kilometer did he offer the information that Griscom was back there in the bush, shooting. We would have called Griscom had Moguel spoken in time, for we were anxious to reach Boca de Paila before the sun became so low as to make it dangerous for us to cross the outer bar there.

When I reproached Moguel for this he looked pathetically crestfallen. Then, as if to make amends, he said swiftly:

“I can show you a ruin across the bay.”

Forgotten Gods of Lost Lagoons, when shall I understand Mexican character! Here we had been hanging around this desolate stifling bay for five days, beseeching Moguel and every native we met [143] to tell us if they knew of any ruins. “No hay” they said (“There aren’t any”), until we have come to loathe that phrase as we have never loathed the more famous “Mañana” or “Quien sabe?” And now Moguel offers to make amends for a slight unthoughtfulness by showing us “a ruin across the bay.” This is my fifth trip to Mexico, yet the more I see of these people the less do I pretend to understand their devious natures. Talk about the “inscrutable Chinee” if you like. Beside the Mexican he is an openwork stocking.

Of course, Moguel is not a Mexican by birth, but he is one by long residence, marriage and mental affinity.

It seems the handsome youth, Pinto, who tried to find us a shrine yesterday, is Moguel’s stepson. Moguel has appointed him to take us to “the ruin across the bay.” This lad’s whole mellifluous name is Ambrosio Pinto. McClurg calls him “the Painted Nectar” and Whiting suggests, “The Venus de Mexico.” His intentions seem excellent, but his intelligence and energy are perhaps inferior to his beauty. This combination lends itself to ridicule, particularly when the possessor of it is as conscious of that pulchritude as “the Ambrosial Boy” seems to be.

Personally I have not yet had any fault to find [144] with him. I can see that he wears his neat flannel shirt, khaki trousers and wide-brimmed, high crowned Mexican straw sombrero with a jauntiness unusual in the young chiclero. And it is obvious that the revolver hung in his cartridge belt is aimed at the Señoritas. But what of it? We were all young once, even Whiting. And Ambrosio will add a valuable touch of “color” to our pictures. Indeed, it is amusing how he becomes suddenly alert when kodak or camera is unlimbered.

We have arranged that Pinto will not only take us to the near ruin but will pilot us to Chunyaxché, indeed will continue with us at the salary of three pesos a day as far as Cozumel Island, where Ambrosio’s mother and small brothers and sisters are living.

Griscom’s absence did not delay us after all, for he was on board the schooner fifteen minutes before we had untangled a new maze of red tape presented to us at the last minute by the wizened, sharp faced Collector of the Customs. It seems his name is Noveles. If this is the plural of novela (fiction) he is well named, for outside of Russia I have never met a Government officer more prolific in the creation of imaginary difficulties.

He could not let us sail until he had received assurance that we appreciated the delicate situation [145] into which he had placed himself by allowing us to land here without the proper papers. We must be very careful not to tell the authorities at Cozumel that we had put in here or Señor Noveles would find himself in hot water. Did we appreciate the delicacy of this matter and how he had jeopardized his position for our benefit?

We assured him that we did. But he continued to hold our papers. Whereupon Spinden’s intuition, based on his long experience in these countries, revealed to him that here was a knot best cut with a knife of gold.

So I hastened to the office of Señor Noveles in a big barn of a building with a tin roof and begged him to accept an American five dollar gold piece as a recuerdo—a souvenir—of our visit. He accepted it with dignified thanks and gave up the ship’s papers.

I do not want to appear to cavil at this gentle old official. Fate has condemned him to live in a town of a few bleak tin-roofed sheds, a place bare of all diversions but simple food and plentiful sleep, a parody on a seaport, of whose population at low ebb he constitutes one half. His salary cannot be much more than a pittance. Can he be blamed for picking up a little graft when luck throws in his way a yacht loaded with foreigners who are rolling in money, according to his standards? Seldom have [146] I parted with a five dollar gold piece more cheerfully. And if the recuerdo has already been sent to Santa Cruz de Bravo in exchange for that white aguardiente, why I wish you joy and a stronger stomach than I have, Señor Noveles.

Spinden and I find Griscom something of a hero on the schooner. While we were exchanging diplomatic phrases with General May, Griscom was landing a fifteen foot shark which had been hanging around the schooner to the annoyance of Whiting’s chronic will-to-swim. When the shark was hooked several men jumped to the line, all shouting at once. One urged getting a boathook or something, and they all ran off, leaving Griscom braced as against a racehorse, his gloves smoking with the outgoing line. He hung on grimly till the others collected their wits. After a long fight the shark was pulled close enough for McClurg to shoot it three times through the head.

Griscom found a colony of flamingoes inhabiting the shore northeast of Vigia, but could not approach near enough to take photographs. The verification of the existence of this colony is a thing to be proud of, however, for this is the farthest south record of these birds in Central America. Last, but not least, our bird man shot near Vigia a rosy ant tanager of a new species. That’s five new birds!

We hung McClurg’s shark from our bow—a warning to his kind

[147]

McClurg has not been idle either. He took the schooner some twelve miles toward the head of the bay from Vigia, and when the shoaling waters persuaded Gough to anchor McClurg and Whiting and Griscom went two or three miles further in the Imp. At that point even the Imp began to find insufficient water, and the exploring party had to turn back. My hope that we might find ruins near the unknown head of the bay is shattered. The old Mayas would hardly have built on the edge of the maze of mangrove keys and barely covered mud bars which McClurg says extended as far southwestward as he could see when he had to turn back. For the great trading canoes of the Mayas probably drew as much water as the Imp.

The schooner has already proved a good sea boat. And on McClurg’s trip up the bay she proved to be all that he hoped when, with a bottle of beer at Belize, he christened her “a good mud boat.” A dozen times the mud clutched her, says McClurg, but she extricated herself each time without any such elaborate measures as we had to take on Hicks’ Key.

On Pinto’s advice we anchored at the mouth of a narrow bay between the mainland and Allen Point. Ambrosio confirms the word of the Belize fisherman that this inlet connects with the ocean at Boca de [148] Paila, and that Allen Point is not a peninsula at all as our chart indicates, but is merely the southern extremity of a long thin island, a mere sand bar supporting some fifteen miles of guano palms and coconut trees.

Pinto said the ruin was near three conspicuous palms about three kilometers from the position of the Albert. But these three coconut trees were not reached until the Imp had anchored off a pretty little beach a good ten kilometers from the schooner. Then there was a delay about finding the ruin. Pinto had chanced upon it when gathering firewood for a fishing boat two years ago, and he had never returned till now.

He indicated the general direction to follow, and we spread out at intervals of twenty feet, Spinden, McClurg, Whiting, Pinto and I. So thick was the brush that even at such close quarters we often lost sight of each other. But in pauses between his own attacks on the bush each man could hear the swish of other machetes, and hear the cries of, “Do you see it yet?”... “Is this another ‘sell’ of Venus’s like yesterday’s shrine?”

As luck had it I caught the first glimpse of the first Maya ruin found by the expedition. Through the falling green ahead of me as I raised machete for another blow I saw a low grayish structure.

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“Here it is,” I shouted, “a poor thing, but our own!”

It is a tiny building, only sixteen feet long by eight feet ten inches wide—outside measurements; only ten feet and a half by four and a half inside. The door is only three feet five inches high and the walls four feet. The roof, which has fallen in, was probably of stone slabs, for we found several of these within the walls. In short, it is a characteristic example of those curious little shrines much built during the last period of Maya architecture, those shrines whose diminutive size led earlier explorers of active imagination like Dr. Le Plongeon to the erroneous hypothesis that the builders had been dwarfs.

Because of its location between the booming ocean and the placid salt lagoon we had just left Spinden thinks that perhaps fishermen once came to this little temple to burn incense to some watery divinity. Appropriate to this suggestion there are fossil shells imbedded in the coral rock which is the material of which the building was made. As it is of late-period Maya architecture it probably is not more than seven hundred years old.

We have called it “Chenchomac,” using the name which Ambrosio says the Indians apply to this locality. In Maya Chenchomac means “Well of the Fox.”

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“In Maya?” it may be asked. That is in the language of the modern Indians of this country, whom scientists agree to call Mayas. It must always be remembered, however, that these Indians use Spanish characters when they write their language, or rather, Spanish characters are used by the learned men who construct Maya grammars and make other linguistic studies in the hope of finding some connection between the modern language and the baffling hieroglyphs. For these Indians of today cannot read a single hieroglyph.

We cast through the bush for an hour, hoping vainly to find more buildings. Tired of fighting thorns and mosquitoes we sat down on the ocean beach and watched the waves burst into clouds of white. This beach of fine creamy sand extended both north and south as far as we could see. I suppose some day the realtors will find it, and there will be another Florida boom. But thank God, I shall be as dead as the Mayas who built that shrine to their Turtle Deity.

Here is yet a place where one may escape the tawdriness, the filth, the aching confusion of ugliness and noise with which man has seen fit to ruin the placid green face of the earth.

Spinden and Mason before remains of a fisherman’s shrine—a small thing but our own

We took off our boots and wiggled our toes in the sand, in the little uphill rivers of clean foam and [151] clean green water,—the last fillip of those ponderous swells which rolled in from Africa. Here I could never know, thank God, those chaotic fears, those indefinable feelings of inferiority which an hour in New York or London or Chicago always awake in me. There was noise enough here, but a simple noise which did not daze the brain but rather whetted it, the oldest noise in the world, the shout of the leaping wind and the thunder of the tumbling sea.

That wind grew and whipped froth around our boat’s stern as she scudded for the schooner through a gray, angry dusk. But we were well content with the world and with each other.

It is a small thing, that shrine of Chenchomac. But it is a beginning. We have discovered something of that which we are seeking, and our appetite is sharpened for more.

Chunyaxché has been a name, a cross pencilled on a bare map. Yes, and a living hope. But now it is a conviction, a vivid conviction of buildings shrouded by brush, buildings gray with weather except where some falling tree has scraped off the patina of dead centuries and shown the true white of the limestone.

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## CHAPTER VII
THE FACES OF OLD GODS

The Albert got underway at dawn and picked a hole in the reef about a mile and a half east of Allen Point. The wind dropped rapidly, but it had been enough east of north to leave tall oily seas, which threw the schooner about with creaking of idle booms and skidding of loose objects like a boathook, my rubber boots and Spinden’s cot. Spinden was prostrate again, wedged against the Imp on the forward deck. Our temporary mutilations by insects are nothing to what he endures for the expedition.

Boca de Paila is about eighteen miles north of Allen Point.

“Boca de Paila,” says Spinden, “is hard to get into, hard to stay in, and hard to get out of.”

This statement is admirable, for it is at the same time succinct, pertinent and complete. The Mexican name is well chosen. Boca de Paila means “Mouth of a Cauldron.” The “mouth” in the reef here is narrow, and the water inside is nearly always turbulent, for the insufficient reef merely knocks [153] the white caps off the sea rollers, does not stop them or even change their rhythm. Of all the alleged harbors along this God-forsaken coast Boca de Paila most strains the allegation. After dodging coral heads all the way in from the reef mouth and bumping bottom twice here we were anchored in the midst of them on none too good holding ground, pitching and lurching in a nasty swell with the foaming beach only four hundred yards under our lee.

Spinden, who had lain in a coma all morning, was now in a fever to start for Chunyaxché. This day was half gone and prudence suggested awaiting the beginning of another before undertaking to reach ruins a vague but considerable distance away over uncharted inland waters which our pilot seemed to know none too well. But our archæologist’s ardent yearning for terra firma was a moving sight. With a haste which was regretted later, duffle bags were packed by the shore party, consisting of Spinden, Whiting, Ambrosio Pinto and myself. Griscom was to come into the interior later if we found any land birds for him to skin. Meanwhile he would hunt the beaches and marsh. McClurg had hydrographic work to do, and, as usual, he preferred any schooner to any land. His intense aversion for land and Spinden’s equal antipathy for sea continue to be a spectacle for a philosopher to muse upon.

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About half a mile directly behind the mouth in the reef is a break in the shore, an opening into a great expanse of lagoons, lakes and swamps. (Ambrosio says that not even the Indians know the exact limits of this “lake country,” as they call it.) This inner boca like the outer one is guarded by a bar. A small sloop which had crossed this was anchored on the inner side, but our schooner was too deep to follow her. Indeed the surf on the bar looked as if the feat of crossing would be difficult even for our small boats. We got into the larger one.

To make the Imp lighter crossing the bar most of the baggage was put into the other tender. In Delirium Tremens the Captain now led the way to the bar. (This does not sound like safe pilotage but it served us well.) We were soon in smooth water, the hum of the two outboard motors extinguishing the disappointed roar of the surf we had evaded. Here at its entrance the lagoon offered loveliness to lure us into the mud and mangrove horror beyond. Through deliciously clear tropic water white sand gleamed under our keel, exaggerating the vivid gold and blue and black of swift fish. The lagoon was so narrow that on each side we could almost count the shells on a creamy beach.

The Imp used the little sloop as a dock while she took her baggage from the Delirium Tremens. This [155] sloop, the Nautilus, at fairly regular intervals brings here supplies from Cozumel for the Indians and carries their chicle back. To make this exchange the Indians come thirty-seven miles from their holy city of Chunpom, twenty-five miles afoot or a-mule and twelve miles in fragile dug-out canoes nine feet long and eighteen inches wide.

With our handsome and youthful guide in our bow we left the friendly Nautilus and Delirium Tremens and turned toward the unknown. The lagoon forked, Ambrosio Pinto waved his hand majestically to the right and we rounded a point of black mangroves which blotted the other boats from our view. Almost immediately we ran aground.

“You say you know this channel, Ambrosio?”

“Si Señor.” He added that it was shallow for only twenty feet. We all got out and dragged the boat through six inches of water. When we had gone fifty feet Ambrosio said we were almost out of the shallows. We got out of them after four hundred feet more of this back-breaking pulling. At this point the water was deep enough to float the Imp if only one of us walked. Ambrosio was nominated. After another hundred yards he found deep enough water to float his weight with ours. Our little propeller threw up a wake of swirling mud. The lagoon [156] was now a wide shallow lake of brackish water with low shores of the monotonous mangrove.

When we had reached the middle of this lake a jet of water as from a lawn fountain sprang upward from the Imp’s bottom. We regarded this phenomenon with mild curiosity. It is surprising how short a time one must be exposed to the constant risk of running aground, capsizing and sinking in order to become callous to such matters. Mexican indifference and fatalism was in our blood already. The water was only four feet deep but that was enough to sink the boat and raise havoc with our baggage. And I am sure that if the water had been four fathoms deep our reaction would have been the same. A delicious humor filled our veins. The leak was a matter for discussion, for debate but not for emphatic action.

Spinden suggested it be stopped with my handkerchief. I happened to be carrying two of linen and one of cotton. I wanted the latter to clean my shotgun with but reluctantly began searching for it through stuffed pockets while suggesting that the tail of Spinden’s pink shirt would make excellent caulking. No, he had worn the shirt to impress the natives and he would keep it for that purpose, tail and all.

I kept pulling out linen handkerchiefs but couldn’t [157] find the cotton one. Much of the lake was now in the boat and the rest was very close to her gunwales. My regard for linen and Spinden’s for silk began to be criticized by Whiting, who was running the engine and in its noise was not appreciating the repartee. At this moment Ambrosio finished whittling a plug from a pole we carried. The plug reduced the leak to modest proportions. We were saved a two-mile wade back to the Nautilus. And we had discovered a use for the “Venus de Mexico.” Ambrosio could whittle.

Now another debate arose. The question might be stated this way; “Resolved, that my baggage shall not be put in the wet bottom of this boat.”

Everyone took the affirmative. And everyone suited the action to the word and lifted his belongings to such spots on the commodious seats of the Imp as were not occupied by three wrangling Americans and a silent Indian. The boat became top-heavy. This situation was dangerous, but each man’s reasons for keeping his stuff out of the wet belly of the boat were good.

Spinden: “Confound it, my bags are full of films, the water would ruin them!”

Mason: “My duffle bag is loaded with beans and coffee and crackers. Do you want them soaked in brackish water?”

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Whiting: “My bag is full of ammunition, which is future food. Films are a luxury, soaked crackers can be eaten, but you can’t kill a turkey with a water-logged cartridge!”

Someone thought of a happy compromise. Ambrosio’s poor little duffle bag was put at the bottom and the oars laid between that bag and the anchor to make a rack for the other luggage. I began to bail with the shell of a gourd.

At last we reached the other side of this expanse of open shallows and entered a channel some hundred yards wide which wound among clumps of mangrove. Herons, bitterns, white egrets and their reddish cousins and roseate spoonbills rose at the buzz of the first gasoline engine they had ever heard. In half an hour or so the channel narrowed rapidly. We tasted the water, it was sweet. The wide, sluggish river had become a freshwater stream with a very perceptible current.

Instead of deepening, however, it was shoaling. And it was narrowing at an alarming rate. Consequently the current was increasing until our motor could barely make headway against it. To add to our difficulties the course of the stream now wound like the path of an erratic snake. Our pilot sat in the bow, his beautiful face set in that vacant expression characteristic of the least cerebral type of [159] moving picture actor. He sat in the bow—and looked backward.

Whiting stood up in the stern, cursing Ambrosio softly and steadily as he threw the metal steering handle from side to side and tried to determine which bank of the twisting rivulet harbored the fewer snags. At each turn our stern would graze the bank and our following wash over-ran the land.

It was like Mississippi navigation on a very Lilliputian scale. Where the current bore around a bend and into the opposite bank there was the deepest water and there we had to go despite the current. The depths ranged from one to three feet, and we drew nearly one. In the midst of some tiny rapids we bumped bottom, hung there a breathless instant, then with the help of an extra oar moved ahead. As we grazed a bank Spinden sighted rare orchids and jumped ashore. He could easily walk faster than we were now going. It was navigation under the most peculiar circumstances I have ever seen, and I dwell upon it because it reflects an interesting light upon the builders of the ruins who poled their canoes laboriously against this swift stream—as indeed do their descendants who sell chicle to the white men today. If you chew gum reflect that its fundamental ingredient may have been brought down this difficult stream in a dug-out canoe.

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For another reason this river is interesting; it is the most northerly surface river we have ever heard of in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is a limestone plain famous for its underground rivers, pools and lakes but notorious for the absence of surface streams.

The swamp gradually gave way to savannah.

We swept around a bend, Ambrosio waved a majestic arm, and there was the first temple, dazzling white in the sun!

It is a one-storied, oblong building, rather small—in short, an outpost of the city. It faces a lake about two hundred feet west of it, a lake of which the river we had been following is an outlet. With happy inspiration Spinden promptly named the building, “Vigia del Lago” (“The Watch on the Lake,” or “The Lookout on the Lake”).

There were no trees near the building except a dead one on its roof. But there was a lot of brush and high grass, which had to be cut down before we could get photographs of the front of the temple with its three doors, and an interesting carving over them.

The size of the lake surprised us. Ambrosio says it is fifteen miles long and three miles wide, but it is not shown on any of the maps we brought. It was the narrow northern tip of the lake which we crossed.

We find an outpost of the commercial city of Muyil on an old Maya trade route

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The stolid Ambrosio seemed to be leading us directly into a bank of high grass when it suddenly opened and showed us a channel as narrow as the upper end of the river we had left. The more we studied the construction of this the more convinced were we that it was a canal, a canal made by the Mayas centuries ago. It ran nearly straight, and although its banks were covered with grass they were higher than the land behind, and on each side of the water and paralleling it could be seen the long mound made of the earth thrown out when the canal was dug. A barely perceptible current moved against us.

After a quarter of a mile of this we entered a second lake, perhaps a mile and a half broad and two miles long. On the farther side were visible three or four roofs of thatch, and soon we could distinguish two men observing us from a little dock made of logs. A dazzling white beach belted the lake. Behind the yellowish roofs we were approaching rose high trees—the beginning of the big bush. Altogether it seemed a delightful spot to us weary of mangrove swamps and mud. We could not yet see the insects.

The Imp grounded a few feet from the little dock and we waded ashore. One of the two men awaiting us was Señor Amado Castillo, head chiclero of this [162] region, right-hand man of General Juan Vega, of Chunpom, who is second in command to General May, military commander of all the Indians of Quintana Roo.

“Yes, there are ruins here,” said Don Amado, “I’ll take you to them.” Spinden went off with him while Whiting and I carried baggage, cots and my hammock under a thatched roof supported on a pole framework, a shelter offered us by the hospitable Señor Castillo. It was nearly dark, and we began supper. Now we regretted the haste in which we had started. I had forgotten bacon, lard and flour. But we made a makeshift meal of pea soup, rice, dried raisins and tea under the thatched roof which Don Amado lent us for the night.

Spinden returned in high satisfaction. He had seen two buildings, he said, a structure with pillars and a temple on a pyramidal mound, a typical Maya “Castillo,” to use the misnomer which has stuck to this type of temple since the uncouth Spanish adventurers first applied it. Dark had fallen before Spinden’s guide of the fit name (Castillo) could show him more than these two structures. But Don Amado said there were seven or eight other buildings in the bush, and any quantity of mounds marking where others had already succumbed to decay.

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As we listened to Spinden over our crackling little fire Whiting and I forgot our fatigue, forgot the stinging ants which swarmed over us from the ground on which we had stretched our aching bodies. Here was success, complete, dazzling—and now that we had it—ridiculously easy. Forgotten were not only the bites, the bruises, the sea-sickness of today and yesterday, but the foot weariness and the heartaches of the trying days of organization in New York. A city with eight or ten temples still standing!

Spinden and Whiting put up their cots on opposite sides of this shack, and in the middle I hung my hammock under the great billowing piece of canvas and dangling mosquito net which the archæologist calls my “hangar.” It was a cold night—and the knack of keeping blankets about one in a narrow hammock has never been mine. Then there were tick bites to keep me awake, and above all, wonder about these ruins.

Quietly I reached down for my boots, putting them on in the hammock to avoid the ants which were swarming on the dirt floor.

Fully dressed I slipped out of the hut between my snoring companions and followed the path I had seen Spinden return by a few hours before. A branch led off to the right, and instinct told me to take that.

I had gone perhaps two hundred yards through [164] the mystery of moonlit woods when there rose through the trees at the left of the path the high dark bulk of something which gleamed where moon rays reached it.

I worked around to the west of it, where there was a slight opening. The low moon was now behind me. And there rising before me was a typical-Maya pyramid, four sided with ascending terraces and a wide stairway. And on its top a temple, shining like silver under the moon. A true Maya temple not seen by archæologist until today. And carved on its corners—one to each corner—the faces of old gods.

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## CHAPTER VIII
A LOST TRADE ROUTE

It was in the afternoon of Thursday, January 28, that we reached the ruins. Now it is Wednesday February 3, and we are all back on the schooner. Our fingers are stiff from gripping machetes and axes, our palms are broken and blistered. But for every blister a Maya building new to archæology has been plotted on scaled paper for the archives of the Peabody Museum of Harvard. Not since Oregon logging days have I known a week of such physical labor; and never have I known labor which brought such quick and overwhelming reward.

Our first morning at the ruins we tried to map out a plan of attack on the bush, but it was impossible to stick to any plan. A man would begin to cut his way in toward one building when he would catch a glimpse of more enticing walls to one side. Before he was half through clearing the bush about this he would be diverted by a shout from a companion:

“Hey, there’s a painting on the wall over the altar in this shrine, come and look at it!” Or:

[166]

“Hombre, I just dug up a round stone in front of this temple. Part of a pillar, or you can have my beans tonight. Come and help me dig up the rest of it.”

Castillo says the ruins should not be called Chunyaxché, which is the name of a native settlement several kilometers from here. He believes the city now far gone in decay was called Muyil, and that it gave that name to an Indian village which was so called, and which flourished in the very midst of the ruins some fifty years ago. He says the Indians call the small lake near the ruins Laguna de Muyil and that their name for the larger one is Laguna de Xlabpak (or Lake of the Big Wall, in reference probably to the temple Spinden named Vigia del Lago or to another ruin which Castillo says stands far down the western shore of the lake, a ruin we have not had time to inspect).⁠[1]

[1] After my return to New York an officer of the American Geographic Society sent me a new map made for the chicle companies which shows both these lakes. The smaller is here called Lago de Muyil and the larger Lago de Chunyaxché.—The Author.

It was hard for us to give up the name of Chunyaxché but Muyil does seem better supported by the evidence, and we have accepted it.

From this high building canoes approaching Muyil were sighted before they could see the city

Our first hasty survey of Muyil the morning after our arrival convinced us that we could not do justice to the ruins without several days’ work. [167] Axes were needed to cut trees too large for our machetes. Rope was needed to make less dangerous the task of climbing the chief temple, parts of which will soon cave in. Food was needed, iodine for tick bites, and many other things. The junior member of the expedition took the Imp back to the schooner for supplies. Before we left he did this so often that we came to speak of the “Whiting Ferry Service.”

For six days we worked from dawn to dark, with Amado Castillo and an Indian helping us. Yet so thick was the growth of trees, shrubs and vines over the buildings that this period was not sufficient to clear them all. Consequently there were several interesting buildings of which we failed to get photographs through the confused dim light of the dense bush. One of these was a building which the Indians called “El Centro,” the center. This was a temple on a terraced mound. We had visited it several times before we found, under the base of the stairway to the external temple, an opening into a passage which led to an internal house of worship, a buried temple in the center of the mound! One of our Indians ran away when he saw us going under ground, but Castillo, who does not share native fears of ghosts and demons, told us this subterranean chapel had been used as a hiding place [168] by Indians fighting Mexico in the revolt of 1848 and more recently. Indeed, beside fragments of rotted baskets and gourd vessels was a relic of much more recent times, a piece of a boat’s rudder with an iron fastening. Twenty or thirty fighting men might easily hide in this cavernous place of ancient worship, but why should they bring the rudder of a boat with them? Were they repairing it while Mexican soldiers hunted the shores of the two lakes for them? What dramas this temple must have seen!

And what occult rites were observed here? The fact that it has three altars, the fact that it was hidden under a building which some half surviving tradition has persuaded the modern Indians was the center of the ancient city—these facts and others suggest that this secret place of worship had some special importance. Perhaps this holy of holies was forbidden to ordinary devotees of Itzamna, the Supreme Deity, Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, Ahpuch, Lord of Death, and other Maya gods. Perhaps it was reserved for the devotions of those who had reached the rank of priest. Perhaps Emperors or Sacerdotal Monarchs themselves came here to burn their offerings of copal—the incense of gum which is used by the Indians to this day. Of all the ruins at Muyil this well-preserved subterranean temple has perhaps the most appeal to a layman. [169] If it were reproduced in an American museum it would draw large crowds.

But to the scientist other buildings are more interesting because they can give him more information about the age of Muyil and the nature of the people who lived there.

Of course we are particularly on the alert for hieroglyphic inscriptions. These are very often found on upright stone slabs, standing apart by themselves with one end in the ground. On the afternoon of our fourth day at the ruins Spinden found two of these, one at each side of a shrine. But, alas, centuries of wind and rain had erased the messages which almost certainly had been carved upon their faces. This fact might lead the novice to the conclusion that these slabs must be very old, for distinguishable glyphs have been found dating as far back as the second century after Christ. However, this conclusion would be erroneous. You cannot judge the age of a city solely by the degree of erasure of its hieroglyphs, for the action of weather upon stone is very variable. Where these stelæ—as the slabs are called—have fallen face downward upon some soft bed of earth or leaves the inscriptions are often preserved years after they would have been obliterated had the carved mileposts in Maya history continued to stand erect.

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There is much evidence that Muyil belongs to the last great period in Maya culture, the Period of the League of Mayapan. Of course, the city’s location in the northern part of the Maya area would lead to this supposition before an examination had been made. Then a look at the grotesque faces decorating the four corners of the highest temple would alone incline the archæologist to the opinion that Muyil is not a First Empire city. Such faces or “mask panels” are common in Maya architecture; but in the southern and older area the details of the face are generally built up of stucco, whereas in the northern and later area they are in relief. These faces at Muyil are in relief—that is, cut into the walls.

This tall temple with the grotesque faces of conventionalized art at its four corners presents one entirely new feature in Maya architecture. This is a round cupola or small tower, which rises from the roof of the temple proper, itself set upon a pyramidal mound of five terraces, ascended by a wide stairway. The cupola enhances the effect of height and grandeur.

The whoop of joy which Spinden let out when he found this cupola was good to hear. We had been clearing brush and trees a foot in diameter from the terraces and stairway for several hours. At the risk [171] of a dangerous cave-in he climbed to the top of the temple, where the brush and cactus were so thick that he had hacked for fifteen or twenty minutes before he could discern the outline of the cupola. I believe his elation did much to convince the Indians helping us that we were not hunting for gold—as their kind persist in believing.

We were interested to see that cactus grew about this cupola. There was no such desert growth on the wet ground thereabouts, but the dry, rock roof of the temple provided the right climate for the familiar cat’s-claw of arid regions.

The roof of the temple was only fifty-four feet above the ground. But the building and supporting mound of five terraces had been planned in such careful proportion to each other and in such cunning relation to their surroundings that not only did they seem bigger than they were, but this impression of their imposing bulk was enhanced by each view of them. The same thing is true of El Castillo at Chichen Itza and of the House of the Diviner and its supporting pyramidal mount at Uxmal. In fact this is true of every good example of the Maya Castillo type of edifice, that is, a temple on a pyramidal, terraced mound with broad stone stairway. I never look at such a structure without saying to myself, “What a satisfactory mass.”

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All Maya buildings are made of rough blocks of limestone held with a mortar of the same material and often provided with a surface coating of stucco. Nearly all Maya buildings, whether temples or palaces, are placed upon artificial mounds. But in the southern area there was a tendency to place these separate mounds on one large common base or artificial acropolis. This sort of acropolis was not used in the north, where the city planning seems to have been more haphazard. Indeed, it was mainly in the south, too, that cities were carefully orientated with regard to the four chief points of the compass.

Regular depressions or sunken courts, which may have been theaters, are also characteristic of the south. The same thing is chiefly true of the use of stelæ, or obelisks, carved with inscriptions.

Muyil, which has stelæ, and which is marked by some observance of the principle of orientation, is situated in the southern part of the northern area.

As we looked at the grinning faces of the gods carved on the corners of Muyil’s Castillo we thought of the barbaric spectacles which they had seen. We recalled the description of human sacrifice on a similar temple at Uxmal as pieced together by the imagination of the Spanish historian, Cogolludo, from hints he had picked up among the natives:

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> “The High Priest had in his Hand a large, broad and sharp Knife made of Flint. Another Priest carried a wooden collar wrought like a snake. The persons to be sacrificed were carried one by one up the Steps, stark naked, and as soon as laid on the Stone, had the Collar put upon their Necks, and the four priests took hold of the hands and feet. Then the High Priest with wonderful Dexterity ripped up the Breast, tore out the Heart, reeking, with his Hands, and showed it to the Sun, offering him the Heart and Steam that came from it. Then he turned to the Idol, and threw it in his face, which done, he kicked the body down the steps, and it never stopped till it came to the bottom, because they were very upright.”

According to our standards the Mayas were cruel, no doubt, although they made much less sacrificial use of blood than the Aztecs. But when all is said and done the Mayas were perhaps the most deeply religious race that ever lived. Remember that when an explorer finds a ruined Maya city he is finding merely the stone buildings which formed the ceremonial center of the ancient metropolis. The other buildings once there, perhaps thousands of them, were constructed of wood and thatch which turned to dust long before the arrival of the archæologist. It is the great public buildings which remain, and the significant thing about the Mayas is that nearly [174] all of their public buildings were devoted to religion. Even the so-called palaces probably housed priests rather than lay kings, for church and state went hand in hand with the Mayas and the rulers had a sacerdotal character. The spiritual impulse dominated the whole life of this ancient people. Not the Sphynx of Egypt, not the Temple of Heaven in Peking, not the Roman Forum, not even the Acropolis of Athens cries out with such vigorous emotion as these decaying shrines of the first Americans.

Think of their building their hundreds of cities without iron, think of their cutting practically all these stones with only tools of harder stone (for the few copper chisels which have been found seem to have been a rather late invention never widely used). Then think of their hauling those big stone blocks to the tops of their pyramids without any modern machinery. Apparently they had no pulleys, not even a simple wheel.

The majesty of the performance gives one faith. Yes though time has tumbled most of it the remnant of the beauty which once shone through every Maya city makes even the confirmed pessimist wonder if man is such a contemptible insect after all.

Is it possible that the outcropping of a deep feeling for beauty is the first sign of decay in a race? Once amid the loveliness of Chichen Itza Xoch [175] suggested this to me. It seems an obscene theory. At least if there is anything in it our dear United States are safe from decay for a long time to come.

About one-third of a mile northwest from our camp on the edge of the lake we found a group of four buildings. Three were so far gone that their past function was hard to determine, but the fourth was a fairly well preserved temple. On clearing away a pile of rubbish from the western and chief entrance to this we found that this portal had had two sets of pillars at each side, one pillar behind the other, instead of abreast of it. This is the first instance of this tandem arrangement of pillars we know of in the whole Maya area. And like the cupola on El Castillo it indicates originality on the part of the men who built this old city, and a flair for experiment.

Perhaps forty yards north of this group is a small temple which interested us because of a fragment of painting on the rear wall over the altar. Try as we did we could not bring to light enough of this painting to tell what it had been, a scene of sacrifice, perhaps, or a portrait of some grotesque, anthropomorphic god. At a point not far behind this edifice begins a raised stone roadway which ends at the foot of the western side of El Castillo. This structure is carefully oriented.

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When Whiting made the first of his many trips back to the schooner he took with him Ambrosio and an Indian who had just reached the lake from the interior with a mule train bearing chicle which Amado Castillo wanted to send to Cozumel aboard the sloop, Nautilus. Part of this cargo was put in the Imp, and part was loaded in a narrow eight-foot dug-out canoe which Whiting towed. Castillo said this chicle came from Chunpom, twenty-five miles northwest of Muyil. He calls Chunpom a “holy city,” with a population of 5,000. Doubtless the truth is that the vicinity of the village of Chunpom holds this number of Indians, for these natives avoid close packed settlements as eagerly as the Chinese seek them. Perhaps in all Quintana Roo there are not more than 15,000 Mayas left.

Spinden and I spent the first morning cutting trees growing out of the sides and roofs of the four buildings in the northwest group. All morning beans were cooking, the same beans which had been too hard to eat the night before. Spinden and I sat out in the full force of the tropical sun and ate hot beans and drank hot tea.

But an hour after we had gone back to work the sky was overcast, and a chill, damp wind was blowing from the north. At the first sign of rain the Indian who had been helping us, or rather who had [177] been helping Amado Castillo help us, scuttled for his hut. It seemed no great loss, however, for he had been utterly lazy. But Don Amado explained that the man is recuperating from malaria, which is ample excuse.

Before long Spinden and I were wet to the skin, and thoroughly chilled in spite of our exercise. It seemed impossible that three hours before we had been regretting the necessity of drinking hot tea. Now hot tea was our greatest need.

We sheathed our dripping machetes and jogged into camp, with the wind whipping at our heels. There was no firewood in our hut and the wood outside was wet. But luckily I had brought a sterno, one of those little cans full of alcoholic fuel which constitutes a small stove in itself. We hung the teapot over the can of fire, and piled about it pieces of wood. The steam and smoke which the damp wood gave off drove the mosquitoes out of the open sided hut, and at intervals drove us out. The tea was so good that we decided to make a meal without waiting for the Imp, whose return in this storm was unlikely anyway. We consumed vast plates of hot beans and stewed apricots and endless cups of tea. By this time our clothes were about dry enough to sleep in, and it was dark. Spinden risked his life by tinkering with a damp quantity of carbide [178] and an involved carbide lamp, but at last he got a light fixed so that he could read in bed.

We started to undress when Spinden thought he heard the sound of an engine. Yes, despite the head wind and the lashing cold rain the Imp was coming! We ran down to the little log dock and probed the night with electric flashlights, to show them their way.

As usual the boat hit bottom twenty feet from the dock and her occupants had to wade ashore. Whiting was followed by Griscom. The bird man rushed up to me with rain sluicing off his familiar, disreputable sombrero. For all the dark of night and gloom of storm he had sensed the wild loveliness of this camp on the lake beneath the big zapote trees and he gripped my hands, exclaiming exultantly:

“Gad, man, this is the real thing—what?”

“Is it wild enough for you at last?”

Through the dark brown stubble he grinned his hobo grin:

“This’ll do, fellah. When do we eat?”

Having finished mooring the Imp, Ambrosio trailed us to the fire, a sack of grub over his right shoulder and a string of fish in his left hand. He cleaned them rapidly while Spinden and I offered Griscom and Whiting beans and apricots, and prepared to increase the menu with the bacon, rice, [179] flour, canned goods and rum Whiting had brought.

The fire now was a red roar, tingeing the black wet night as the wind lashed it out under the loo’ard eaves. When we four had eaten all we could hold Ambrosio began to cook his fish. They were deep silvery fish about ten inches long, looking like the scup of Cape Cod. After he had eaten six or seven the “Ambrosial Boy” smoked the rest. He then stretched out on the floor, and in spite of the nipping ants went quickly to sleep. The rest of us turned in, all slightly damp.

That was the coldest night yet. My two blankets were altogether inadequate. The one thing that could be said for that night was that the cold drove away the mosquitoes.

Before dawn we were all awake, stretching and grumbling. The first definite remark was made by Spinden:

“Two zones of life meet here,” quoth he, with the air of an oracle.

“Ants and ticks?” queried Whiting.

Griscom’s quick, unrestrained laugh bubbled from his chest while the tears rolled down his face.

“Well, I guess I’ll put on my trousers,” remarked the archæologist, when his own laughter had stopped.

“Don’t put on mine,” I warned.

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“You haven’t any,” he countered. At this the mirth became more raucous than ever. My only trousers at Muyil had been slashed and punctured from waist to knee by thorns and the sharp corners of stone buildings. For although limestone is soft it is hard enough to tear cloth, and whenever one is amid ruins one is always slipping on the loose stones which lie about and tearing something. The last button was gone, and a single, delicate safety pin held my lower garment up, and together. Originally white duck the trousers were now a rich brown with black mottlings gained from charred wood. When I sprang from my hammock to don the infamous pants I so shook the roof of my “hangar” that a cool gallon of rain water which it had collected in the night was deposited on Whiting’s face.

It was Griscom’s brilliant idea to hire Señora Castillo to cook for us. For the rest of our stay we ate in the largest of the four or five thatched shacks the chiclero had built on the low grassy bank over the creamy beach where we bathed at twilight and washed out our limited laundry lists. At every meal the malarial Indian who lived here and two or three others who came down from Chunpom with more chicle sat and watched us gravely, now and then breaking out in silly giggles at some mannerism [181] of ours which struck them as unusually grotesque. From hints which Castillo let fall we soon realized that he had sent word to Juan Vega in Chunpom that some gringos were here, and that they had a schooner at Boca de Paila which would take “General” Vega to Cozumel. There would have been no use grumbling about this even had we been so inclined. And realizing how rare an event is the arrival of a commodious boat at Boca de Paila, and well aware that both Castillo and Vega had it in their power to help our work greatly or to stop it altogether, we vowed that it would give us great pleasure to have the “General” as our guest.

Frequently our meals would be interrupted by the sight of game, a scaup duck swimming within a few yards of the east entrance to Castillo’s humble abode or a parrot in a clump of trees within a stone’s throw of the western door. Even if the bird was a woodpecker, too small to provide much substance, it yet offered the flavoring for the delicious gravy which Spinden was forever making with the help of our flour. Plain rice is one thing, and rice under hot brown gravy is another.

Griscom got no new birds at Muyil, but he collected a number of valuable ones including other specimens of his new rosy ant tanager and oriole.

I shot a cormorant in the lake one day and as it [182] flopped in the water its mate circled about, in such obvious mental distress that I stayed my trigger finger as I aimed at the second bird. Then, at the last moment, I pulled; and perhaps the devoted bird really preferred to share the fate of its companion. My desire to eat a cormorant once shot on Long Island Sound had been thwarted by the cook’s flat refusal to touch the ugly black bird, and I was determined to try the meat of one of this pair. But before I was aware of what had happened their bones had been picked by the Indians. Ambrosio, who took part in the feast, says that cormorant should be cooked with plenty of red pepper and garlic.

“The garlic keeps you from tasting the cormorant and the cormorant keeps you from tasting the garlic,” he explains.

The wind continued to blow from the north but the sky cleared and the weather warmed somewhat. It was neither temperature nor insects which ruined our third night in camp; it was mules. The pack animals of the chicle train stamped and snorted all through the hours of darkness. As our hut had no walls we could not keep them out of it. One of them nibbled at the mosquito netting which enveloped Griscom’s cot, and another sampled some loose pages of notes which Spinden left under a small [183] stick beside his bed. Whiting avers it was this animal which later suffered a violent attack of cramps.

Muyil is a paradise for insects, and were it not for the bugs the place would be a paradise for humans. Here there is not the usual scrubby growth of Yucatan, but tall noble trees, the real monte, or “mountain,” as natives call big bush. Each night a plump moon struck a silver trail across the lake and turned the beach to a ribbon of gold. At that lovely hour we could almost forget the horseflies which swarmed in the woods by day, and the mosquitoes, ticks and ants which nipped and stung and burned our bodies regardless of the movements of the planets. Anyway, we could avoid them in the lake, where we swam often, with no fear of attack from the depths.

Whiting, who is very dependent on his spectacles lost them off the Imp in six feet of water. Twenty-four hours later he rowed back, dove a few times, and found them!

They were somewhat scratched by the sand. Perhaps this was the reason he missed by half a mile the western end of the canal between the two lakes when he brought Griscom and me down to the schooner yesterday, that is Tuesday, February 2. Of course, the wind, which had blown from the north for four days, had to come out hard from the southeast, [184] dead ahead, just before daybreak. Even on the smaller lake the waves ran high enough to splash water over the tarpaulin with which Griscom protected his box full of precious bird skins. When we reached the further end of the canal we were hammered by waves so high and so sharp that the only way we could take them was bow on. This meant laying a course which took us some two miles south of the outlet river, but we had to do it.

The wind was blowing a young gale. Griscom and I were constantly engaged while crossing the lake in throwing out water which came over the gunwales as well as through the bottom in the usual way. Nevertheless we reached the lee of the eastern shore without drowning. To avoid the wind we poked along so close to the shore and out-running bars that we grounded several times. But at last we found the river, and said good-bye to the white temple from which some Maya priest kept watch over the canoes which brought up this stream the quetzal feathers for his rites, the plumage of the sacred bird from the highlands of Central America. At least, Griscom and I said good-bye to Vigia del Lago. Whiting was to maintain his ferry service one day more to bring out Spinden and the overdue General Vega. (Spinden was to make a last effort to find that building with pillars, which he had lost since [185] that first afternoon at Muyil. This gives an idea of how thick is the bush.)

Vigia del Lago (“The Watch on the Lake”). Note decoration over doors

As we passed the temple a big bird flew down the river.

“Shoot!” urged Griscom. I fumbled the wet gun, shot late, and missed.

“Too bad,” said the ornithologist, “that was a tiger bittern. I want one. You keep ready now and when I see something I want I’ll yell ‘shoot.’”

“Shoot,” he called a few minutes later, but I saw no mark. Half standing, he could see a low flying bird, invisible to me. At last it rose over a bush and I fired, at great range. To everybody’s surprise the bird fell.

Whiting stopped the engine, and held the Imp against the bank by a root. We found the bird, a fine big tiger bittern. It was merely wounded in the wing and was a splendid sight as it darted at us its six-inch lance of a beak backed by the power of a long sinewy neck with the tawny stripes which give the bird its name. Again I regretted that my moving picture camera was out of order. This had refused to function ever since we had reached Muyil, in other words, ever since I needed it most.

Griscom never kills a wounded bird by giving it a second shot, or by striking its head with a stick or with the barrel of his gun. Any of these common [186] devices of careless hunters would be apt to injure the plumage. Griscom’s method is to apply pressure on each side of the bird’s breast, above its heart. A small bird can be killed this way by the use of thumb and forefinger alone. But this tiger bittern was quite a problem. Its long beak was a really dangerous weapon. So I held its head while Griscom applied the fatal grip to its chest with both his hands. Even so perhaps three minutes had passed and he was nearly exhausted before the film of death overspread the savage yellow eye of the great winged fisherman.

Any hope that the wind was abating which we may have had under the shelter of the banks of the river was dispelled when we saw the great white-topped yellowish waves rolling across the shallow salt lagoon. The Imp took this buffeting bravely enough, but she had hardly gone ten times her own length from the end of the river when the little motor began to sputter and miss. The trouble was caused by spray falling on the spark plugs. These two outboard engines have given us hard faithful service, and since we have stopped feeding them kerosene and iron filings we have no trouble so long as we keep the spark plugs dry. On a wet day Gough will often take out the plugs and heat them before trying to start the motor. His favorite [187] method is to spill a little kerosene on the Albert’s deck and set fire to it, holding the spark plugs in the flame.

In New Orleans I bought rubber jackets to cover the plugs with, but we always seem to leave them behind in the schooner.

Whiting now put his rain coat on the end of an oar which I held over the motor, which continued to run fitfully—not giving the propeller one quarter of its full power. Our course did not lie directly into the wind. The result was that our bow was constantly being blown to starboard and we were continually shipping water over the port gunwale. Griscom, who was sitting forward and getting the full benefit of these douches, kept begging us to “head her up into it.” Pulling on an oar with my left hand I managed to hold her bow up a little, but we dared not run directly into the wind for that way lay a wide expanse of shallows. Griscom did not know this, and it was hard to explain it to him in the steady shout of the wind.

Gradually the spark plugs dried out under the rain coat and the little motor putted with more and more confidence. If all continued to go as well as this we would get across the wide lagoon ultimately. But when we reached the ocean would we find the schooner there? This was the question which worried [188] us. There was only one reason to suppose that Gough would remain on a lee shore in this blow, and that lay in the fact that it might be even more dangerous for him to attempt to cross the outer bar between the reefs than to stay where we had left him. We had hit that bar twice coming in, and with the surf which must be running there now the chances were that the schooner would be let down between waves hard enough to break her back.

But if she had left the anchorage, there would be nothing for us to do but camp on the beach until we had eaten our few crackers and drunk our bag of water. Then, if the schooner had not returned, we could avoid starvation by going back to Muyil.

It was a tense moment as we ran down the little inlet towards the sea. If the schooner had not moved we would see her masts any moment now over the sand bar to port.

“She’s gone, fellahs,” said Griscom, in the bow. There could no longer be any doubt about it. Where the Albert had been was only an expanse of heaving green and white.

I remembered the thrill I had in reading Treasure Island when Jim Hawkins found the Hispaniola had slipped her anchor. This was a thrill, too, but of a different kind.

We ran on down the lagoon, scanning the horizon [189] for a sail, half hoping our boat might be standing on and off beyond the reef, waiting to signal to us.

“Why, there she is!” exclaimed Whiting. And there she was, up the beach half a mile, much nearer shore than we had left her. Perilously near shore she looked, indeed. But the awning over the fore-deck suggested that all was well. They wouldn’t let her drag ashore without taking in that awning and putting sail on her.

Now that we had located the schooner the question was, could we reach her? The inner bar was a chaos of bursting water. I did not like its expression.

“What do you think, Whiting, can we make it?”

“It’s worse’n it was in my other crossings. But let’s run up and have a look at it. Better have the oars ready, these spark plugs are still damp.”

Before we knew it we were in the midst of high short rollers—we had not realized that such waves could carry past the bar.

“I don’t believe we can make it, hadn’t you better turn back?” I shouted at Whiting.

“Too late,” he yelled, “we’d capsize in these seas. And we might as well spill on the bar where it’s shallow as here where it’s deep.”

At that moment the engine stopped.

“Pull, for God’s sake, steady and hard,” yelled [190] Whiting, half standing in the stern and scanning the broken water ahead for a possible spot smoother than the rest.

Over my shoulder I had had a glimpse of great green curlers hammering into white smother on the bar and I did not think we had a chance of getting through. But as Whiting said, we might as well sink in shallow water as in deep.

“Pull on your port oar hard—HARD! There, steady now. I’ll steer, you watch your oars, don’t catch a crab. Save your strength till we’re in it, just pull carefully.”

“More on the starboard oar now. That’s it. Steady. Watch it now, here they come. Now Give Her All You’ve Got.”

A giant wave lifted our bow, seemed to throw us back ten feet. It was a miracle that the oars were not knocked from my hands. I cursed myself for not having inspected Gough’s oars before we sailed. These thick nine-foot ash sweeps were much too heavy and long to be pulled with only one hand to each of them. But I tried to concentrate on Whiting’s voice as it came blurred through the wind from where he crouched in the stern. I pulled till I was half blind.

“There, we’re through,” I vaguely heard Griscom say, but didn’t believe my ears.

[191]

“’Atta boy, we’re over,” Whiting was yelling it now, “take it easy I say, we’re over.”

Incredible, but true, we were over. The waves were no longer breaking. They were huger than ever but they were longer, far enough apart so that we could turn safely and run almost before the wind to the schooner.

Over my shoulder I saw McClurg aiming his little movie camera at us.

He laughed till he had to sit down from the weakness of it when we clambered aboard the schooner.

“Whiting’s not so bad,” he managed to say to me finally, “he’s been kept half civilized by his trips to the schooner. But you and Griscom, I’ve seen some beachcombers in my time but, man, you two win the celluloid binoculars.”

At that Griscom and I became rather jealous of each other, he claiming that he looked the bigger bum, and I upholding my own claims. So they lined us up on deck and had a “Biggest Bum Contest,” with McClurg, Whiting and Gough as self-appointed judges. By unanimous vote Griscom was declared the biggest bum on the schooner.

Griscom’s shirt was torn, his hunting coat and khaki breeches were stained with mud and the blood of his birds. My only garment was the infamous [192] trousers, now unfortunately lent a certain respectability by a belt I had found in the bottom of my duffle bag just before leaving Muyil. Even so, the trousers were disreputable enough, and had I been similarly clad above the waist I might have given the bird man a closer contest. But where I was naked the ocean had washed me clean. And cleanliness does not become a bum.

I said something to this effect, but McClurg cut me short:

“No, Mason,” said he, “no matter what you wore you wouldn’t have won. You’ve been in the bush a day longer than Griscom and your whiskers don’t compare with his. It’s his Weary-Willy stubble and that hobo grin of his which would always make him the bum of this ship. You might just as well shave and be comfortable.”

McClurg does not seem to have been bored by his week alone with the crew. He has shot several birds valuable to Griscom, and their skins were preserved for the American Museum of Natural History by the efforts of Gough and Belize John, who is quite an adept with the knife now. In Delirium Tremens McClurg has explored the maze of lagoons beyond the inner bar and he has proved the truth of what we had been told by fishermen about the long strip of land whose northern end is a mile [193] south of us now and whose southern end is Allen Point, on Ascension Bay. That is to say, McClurg has established the fact that this is an island, not a promontory as is indicated on U. S. Navy chart number 966. Part of the water which makes it an island is a mere narrow lagoon, hardly a foot deep in places, nevertheless it is an island and should be so drawn on future charts.

There have been other events to prevent ennui overpowering the men on the schooner. One night a lantern, hung too high in our cabin, set fire to the deck above it. And night before last Gough was awakened by the roar of the surf on the beach only fifty yards from his ear. The schooner had dragged her anchor.

There were several nasty seconds, vividly described to us by McClurg, before they got one engine going just in the nick of time. The wind was blowing so hard that all this motor could do was to hold the boat even. They hung there on the foaming brink of destruction for another five minutes before the engineers could start the second engine. It was still dark, and they dared not try to find the opening in the reef. Indeed they had seen so many coral heads by day that they dared not even look for their former anchorage. When they had hauled offshore two or three hundred yards they let go both [194] anchors, which luckily held. This is why we did not find the schooner where we had left her.

In the confusion of hauling off the beach someone upset a pail of spider crabs which Gough had caught for bait. Several of the barefooted sailors have been nipped by the vicious little creatures, and we have been warned to be on the lookout for them. Fleas are also aboard, for which McClurg blames the trip to Santa Cruz de Bravo, but admits the laundress at Vigia Chico may be responsible. With Spinden’s lizard still at large the schooner is no place for a nervous woman. As for the dead lizards, which Spinden pickled in formaldehyde, they had to be thrown overboard. The trouble was too little formaldehyde and too much lizard.

As I said before this is Wednesday, six days since we went up to Muyil. Whiting ran his ferry for the last time today and brought out Spinden and General Juan Vega, with a dark, silent retainer of that Potentate.

I have never seen a less military looking man who was called “General,” and I suspect the title is somewhat exaggerated—even according to Mexican standards. Yet there is no doubt that Vega is a power among the Indians, whether he is really second in command to General May as Castillo says or not.

[195]

Like most of the men on this coast he is thin. He has an ingratiating smile, an almost timid look, or it would be timid if there were not a certain self-confident slyness in it. He is not an Indian by birth but a Mexican who was kidnapped in boyhood by the Indians. He rose to be a leader of his abductors by virtue of his naked wits, so doubtless the sly look was well earned.

He confirms something that Castillo told us, namely, that there are ruins on the mainland north of Tulum at places called Paalmul and Xkaret. No ruins by these names are on archæological maps and we are eager to cast anchor and sail north. But the wind keeps us behind the reef tonight.

Only this morning Spinden found the building with pillars which he “lost” after his first glimpse of it. The queer thing was that Castillo did not seem to remember having shown it to Spinden that first afternoon, and even said that Spinden was dreaming. Is there something which makes Castillo regret his part as our guide about the ruins?

There may well be for Juan Vega imparts the interesting news that his Indians held a council of war when they heard that we were approaching Muyil. One party was for ejecting us at any cost before our presence had contaminated the shrines of “the Ancients.” But others, more accustomed to the [196] ways of white men through the educating influences of the chicle traffic, voted not to molest us so long as we treated the ruins with respect, destroyed nothing and carried nothing away. How glad I am that I followed Spinden’s advice not to carry off a few dusty shards I found in that subterranean temple!

Vega makes a great point of declaring that he was the leader of the faction which prevailed upon the belligerent Indians not to attack us. It is obvious that he considers this well worth his passage to Cozumel, which indeed it is, a hundred thousand times over.

For whatever may happen to the Expedition now it has attained its chief objective. Our contention that ruins unseen by scientists could be found within a few miles of the east coast of Yucatan has been proved sound. Whatever ruins we may find from now on will be so much to the good, so much velvet. There is no more excuse for lying awake nights wondering if the plan of the Expedition was not just a romantic dream.

Altogether we found twelve temples or ceremonial buildings at Muyil, and mounds too numerous to count where others had crumbled. In his excursions through the big bush Griscom found these traces of architectural decay over a wide circumference [197] about the narrow area where we worked. Muyil deserves much further study. If only the Mexican Government would permit us to come down another year and excavate, or would send its own men to do so!

As Spinden and I sit over his folding table in the schooner’s hold and study the plans of buildings we drew and the notes we made the significance of our discovery constantly grows. The ruins are important merely as evidence of the high skill in the painting and carving of stone possessed by the race which once flourished here. They are even more important because they contain two new features in Maya architecture, the use of tandem pillars and the stone cupola on the roof of El Castillo. But they are most important because of the testimony of much evidence, some direct and some indirect, that Muyil was once an important post on a great Maya trade route.

Spinden’s expedition to Colombia several years ago convinced him that the pearls and emeralds found in caches of Maya treasure reached Yucatan from the region of the present Colombia, that is, a part of South America as far distant from Yucatan as New York is from Chicago. It has also been established that the turquoise of the Mayas traveled an even greater distance than the pearls, for the turquoise came from what is now New Mexico.

[198]

Muyil’s buildings are in the style of a solid, commercial town. Muyil’s location is the location of a seaport, speaking from the point of view of shoal draft trading canoes. We believe that that river whose bends and snags Whiting now knows by heart and that canal connecting the two lakes east of the main group of ruins were once links in a great commercial system of waterways and land routes which existed 700 or 800 years before the building of the Lincoln Highway and the Panama Canal.

[199]

## CHAPTER IX
THE CITY OF THE DAWN

Diego Velasquez, Governor of Cuba, needed slaves to work the mines of that island. He commissioned Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba to go and get them from the islands called the Guanajos (now the Bay Islands of Honduras), which had been discovered by Columbus on his fourth and last voyage in 1502. (Roatan, the home of Captain Gough, is one of these islands.)

Hernandez de Cordoba sailed from Santiago de Cuba on February 8, 1517. The Spanish historian, Gomara, tells how he reached not his destination but

> “a country hitherto unknown and unseen by our people, where he found salt-pits, at a point which he named Las Mugeres (Women), because he there discovered stone towers and chapels, covered with wood and straw, in which were arranged in order several idols resembling women. The Spaniards were astonished, for the first time to see strong edifices, which had not as yet been discovered, and also [200] to perceive that the inhabitants were so richly and tastefully clothed. They wore shirts and cloaks of white and colored cotton, their head dress consisted of feathers, their ears were enriched with ear-drops and jewels of gold and silver. The women had their faces and breasts concealed. Hernandez did not stop there, but ... a little further on they (the Spaniards) found other men, of whom they inquired the name of the large town close by. They answered, ‘Tectatan, Tectatan,’ which means ‘I do not understand’; from this the Spaniards thought that this was the name of the town, and, corrupting the word have ever since called it ‘Yucatan.’”

Not the town only, whose identity has long been lost, but that whole land has ever since been called Yucatan. And, it is worth remembering that for some time after Cordoba’s cruise the Spaniards thought of Yucatan as an island, around which they hoped to find a passage to the rich Indies they were always seeking.

Lust for gold was the motive which led to all the Spanish discoveries. The dissemination of Christianity was always a later and secondary interest.

The earrings and other trinkets which Cordoba saw encouraged the avaricious hopes of the Spaniards. A year later Juan de Grijalva sailed his four ships from Cuba to Cozumel Island, off the east coast of Yucatan. How the imagination strains to conjure [201] up a picture of these first meetings between the mechanical, warlike civilization of Europe and the religious and artistic culture of ancient America!

To modern eyes such vessels as Grijalva had would seem absurdly high for their length and dangerously clumsy. No wonder the current which races northward between Cozumel and the mainland hampered navigation in such unwieldy craft!

Grijalva managed at last to reach the south end of the island, where he anchored. Landing, he fell on his knees and thanked God for giving this island to Spain. He then performed the usual solemn annexation ceremonies, while the Indians looked on in amazement. Not realizing that he was being robbed of his homeland the Indian Cacique presented Grijalva with a jar of honey. The natives crowded around the Europeans, respectfully touching their bright weapons, and marveling at their thick beards.

The Spaniards were afraid to eat the food which the Indians gave them, whereupon the generous natives produced cotton shirts and jewels. Cotton, one of the New World’s most valuable gifts to the Old, was apparently unappreciated at first. And had the Europeans realized that these jewels had been brought in Maya trading canoes from richer lands to the south and north they might have left [202] this country in peace a few years longer. As it was they blustered along the coast, “impressed,” as Prescott says, “with the evidences of a higher civilization, especially in the architecture,” and yet arrogantly breaking the native idols or pitching them into the sea until the whole country rose against the intruders. As American Indians went, the Mayas seem to have been a rather peaceful people. But no nation with any self-respect would long tolerate this sort of bullying.

It was largely because Europe had gone ahead of America in mechanics that the Spaniards were able to win the bloody struggle which followed. Scientists believe that the Mayas had scarcely any metal tools. They had no beasts of burden, and the limestone blocks of “the very large houses, well built of stone and plaster,” which the sailing master of Grijalva reported, had been cut with stone tools and put in place by man-power alone. It was because this power was almost unlimited and directed by intelligent rulers under a sort of feudal system that the Mayas had been able to build the great white cities which astounded the Spaniards.

But the Indians had nothing so deadly in battle as the guns of the Europeans. The bullets from these pierced the tortoise-shell shields of the natives, while the flint-headed arrows and spears of the Indians [203] were turned by the steel mail of the Castillians.

Victory breeds in the victor contempt for the vanquished. Years passed after the first conquest before Europeans began to realize that the already crumbling civilization which had been given its death blow by the soldiers of Spain had possessed certain cultural achievements which put the savants of Europe to the blush, such as the intricate and accurate calendar which the Maya priests had made by long vigils in which the naked eye had no mechanical aids.

Before the Conquest had been begun, however, on May 7, 1518, to be exact, the four ships of Juan de Grijalva sailed to the mainland opposite Cozumel Island and turned southward exploring the coast. Juan Diaz, their sailing master, described their passing

> “three large towns separated from each other by about 2 miles. There were many houses of stone, very tall towers, and buildings covered with straw.... We followed the shore day and night, and the next day towards sunset we perceived a city or town so large, that Seville would not have seemed more considerable nor better; one saw there a very large tower; on the shore was a great throng of Indians, who bore two standards which they raised and lowered to signal us to approach them; the commander did not wish it. The same day we came to a [204] beach near which was the highest tower we had seen and one discerned a very considerable town; the country was watered by many rivers; we discovered a bay so large that a fleet might enter. It was lined with wooden buildings set up by fishermen.”

The day the Spaniards reached this bay was May 13, which happened to be Ascension Day that year. So the bay was named Ascension Bay. The Spaniards were mistaken about the “many rivers.” They may have sent a small boat far enough in to see the stream leading to Muyil, but that is the only river we have seen along this coast. No doubt many of the salt lagoons and sluggish backwaters of bays were mistaken by the discoverers for rivers.

Modern archæologists are inclined to agree that the city compared to Seville was probably what is now the conspicuous group of ruins called Tulum (or Tuloom or Tuluum, according to various archæologists. The second spelling most accurately indicates the pronunciation to an American, but I have accepted the first, for reasons which I need not go into here). What of the “three large towns separated from each other by about 2 miles”? Were any of them Xkaret, Paalmul, Chakalal or Acomal, where Indians report to us ruins still standing which have not been visited by archæologists?

[205]

There must be something left of these “large towns” we told each other, as our schooner retraced the course of Grijalva’s caravels and approached Tulum from the south.

I was in the hold reading John Lloyd Stephens’ account of the Castillo at Tulum:

> “It rises on the brink of a high, broken, precipitous cliff, commanding a magnificent ocean view, and a picturesque line of coast, being itself visible from a great distance at sea.”

“Come up,” called Griscom, “we can see Tulum.”

We were only an hour and a half out of Boca de Paila, and I hardly believed him. Much as I have read about the conspicuous location of these ruins I did not realize how the square high center of the Castillo, that “very large tower” of Juan Diaz, stands out as a mark to distant ships. We must have been ten or twelve miles from it at this time, but could see it plainly with the naked eye.

The gentle north wind which brought a bright day and high visibility also produced a calm sea under the cliff which made landing easy for us. Morley and Lothrop told us that we should have to jump overboard a few feet from shore and be “spewed up to the beach by the sea,” as was their experience. But this day was made to order. Our two boats [206] were able to land on a thin strip of white beach just south of the Castillo. From here a steep gulley ran to the top of the forty-foot limestone cliff, which in many other places is impossible to climb.

Most of the eastern coast of Yucatan is a low, monotonous sandy shelf covered with scrub palms. Tulum is placed on the highest piece of land between Cape Catoche and Chetumal Bay. For location few cities, ancient or modern, can surpass it. The name means “Fortress.” The ancient name Zama means “City of the Dawn.” Both appellations are fitting, although perhaps the present one is the best. This old Maya metropolis does not face the dawn, but turns her back on the east. The builders deliberately chose to face away from the finest ocean view on the whole coast. It was probably for purposes of defense that they made the back of the two wings and the central tower of the Castillo of solid masonry and placed all their doors on the other side facing an extensive ceremonial plaza crowded with buildings of religious purpose. For the same reason they built a wall fifteen to twenty feet high and almost as thick about the three sides of the city not protected by the jagged and pitted limestone cliff.

The chief temple of Tulum turns its back on the finest view on the whole coast of Yucatan to face a ceremonial plaza

In the archives of Spanish history no one has found any account of the subjugation of Tulum, although [207] the conquest swept down this whole coast. After the account of Diaz the world heard nothing of “the City of the Dawn” until 1840 when one Juan Pio Perez mentioned it as having been seen by a traveler named Galvez. The place was first given something like the reputation it deserves by the writings of Stephens and the drawings of his companion Catherwood, made in 1842. Then the Indian wars of 1848-50 plunged Tulum back into its former isolation. In 1895 the Allison V. Armour Expedition was prevented from landing by fear of the hostile Indians but the yacht of that party approached close enough for Mr. W. H. Holmes to make two excellent sketches. Danger from the same source obliged Messrs. Howe and Parmelee to leave after a two-day visit in 1911. Morley and Nusbaum made a daring visit in a tiny dory in 1913 and after being “spewed onto the beach” in the usual manner spent a few hours in a vain search for fragments of a stela found by Stephens and buried in the sand by Howe and Parmelee for safekeeping. In 1916 Morley and Gann managed to find some of these fragments and re-buried them. In 1918 Morley, Gann and John Held, Jr., recovered these pieces of stone and found some additional pieces of the original stela.

If these stones could speak what a story could they tell! Indeed, a very readable romance might [208] be woven about their history since Stephens found them, the bare bones of which I have given above. The date on this stela is unquestionably an early one and the reading of it has been the subject of a very pretty archæological controversy. Stephens lived before any of the glyphs had been deciphered. Howe read the date on the front of the stone as corresponding to 304 A.D. of the Christian count. Gann and Morley read this date as 305 A.D., but they decided it referred to some event previous to the erection of the monument. They were influenced to this decision, explains Gann, by the fact that “we know from a number of historical sources that Tuluum and Chichen Itza were not founded till towards the end of the sixth century of our era by Maya from Bacalal (Bacalar), led by their Priest-Chief Itzamna.” The contemporaneous date of the stela Gann and Morley place at 699 A.D.

Lothrop, who studied Tulum for the Carnegie Institution and who is now attached to the Museum of the American Indian in New York, thinks that Morley and Gann are wrong, both in their reading of the date and in their interpretation of Maya history. He says,

> “The most probable date ... is 442 A.D. (Professor H. M. Tozzer and Dr. H. J. Spinden agree [209] with the writer on this point). This is given additional weight because it so closely accords with the traditional date of the colonization of the east coast as recorded in the books of Chilam Balam.”

The Books of Chilam Balam are records dating from after the Spanish Conquest written by natives in the Maya tongue but in Spanish characters.

This archæological debate is especially interesting because it concerns the age of Tulum. I must say that Lothrop’s argument—which I have barely sketched—seems convincing to me and that Gann seems to display unwarranted assurance when he says he “knows” that Tulum was not founded until “towards the end of the sixth century.” Quien sabe?

Sickness and rum have decimated the Indians who repelled previous expeditions to the Seville of the Caribbean. Yet the last survivors of the tribe which may virtually disappear within a few decades still watch the secret shrines of their forefathers, and still worship there. On entering the Castillo we found the ashes of recently burned copal (gum incense). And we had hardly made this discovery when we saw an Indian running down a path toward us. He was a wizened little fellow, and there was a sort of unearthly obscenity in the grin with [210] which he eyed us. Indeed he might have been a messenger of one of the lesser demons of the old religion. He said little, and that we could not understand, but it was obvious that he was watching to see that we committed no acts of vandalism.

A few minutes later appeared two more Indians, a dirty young man and a dried up ancient with a flowered blouse such as an American woman might wear, and a great gold earring in his left ear. We saw similar decorations in the ears of the priests at Santa Cruz de Bravo. The old man was “General” Paulino Kamaal, chief of the Tulum Indians, a branch of the people governed by General May. The youth was his son, the heir apparent to the Tulum throne. They lived in thatched huts some distance from the ruins.

They invited themselves to lunch with us on the schooner. When we boarded the ship there was a dramatic meeting between this old rogue, Kamaal, and Juan Vega. For a few minutes the air was thick with Maya ejaculations. At length Kamaal and Vega accepted our rum and cigarets and Vega explained the meaning of the pow-wow. It seems that thirty-five years ago a boat containing Vega, his father, and several other Mexicans reached Tulum from Cozumel. It was attacked by the Indians, who killed everyone in the boat but Vega, [211] then a small boy. He was adopted as I have already related. But what interested us and Vega is that he recognized Kamaal as a member of the party which had killed his father. The old Tulum chief admitted his part in the massacre without the slightest embarrassment, indeed with obvious pride. His manner was of one who might be saying, “Yes, I remember how I walloped you at tennis thirty-five years ago.”

The ear-ringed chief of the Tulum Indians, “General” Paulino Caamal. His son (at left) coveted Whiting’s spectacles

McClurg does not seem to appreciate the importance of cultivating the good-will of these local jefes, rascals and cut-throats as many of them doubtless are. His frank disgust each time we bring a tatterdemalion “General” aboard is amusing to watch. I was afraid there might be trouble when he ignored the dirty hand which old Kamaal insisted on offering him, but the tactful Gough pushed a plate of beans into the old Indian’s paw and a delicate situation was averted.

Kamaal’s eyes glow like old embers. When he had finished his meal he thanked us briefly, but warmly. Then he rattled off a string of gutturals with a mischievous side glance at Vega.

“What did he say?” I asked that genial fellow.

“He says that thirty or even fifteen years ago you could not have landed here. You would have been surrounded by his people, all strong young warriors. [212] He says those good days have gone, but he is glad to meet you, even under these conditions.”

I started one of the Johnsons and took ashore the “heir apparent” and his father, looking like an old woman with his flowered shirt, his great earring, and his wide straw hat pulled down to his shrewd, vital eyes. Before they took the trail north toward the ruins of Tancah they asked in the sign language for more cigarets. I gave them the only package in my pocket, and a small bottle of Woolworth perfume. This last gift delighted the old man. He directed his son to empty at my feet a cloth sling containing about a dozen oranges.

Someone aboard the schooner had told this potentate that we should be returning to Tulum in about ten days. As we parted he mustered his only Spanish, or the only Spanish he had uttered to us:

“Diez dias—con licor.”

By the way he rubbed his stomach I took this to be the expression of a gentle command that we should return in ten days, with plenty of rum.

Tulum has perhaps more wall paintings than any Maya city known. After lunch Spinden was copying some of these in the Temple of the Frescoes and I was admiring the outline of that small but lovely building when two young Mexicans approached. One was José Sauri, Agent of the Department of [213] Anthropology of the Mexican Ministry of Public Education. By order of the Government he had come here from Cozumel to meet us, and to see that we committed no injury upon the ruins.

Sauri asked us to take him and his father’s sloop back to Cozumel. So now we are towing the sloop, steered by an old sailor friend of Sauri’s who does not seem to mind the gaseous fumes which pour upon his grizzled head from the Albert’s twin exhausts. And Sauri sits in our midst with our other two “deck passengers,” Juan Vega and his silent, moustached retainer.

This has been a day to remember. Tulum is one of the wonders of the world. It has not quite the varied splendor, the architectural richness of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, the two best known ruined cities in Yucatan. But frowning from its desolate and formidable cliff it leaves an impression of stern majesty which those riper centers of the Maya Renaissance could never have produced, even in their prime. No Maya building has ever moved me so much as that little Temple of the Frescoes, with the four columns of its main entrance and the flaring concave sides of its second story—those leaping lines of a Peking roof. Spinden laughs at me and says it is something of a hodge-podge. He is right. But although it suggests Greek architecture below and [214] Chinese above it remains for me a piece of sheer beauty in white stone.

With night has come a stiff east wind. I am wearing flannel under a waterproof shirt. But Vega, beside me, seems comfortable in his thin pyjamas. He is an interesting character, a mixture of business man, mountebank, diplomat and seer. He is telling me about the social usages and customs among the people he rules, trying to get my opinion of them without giving me his. He is especially concerned with marital infidelity and divorce, but for the life of me I cannot learn his own convictions on these subjects. Which is partly due to my ignorance of Spanish. Yet I can sense that he is constantly retreating behind jokes and light persiflage, watching me like a hawk all the while.

Gough is keeping a sharp lookout for one of the lighthouses on Cozumel. Whiting comes forward and remarks to me that when he was aloft just before dark he found Spinden’s lizard on the port main shroud, close to the cross trees.

“I’d have shot it, but I was afraid of cutting the shroud.”

Vega suggests putting a man on watch at the foot of the shroud to catch the creature if it comes down.

McClurg comes forward and says that at last he has discovered the schooner’s compass. It is hidden [215] away in the engine room, and apparently is never consulted by the skipper of this good mud boat.

Tulum’s Temple of the Frescoes contains some of the finest paintings in the whole Maya area

That worthy now sights the light of San Miguel, chief port of Cozumel, a town of some 1500 people, and our destination tonight.

Although we are under the lee of the island the wind is rising, and the boat is rocking heavily. Spinden seeks his cot in the hold with a groan. The cold has already driven everyone else below but Vega, the Captain, the helmsman and me.

Now several lights are visible at each side of the high lamp which warns mariners of the proximity of San Miguel.

For the ninth or tenth time Vega remarks:

“Among my people we punish infidelity by beating the woman on the neck and the man on the buttocks. Do you approve of that?”

For the ninth or tenth time I reply laboriously that the distinction indicates an interesting sense of chivalry but that both punishments seem commendable to an Anglo-Saxon sociologist. Why not try them in New York?

“Ah, but your men don’t have to have a woman to cook for them. You can get a divorce and eat in a restaurant. You are lucky.”

The Albert slides between the dim white shapes of chicle schooners. Someone on the largest throws [216] a beam on us from an electric flashlight. Now, for a little while we shall be in comparative civilization. Tomorrow we can send off radios. And perhaps we can buy phonograph needles, which we forgot to get in Belize.

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## 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 [218] 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.”

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“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?”

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“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.”

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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.

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“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, [223] 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.

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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 [225] 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.

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 [226] 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 [227] 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. [228] 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.

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

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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 [230] 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 [231] 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 [232] 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 [233] 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 [234] 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 [235] 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 [236] 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 [237] 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!

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 [238] 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.

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 [239] 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 [240] 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.

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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.

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 [242] 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 [243] 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.

[244]

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!”

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## CHAPTER XI
SECRET SHRINES BY LOST LAGOONS

Of course I picked the coldest night we have yet had to sleep on deck.

The swinging berth is too narrow to turn over in without a process which requires as much care as the insertion of the last sardine in a can. This means that I must wake up each time I turn over. Furthermore the kapok mattress is so thin that I feel the board through it, and it is so short that I lop over each end of it. On his ample pneumatic mattress McClurg sleeps like a tired babe, while I turn and twist, bumping my head on the deck timbers above and chafing my nose against the supporting chain.

To aggravate the usual difficulties of sleeping last night my head was full of visions of Camera’s promised temples of Tabi. And my body burned with the bites of ticks.

People react differently to insects. I know a man who pursues a wintry climate all the year around because a mosquito is as poisonous to him as a viper. But the consensus of opinion among men of normal [246] zoölogical reactions and wide experience among bugs is that the mosquito and the flea are charming epidermal tenants by comparison with the Yucatan tick, and his small cousin, the red-bug.

It is not so much that the tick imbeds his head and the red-bug most of his person in your hide, if you let him. For you do not let him. A careful coöperative tick inspection at least three times a day will prevent such burrowing, and this rite is scrupulously observed in every well ordered expedition. But inspect as often as you like and the tick still finds opportunities to bite you. Apparently even when given the freedom of the premises the average tick like the cautious oil operator will sample the surface in a dozen places before spudding in. And each one of the spots thus tentatively punctured is good for a week or ten days of itching and burning.

Men have different religions and different tick lotions. Pity one who has found no comfort in the orthodox varieties of either! The way to avoid dying is to avoid being born. The way to avoid tick bites is to stay out of tick country.

High boots with trousers tucked well into them are frequently recommended to novices. But beware, this device merely drives the tick upward to the more vital regions. And the tick has not yet been [247] born who cannot get in over belt, collar band or through button holes. And of course, if you want him in your ears....

No, the natives who go barefoot have the least trouble. Inspection of bare ankles is easier than inspection of muffled waist line. And after a while the ankle becomes protected by a layer of flesh corrugated and mostly numb.

Cures for the itching are as difficult to find as preventatives of the biting. The ten per cent sugar of lead in pure glycerine recommended to me by George Laird, of the Chicle Development Company, is the best palliative of the pain I have ever found in a bottle. The best one of all, though, is an application of ice. A portable pocket ice plant would make the inventor’s fortune.

Lacking ice the sufferer may immerse himself in the coolest water available. But we can do that only by risking mandibles which might end the suffering by ending the sufferer. Yet when one has twenty or thirty raw red tick bites nicely bunched one is sometimes tempted to invite a barracuda to tear out that whole offending section of one’s anatomy.

Seeking relief in coolness I went on deck about one o’clock.

But the cure was not much better than the disease. [248] Soon my teeth were chattering and for every tick bite I had a hundred goose pimples.

The next three hours were an alternation of tortures. Either I was dangerously chilly, or comfortably warm and tortured by tick bites. For the moment one’s skin reaches a normal warmth the bites burn with a heavy agony like flesh that is roasting.

At last, with exhaustion, came sleep. But after an hour of that I was aroused by the touch of cold rain. I pulled over me a pup tent which serves me as a waterproof blanket, and I tucked its edges under the mattress on the deck in order to keep my foundation dry.

Confident that I was safe from the elements I dozed off, only to awake again with a sensation of unpleasant dampness beneath me. Water had come up through the mattress, which was now a saturated sponge.

The night was thinning anyway, so reluctantly I stood erect. The resultant noise was like an elephant wrecking a tent under a waterfall. It reminded me of the tumult of a Chautauqua tent which once fell on me in the middle of a cloudburst. Several quarts of water which had collected in the valleys of the collapsed pup tent sloshed to the deck in cascades.

Back view of round Paalmul “observatory.” Priests were the astronomers of the Mayas, who saw no conflict between religion and science

[249]

As the ultimate frustration of the struggles of that agonizing night this was somehow immensely and overwhelmingly funny. Griscom, who had patiently borne my night-long efforts to achieve quiet repose, laughed and laughed till the tears rolled down his face and the whole schooner was awake.

After a long morning of photographing and measuring twelve buildings at Paalmul we persuaded Anaclito Oc to ship with us for the four mile run to Chakalal.

There is greediness behind the haste with which we dash from one group of ruins to another. We are not forgetting that several previous expeditions were prevented by the weather from discovering the buildings which we are studying. Always in our minds is the rumor that Gann is coming down this way in a schooner. We are like men in a gold rush, trying to stake out as many claims as possible before all work is stopped by the blizzards of Alaskan winter.

After the wind had driven us from Xkaret by shifting to the east it obligingly backed into the north again and has held there. Of course the scope of our expedition is purely explorative, anyway, but we are hurrying down this particular segment of coast faster than we should were not our work dependent on the continuance of an offshore wind. [250] Once we have “staked our claims,” that is, discovered as many new sites as possible, we can return for more intensive study. If weather does not permit returning by sea we may revisit these places by land another season. Now that the profits of chicle gathering are bringing the Indians to a peaceful frame of mind towards foreigners it will be quite feasible to leave the railhead at Valladolid in the State of Yucatan and strike through the bush to this coast.

A beach inhabited by a species of sea snail which provided our soup for two days marked the spot to land at Chakalal. Oc had worked here three or four years previously with a gang of chicleros. He thought he could find a trail they had cut, passing a Maya temple. He plunged into the bush to look for it, leaving Spinden and me on the beach. In half an hour he emerged, unsuccessful. He went in again, and after nearly an hour we heard his whoops, half muffled by the thick brush. He burst out of the jungle at almost the very spot where he had first sought the trail. There it was, said he, but so overgrown that Spinden and I had no evidence of it but Oc’s word.

There was less than an hour of daylight left when we forsook the bright beach for the dull bush. We advanced in single file, all hacking at trees in mid [251] stride to mark the route back. The sun had set when we reached the temple, something over a mile from the beach, we judged. We lingered hardly a second, merely snatching sprigs of vanilla, with which the temple was covered. Before we had gone a third of the way back the woods were dark, and a night monkey was howling. But our blazes gleamed faintly on chaca and zapote trees, and the guide had the trail instinct of a homeward bound mule.

In the morning we returned to it, found another temple within a quarter of a mile of it and a mound where a third building had dissolved close beside the first. The frequency with which one finds mounds with hardly a stone standing beside buildings almost intact is partly due to a varying solidity of construction, perhaps, but it is chiefly the result of a difference in age. Some sites were occupied continuously for several hundreds of years during which new structures were springing up more or less continually. Others, like Chichen Itza, were abandoned only to be re-occupied.

These two buildings, overshadowed by some of the largest trees we have yet encountered in this land of scrubby vegetation, are very good representatives of a type of structure peculiar to East Coast architecture. These are single-room temples, rather small, yet too large to be given the technical term [252]“shrine,” which archæologists are coming to restrict to the small sanctuaries like the one at Chenchomac—over which larger buildings are often erected, as already explained. Like most Maya buildings and practically all of the East Coast temples these are raised on a substructure of stone and earth. Sometimes, as in the case of the temples of Tikal, this substructure is over a hundred feet high. With the smaller east coast temple like these two I am discussing it is a mere platform or terrace from one to three feet above the ground. One might suppose it was a desire to break the monotonous flatness of Yucatan’s scenery which led the Mayas to adopt this custom of raising their buildings, but even in the hills of Guatemala they did it. Perhaps a desire to escape the waters of the rainy season had something to do with it.

The walls of these temples, like others of their type, are about two feet thick. The lintel over the door is set in, and nearly always has traces of paint. Against the back wall, facing the door, is an altar made of mortar, raised a foot or two above the floor and three or four feet square. Buildings of this type often have flat roofs, in which the stucco is partly supported by beams of the zapote tree, so enduring that we have found many of them still sound. In other cases these buildings have the vaulted ceilings [253] characteristic of most buildings of pure Maya architecture. A flat roof is always suggestive of the influence of the Toltecs who overran Yucatan in the thirteenth century.

This building on the harbor of Chakalal contains murals of a style never found before in East-Coast art. A subterranean river of fresh water enters the salt lagoon at each side of the temple

Two cornices, at least, break the surfaces of exterior walls, but sometimes there are three or even four projecting ridges of stone. Needless to say the material of all Maya buildings is the limestone which forms the foundation of the whole peninsula, which is very young, geologically speaking. The Indians burned this stone to get lime, crushed it to make a rubble for the cores of walls, etc., and cut it to make solid building blocks.

In one of these temples we found an incense burner, of a sandy sort of ware. Maya pottery was shaped by hand generally, although sometimes a block turned by the foot was held under the utensil during formation.

In a similar temple on a half hidden lagoon north of our anchorage we found much greater treasure. Gough came upon this temple while looking for fish. They swarm over the bright sandy floor of the bay, especially fish about two feet long of a luscious dark blue. This little bay is perhaps four hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide, except at its narrow entrance, for it is shaped like a sack or an oriole’s nest. On the north side there is an offsetting, [254] smaller bay where we saw an empty turtle crawl, that is a pen of stakes driven into the bottom through shallow water. Here the sea tortoises are kept until the fishermen are ready to kill them for their shell or meat.

The temple—which has conical stone decorations about a foot high on its roof, stands at the very head of the lagoon, which terminates in an abrupt wall of jagged limestone. From under this wall or cliff come bubbling out two subterranean rivers of fresh water. One of them runs on the surface a few yards through a small chasm in the rock before it reaches the lagoon, but the mouth of the other under the rock can be detected only by the sight of the fresh water boiling up through the salt. McClurg cast back through the bush looking for further outcroppings of these rivers but could find none. It is the nature of limestone to break into pockets and hidden chasms and Yucatan is full of subterranean ponds, rivers and even lakes. Many of them were used by the old Mayas for their supply of drinking water, and some are reached through tortuous, descending caves.

Spinden entered the temple first and I knew he had found something good by his grunt of satisfaction. The treasure was nothing less than several wall paintings. We have already found many [255] traces of this sort of decoration, but these murals in the little temple on this lost lagoon which once was doubtless crowded with great canoes are very well preserved. There is a jaguar and a feathered serpent in two shades of green, and several imprints of the curious red hand.

More than anything we have found these paintings gave me a creepy feeling of the nearness of the ancient builders, as if in a dark corner of this temple I had glimpsed a be-feathered priest at his occult rites. The sight of these beast divinities, which the Mayas endowed with half human attributes, seemed to increase the poignancy of the riddle which has baffled investigation. If only these walls could speak!

The Mayas, like the Greeks, made much use of color, sometimes a whole building being painted one tint. Mural paintings are not uncommon, and from them alone has been learned much of what we know about the old astronomers. The red hand, a very common symbol, has been something of a puzzle. The suggestion has been made that it signifies strength, power and mastery, and that it is the sign of some secret brotherhood. There is reason to believe that some of the impressions of this sign were put in Maya buildings after the conquest, in short, that here is a tangible piece of the old ritual [256] remembered by degenerate descendants of great ancestors.

Sometimes the impression was made by placing the human hand against a surface and painting around it and between the fingers. In other cases the red paint was daubed over the hand of the artist and that slapped against a wall.

Jaguars were favorite subjects of Maya artists, and the Rain Gods of the Four Quarters were given the forms of jaguars in Maya religion. The Gods of the Mayas were many and included planets and forces of nature as well as animals endowed with human or superhuman intelligence. In addition there seems to have been a belief in a formless supreme being. Of the gods commonly portrayed in painting and sculpture the jaguar was second in importance only to the plumed serpent, Kukulcan. This serpent of ours has no plume but he does have a bird’s foot with open claws at the extremity of a sort of dragon’s leg attached to his body. This foot is held angrily below his gaping jaws, which would not be recognized as a snake’s jaws by a person unfamiliar with Maya art, which followed a course of conventionalization that took it to the opposite pole of such realistic portrayal as is now all the rage in the literature of the United States.

Wall paintings, which were in two shades of green, found in a temple at Chakalal. Above, a sacred jaguar; below a sacred serpent, probably Kukulcan, the feathered snake. Instead of feathers this one has a bird’s foot held below the open jaws, which would be recognized as jaws only by a person familiar with Maya art in its conventionalized forms.

The most important feature of these paintings is [257] that they are in a style quite different from anything heretofore found in old Maya settlements along the Caribbean Sea. They do not at all resemble the wall paintings at Tulum, or at Santa Rita, in British Honduras. The nearest things to them in artistic treatment are certain representations found in the Tro-Cortesianus Codex, one of the three old Maya books which fortune preserved from the destructive bigotry of the Spaniards. This Codex is assigned by authorities to northern Yucatan, and to a date not later than the beginning of the 13th century. There is no evidence of Nahua or Toltec influence in the Tro-Cortesianus Codex, an influence we are growing tired of observing, for we have found it in many of the buildings along this coast. Toltec art is inferior to Maya art, and the explorer is always pleased to find remnants of the pure Maya culture.

There are many signs that this temple is being used by modern Indians. A trail debouches near it. A fresh beam with the bark still moist had been put across the western end of the temple to hold up the sagging walls. There were palmetto leaves on the floor where someone had made a bed, and there were fresh ashes before the altar. On this was the dried skin of a rattlesnake, and another lay nearby. Gough suggested that these had been put here by natives as part of modern rites to the sacred [258] serpent. We take little stock in this suggestion, for snakes which are about to shed their skins like the darkness of temples, and use the rough stones as an aid in the process of undressing. It is interesting that although we have found several snake skins before these we have not yet seen a live ophidian. We are quite content to have it this way.

There is certainly a dramatic fitness in the sight of these skins lying beneath the painted Serpent God. Did these rattlesnakes recognize their mythological ancestor? What a part the serpent has played in the imaginations of primitive man!

As Spinden says, “The unique character of Maya art comes from the treatment of the serpent. Indeed, the trail of the serpent is over all the civilizations of Central America and southern Mexico.”

Similarities in conventionalized art are more significant than those in realistic art, so the advocates of the theory that the Mayas are descended from the Egyptians make much of the fact that the conventionalized feathered serpents of Yucatan are matched by winged serpents found in the Egyptian pantheon.

However, the sinuous serpent body lent itself readily to artistic representation the world over. It is only natural that under similar circumstances human minds should react similarly, whether in [259] Burma or in Guatemala. Old World artists never thought of the serpent in the spiritual terms of the Maya. They never put human heads and hands in the mouths of their sculptured snakes.

The itch to find as much as possible before a shift in wind should cover the coast with surf and make landings dangerous or impossible drove us from Chakalal at sunrise. Forty-five minutes later our thermometer registered sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Brrrr, that is cold.

Anaclito Oc had already been sent back to Paalmul in the Imp, with a reward for his services big enough to raise the price of all ruins to us if other natives hear of it.

After a four-mile run before the boisterous wind which enabled us to save fuel we sighted another of the characteristic outpost temples. Spinden says they remind him of signposts marked, “Here Is A City.”

We went ashore to investigate. In the rear of the flat-roofed building was an altar, with traces of recently burned copal incense. Leaning against the back wall of the building, their bases in these ashes, were two small crosses of planed wood. While Spinden was measuring the building I took these crosses outside and photographed them. I had just [260] finished when I saw an Indian coming along the beach of the lagoon behind the small promontory on which this temple stands. I dashed inside and restored the crosses to their places on the altar.

Again and again we have reached a ruin only to have an Indian appear as if by magic and keep a close eye on us until we had finished our work. It is becoming very evident that the Indians regard these temples of Los Antiguos with a certain reverence and that to a large extent they still resent foreign intrusion. This is very significant. Bear in mind that science has never been sure of the relation between modern natives and those who built the tall cities of white limestone.

That the Indians still use the old temples for worship there can be no doubt. But it is quite another thing to say that they have definite traditions of the great past which they could give up if they would. Alas, it is all too possible that the very natives who mix the symbols of Roman Catholicism and the ancient religion of Mayapan understand the true significance of neither cross nor copal.

The laborers who built the stone temples probably lived in huts like these of the modern Indians of Acomal

Gough and Whiting, who were on the beach, engaged this Indian in conversation till we descended from the steep promontory. He said he was General José Puk (pronounced Pook), Chief of the Indians of Acomal. It was his people who had told the Morley-Lothrop [261] party of ruins near their village. The locality of this temple where we found the crosses is called Ak, said the General, which means Turtle. It has a good canoe harbor and is a sort of suburb of the ruined town of Acomal. The General said the best way to reach those ruins was to go down the coast two miles to the modern village of Acomal and then strike inland. So he came aboard with us.

At the sight of another Indian General boarding the schooner McClurg threw up his hands. Puk is indeed a picturesque hombre. At this moment he was wearing an English cloth cap with the visor turned backwards, a red neckerchief and a green flannel shirt. From lanyards over his shoulders which crossed on his chest were suspended a catskin pouch and a machete. With the exception of the sandals on his feet he wore nothing below the waist except a pair of B. V. D. drawers. He has sideburns and moustache, but they are so sparse that they don’t show unless they catch the light just right. With aquiline nose, strong chin and fine, frank, manly expression he is altogether the most attractive Indian we have yet met. When we reached his village he changed his cap to a six gallon felt hat with a picture of a houri on a beer tag stuck in the band.

We presented his children with dolls, rubber balls [262] and jack-knives, and his wife with a bottle of perfume. The General promptly appropriated this, so we gave the poor woman another. Thereupon the General took that, too. I remembered we had a bolt of colored calico on the schooner and sent Nelson after it for the woman, but I am not sure the General has not had it made into drawers.

Anyway he earned his presents. In the morning he took Spinden, Whiting and me to a pair of temples much like those at Chakalal except that one has human heads in stucco on the exterior front wall, one at each side of the door. The other has before it on an outdoor altar a piece of stucco shaped like a pineapple and about two feet high. Similar objects have been found elsewhere in the Maya area, but their purpose has never been determined except that it was obviously a ritualistic one.

Insect life was plentiful at Acomal, and we stopped every few minutes for tick inspection.

Simultaneously Whiting and I began to feel chilly and feverish, with aching backs and legs. Therefore we did not accompany Puk in the afternoon when he took Spinden to four more temples. But McClurg and I ran the Imp into a lagoon about half way between Acomal and Ak, where Puk said we could find a ruin. It turned out to be one of those interesting combinations of a larger building [263] built over and completely enclosing a smaller one.

Lothrop calls this peculiar East Coast double building a palace, arguing that the interior arrangement indicates that the larger rooms were used for residence and that the smaller building against the back wall of the chief structure is a sort of private sanctuary. One reason which he cites for his conclusion is “the fact that no other structures exist suitable for residence” among East Coast sites. He is evidently thinking of the fact that in other parts of the Maya area there are buildings of many rooms which seem to have been well suited for the residence of priests and other dignitaries. Two such buildings, which may easily be seen by any tourist to Yucatan, are the high bulky “Nunnery” of Chichen Itza and the long, ornate “House of the Governor” at Uxmal. Lothrop’s argument does not seem overpowering to me, for it is quite possible that all the stone buildings which still stand in damaged form were used for administrative and ceremonial purposes alone, and that the Maya rulers, like the artisans who slaved for them, lived in dwellings of wood which have long since vanished. If our own people should be wiped out by some great catastrophe and our cities abandoned the archæologist a thousand years hence among the [264] stones of New York might find the Public Library and the Woolworth Building conspicuous among the structures not entirely destroyed. But he would not be safe in arguing that because they had been divided into many rooms they had been used for residential purposes.

However, Lothrop’s suggestion about the East Coast “palace” is interesting, particularly when he says that “The presence of the sanctuary shows that even in his home the Maya noble was unable to escape the all-pervading influence of religion.”

For mark you, all these buildings which we have been finding were of some religious significance. This is true of the mysterious round building at Paalmul even if that was an observatory. For in that case it was an observatory manned by priests, priests who believed that the Supreme Being had given them their faculties to use, and that obedience to the impulses of curiosity would never be resented by God. It is difficult to name another race in which the religious emotion so dominated the high artistic expression of a whole people, or worked to produce so ardent a search for the secrets of the universe.

All good things end at last and this north wind faded last night (Friday) and gave way to a ripping [265] breeze which came from a point a little south of east. At eight bells in the evening Gough snatched up his anchor and stood offshore. He lay off and on all night, not attempting to make much headway and not troubling to hang a light in the rigging. It is a deserted coast. We have not sighted even a canoe off the beaches since we left Cozumel on Monday.

What a different picture it must have made seven hundred years ago! Xkaret, Paalmul, Chakalal, Ak and Acomal are as close together as towns on the Connecticut shore between New York and New Haven.

Of course, conventionalized art is apt to spring from a later stage of culture development than realistic art. But the Mayas continued some use of realistic sculpture up to the time of their downfall, and the realistic heads affixed to temple exteriors which we have been finding does not mean that these old seaports date back to the first period of Maya history. Indeed, they are unmistakably of the last period, which ran from about 1200 A.D. to the arrival of the Spaniards. And if decadent peoples sometimes revert to primitive art forms these imitative sculptures may lend one more support to the contention that the Maya civilization had run far downhill when the Spaniards found it; a contention [266] which all the other evidence nearly lifts to the dignity of a fact.

We believe that probably the “three large towns” seen by Juan Diaz in 1517 were among the five sites which we have just finished exploring.

Daybreak found us wallowing in a short green chop. Under our lee was the crumbling temple and high mound which probably gave Paalmul (“Broken Pyramid”) its name.

A short distance north of Xkaret we saw the thatched houses of Playa Carmen. In spite of the on-shore wind we managed to land in the Imp, which is an excellent surf boat, particularly since Gough covered her tender bottom with a layer of canvas at Cozumel. There are several ruins here which were discovered by the Carnegie Institution Expedition of 1918. Spinden put his tape on two buildings which that expedition did not have time to measure. One of them has been used by the Indians for drying tobacco.

We were surprised to find in this town of eight huts and forty-eight people a school. It was opened by the Mexican Government a few years ago and has nine pupils. That the Calles régime should carry education to such a tiny and inaccessible hamlet speaks well for the future of Mexico. The sum of the world’s knowledge about the Mayas of old is [267] bound to be helped by carrying enlightenment to the poor handful of Indians living in what was once perhaps the most thickly settled piece of the globe.

I have sometimes been asked for an estimate of this ancient population expressed in definite figures. It might be possible to work out an estimate of maximum population per square mile, but it has never been done. However, the figures must have been high, no other conclusion is possible to one who sees the generosity with which pyramids, raised platforms and walls built by human labor with stone tools were scattered over the countryside.

Over our teacups at lunch I put a question on this point to Spinden. He said:

“A factor which many people overlook in such a problem as this is that there were in the Maya area no beasts of burden, and consequently no use of agricultural food products except for human beings. In the United States at present we use only one-fifth of our cereal productions and the rest is given over to food and draft animals. The Mayas, therefore, were able to get 100 per cent efficiency in human labor out of the food which they raised, and since human beings were necessary for the carrying and cutting of stone you can readily see that the means of supporting a human population [268] once existed, as well as the need of such a population to explain such remains.”

We went on to Puerto Morelos, which we reached in early afternoon. This place has a good harbor for boats of not more than ten or fifteen feet of draft, and it has a sizable dock, a lighthouse and a narrow gauge railroad running to chicle camps a few kilometers inland. Otherwise its chief features are sand and an air of dismal decrepitude. We were disappointed to hear that the ruins in the interior seem to have no artistic features of any particular interest. And with Spinden seasick again and Whiting and me full of chills and bone misery we decided to run back to San Miguel de Cozumel, where we plan to leave Griscom to finish his studies while we others look up the ruins mentioned by Ramon Coronado.

Griscom has now established the existence of two hundred species of birds on the mainland of Quintana Roo, of which few were definitely known before. One of his last kills was a very rare pheasant cuckoo. A week on Cozumel Island will finish his assignment from the Museum.

Temple found at Acomal with curious pineapple shaped object on outdoor altar before it

We are sorry to lose him, and McClurg too. For just before we sailed from San Miguel the Commander got a cable which convinced his conscience that his business needs his attention. But he never planned to stay with us more than four or five weeks, [269] and unless we visit Mugeres Island there will be no new coast for him to study. His work is virtually finished, as well as Griscom’s, and he has never had the slightest interest in the inland trip to Tabi which is now uppermost in the minds of Spinden, Whiting and me. So he is taking a freight steamer to Belize in two or three days and there catching the United Fruit boat to New Orleans.

But sadness over the coming separation and the sickness of three of us cannot keep down that warm feeling of triumph inside. The ancients were right in assigning the seat of the emotions to the belly. When I think of the discoveries we have made since Monday it is with a distinct physical glow, which centers around the solar plexus. Five sites of ruins in five successive days! We might wait here five years for another five days of weather so favorable for landing on that whip-sawed mainland coast. Mark you, the prevailing easterly winds of winter did not matter so much to the canoes of the Mayas, for they, like our dinghies, had shelter in the shoal harbors we have been exploring. But there our schooner could not go to escape the wind and sea, and the Albert was a necessary base to our operations. It is of our schooner we are thinking when we say that our success this past week has been ninety-nine per cent the result of gorgeous luck.

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## CHAPTER XII
NATIVE WOMEN

Every explorer is expected to have his experiences with native women. If he does not have them he invents them, and during interludes in his own country he regales his commuter friends with tales of dusky, undraped beauties, unspoiled creatures with generous charms and innocent hearts. Enjoyment of the envy in the eyes of the civilized listeners to such narratives is often the chief reward of exploration.

Let me not be too flippant. There is a serious side to the matter. I am not referring to that which every woman knows. I am alluding to another facet of this subject, the neglect of which has cost the life of more than one of those bold men who carry the first banners of civilization into the wilds. In short, I mean the jealousy of native men. This factor has brought many an expedition to disaster. I recall that several years ago I was accepted as first substitute in reserve for a party of exploration [271] up the Amazon only after I had taken an oath never to speak to a native woman except in the presence of three witnesses.

Before I left the United States friends—mostly male, but not all so—would look at me sideways and with a clearing of the throat or some other introductory gesture would ask:

“What about the native women down there?”

Well, Frank Whiting and I have had our first experiences with native women.

This milestone in our lives was passed, this qualification in our careers toward full blown explorerhood was gained down here in Belize, where we came to get medical help in extinguishing the malaria in our systems.

Of course we had encountered native women earlier in the trip. At Paalmul, Acomal and Cozumel there were a few of the species of the big-bosomed type for which Gann seems to have invented the word slummocky. (He should change the second letter to a t.) But these creatures were—well, Gann’s adjective is sufficient description. And mindful of the welfare of the Expedition we always had the full quota of witnesses required by underwriters of exploration.

But in Belize, not being on active duty, we faced a different situation. Each day we have been going [272] to a rendezvous with a pair of native ladies. These private meetings have been usually in the morning, for at other hours they have domestic duties—they are both married.

Yes, every morning at ten o’clock we have been meeting them, and each time we return to our boarding house with new hope, new interest in life. These meetings have been taking place in the Belize Hospital, and the ladies have been giving us nine grain injections of quinine.

Now I am tired of native women, and native men, too. There is something depressing about living in a population which has one hundred black faces to every white one. If these negroes were gay and musical like ours, it would not be so bad. But they are a dour lot, afflicted with unattractive forms of religion.

After three or four days of Griscom’s excellent nursing a Mexican doctor at Cozumel diagnosed our malady as malaria. That meant that we would simply be in the way for two weeks at least, for Spinden could not plot his buildings and Griscom could not skin his birds with our cots taking up all the open space in the hold of the schooner. They politely urged us to depart, and with McClurg coming to Belize anyway it seemed wisest to take advantage of two berths in the steamer which brought [273] him, and with the help of British medical skill try to get well as quickly as possible.

Left to right, back row: McClurg, Spinden; front row, Mason, Whiting, Griscom. Note malarial expressions of Mason and Whiting

The first doctor we called on told us that the hospital was full, and advised us to eat anything we liked and drink, “Well, not more than a gallon of beer a day.” We had been starving, on the advice of our shipmates and the Mexican doctor, and the news that we might eat encouraged us so much that for a day and a half we deceived ourselves into thinking that the fever had left us. We even cabled Spinden that we could join the schooner in five days.

But an increasing unsteadiness of the legs as we walked about the town, and a near-collapse of Whiting over the second glass of beer persuaded us to the reluctant conclusion that the heat we felt was not entirely caused by the tropical sun. The hated thermometer came out of the pocket. I sent the mercury to only 102 but Whiting boosted it a full degree higher.

After that for ten days we sallied out only to get our mail and the daily injections. The rest of the time we lay about half dressed on our beds in the stifling attic of the boarding house recommended to us as Belize’s best hostelry. It certainly is superior to the more conspicuous “International Hotel,” though to say merely that is to damn with faint [274] praise. It is conducted by a local celebrity, Miss Staine (or Stayne?), a plump, warm-hearted mulatto lady from Jamaica with a strong Nordic contempt for “Belize colored trash.” For ten days we read and re-read her magazines and played the old game of matching temperatures, with Whiting always winning.

We changed doctors and began to take quinine internally, which made it easier to sleep. In spite of thirty grains a day it was soon apparent that Whiting could not rejoin the schooner at all.

Meanwhile came an occasional radio indicating successful activity on the part of Spinden and Griscom. Failing to get passage to Cozumel I wirelessed Spinden to bring the schooner to Belize to pick me up. A few hours after the Albert had sailed the United Fruit Company consented to Griscom’s importunities that a northbound freighter from Belize be stopped at Cozumel to take him to Mobile, for he had finished his work with the discovery of one more bird new to science and the collection of proof that there do exist on Cozumel some eighteen kinds of birds found nowhere else. For days I had been trying to arrange to have this steamer stop at Cozumel to put me off there, and I could have wept now that Griscom’s mysterious pull had accomplished it just too late to benefit me.

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But it seems to be just as well, after all. For fifteen minutes before the still feverish Whiting boarded this same steamer to go home our schooner arrived with Spinden, boasting a fever of 102! My own temperature had been normal for two days, but as Miss Staine said I had got one patient (Whiting) off my hands only to acquire another.

Spinden was in bed two days. Thank Heaven it was not malaria in his case. Just complete exhaustion and digestive breakdown brought on by his almost continuous seasickness of the past six weeks.

Between visits of the doctor he narrated the adventures he and Griscom had at Cozumel. Four days after we left them they anchored the schooner about three miles west of Molas Point, the northeastern extremity of the island, named for one of the many pirates who have hidden along this coast between sorties out on the Spanish Main.

Spinden and Griscom went inland half a mile. There they found a small temple, with a human figure carved in stone occupying a niche over the doorway, and with a carved human face at each side. Over the door was a round column two feet high, surmounted by a peculiar stone triangle. A dog’s head carved in stone was affixed to the wall on the west side of the temple.

Continuing inland, they crossed a fresh water [276] lake with a viaduct made of great stone slabs, which had been built by the ancient Mayas. It was raised two feet above the water. For a quarter mile it could still be used, but the balance was disintegrating for a considerable distance. The slabs had either been worn smooth by pedestrians or had been chosen for their smoothness to the bare feet of pilgrims coming to Cozumel’s shrines as Greeks sought the shrine of Apollo at Delphi.

In a high forest, six miles from the landing place, they found five buildings, three of them well preserved. Two were temples and the other three belonged to the typical palace arrangement, facing inward around a patio seventy feet broad. The main building of this group opened on the front, with four pillars in the center, two of each group being decorated with three-foot statuettes in rounded relief on stone, and heavily plastered. The left hand of each figure was on the hip and the right arm was raised in a gesture like a traffic cop signalling automobiles to stop.

Another very interesting feature was that the flat roofs of these buildings had cross beams, the larger wooden supports running in one direction and the smaller ones going the opposite way. The holes between had been filled in with stone and cement poured into the cracks. The use of a few [277] beams running in one direction is common enough but this arrangement of criss-cross timbers is probably unique.

Though Cozumel Island is small, Spinden found ruins the thick bush had hidden from previous explorers

The guide said there were other ruins nearby. He called the site Saint Tomas, after a large cattle ranch which had been abandoned in this region forty years ago. But it was time to return to the schooner and Spinden and Griscom did not look for these other structures, thinking they could do so later. This was the afternoon of February 19.

They then returned to the schooner, making a cross cut north by west and wading in lagoons up to the waist. On this trip they stumbled upon a colony of flamingos, which Griscom had long wanted to find.

On February 20, while the entire crew, except one sick sailor, were shooting flamingos, a violent norther suddenly burst over the island. This was perhaps to the very day four hundred years after the fleet of Cortes was dispersed by a storm off Cozumel. Our boats started for the schooner at once, leaving Spinden and Griscom in the bush.

The smaller boat was so carelessly handled that its engine was damaged and an oar was lost, so that its occupants had to be transferred to a larger boat, except for a San Blas Indian, who manœuvred the boat to a safe landing. Then he wandered along [278] the beach all night in a panic, cutting his bare feet on the jagged coral and falling into a deep hole in the limestone. He was picked up feverish the next day on the east side of the island.

Meanwhile, the other boat reached the schooner barely in time to work her around, so that she could gain the protection of the east side of the island. Finding the schooner gone, Spinden and Griscom walked for four hours through the swamps and the thorny bush. They were sighted from the schooner at dusk.

The next day they measured a large ruin on the east shore called Casa Real. Near the southern point of the island they found another ruin, containing three rooms and five doors, called Cinco Puertos. These two ruins are used as landmarks by turtle fishermen, but are not believed to have been examined previously by archæologists.

At the southern extremity of the island they found a temple built over the entrance to a cave which contained a permanent fresh pool. Stairs from the doorway descended to the cavern.

They next visited a village of thirty-five inhabitants on the west side of the island south of San Miguel. This hamlet, inspected by the Allison V. Armour Expedition in 1895, then had “two fairly well preserved structures, while others, almost [279] wholly destroyed by modern builders, were traceable, thus indicating an ancient occupancy of more than usual importance.” Spinden found that one of the ruins mentioned by W. H. Holmes in the foregoing quotation had recently been torn down to build a jail!

Seventeen years ago Arnold and Frost, the British explorers, found the Mexicans making a stone quarry of a group of ruins near San Miguel, including a building which contained “a remarkable carving representing a figure of a god seated cross-legged, in true Buddhist attitude, in a niche.” The senseless folly of looting the stones of ruins for the construction of such valuable modern structures as jails and the walls of cow corrals is a common sin in Mexico. In Merida, the capital of Yucatan, one frequently sees in the wall of a modern house a stone carved in the days of Tihoo, the Indian town destroyed by the Spaniards to make room for Merida.

Although Cozumel is but some six miles wide and twenty-four long and boasts such adjuncts of civilization as three lighthouses and a radio it is not surprising that Spinden found there ruins new to archæologists. Undoubtedly many more are waiting in the thick bush. They should be worth seeking because Cozumel shrines seem to have had a particular sanctity to the Mayas.

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One very interesting discovery of Spinden’s was examples of the red hand so conventionalized by the artist that the five fingers looked like the five petals of a flower or the five flames of a lamp. This shows that whether the red hand had a political significance or not it also came to have a purely decorative use. It is possible that this symbol originated in the dawn of Maya culture with the use of the five digits of the hand in counting.

When Stephens visited Cozumel about eighty-five years ago the island was uninhabited. Today it has a population of perhaps eighteen hundred, of which all but three hundred live in San Miguel. This village has taken a great boom with the growth of the chicle trade.

But the early Spaniards made as much of this island as the Mayas they supplanted. There is on record somewhere the lament of a Spanish cleric who thought he had been unjustly treated because he was made Bishop of Mexico instead of Bishop of Cozumel!

This “lighthouse-temple” on Cozumel Island was both a shrine to a marine god and a beacon to commercial flotillas of the Mayas

Spinden visited several high temples of the sort which impressed the Spaniards, who called them “towers.” Any modern explorer of the island will appreciate the rough accuracy of Juan Diaz’s description of the temple where Grijalva annexed the island to Spain:

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> “One descended this tower by eighteen steps; the base was very massive; it was 180 feet in circumference. On top there was a little tower as high as two men; within were figures, bones, and cenise of idols which they worshipped.”

Lothrop thinks that cenise “may be a corruption of the Tainan word Zemi, here used in the sense of ‘images.’”

Nearly all the buildings which Spinden saw on Cozumel were fairly sizable, and all of them were two rooms deep.

While we were getting back some of our strength Spinden and I lay around on Miss Staine’s none too soft beds and discussed the future. With much regret we reached the decision to abandon the return to Xkaret. It is out of the question now to expose Spinden to any more seasickness than is absolutely necessary. Partly for this same reason we have decided to try to reach Tabi not by returning to Ascension Bay and taking the Fotinga to Santa Cruz de Bravo again but by striking inland from the head of Lake Bacalar, which is back of the peninsula on which Payo Obispo is situated. Another factor which has influenced us to this decision is that the changed itinerary will mean seeing more territory which will be new to us. The Spaniards found many native settlements in the Bacalar region, [282] and a letter which Spinden has just received from Dr. Tozzer, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, points out that there is much unexplored country north and west of the lake.

Briefly, then, our plan is to go to the head of Lake Bacalar by boat, and thence proceed by mule and Shanks’ Mare to Santa Cruz de Bravo, Tabi and Peto, the southern end of the Yucatan railway system. If we succeed in reaching the railhead we shall be the first archæological party that has ever crossed the wild territory of Quintana Roo, although the explorer Maler crossed the Yucatan Peninsula over a more western route. And if we find any ruins in this primeval wilderness they are likely to be older than the cities of the east coast. The course of Maya civilization was from south to north, and until we are nearly to Peto we shall be in lower latitude than Muyil, the most southerly of the towns we have found thus far, and the oldest.

Even if we do not reach Peto we shall at least have followed one of the most interesting eddies of the Conquest, shall have trod a country of great historic interest.

If we were in good condition there would be little doubt about reaching Peto, providing the Indians are as untroublesome as they have been. Frankly I am worried by the fact that we are both still about [283] forty per cent below normal strength. I, for one, do not feel capable of sitting on a mule’s back eight hours a day. The after-effects of malaria are worse than the disease. Spinden has lost many pounds and is still off his feed. But each day we become a little firmer on our legs, and we can but try.

While Spinden was still in bed at Belize I boarded the Albert to take stock of stores. There was the old familiar smell of wet floorboards, groceries, and an undercurrent of gasoline. It was like getting home again, but to a deserted home. Rain was falling outside, another norther. I opened a bottle of rum, but found small comfort in it. Whichever way I turned there was the unaccustomed sight of a bare bunk.

I listened in vain for Whiting’s oaths, McClurg’s chuckle and Griscom’s bubbling, runaway laugh. And the boat kept reminding me of Xoch because she had planned this trip with me, had thought of sharing it, so the schooner seemed like her boat. And soon I was leaving it.

There was too much tea, as Spinden had predicted, too much soup, and not enough bacon. I traded the excess of the first two commodities for more of the last.

We sailed again on Tuesday, March 2, at the very hour we had put out of Belize before. But we [284] shipped with three ghosts. We were not gay at all this sailing, for we could not forget the empty places at table, the empty bunks at night.

We ran aground on the same bar off Hicks’ Key, but worked free with less trouble than before. We spent two days and a half in Payo Obispo trying to hire mules. We went down to Corosal in British Honduras to see a chicle man who has mules up on Lake Bacalar. He agreed to let us have six at two dollars a day apiece. The next day, just as we were ready to start, he sent a messenger to say the price was five dollars apiece.

Spinden went over to Consejo Point on the British side of Chetumal Bay and telephoned the pirate that we would not be robbed. He argued and berated the fellow so successfully that the price went down to very near the first figure.

Now it is the morning of Saturday, March 6. The Albert is moored against the north bank of the Hondo River just below where the Rio Chak empties the overflow of Lake Bacalar into it. We made a reconnaissance to the town of Bacalar and the chicle camp of Xtocmoc (shtocmoc) yesterday. Today we shall take the small boats as far as Xtocmoc, spend the night there, and pick up our mules and drivers at Santa Cruz Chico at the north end of the lake tomorrow. There we send the small [285] boats back—burn our bridges behind us. Two hundred and twenty-five miles of thick unexplored bush will be between us and Peto, and about half that distance to the temples of Tabi. It’s just a case of give your mule his head and hang on. If the fever doesn’t clutch us again we shall make it.

Buildings at Acomal showed an interesting use of stucco faces (there is one at each side of this door)

It is hard to say good-bye to infallible Gough and his six good boys. And almost harder to say good-bye to the old Albert. We still know she is not a beauty, but she has been ideal for this trip. She has scraped reefs, plowed mud banks, bucked northers and come through. A good sea and mud boat. Not since I left Pancho Villa’s private freight car has it been so hard to leave a moving home.

Delirium Tremens is loaded above the gunwales with our baggage. Nelson holds the Imp ready. We step in, the propeller beats the water, we shoot into the narrow channel of the Chak and a thick green bank blots out the Albert and the waving caps of her crew.

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## 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 [287] 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 [288] 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.”

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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.

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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 [291] 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 [292] 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 [293] 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 [294] 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 [295] 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 [296] 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.

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“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 [298] 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.

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“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.”

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 [300] 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.

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

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.

[302]

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 [303] 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. [304] 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 [305] almost constant menace of the natives and the piratical raids of other powers.

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 [306] 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 [307] 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 [308] 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.

The author was glad to reach “civilization,” at Chichen Itza

[309]

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 [310] 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 [311] 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.

> [312]

> “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.

[313]

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.

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## CHAPTER XIV
THE FIRST AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE

Toward evening on July 30, 1502, four Spanish caravels, looking for the long-desired coasts of Cathay, drew near an island off what is now Northern Honduras. Thinking to annex this land for the crown of Spain, the discoverers felt their way into a cove, the hails of the leadsman on the foremost caravel mingling with the cries of birds never before seen by European eyes.

Four anchors dropped through the pale green of water, so clear that the eye could see, at six fathoms, the flukes bite the white sand. At this moment there swept around a point a canoe, eight feet wide and very long, though fashioned from a single log. The last rays of the sun flashed upon twenty-five dripping paddles and the fifty brown arms that drove them. An air of exotic and mysterious splendor was exhaled by the wealthy merchant who owned the boat as he sat under a canopy surrounded by the rich textiles and pottery he had come here to sell.

There was no more traveled man then alive than [315] the commander of those four Spanish vessels, ornate but clumsy, with high ends and rakish masts. He had voyaged much through the New World within the past decade, yet never before had he seen there clothes and general accoutrement of such a civilized aspect as the gold ear-rings, cotton mantles and other trappings of these brown traders. The European’s attempt to question the merchant through Cuban interpreters seemed to draw out the information that the canoe came from “a country called Maiam.”

That land lay west and north of this island (which today is called Bonacca). The commander of the Spanish ships wanted to visit it. Yet on the morrow he turned his ships southward, lured by a high range of mountains that offered the baffled man his hundredth and last illusion of the long-sought Cathay.

Thus was the distinction of being the discoverer of the country of the Mayas narrowly missed on his fourth and last voyage by the broken-hearted old Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus.

This picture of the first contact between Europeans and representatives of the highest native race ever developed in the Americas ought to be more generally known. The merchant in his great trading canoe is a truer index of the life of the Mayas than are the painted and nearly naked warriors encountered by the later European discoverers, whose [316] greed, bigotry and tyranny awoke the hostility of a naturally peace-loving people.

For that such the Mayas were, the findings of our expedition strongly indicate. That is to say, the Mayas were essentially a nation of peaceful farmers and traders. There is more significance in this statement than may appear at first.

Bear in mind that heretofore most of the world’s information relating to the builders of the great ruined cities of Central America has concerned the small ruling upper class, the priests who worked out the elaborate and accurate calendar and the monarchs at whose orders public buildings were decorated with sculpture and painting—the admiration of discerning critics throughout the world today. For obvious reasons fewer data have come to hand concerning the huge lower class, the small merchants, peasants, artisans and slaves. Some of the most important of our recent findings, however, relate to this inconspicuous but important bulk of the Maya nation.

The release of part of the population from the mere labor of gaining daily bread is necessary before any people can produce even a rudimentary science or art. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ the Mayas had accomplished this. So fertile was the soil of the wet tropics in what is now northern [317] Honduras and Guatemala, that the minds and bodies of many men were set free from humdrum toil. It became possible for priest-scientists to isolate themselves in monasteries and observatories, where they studied the bright night skies, building up an extraordinarily comprehensive body of astronomical knowledge.

From the rich mural reliefs and paintings of cities that have emerged from the refuse of long tropical years it is clear that by the first century or so of the Christian era the arts of the Mayas were nearly abreast of their science. By this time they were making pottery and textiles that were highly esteemed by neighboring tribes. Of course, the products of the soil continued to be the basis of their existence; but manufacturing and trade sprang up to engage the energies of the laity.

Archæological evidence indicates that in the days when Christianity was young the Mayas were developing the arts of peace; that, as nations go, they then and always rather slighted the arts of war. Compared with other early American peoples, the Mayas had little taste for blood.

It is true that the horrible rite of human sacrifice obtained some hold among them; but this was as nothing compared with its prevalence among the Aztecs of highland Mexico. Their sculptures, paintings [318] and pictured books are the work of a religious and peacefully inclined people. There are, indeed, a few representations of warriors leading home captives; but the figure of the soldier in Maya art is negligible. That of the priest is ubiquitous. The Maya War God, the “Black Captain,” enjoyed no such importance as did the bloody Huitzilopochtli in the pantheon of the Aztecs.

The manner of the Maya resistance to the Toltec invasion, like the manner of the later Maya resistance to the Spanish invasion, shows that the Mayas did not take kindly to fighting.

Drouth, starvation and epidemics led the way to the downfall of the Toltec monarchy in the middle of the eleventh century. Remnants of this warlike nation left the region of the present Mexico City and drifted southward.

About 1200 A.D. they seem to have begun a series of successful battles with the Mayas of Northern Yucatan, who had just been enjoying a renaissance of culture under the league of three great cities, Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan. These Toltecs were wandering adventurers and mercenaries, their national epic now nearly told. Yet the fragments of Toltec architecture we found even on Cozumel Island, the easternmost outpost of the Mayas, show that the northern fighters ran through [319] that fat southern country as wolves run through a sheepfold.

Although Spanish commentators of those times were eager to find excuses for the Conquistadores, eager to put the best possible light upon their aggressions, interlinear evidence convinces the neutral reader that hostilities were usually provoked by the Europeans and that the Mayas were ever ready for honorable peace. Summarizing the reports of the contemporary Spanish writers, the English historian, Fancourt, tells how the Indians of Eastern Yucatan had had ample reason, by previous experience with Spanish expeditions, to distrust the motives with which the Conquistador Montejo came among them in 1527. Yet the Indians “were unwilling to commence hostilities and suffered the Spaniards to disembark on the mainland,” which was promptly annexed by Montejo in the name of the Emperor-King Don Carlos.

Later 200 Spaniards occupied the Indian town of Tihoo (the site of Merida, present capital of the State of Yucatan). This occupation aroused the Indians as nothing else had done, and their army grew to a size variously estimated at from 40,000 to 70,000. Cogolludo describes them as naked, except for loin cloths, their bodies smeared with colored earth of various tints, ornaments and stone hanging from [320] their pierced nostrils and ears. They were armed with bows and arrows, pikes, darts, lances tipped with flint and huge two-handed swords of hardwood. Blowing conch shells and striking their spears on their shields of large turtle shells, they advanced on the Europeans from all sides “like fiercest devils.”

This fight was the bloodiest in the history of the conquest of Yucatan. It lasted nearly all day. The Indians were completely routed and their spirit forever broken. Cogolludo says: “The fame of the Spaniards rose higher than before and the Indians never rallied again for a general battle.”

As our expedition skirted shores once eagerly scanned for landing places by lookouts on the war vessels of Grijalva and Montejo, and as we cut our way through jungles where the feet of the Spanish men-at-arms had once trampled the tender growth of the wide Indian cornfields, we were constantly alert to discover remains that would throw light on the question, were the Mayas a warlike nation? Deserted Spanish forts we found aplenty, guarded now by nothing more deadly than stinging ants and the thorns of the thick bush. The testimony of the Maya ruins, which we found in abundance, answered the question with an emphatic negative.

The city of Xkaret is surrounded by a wall, but [321] it is the wall of a people who sought security, not a wall built by men who knew much about fighting. It showed us none of the moats and turrets with which old Spanish forts were strengthened.

With military works a rarity in the Maya territory, walls that have an opposite connotation are found on every hand. These are much lower and narrower than the defensive walls, and are not unlike the familiar stone fences that mark off divisions of property in our own stony New England. There is reason to believe that they served a similar purpose among these ancient Americans—an agricultural and commercial people like ourselves.

It is well known that some of the fine roads that the Romans left to their successors in Europe were built for military purposes. Several elevated stone roads comparing favorably with the work of Julius Cæsar’s engineers have been found in the Maya area; but they seem to have been constructed for anything but warlike purposes. The “Via Sacra” at Chichen Itza was just what its name implies, a holy road down which the priests led the virgins to be sacrificed to the God of Rain. This god presided over a sinister sunken pool into which these hapless maidens were hurled. The causeway leading up to the city of Coba is believed by some archæologists to have connected with Chichen Itza—in which [322] case its use was probably religious and civil, not military. Edward Herbert Thompson, who examined this road several years ago, believes there may have been a continuation of it on the unexplored eastern side of Coba, for use by pilgrims bound for the island of Cozumel, known to have been an objective of many journeys taken by devout Mayas. In fact, it is quite likely that our Xkaret, with its fine canoe harbor, marked the mainland terminus of some such pilgrimage route, being, in short, the point where the faithful were ferried across to the holy island.

With the exception of the twelve odd miles of open water, there may have been a fine stone road all the way from the chief temple of Chichen Itza to a temple, measured and photographed by Spinden, on the eastward and ocean side of Cozumel. A link in such a transportation system may well have been the causeway we found crossing a fresh water lake in this extraordinary island.

So much for the contention that the Mayas were a peaceful people. Now for the evidence we have found that aside from the small upper class, engaged in art and science, the Mayas devoted much time to trade and commerce.

In conquering a large part of the New World, the first motive of the Spaniards was mercenary. [323] Consequently they were quick to observe any signs of prosperity among the natives whom they encountered. Their comments upon signs of this sort of thing among the Mayas are much more numerous, unfortunately for archæology, than are their references to native culture, toward which they felt hardly a passing curiosity. They reported the riches of Indian trading flotillas and described in detail the golden and jeweled ornaments of Maya caciques.

There are many Spanish allusions to the cotton of the natives and to “nequen cloth,” perhaps a sort of matting of henequen, or sisal fiber, the chief product of Yucatan today. These products are but two of the many gifts of the American Indian to the world. In the long catalogue Spinden places corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, squashes, cocoa, peanuts, tobacco, cocaine, quinine, rubber and many other valuable things. The plants of America show signs of having been domesticated longer than do the plants of Asia. This evidence is annoying to dogmatists who hold that America was settled from Asia!

The Spaniards soon learned, however, that the gold and precious stones the Mayas wore had been imported to Yucatan, and that opportunities for gain there were much fewer than in Peru and in [324] upland Mexico. Adventurers flocked to the standards of Pizarro and Cortes, in these respective regions, many of them deserters from the force of Montejo in Yucatan.

Spanish historians tell us that the colored cotton fabrics of the Mayas were distributed over the whole of New Spain. Certain types of Maya pottery have also been found over a wide area, indicating commercial distribution of this product. The Mayas made many different classes of pottery for various markets, and they were very proficient at decorating it, applying modified hieroglyphs or the geometric patterns so common in their architectural decoration.

On the other hand, the list of trade articles found in the Maya area and certainly not made there is a large one. As already noted Spinden’s work in Colombia some years ago established the fact that most of the pearls and emeralds of the Mayas were imported from that region. The turquoise, found by the Spanish in Yucatan, came from what is now our State of New Mexico. Even if Colombia and New Mexico marked the southern and northern limits, respectively, of Maya trade, these bounded an area of which any nation confined to primitive means of communication might well be proud.

Material for the ornaments of gold and jadeite [325] worn by the Mayas came from the highlands of Mexico and from Central America, in payment for figured cotton goods and graceful pottery.

There is no doubt, then, that the Mayas maintained extensive trade relations with other American nations. Recent additions to the world’s knowledge of these people of Yucatan make one wonder whether toward the end of their history commerce was not taking almost more of their energy than the ever-necessary agriculture.

Heretofore inland trade routes have engaged the attention of students of Maya history. Pretty surely the famous march of Cortes from the highlands of Mexico to Guatemala was along inland roads of commerce. Another overland trail connected the highlands of Mexico with the big cities of northern Yucatan, and probably an offshoot left this, in what is now the State of Campeche, to connect with the southward route Cortes followed.

Our expedition brings home very strong evidence of a water route down the east coast of Yucatan. Strung along this reef-bound coast we found good canoe harbors connected with ruined trading towns at Xkaret, Paalmul, Chakalal, Ac, Acomal and Muyil.

Probably there was much more shipping from the region of Xkaret and Cozumel southward than from [326] that vicinity northward, around Cape Catoche. In other words, the overland trail from the big cities of northern Yucatan, by which pilgrims used to reach Cozumel Island, was pretty certainly an important artery of trade to the coastal cities we found, forming a missing link in the water route to the south.

When Spinden and I crossed the Yucatan Peninsula we found a considerable inland area south of Chichen Itza in which evidences of Maya occupation were much thinner than in the vicinity of that great city and along the coast. In short, there seems to have been no considerable commerce by land route due south from the Chichen Itza and Coba region.

The overland trade route from that district to Guatemala and Honduras, which went west to Campeche and then southward by the trails Cortes followed, was much longer than the land and water route via Xkaret or Paalmul or Chakalal. We believe that this latter route was much used, from the second occupancy of Chichen Itza in the tenth century up to shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards.

When all the evidence for the existence of this coastal trade route is reviewed, one fact stands out above all others. That is the extremely thick settlement of this region, with traces of extensive [327] public works. A purely pious interest in the shrines of Cozumel Island would not have produced such extensive construction.

The canal that connects the two lakes east of the ruins of Muyil was not dug for the passage of pilgrims. Some of the high buildings overlooking the dangerous rocks that the trade winds whiten with foam were lighted to God, no doubt, but they were also excellent beacons to belated argosies bearing the incense and feathers and jade so dear to the deities of a nation of peaceful traders.

Examples of the mysterious red hand. The four in the center are a conventionalized form found by Spinden on Cozumel Island, indicating that whatever religious or political significance the red hand may have had it also had at times a primarily artistic use. The imprint at the left was made by wetting the human hand in red paint or dye and slapping it against the wall. The two at the right were made by holding the hand against the wall and painting around it.

[328]

## 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 [329] 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 [330] 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 [331] 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 [332] 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.

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 [333] 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, [334] 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 [335] 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 [336] 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 [337] 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.

[338]

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 [339] 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 [340] 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.

## Transcriber’s Notes

- 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.