A MAYAN INDIAN.
[Frontispiece.]

THE
AMERICAN EGYPT

BY
CHANNING ARNOLD
AND
FREDERICK J. TABOR FROST

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, MAP AND PLANS

LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW
1909

To
ALICE ALTHEA ARNOLD

[PREFACE]

In publishing the present volume, it is our privilege to produce the first book ever written by Englishmen on Yucatan—that Egypt of the New World, where, it is now generally admitted, Central American Civilisation reached its apogee—and to be, for the present at least, the only Englishmen who can claim to have explored the uncivilised north-eastern portions of the Peninsula and the islands of her eastern coast. Mr. A. P. Maudslay, who in 1889 made a lengthy stay at and a detailed survey of Chichen, has done yeoman service to Central American archæology by his years of patient work (alas! too little appreciated) in Guatemala, in the Usumacinta district and Southern Mexico.

Work, and wonderful work, has been done in civilised Yucatan by bands of earnest labourers from the States, from Germany, and from France. Among these the most notable is the late J. L. Stephens, the American traveller, who visited Yucatan in 1842, and who is justly regarded as the Father of Mayan archæology. In his footsteps has followed, during recent years, Mr. Edward H. Thompson, one of the most painstaking and accomplished of American archæologists. France has been represented by M. Desiré Charnay, and latterly by Count Perigny. Of the German field-workers the most assiduous have been Professor Seler, T. Maler, and K. Sapper; while all who wish to see the Mayan problem solved must pay a meed of thanks to the eminent Professor Forstemann for his attempts to decipher the inscriptions, even if they feel, as do we, that he has allowed his enthusiasm to lead him too far astray on a will-o'-the-wisp path of inquiry and theory.

The problem reviewed in this volume is a profoundly interesting one. The ethnology of the Americas presents a problem as yet unsolved. The average ethnologist has been content to label the vast affiliated hordes and tribes of the two Americas "Mongolian." But the American ethnological puzzle is deepened by the existence of what is known as the Mayan civilisation and its many ramifications throughout Central America. Whence came these building races? What cradle-land is one to assign to architects whose achievements often rival in grandeur the monuments of Egypt? How is one to believe that they were ordinary members, or members at all, of that great affiliated race of American Indians whose ideas of building were represented in the north by the snow-house of the Eskimo and the wigwam of the Sioux, and in the south by the leaf-shelters of the cannibal inhabitants of the forests of Brazil?

In the later chapters of this volume we endeavour to analyse the evidence which we and others have collected on this thorny Mayan problem. We cannot too strongly urge that the time has come to drop once and for all the Toltec theory. We know that we are thus taking up a position in direct opposition to four-fifths of the students and scholars who have worked in the field; but we are as convinced that the race which built the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan is not a vanished race as we are convinced that the Toltec theory is a gross error.

And if we are obstinate as to the origin of Mayan civilisation, we fear we must be charged, too, with gross obstinacy in the matter of deciding the age of the ruins. We would like to believe, with those more sanguine, that the wonderful structures have a history rivalling Memphis or Syene. But we cannot believe it, and we hope that those who read this volume will acquit us of coming to this very disappointing decision on flimsy grounds. In such matters no grounds but practical ones are to be trusted, and we claim that an expert builder's careful examination of the ruins, after due allowance is made for the friability of the limestone used in such a climate as Yucatan enjoys, will prove to any open-minded inquirer that the oldest building still standing, so to speak, intact, has not seen more than six centuries.

In the present volume it has been impossible to do more than "open the case" for the theory we propound, viz. that America's first architects were Buddhist immigrants from Java and Indo-China. To attempt to prove this would require much time and money; but, alas! archæology is not such a popular and paying science as will allow those without large means at their disposal to follow up their theories.

We should need many months of careful study in Java, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon and India. If investigations there proved satisfactory, the next step would be to follow the route we have suggested as that taken by the migrators in a vessel as similar as possible to those it may be presumed they employed. Along the route a more minute study of the archæological remains on the islands of the Caroline and Marshall groups than has yet been undertaken could be made. Thence the voyage would be continued to the American mainland, where a thorough investigation of the country between the coast and Copan would probably yield valuable data. But such an expedition would require an outlay of thousands of pounds and would occupy two or three years, much of which would have to be spent under such hardships as only enthusiasts could contemplate.

C. A.

F. J. T. F.

London, 1908.

[CONTENTS]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

THE AMERICAN EGYPT

[CHAPTER I]
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MEXICO

Most of us want to do what we are not doing. In the majority of human hearts, deep down, is an intangible tormenting wish to go somewhere, to see some land, to do something which is not in the programme drawn up for us by the inexorable fate of birth and circumstance. Usually the longing is crushed out by the juggernaut wheels of life's ponderous Car of Necessity, which drives us all forward towards the Unknown in a set groove from which the most desperate efforts never extricate us. We long for the North Pole, we sigh for a trip to the Antarctic regions, we dream of scaling the Mountains of the Moon, with the unreasoning longing of children. We feel we shan't be happy till we get there, and ... we are never happy. We go on longing and ... living in Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton; most of us never will.

We—the authors of this book—were not living in Brixton, but in quite as commonplace a suburb when the torments of unfulfilled aspiration seized us and shook us, as a terrier might a rat. The demon of discontent shouted at us, grinned at us, sneered at us. "You hate this suburb: clear out, go away!" it said. "Throw up your work and duty. Burst through the fetters of the commonplace!" Well, we couldn't stand it. We bore it for some weeks, and then "one midnight in the silence of the sleeptime" we knocked the ashes out of our pipes, as we sat mournfully facing each other over our suburban hearth, and from the fullness of our tormented hearts we cried aloud, "We will go to Yucatan!"

But our "leaving Brixton" was not suspicious enough in its suddenness to alarm the tradesmen. Yucatan, that curiously unknown peninsula, easternmost portion of the Republic of Mexico, which by reason of its wondrous ruined cities has earned the title of "the Egypt of the New World," had long been a dream of ours. We had put in years of study of the very few and scarce books describing some of those ruins, and hard work on the literature of the problems of Central American civilisation, before we had the satisfaction of "leaving Brixton."

But everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and at last, in pursuance of our resolution to shake the dust of the commonplace off our feet, for a time at least, we found ourselves on a very dingy November afternoon with two unwieldy packing-cases full of guns and saddlery, and innumerable portmanteaux, standing on the Prince's Landing-stage, Liverpool, staring out seaward into the dank mist where an old salt declared our liner to lie. It was obvious he did not, for in a few minutes a dropsical tug—it was almost as broad as it was long—fumed up to the pierside and, hoisting the company's flag, invited us to go with it trustingly into that mist from which we were destined to pass—though that looked an impossibility—into the dazzling glories of the Eternal Carib summer. Having posted our last wills and testaments and dying wishes to our friends in seventeen envelopes, and given one more pathetic glance at the sombre grey glories of the Liverpudlian capital which stood out drear and grim behind us in the fading light, we surrendered to the captain of the tug, in company with other apprehensive-looking voyagers.

If you have never taken a long sea-voyage, and the etceteras and discomforts of many months' travel in a land (the language of whose inhabitants you have been for weeks trying to grapple with in unintelligible grammars) loom awesome in your mind, there is something positively terrifying in standing on the deck of a tender (as all well-conducted liner-tugs insist on being called) on a damp, dark autumn afternoon. Its grimy decks and its reek of oil offend you. Its chilly bareness, its inhospitable, straight-backed wooden seats, the gaunt nakedness of its wallowing outline, conjure up to your overwrought mind vague comparisons with the bare, whitewashed execution-shed of which you have read in the Yellow Press. You feel you are in a Nautical Executionshed. You stand there shivering. You look back at the fast fading friendly wooden joists of the landing-stage. You wish you had never come. You feel as you do when you get into the dentist's room, having earlier in the day telegraphed to him that you must have the offending tooth out with gas. You see the deadly chair and the cylinder of nitrous oxide and you feel that perhaps after all you could have borne the toothache. Supposing (you shudder at the thought) something went wrong and you never, never woke up. "There! Now please open your mouth wide and breathe deeply." Oh no! Beg pardon! "Mind your toes there, sir, please," from an energetic officer in gold-laced coat, as the gangway flashes out from the steamship's black side like a snake's tongue. A grinding, squeaking noise as the dropsical tug affectionately rubs itself against the fenders which hang on the liner's side—a mad, foaming maelstrom of grey sea-water, whitened as the screw reverses—a Babel of orders and counter-orders, and—you are swallowed up into the floating town; you are on board. You look wildly round: nothing will save you now. The grim pilot in beaver cap stands on the bridge, significant official, to see that no hitch occurs in the execution; the steam whistle sounds mournful through the mist fast settling into fog; the great engines, which are to work unceasingly for seventeen days and nights, break out into a long moaning, groaning, thumping, as they start upon their Sisyphean task, and ... you are off.

Nothing is ever as one expects it. We expected the Atlantic to be at least riotously playful in November. We expected our boat (she was only 4,000 tons) to be tossed, as you flip an empty nutshell, by one great bullying roller to another, in their titanic play. Not a bit of it. We steamed down the Mersey, out into the Irish Channel, and though the good ship Floridian rolled (Jerusalem! we had to keep our eyes on the children, for the deck was at 45° nearly all day: it was "All hands to the kids!" to stop them slipping overboard), we eat and we drank and the chill air off the Irish coast became balmy, and the mists broke and we raised our caps to My Lord the Sun, whom we had not seen since the summer; and, before we knew where we were, deck-chairs were out and overcoats were off, and officers in white-drill uniforms paced a bridge shaded by snowy awnings, and we leaned back and smoked dreamily in the sunshine and rejoiced that we had "left Brixton."

Some nineteen days later we had just serenely entered on the second course of our admirable daily breakfast when a friendly officer's face appeared at the companion and uttered the monosyllable "land." It's a stupid-enough-looking word when it gets itself written, but it can mean a lot when for nearly three weeks you have not seen anything of it worth talking about. We had become such sea-dogs; we had grown so used to our daily prospect of dancing blue wavelets, of the sunbathed infinite waters, darkling from sapphire to slaty grey at the horizon—our horizon; we had sat so many nights contented under the awnings in the moonlight, the exquisite tropic calm of the sea-night broken only by the periodic music of the ship's bell with its haunting recitative "All's well!" from the look-out man; lulled by the magic of the eternal Carib summer, we had all so learnt in this rare fortnight the wisdom of the lotus-eaters, eating the honey-sweet fruit of the tropic with never one wish to go homeward, that it came as something approaching a shock to us, that word "land." Why, we thought it was as extinct as the dodo! Time and space seemed to have melted for us into a world of infinite blues and golds and whites, a world peopled by merry porpoises, by silver-bright flying-fish, and snowy sea-birds. Knives and forks clattered down on to plates and an eager throng of those "whose island home was far beyond the seas" dashed for the companion stairs. We rushed on deck with something of the eagerness the great Christopher must have felt as he hurried to his galleon-poop when the Spanish sailors saw from the mast-head, as in a glass dimly, what they took to be the coast of a New World.

There was not much to see. But stay! What is that which floats, magically suspended, cloudlike, before the glass? You rub your eyes: you dust the glass: you look again. Yes! right up in the sky there, as far above the dark line of shore as the puffy white cloud-spots which dot the boundless azure, is a triangle of rose-tinted white; and as you stare the wonder of it all grips you. You see the sun glinting dazzlingly on its eternal snows; you see the great rents and crevasses seaming its sides; you see where the cloud-bank blots out and shrouds its vast shoulders and flanks. It is Orizaba, mighty Orizaba, raising its majestic head four miles into the infinite blue.

In the enthusiasm of the moment we all agreed, even those of us who had suffered from the voyage (and they were few) that it was worth coming six thousand miles to see such a sight; and we were all the better pleased with ourselves and our luck because our good skipper, who had sailed to Vera Cruz off and on for a quarter of a century, declared it was only once in ten times that the great volcano condescended to expose its marvellous beauties so well.

Vera Cruz is a town in travail. Its labour pains have seized it. Accoucheur Sir Weetman Pearson at the bedside is assisting at the delivery of a marinopolis—a City of the Sea. Majestic buildings are breaking out amid squalid Spanish stuccoed houses, with frowsy passage-ways and garbage-strewn courtyards, dating from Maximilian's day and earlier. Quays and wharves, lighthouses and customs offices, plazas and docks, broad asphalted roadways and stone houses, are rearing themselves where once, ere Sir Weetman's stalwart navvy-elves did their fairy work, were naught but pestilential marshes, spawning-ground for the "Yellow Jack" mosquito, tiny fever scourge-bearer to the panic-stricken inhabitants. As we steamed inside the great stone breakwater built of cyclopean masonry, Vera Cruz's first line of defence from the inroads of the deep, the impression one gets is that of the incongruity of it all. The new Customs House and Oficina de Correos (Post Office), palatial piles, stand out seaward on the plain, far away from the green-shuttered, down-at-heel, ramshackle hovel-town, as if ashamed of it all. What you do feel is that when the confinement is satisfactorily completed, Vera Cruz will be a great city. To-day she is still building-enterprise plus a plaza. Every Spanish-American town is a town with a plaza: Vera Cruz is a plaza with a town. We will get there in a minute, but meantime there are ropes being thrown from our liner to the quaint yellow-faced Mexicans on the quay; the indicator-bell rings from the bridge, the needle flies round to the magic word "Stop," and the huge steel muscles of the great panting, tired engines are at rest at last. It is a glorious day. The coast mists have melted away, and the whites of the distant houses, the dark greens of the palm trees, the flags of all nations fluttering on the shipping, make a vivid contrast in the blaze of sun with their distant background of lofty sand-dunes rolling westward in a horizon of glistening white towards Mexico City.

The quay at Vera Cruz is a kaleidoscope of international trade-life: a spectacle unexampled in its way. Great steamships—their hatches burst open—continuously belch out their many cargoes upon the wooden piers. The clouds of dust, the reeking smell of toiling men, the screaming of the steam whistles, the grinding and creaking of the winches, the cries of the workers, the short, sharp words of command, the hoarse shouts in a score of languages, and the jangling crash of iron rails or girders or iron sheeting as each fresh load breaks from the winch on to the heaped-up mass below, make up a veritable trade-hell. Niggers from Jamaica and the States, the purple veins standing out like weals upon their foreheads, strain and grunt under huge bales; Koreans, red-tinted, flat-faced; Chinamen, their blue wide trousers tucked up to their knees; Spaniards and Mexicans; Italians and Greeks; the dapper Japs, their lithe bodies and small faces contrasting with Viking workmen from Sweden and Norway; Creole lads with raven-hued curly hair and sunkissed faces, their black velvet eyes alight with the lust of the south; high-cheekboned, smooth-chinned Aztec Indians, ragged-garbed; sailors of all races, blue-bloused, guernseyed, naked-chested, cheeks and necks that golden bronze for which wind and sea are the only cosmetics, jostle and push, laugh and curse, sweat and pant in their effort to live.

Nowhere can one see the inwardness of the harsh struggle for life better than on Vera Cruz quay. Derelicts, wastrels, beachcombers, sinners and sinned against, bloodshot-eyed drunkards and leaden-grey opium smokers and eaters, strong and weak, healthful and sickly, men with faces of vicious angels, men with faces of devils let loose from Hell, they have come from the uttermost corners of the earth, these groaning, sweating, reeking human beings, to fight in blistering sun and pestilential dust for the right to live. Long, ordered lines of porters wheel their laden trucks to the bonding sheds; long lines of porters wheel their empty trucks, like passing trains, back to the gaping hatches of the giant ships. Under great umbrellas of scarlet, yellow or green cottons, jutting up like gigantic vari-coloured toadstools, sit portly Mexican dames, coarse of face, ponderous in bosoms and stomachs, the trestle-trays at their sides loaded with fulsome heaps of fly-marked fruits, with sickly terrors of sugar and pastry (euphemistically known as pan dulce, "sweet bread"), and sweetmeats of such unholy colours that they look as if they had been dipped in the devil's own dye-pot.

There are no cabs in Vera Cruz. If there were it would make no real difference to the unhappy traveller, for there is no roadway to the quays' sides, and baggage is shouldered by one of the innumerable rascally-faced Mexican touts or trundled in huge railway barrows down the piers and jolted over execrable roads towards the barn-like structure which does duty as terminus for the Central Mexican Railroad, one of the most wonderful lines ever laid. A few hours in Vera Cruz is enough to set the weary Briton humming perpetually the air of "Pay, pay, pay." Everything in Mexico is a question of money, and everybody has his or her price. It is often a large one, and a trade union of robbers has decreed that you must pay a dollar (two shillings) a package to have your baggage conveyed from quay to station, a distance of a quarter of a mile. It does not matter how many or how few are your impedimenta, nor the size of the package. The smallest must be paid for at the same rate, though in the reverse case you do not score; for a very large package is charged for at double rates. Unless you are content to drag portmanteaux through the mob, you must 'foot' this first outrageous bill. A fellow-passenger of ours travelling quietly with his wife paid twenty-four shillings for the transporting of his kit.

The Customs House officials are fair-minded enough, and there is little trouble for the stranger there. Everything obviously for personal use is "passed" ungrudgingly with the single exception of silver plate or ornaments. Our only difficulty lay in explaining in execrable Spanish to Señor el Aduanero (Mr. the Custom House Officer) that with a long tour in primeval forests and cruises amid archipelagos of islets before us, 20 lb. weight of Cadbury's solid chocolate and two dozen tins of their cocoa essence were moderate estimates of our personal needs in the direction of this best of all nutriment. He scented trade; and it was some minutes before we prevailed upon him to take his eagle eye off the suspiciously glistening tins which meant such comfort for us in our wanderings. Mournfully learning that our luggage would cost us sixteen shillings to move into safety till we sailed again for Yucatan, we entrusted it to an apparently honest Railway Agent with some misgivings. Never let your baggage out of your sight at Vera Cruz. The contents are often stolen in the very Customs House. The luggage porters interchange their metal badges, too, so that while No. 29 takes your bag and swears to meet you at the station, if you ever have the luck to see that number again, you will honestly be obliged to admit to the police authorities that the wearer is not the same fellow whom you employed and ... well,—the matter rests there and your stolen bag in Vera Cruz.

But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is dusty and frowsy enough—this stone-paved square with its tawdry green and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by crevasses and large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk—bandstand above, drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of chairs and round tables; the outer circle is formed of iron garden-seats backing on to the flower-beds, rich with scarlet-blossomed poinsettia, twenty or thirty feet high, with yellow and purple bell-flower blooms, with scarlet tulipans and a pale pink and white blossom of a jasmine-like shape and size. Overhead in the thick leaves myriads of piches—bright-eyed, sleek-feathered cousins of the English blackbird—chatter, chatter, chatter till you wonder if they will ever stop: the Veracruzian tells you they never do. On three sides of the plaza the houses are arcaded; on the fourth is a hideously meretricious pile of yellowish stone—the cathedral.

It is but 10 a.m., yet the sun is so fierce that the arcades are curtained off with sunblinds reaching to the pavement edge. Within these tunnels of stifling shade, Vera Cruz breakfasts at ten and dines at five, and drinks all day. Tables for two, tables for four or more, tables of metal or of wood, stained with ringed stains of wineglass or coffee-cup are ranged up by the blinds, leaving a passage for strollers. All day, almost all night at these tables sit men—men of all conditions. It is the kaleidoscope of the quays, a shade higher and ... lower. For the filthy, sweating nigger at the hatch-side catches something—however little—of the majesty of toil. But these men, they neither toil nor spin. They have come in from plantations where they are almost kings, and they hold their glasses in fever-yellowed hands, and leer at the passing women and girls, whose coarse beauty shrouded in mantilla, whose plump powdered necks, and bosoms heaving opulent under tawdry muslin frocks seem fitting part, the female complement to the drink-sodden scene. But stay! there is a pleasanter sight, at that table over there. It's worth a glance—you are glad to look away from the wolfish-eyed victims of drink and debauchery at those two hearty English skippers, tanned and bearded, who take their liquor like men, and talk of their just completed "runs." They are in the place but not of it, and somehow you think you catch an envious glance thrown their way by the gaunt, blear-eyed creature who crawls past them after his fifth cocktail.

In the streets the picturesque Mexican life is a-doing. The ranchero—so tight of trouser that it looks as if his legs must have been melted and run in hot into those grey pantaloons, like bullets in a mould—silver-spurred, his huge Mother-Shipton-shaped felt hat embroidered and bound with silver laces, his feet hidden in the great leather pockets which serve as stirrups here, canters into the plaza on a white Arab. Round the corner comes the milkman on a mule, his four jars of milk bulking so large round his saddle that you wonder he can get on or off. The raucous shouts of the Indians as their waggons jolt and bump and rattle over the broken cobbles: the "Mūla-mūla!" of the Mexican as he urges on the mules which draw the yellow varnished tramcars down the rickety lines: the cracked treble note of the old woman who thrusts her roll of lottery tickets into your face with the eternal "Por mañana," and the loud insistent cry of the brown-faced, barefoot, rascally-handsome newsboys, mingle into one inharmonious chorus. On the shady seats of the plaza loll the ever-tired Mexican workmen, smoking cigarettes. Twelve strikes, and the troop of rurales in grey uniforms, with carbines and heavy revolvers—the mounted police—ride out from their barracks to take their work of patrolling the town. The townspeople gather and look, and then they sleep again; while in their shirt-sleeves, cigar or cigarette between their lips, Mexican clerks balance ledgers in banks and merchants' offices behind lattice blinds, and a postmaster in white-drill trousers and coloured silk vest sells you postage stamps between puffs of smoke.

The last few years have made a world of difference to Vera Cruz. A decade back for three-quarters of the year it was plague-ridden. In the dusty street-arteries, up and down which its vicious, frowsy life is pumped forwards and backwards to its plaza-heart, you might have walked and scarcely found one doorway without the great splashed crimson cross—seal of the yellow-fever fiend within. To-day it is growing into a health-resort, but even now sanitation is embryonic. Dustcarts, gruesome guillotine-like tumbrils, parade the streets; and "gilded pools a steed would sniff at" make road-crossings into fording-places where you must leap from one broken cobble to another and stumble into chasms of earth and unsightly ruts. But the gods have been good to this evil little town. For there are armies of unpaid scavengers who parade the streets, doing their work so silently and so perfectly that the municipality has passed a law by which an injury to one of them is a special crime and misdemeanour, heavily fined. These are the zopilotes, as the Mexicans call the American turkey-buzzards,—to kill one of which costs the murderer at least five dollars. Cadet branch of the vulture family, in their skinny bald heads, their rusty black moth-eaten feathers, their great splotchy claw-feet, their torn and ragged wings hanging loose and low, Nature has given them just the dress becoming such birds of hell. No! you did not believe birds could be so ugly, birds could have such hateful eyes, such splay feet, such blotchy beaks. They are everywhere: they perch on the cathedral towers, on the balconies of houses: they ride on the dustcarts, fight for the unspeakable in the gutters, tear at the rotting fish-head and settle in scores round the carcase of a dog. A score of them amble in front of you on the pavement, and hop their ungainly, hideous sideways hops as you spurn them, veritable birds of Beelzebub, Lord of Flies.

But Vera Cruz has good reason to thank heaven for her flying dustbins, and as they peer sideways at you out of their blinking rheumous eyes they seem to know it. "We don't fear you, passer," you could imagine them saying (though one of the uncanniest facts about these awful birds is that they have no cry: they are as silent as the dead they filch and feast on), "we are an essential part of this earth-hell: we are the Devil's bailiffs." You see the birds in other Mexican towns and cities: you see them in Yucatan perched on the walls of haciendas or in the woods wrenching at the hide of a rotting cow, but they never seem to personify evil as at Vera Cruz. And there is evil there! There is vice in the air. Round the town clings an indescribable haunting sense of sin—sin which is swinish and foul—not the dazzling vice of a Semiramis Court, the glorified debaucheries of a Capri, but a dreary, drink-sodden, fetid sin, clinging to the town like the noisome smell of a charnel-house. Not that you see it. "There ain't no Ten Commandments" at Vera Cruz; but you don't see them broken: you simply feel they don't exist. Outward decorum here, as in most Mexican towns, is a feature. Street women are banished to a special quarter, and the shops are cleanly compared with some of Paris in the Rue de Rivoli or the Boulevard de Montmartre. But the women and men, the girls and the boys, have such faces and eyes that you feel that anything, everything, is possible. Perhaps we do "the New City of the True Cross" injustice. All trade-centres where the foreign sailor comes are much of a muchness. We simply record our impressions. "Peradventure there be seven good men in Vera Cruz." There are probably many score more, but one cannot help wishing the streets did not smell so rancid.

Time was so much the essence of our tour that we decided to travel by the night train to Moctezuma's capital—where our chief business was the procuring of passports—despite the lamentations of acquaintances who assured us we were throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime—the sight of the train's climb of 8,000 feet in the sunlight. As it proved, we had perhaps in some ways a really more awe-inspiring night spectacle; for the moon, which had bathed the tropic seas night after night for us in such gorgeous silver, had but just passed its full the very day of our arrival in port.

When the tepid night settled down upon the plaza, we made a hurried meal and, leaving the crowd still drinking, made our way to the station. There are two trains every twenty-four hours each way between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, and a few minutes after we reached the platform the day train from the capital came lumbering in, the bell on its huge Atlantic type of engine ringing mournfully. The same train starts back within a few minutes—the engines only being changed—and the narrow platform was quite the wrong place for the dreamer during the next few moments, with the crowds clambering out of the huge corridor cars and a mob of would-be passengers fighting to get in. In the mêlée one of us slipped between the train and the platform, while the train was still slowly moving, but was withdrawn by a friendly arm before the oncoming bogey-wheel had passed over his foot and put a summary end to explorations in Yucatan.

Railway fares in Mexico are cheap, and the carriages are nasty. Seats of green leather with metal arm-rests (invention of railway-devil, surely) are ranged, like the seats on a bus-top, each side of the car with an avenue down the centre. A Pullman sleeping and breakfast compartment always form part of the night trains. Otherwise there are firsts, seconds, and thirds, the latter wooden-benched contrivances, designed apparently with the set purpose of getting into the cubic space available the wherewithal for as much potential human discomfort as possible. Into these cars the Mexicans and Indians are climbing, a river of strange colour—blankets of all shades and stripes, straw steeple hats of every make for the men, the womenfolk bareheaded always—baskets of fruit and breads, bottles of drink, and queer knotted handkerchief-luggage reminiscent—without their cleanliness, though—of those blue and black silk handkerchiefs in which "Jack" brings along his spare jumper and flannel shirt when he "comes home again." For us in our lordly "first"—its floors stained with a myriad expectorations, its cushions bumpy and springless—there is gathering a motley gang of Mexico's upper ten, among whom the diabolical bowler hat and those impossible tweeds, which the foreigner, imitating our fashions, raises God knows where, predominate over the Mexican dress. A minute before we start our most interesting fellow-passenger arrives—a young man—his straw steeple hat set rakishly on one side, his red-white-and-blue blanket thrown round him and under one ear—closely followed by two dark-garbed Mexicans. He is a prisoner, of whom more later, and, as the whistle sounds, we see that his companions are engaged in making him comfortable for the night by mooring him with glistening steel handcuffs to the metal arm-rest of his seat.

We steam out into the still night air, the heavy train bumping and jolting over level-crossings where stand groups of Mexican poor, children, and dogs; past rows of adobe huts, palm-thatched, and frowsy little tiendas (general shops), where glimpses are caught in the oil-flare of trays of unspeakable eatables. It is stifling in the carriages, and we throw up the windows. The moon is rising, the night air is warm and scented—scented with a strange pungent, spicy scent—an indescribable perfume—the smell of the tropics. The train rolls heavily on between dark masses of bush and stunted cactus, topped by waving palm-leaves, and here and there banana plantations, heavy with the grass-green fruit. This is the tierra-caliente, "the hot-lands," the great belt of steaming miasmic country stretching some fifty miles ere we begin the climb up to the highlands of Central Mexico. It is hard to see much, but that long slope of undulating ground out there to the left is a coffee plantation, the dark-green bushes dotting the rounded hillside like tufts of wool on a Bushman's head. Now the train crawls, as a fly on the edge of a teacup, round a fertile crater-like valley. You can look right down into its green glories, where mid the leaves the moonlight touches into quicksilver the boisterous river which bubbles and froths like a Scotch stream in spate. Now we pass through acres of forest banking up each side so high that it is all blackness; while every few miles the mournful tolling of the engine bell heralds us into a wayside village, the lights streaming through the doors of whitewashed huts, and Indians, muffled to their eyes in blankets, standing in silent groups by the railside.

At Rio Blanco we rattle past a great cotton factory, its myriad lights twinkling into such a confusion of illumination that it looks like a swarm of fireflies hovering amid the darkened houses and huts of the town. For hours afterwards we are to see those twinkling lights, thousands of feet below us in the valley, ever shifting their position as the train winds its way round and again round the vast wooded sides of the mountain range. This factory at Rio Blanco is one of the largest cotton factories in Mexico, and during a recent winter was the scene of one of those terrible "incidents" which prove how really superficial is the civilisation of Mexico. The Company objected to their workmen buying their provisions at the ordinary town stores and started a tienda of their own, where the goods sold were both more expensive and of inferior quality. An order was issued that in future the "hands" must deal at the Company's store. The men objected and went on strike. From the capital comes down General Martinez, Vice-Secretary for War, thenceforward to be known as "the Mexican Trepoff," and in one morning his troops shoot down in cold blood 214 men loitering in the streets of Rio Blanco. Enough that the "Iron Master" ordered it. No one disputes the yea or the nay of Porfirio Diaz, maker of Modern Mexico. So the strike is over: labour is scarce in Rio Blanco for a week or so; and Trepoff-Martinez travels back to the capital to ride his fine Arab in Chapultepec Park and spend his evenings at cards in the Jockey Club.

But for the time we lose sight of the factory. We are nearing the limits of the hot-lands, and as you stare out into the night, barrener hills and mounds, stone-speckled, are closing in on each side. Beyond them and above them, blacker distant masses climb into the moonlit sky, ringing round the landscape ahead till it looks as if our train, landlocked, will soon have to come to a standstill. The plains, rich with their harvests of cotton and coffee, of fruits, sugar-cane and olives, have given place all round to mountains; and as we wind forward, heights, rising mysterious, magical, wall us in from the rear till we seem as if we were caught in a black devil's-punch-bowl. And then, like the fitting knell to the apprehensive traveller's thoughts, the doleful engine bell clangs sorrowfully backwards and forwards, and the great train rolls into the station of Orizaba. Here in a bare stone-floored barn-room a grossly obese Mexican (like the camel, he seems to have two or three stomachs, his striped leather-belted cotton vest shows such huge undulations of adipose tissue), assisted by a sickly yellow Indian lad, swaddled in a red and white striped blanket, serves coffee, good coffee too, and pan dulce, sweet bread, crusted with caraway seeds. And here, too, the great climbing engines are awaiting us, snorting and blowing off steam like angered bulls eager to charge the toreador-hills which blot out the world ahead of us. We need both, for the train is to be cut into two—one engine will not carry us safely up the perilous slope—and the Pullman carriages in a few minutes rumble out ahead of us.

We have struck up a friendship with the car-conductor—a half-blood nigger from Cuba, and a delightful companion, who speaks English well and has already told us more about Mexico than a dozen encyclopedia articles, and as, munching a last mouthful of roll, we climb into our car, he gives us a friendly warning to be on the look-out in some fifteen minutes for a queer sight, the Pullman half of the train climbing the mountains above us. If you think of a mountain and then draw round it in your mind a spiral line as if it was a vast cone-shaped screw, you will gain an idea of what the two trains were going to do. They were going to wind up from the valley round and round the scalped faces of the mountains to a height of 8,000 feet above sea-level. Six thousand feet of this alpine work is done in fifteen miles of rail after leaving Orizaba Station during a space of two hours! A gradient of one in thirteen and a fifth! It is pleasant to remember that this miracle of engineering skill was achieved by Englishmen, and that in the long years since, so perfect was their work, no serious accident has ever occurred.

The engine soon gets to grips with its titan task. Over us on the right we see the vast mountains close,—towering upward as a huge wave looms above the swimmer sunk in its trough,—those eternal hills up to the barren fastnesses of which the gallant Cortes and his five hundred climbed four centuries ago, after he had destroyed his boats at Vera Cruz that there might be no looking backward. Slowly we wind round the base of the mountain, then we bend back again on a new spiral till the lights of Orizaba Station twinkle ahead of us instead of behind us. Once more round and the cars tilt outward, outward, till it seems we are at an impossible angle if we are to keep the metals. Two or three more spirals, and we have won this first hill, and here is our next monster; and as we bend round the last of the conquered one you look right across the valley, hundreds of feet deep, to where absolutely opposite is the meagre metal band running round the face of the still higher hill. Talk of horse-shoe curves! So acute seems the bend that one wonders how the most perfect bogey-wheels can take it. But we do take it, till we in the front cars seem to be looking right into the hinder ones where huddle in the dim light Indians as tightly packed as sardines in a tin. The grinding of the brakes; the short sharp pants of the engine, the fierce glare from its opened furnace, the figures of the stokers silhouetted ink-black against the flame-red; the slow creak-creak as the wheels turn and turn again to an ever new curve, make a scene unparalleled. Every few minutes sinister figures, slouch-hatted, scarlet blankets thrown round them to chin-height, men who in the dim light look terrifyingly brigand-like, pass through the cars, in their hands swinging lamps. These are the brake-men—two to a car—upon whose untiring nerve the safety of the train largely hangs.

And now as we enter upon a new curve, sure enough right above, like some giant glow-worm creeping sluggish up the hill, is the Pullman half of our train. We have just caught sight of it, and it twinkles on the curve ahead and twists and contorts itself round the hill till it seems to be doubling back upon us. At one moment we are on the same curve, and not a quarter of a mile separates the two trains. What if the Pullman brakes gave? And then it has twisted itself out of our sight, only to reappear a moving gleam of light in the black woodlands overhead. But look eastward! What a sight! We have climbed over two thousand feet now, and far below us stretch limitless the moonlit hot-lands. It is all black, that distance, save where, a bed of light, the cotton factory of Rio Blanco steals into view beneath that hill on the right. Now it twinkles ahead, now behind us. Now we seem running past it again, but infinitely far away; and then we lose it altogether and bend into a dark curve between two hills. As we lean out of the windows the car tilts till we see no permanent way beneath us. We look sheer down into a gorge which cannot be less than five hundred feet deep. Away down there we see what are huge trees: they look shrubs; a wide river which seems a brook, broken here and there by waterfalls over rocks, as large as houses, which look mere pebbles. Against the silvered sky rise, jagged-toothed, line upon line of hills, roughly pointed, the cone shape of volcanoes, and as we twist out of the black gorge—greatest sight of all!—rises the vast apex of Orizaba, dwarfing the meaner masses around, her snowy peak silvered by the moon into a diamond-brightness. Looking out across that world of hills upon that queenly height one understands why men have worshipped mountains.

But while we have been dodging from window to window like village schoolboys on a treat-day, the lamps of the car have been shrouded in green-baize hoods, and our Mexican fellow-travellers, indifferent to Orizaba's majesty and the angle of the carriages, have stretched themselves into all sorts of uneasy attitudes on the Procrustean seats, and sleep. Even our good conductor, weary of cigarettes, has turned up his collar, and with folded arms nods his peak-capped head till he is to be roused by the jolting of the train into Esperanza. And it is getting cold. Blasé with the wonders of the climb, we close the windows and, unbuckling portmanteaux, gratefully wrap ourselves into rugs and ulsters.

But our companions are not all sleeping. There are two of them very wide awake, and they have much reason to be. The prisoner and his guard face each other, smoking cigarettes, while the odd detective sleeps on the next seat, his head pillowed on a thick hooded cloak rolled military fashion. It is an armed peace between the guarded and the guardian, and it is presently to develop into almost open war. But first a little of the prisoner's history, and then for a look at him.

Vera Cruz State is rich in criminals, and you can get yourself murdered very cheaply round about there. This fellow would have done it for you for the ridiculous sum of two shillings (a dollar); but he can't oblige you now, for he is going up to Mexico City to be shot. He is only twenty-eight, yet he has committed six murders "on his own," and has had as his accomplice in other crimes an older man, already in the hands of the authorities, who is credited with twenty! This latter criminal, long "wanted," was locally known as El Tigre (The Tiger), and, cornered at last, he suspected, as such knaves will, that his young friend had given him away. So he gave as good as he thought he had got—such information to the police as has resulted in that queerly small delicate hand over there being anchored by nasty cold steel to the iron seat.

They are queerly delicate hands. We have seen him stroke his black hair with the free one, and you would have taken it for a woman's, so light was the build of the fingers, so small the darkened blue of the nails. But if his claws are frail, he is a monster in very truth. His six murders have been callous butcher-work enough. He has shot a pedlar for the wretched dollar in his wallet; he has battered the brains out of an aged traveller for half as much again, and for the Indian girl whom he had made his mistress he had nothing but a knife buried to its hilt in the soft brown breast which beat with love of this human fiend. Let us pass down the car under pretext of necessity, and have a good look at him. A rounded boyish face, black-browed, his dark eyes shaded by rich black lashes, a full red sensuous mouth, bitten in at the corners in a way which tells its tale of cynical, sensual selfishness, and shaded by a boy's growth of moustache, he has just the vicious beauty calculated to eat its way to the hearts of tropic maids, who like their northern sisters long to have, but, unlike them, must have. But look at the shape of the bullet head and jutting brow! See the animal glare with which he meets your curious stare! There's the murderer. Ye gods! it is the face of a wolf as it lifts its grey muzzle, blood-spattered, from the lamb's bleeding carcase. There is no mercy in those eyes: he is the foe of all, he has ranged himself as enemy of mankind; and the jut of the skull suggests the truth—how impotent we are in moulding our lives; how we bring with us, ready written, the chapters of our eternal past to shape our passing present somehow, somewhere, by hook or by crook, into an escape into an eternal future. You would not dare say as you saw the radiant man's health in him, the beauty of his flesh, that he was a lost soul. But heavens! what a climb he has before him, a climb at which these climbing engines of our train are as water-babies toddling over sand-castles on the beach.

It was queer to watch him, to thus spend the night with a murderer, such a murderer! It was fascinating to try to imagine his thoughts. Really he seemed to have none; perhaps it was mercifully so ordained. No human brain could surely bear a realisation of such crimes as his. A mental numbness, Nature's anodyne, must overtake the brutal criminal, like the sullen drowsiness of the man-eating tiger in his cage. He sat there, nonchalantly puffing at interminable cigarettes which his captor handed him, his red-white-and-blue blanket thrown round his shoulders and contrasting vividly with the yellow-whiteness of the neck and dead-black of his cropped head. He knew he was going to be shot.... But stay! Not so fast! Perhaps he didn't. What's this? The detective leaps up, the sleeping one wakes: they have sprung on the blanketed figure. What's all the matter? Simply that as the young brute smoked and chatted he has twisted and twisted his lithe, small hand till it slips from the jarvies, and he sits there, as the train rolls heavily onward through the mountain gorges, ready in a minute to spring out of the car-window and be lost in the woods. But he is too late. Some jerk of the manacled arm has aroused suspicion. The blanket is whipped off. The steel band snaps again on that delicate wrist. The two detectives close up at his sides. He says nothing; he never flinches, never moves. He has gambled with his life and lost: now he has lost again, that's all; that and the ounce of lead which awaits his savage heart in Mexico. He motions that he will sleep, and as the train rattles into Esperanza and the chilling air from the mountains makes your teeth chatter, he lies sound asleep, his cruel face, almost beautiful in repose, pillowed on his rounded arm.

There are more coffee and sweet rolls to be had at Esperanza, what time the climbing engine is unhooked and car-conductors—their collars to their ears—stamp their feet and, cabman-fashion, beat their breasts to keep warm. And then we are off again, this time fairly on the level, for though we have still two thousand feet to climb ere we reach the dreary plains around the capital, we have more than 150 miles in which to do it. It is between one and two, and in the past six hours the temperature has fallen thirty-five or forty degrees. We are glad to have the windows closed, save at the quaint little Indian towns where on the low platforms stand rows of Mexican porters looking for all the world like a chorus of conspirators in a comic opera, their blankets drawn right across their faces and mouths, yashmak-fashion, their steeple hats towering black in the starlight.

For the next two hours or so the uplands roll dark and unbroken around us. A cloud-mist lies on the country, and the brilliancy of the moon seems fading. And then of a sudden—or was it that we had slept awhile?—there climbs into the sky the herald star, Hesperus. Have you watched many dawns? Have you noticed how Hesperus seems to put all other stars out, like the lamplighter on his early morning visit to the street lamps? He glitters so radiantly that positively the heavens seem one star and a few light specks, and even the moon looks paler. He is blazing his brightest now, a yellow-golden light like some giant Brazilian diamond, and there, away there, far across the mountain tops, the Wolf's Tail sweeps the horizon. The mist is rising, rolling away; far off the shadowy hills lighten from black to grey, the sinking cloud-banks are embroidered with a golden fringe, and the dim morning light steals into the frowsy, dusty car, outlining the sleeping figures, exposing with an unwelcome frankness the up-all-night look of our unkempt neighbours, twisted into uncouth positions in their uneasy sleep.

"...And in the East
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn."

Awful it is in its majesty—this waking of the sleeping world. It is awful on the Essex marshes or viewed from a mean window in Clapham. But here, what a spectacle! Heaped up, mass upon mass, the mountains took the glad signal, blushing their grey tops into rose. Far behind us looms Orizaba, no longer diamond-cold in her chastity of snow, but roseate with a delicate pink, the tint of the neck-feathers of a wood-dove. Then the rose of the sky turns to crimson, and far to our left the twin peaks of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl, towering above the nearer ranges, don crimson crowns on their snow. In the months that were to come we were destined to see many a dawn in many varied scenes. We were to watch from a small sailing-boat the chill gold gleams steal over the face of the ocean towards us; camped in some ruined temple we were to see "the swift footsteps of the lovely light" sweep over miles of grey-green woodland, reddening the carved porches and façades of palace and shrine, majestic in their grey ruin; we were to wake in tropic forest to find the first glories of the sun darting beams at us through arcades of tree network, turning the myriad dewdrops on the leaves and branches into translucent diamonds; but the wonder of that dawn amid Mexico's volcanoes has never had, can never have, for us a rival spectacle.

With the light the face of the country altered as if the wand of an agricultural wizard had been waved over it. The deep rich greens of the hot-lands had gone. Instead were wide stretches of stony upland, barren wastes of moor, spotted with swamp, hedged in by great scarped spikes of volcanic grey stone, and by huge bald bluffs under which nestled here and there clusters of adobe huts built round the plain white stone churches standing in gardens shaded by olive and orange trees and bright with the red-flowered wild pepper-bush. At the side pathetic little cemeteries, the rudely cut wooden crosses on the graves fluttering their faded coloured-paper wreaths and withered flowers. And here, waving pale in the early light, are acres and acres of maguey, the giant cactus rising more than man's height, from which is crushed out pulque, the national drink of Mexico, a milky liquid tasting like sour ginger-beer. And between these miles of cactus and stone are fields yellowing with Indian corn, the picturesque figures of the Indian harvesters, grouped round a mule-waggon or standing idle, sickle in hand, to watch our train, brightening the landscape with their scarlet blankets. Mexico's world is very much astir now, and, as we pull up at the next station, scores of Indian women and girls, slatterns most, stand perilously near the wheels, stretching out to the passengers at the passing windows trays of weird foods, chopped meats wedged between ungainly, underdone tortillas (the Indian maize biscuit bread), and the skinny, cooked limbs of very much disarticulated fowls, sour-looking oranges and half-ripe bananas, with tins of watery milk. On the platforms everywhere stood rurales—country police—cloaked to the chin in bright scarlet blankets, beneath which showed the tight grey trousers, silver-laced, and the bright, burnished sheath of a sword, their hats sugar-loaf shaped felts of grey ornamented with the metal numbers of their district. In their hand, the butt end resting on the ground, they hold a rifle. These fellows, in their tight breeches and neat monkey-jackets of grey tailed at their waists like an Eton boy's, are fine figures, one of the living testimonies to President Diaz's prudence; for they have one and all been recruited from the ranks of those hordes of brigands which thirty years back made Mexico the warmest place in the world to travel in.

UNLOADING BANANAS, TAMPICO.

RURALES (MOUNTED POLICE) AT VERA CRUZ.

And now we are on the plain of Mexico, ringed round with small cone-shaped hills, a plain of burnt-up grass on which small stunted cattle, horses and donkeys were wandering, disconsolate, to find the greenest spots. Here and there is a swampy place, and round where the water had dried the slaty blue soil showed up in patches broken by the giant flat-faced, oval leaf of the Nopal cactus, which is to Mexico what the rose is to England, figuring in the national arms—viz. an eagle perched on the Nopal with a writhing snake in its talons. By the rail side runs a dusty road, and along this trot Indians, the men with packs on their backs, the women with babies slung on their backs, while shabby dogs scout around the party. Here is a waggon drawn by two mules jolting into the suburban markets, and there is a mule loaded with empty pulque-tins, his master seated literally on the animal's tail, returning from his midnight visit to Moctezuma's city. It is all very picturesque, and a little sad, as we rumble past the shabby Indian wayside huts, and tiny brown boys and girls stand naked in the stony gardens to wave us a greeting. All the Indians on the plain here look so unprosperous, and the starved, ignoble nature of the place adds to one's impression of the desolate life of a once great race.

But now we are nearing the plain's edge. Sparse huts of adobe and the tents of rags stretched on crossed poles are giving place to stone houses. Pretentious churches, gardens rich with fruit trees, mills and factories, sidings occupied by heavily loaded luggage-trains, and the crowds which board our cars at each station mark our approach to Mexico City. We rattle on through miles of squalid suburbs, over level crossings where frowsy gatherings of half-naked Indian women and children watch, with animal apathy, the progress of the train, till as eight strikes we enter the city lying within a ring of volcanic hills.

Viewed from the car window there is nothing in the least impressive about Mexico City. A dreary stretch of commonplace Spanish houses, flat-roofed, unrelieved by cupola or minaret, by tower or spire. The station is as dull: a melancholy wooden structure, oval-roofed, somewhat like the biggest engine-house at Crewe or Swindon. The first hint that we are in a most unpromising land is the discovery that there is no refreshment-room where breakfast can be had. But the Mexicans, we remember, do not breakfast, and a shabby yellow door labelled "Café" leads into a very squalid room where, at a wooden table, cups of coffee and a basket of yesterday's or the day before yesterday's rolls are brought to us by a slatternly big-bosomed Mexican dame, who has not yet washed or combed her hair, and whose dirty, ungirt, betrained cotton dress and cloth slippers, trodden down at the heels, make an unattractive picture.

There are three types of cabs in Mexico City; the blue, the red, and the yellow. The first charges the unwary voyager a dollar (two shillings) for one and three-quarter miles, for which the red's fee is but half. In cleanliness and comfort there is nothing to choose between the two. The yellow cab is pestilential, as its fluttering quarantine paper flag suggests. It is ramshackle and verminous, and, having earned an ill-name, is dying out, destined soon to be as extinct as the dodo. We hired a red cab, and rattled off through cobbled streets, lined with small shops, broad, well-pavemented but garbage-littered, into the heart of the city.

[CHAPTER II]
MEXICO CITY AND THE MEXICANS

Mexico city is a combination of Spanish squalor and Paris-cum-New-York civilisation—very lightly veneered over in some places. It is some five miles across, but its business life centres in a square mile. The busiest streets are narrow—such as the Calle San Francisco, which is as narrow as Cheapside and just as full of traffic. Mexico is thoroughly cosmopolitan, and this is particularly noticeable in the matter of trade. Thirty per cent. of the large shops and stores are American, English and French; the greatest trading concerns are run by American capital; railway and steamship offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, land and mining companies, are in the majority of cases staffed and engineered by foreigners. In the main streets typical Spanish buildings have given way to often quite sky-scraping erections of obvious American build—eight or nine-storeyed masses of flats and offices.

The most insistent impression one brings away from the city is the constantly vivid contrast of an ostentatious civilisation (it is as superficial as the breeding of a parvenu, as forced as the frigid air of superiority of a suburban grande dame) with an Indian barbarism. Wealth and luxury rub shoulders with the abject and savage poverty of the wandering Indian poor. In the city of his forefathers, metamorphosed beyond all recognition, the Indian lags superfluous—spectral, a very Banquo at the feast. You walk in the Calle San Francisco on wonderfully laid pavements, past shops a-glitter with jewels which would not shame the gem windows of the Boulevard des Italiens, past restaurants—veritable maisons dorées, with ornate porticoes in which stalwart Spanish doorkeepers in gold-laced uniforms swing open the portals of these gastronomic paradises for dames of high degree. You watch an everlasting procession of wonderful carriages, glittering with veneer, the black or white Arab horses curving glorious necks adorned with silver and brass chains and trappings, and ... just under your very nose, crawling out of the gutter to save his wretched blistered foot from that rubber-tyred wheel, is such a blend of filth and poverty as only a great luxurious city has the secret of manufacturing. Desolate, his lank, uncombed black hair smarmed with sweat on his grimy forehead, a blanket which you would gladly pay a sovereign not to touch thrown round the stooping shoulders, ragged cotton drawers, tightening at the calf—coolie fashion—and slit and rent in half a dozen places, showing the dull, brown-red skin beneath, the thin, hunger-haunted face all cheek-bones and lustreless black eyes, the descendant of Moctezuma's warrior shambles and halts down the gutter edge. The Mexican beauty, stepping daintily from that victoria, enamelled in rich cobalt blue and black, to enter the French glove-shop, pulls her silken skirts tighter round her plump figure. Was it for the benefit of that passing dandy, or did she really condescend to see the Horror in the gutter? It's nothing, Señorita: just a "noble savage" after a few centuries of civilisation.

In buildings of any really striking architectural beauty Mexico City is curiously poor. The Iturbide Hotel—once the palace of the Emperor Iturbide—is a fine example of the best Spanish house-building, with its carved façade, its charmingly cool, balconied patio and its dignified pillared stairways. The National Palace, at the gateways of which stand shuffling, squat, unbusinesslike-looking Mexican soldiers—is a two-storeyed quadrangular mass of yellow stone with no feature of note—about as ornamental as the Privy Council Office in Whitehall. It faces on the chief plaza, and thus confronts the cathedral—greatest disappointment of all.

Pictures of this huge petrified triumph of Catholicism over Sun Worship (for the church was built on the site of Moctezuma's gorgeous Temple of the Sun) give a very false impression of grandeur. We had heard, too, much of the marvels within. Nothing could be more disappointing. Perhaps the pile suffers somewhat from its environment. The Grand Plaza is not grand at all. It has no architectural merits; it is crowded with rows of tramcars and bordered by mean-looking shops in stuffy arcades. Round the cathedral run pavements bordered by poorly kept flower-beds and ragroofed booths, and then within the cathedral close is a yard half cobble, half mangy grass, wherein squat or sleep innumerable beggars, fruit-sellers, lottery-ticket vendors, the very riff-raff of the capital. The railings are broken in places, advertisement posters and street-boy scrawlings disfigure the church walls, large pieces of the surface of which are broken away. Polite language forbids a description of what the surface of this God's acre is like: suffice it to say that the indescribably filthy habits of the Mexicans render it no place for the unwary walker. To an Englishman this precinct of their greatest church, so vivid a contrast with the velvety lawns and cleanly sanctity of such a cathedral precinct as that at Westminster Abbey, is eloquent of the Mexican character.

The cathedral itself is a gigantic erection, but there is nothing in the least pleasing about it. It seems a hotchpotch of architectural styles (it was near a century a-building), like a dog with no pedigree, or perhaps with too much pedigree—a little bit of everything and the rest church. To any one who has stood in the roar of London's traffic on Ludgate Hill and looked eastward upon the superb grey severity of St. Paul's, such a building can mean little. But step inside, and it is worse, far worse. What is it which so often makes the interiors of even the larger Catholic churches so vulgar? It must be the gilt and colour, the ostentatious striving after effect, the prostitution of what should be divinely chaste to the lewd sensuality of the eye. Catholicism is a sensuous creed. It has been said a million times, and it is a million times true. The sincerely godly man should be able to worship his Maker as well on the top of a Camberwell omnibus as in a cathedral. Catholicism, cynical, knows the sincerely godly are few and far between, and she holds her children to her by a tawdry dazzle, an incensed meretriciousness. The interior of Mexico Cathedral was one of the vulgarest sights it has ever been our misfortune to look on. It was rankly, irretrievably vulgar. The great reredos towered towards the domed roof, a shameless sheet of dazzling gold. Your eyes ached at it. It may have cost £300,000, but to the true lover of churches it was worth about twopence-halfpenny. The walls blazoned with gold-framed pictures of the Virgin and Saints, not one, not two, but dozens, like the ill-assorted pictures in a pork-packing millionaire's dining-room. The merits of the paintings, if they had any, were lost in the nauseating gold of their heavy frames. Croesus never loathed the precious metal as we did, when, shading our eyes, we gazed up at the abominable background of the High Altar. Smaller altars there were everywhere around: innumerable saints in tawdry metal crowns fluttered frowsy linens; coarsely realistic pictures of the Passion made you blush for your Catholic fellow-creatures. Canopies of satin and brocade over episcopal stalls and gilded marble pulpits brought to one's mind the irony of it all: the gorgeous-vestmented priests daring to ape vicegerency for Him who bade His ministers "go forth neither with purse nor scrip." "Verily they toil not neither do they spin; yet Solomon," etc. Yes, right there on the ill-laid pavement kneels an Indian—his arms outspread, his fanatic eyes lifted in an ecstasy of faith to the gilding. He and thousands like him—"the hungry sheep, look up and are not fed"; but the shepherds take care that the flocks feed them. They have always got their cut of juicy mutton. Mexico is not alone. Alas! Sacerdotalism has its dupes in every land. We walked out into the sunshine, glad to remember that we had stood in the wonderful Abbey nave, our eyes restful with its glorious grey chastity, our hearts stilled with that holy calm which seems to bring so much nearer "the peace of God which passeth all understanding."

But if Mexico is poor in buildings, she has features which certainly entitle her to be called a great city. The superb Paseo (there are others, but fine as they are they are dwarfed beside it) would alone make a capital. Between two and three hundred feet wide, lined with a double row of trees and beautifully kept flower-beds, its course broken, here and there, by circuses where stand noble statues centring lawns of velvety turf, it sweeps northward, a majestic thoroughfare, towards Chapultepec—the Mexican Hyde Park—where stands the Castle (it does not look like one), the summer residence of grim Porfirio Diaz. Nothing can be finer than the view up this noble roadway, and praise is due to authorities who have ordained that the banal electric tramcars shall take with them into side streets the blighting vulgarity of their whizzing bustle. At the entrance to the Paseo the cars turn humbly into side turnings running parallel with this monarch of highways.

Another beautiful feature are the private houses. Along the Paseo and in the broad avenidas which branch off it are residences which really deserve the adjective "ideal." Two-storeyed, flat-roofed, solid and yet not pawky in their solidity, as most small buildings built substantially are in danger of becoming; charming in their simplicity of design; the long windows barred with artistically wrought iron; green sun-blinds drawn within; no basements, no areas, but raised solid some three feet from the ground-level and approached by a short flight of steps; they look like summerhouses of cool stone set in the frame of their exquisite tropic gardens. You never see their occupants (the rich Mexicans, especially the women, never walk out or show themselves until the hour for driving in the Paseo or Chapultepec Park arrives), but you envy them these charming dwellings. They are the very antipodes of the cheap, run-up-anyhow heaps of bricks and mortar which we are too often content to call houses.

The Mexican hotels are bad and expensive. Strictly speaking, they are not hotels at all, but large pretentious "doss-houses"; for there are as a rule no restaurants attached, no attempt made to cater for the visitors, nor are there any public rooms for reading or writing. You hire a frowsy room, for which you may quite likely at such a place as the Hôtel de Jardin have to pay six dollars (twelve shillings) a night, and the most the management will do for you is to provide a cup of indifferent chocolate and a sweet roll in the morning, which matutinal orgy, of course, is not included in the room rent. You must "hunt" your food elsewhere. This has its advantages, but it has also grave disadvantages, particularly as Mexico City is poorly equipped with reasonably cheap, clean, eating-places; and after a week or so you get restive and long for the coffee-room comforts of those residential palaces, the English hotels. Nowhere in the world are hotels, surely, so perfect as in England, so cheap, so homely, the staff so courteous. Nowhere has the traveller lavished on him so many little comforts and etceteras of daily life, the sumptuous reading-rooms, the writing conveniences, all of which he never really appreciates till he is condemned to live for a while among "hotel savages." We had been warned, too, of darker horrors in Mexican hotels than the lack of an honest breakfast or an easy-chair in which to read one's letters. Unbidden guests shelter in even first-class establishments and nightly feast on the visitors. So we stayed at the only decent hotel in the city—according to all reports—the new American Hotel St. Francis at the city end of the Paseo. This had a restaurant attached, where excellent food was served to us by a perfectly charming Indian waiter, whose smile at our attempts to talk to him was "sweetness and light." He was not handsome—he had all the worst features of the Mongolian type—high cheek-bones, flattish face; but when that man smiled, well, you just felt a new optimism in the inherent goodness of human nature steal on you. The St. Francis was built Spanish fashion with a courtyard, the rooms facing on to three galleries, the courtyard forming a lounge. As far as comfort went it was nowhere in comparison with the commercial hotels in the provincial towns in England, but it sustained its reputation of being free from vermin, and one's bed linen was changed every day.

The climate of the city is very trying for any one with heart weakness. Indeed, to even the robust the rarefied air at such a vast height as 8,000 feet brings a perpetual sense of being fagged out, and a disagreeably insistent panting at the least exertion. We found all the English residents suffered from a perpetual malaise, the "tired feeling" of the tonic advertisements. Curiously enough, too, the immense altitude, so far exceeding that of Davos Platz, does not protect the phthisical and weak-lunged. The death rate from lung diseases is terrific. The days are hot and the nights are often so cold that you must wear your thickest overcoat or run the risk of pneumonia. A queer result of this is that the streets are quite empty soon after dark. Till nine you will see a few Indians, only their eyes visible above their blankets, straggling along, or a Mexican in closed carriage will dash past. But later the place becomes a city of the dead. Coming back from a dinner we walked through street after street and never saw a soul (it was only 10.30) save the police, who stand in the middle of the roads, a lighted lantern on the ground between their boots.

The city is patrolled after dark by the Republican Guard, mounted on sturdy Mexican cobs and armed with Winchesters, heavy revolvers, and swords. These men stand no nonsense, and the consequence is that outwardly the capital is one of the most orderly in the world. You scarcely ever see a brawl, you never hear a voice raised in anger; and yet the police are not officious. They do not fidget or bustle: they are everywhere, but they are not obtrusive, and they are certainly most courteous. We asked the way of one, and he directed us. Some fifty yards on we heard some one running behind us, and turned to see, with astonishment, the officer, who with many bows explained that he thought we might have misunderstood, so he had run after us to personally put us in the way. Surely politeness could no further go! Imagine a twenty-stone City constable "sprinting" after a Frenchman who desired to study the architectural glories of "Ze house of ze Lor Maire"! There is no doubt we English are phlegmatic.

If a fight takes place in the streets, the police arrest everybody, not only the principals and their seconds, but all the spectators. Thus a perfectly harmless paterfamilias trudging back to his home, yielding for a minute to the curiosity inherent in us all and peering over the heads of the crowd at the struggling men, may find himself marched off to the lock-up, where he must spend the night—for there is no bail system; and next morning he is dragged off before a magistrate as an accessory to a street row and fined according to the lying capacities of the police officers concerned. In Mexico you must play the Levite and "pass by on the other side."

The streets are at all times a human kaleidoscope: the dandy in European dress; the smart Mexican horsemen in tasselled riding gear clattering down the road; the trim cowboy with his grey trousers fitting like an eel's skin, silver-buttoned, a coloured silk scarf round his neck, his head adorned with steeple felt; the wizened Indian beldames in saffron or blue cottons squatting at the church doors stretching out skinny yellow hands for alms; tiny Indian girls carrying still tinier brothers and sisters, and at every street corner bareheaded Indian matrons at trestle stalls whereon are sweetmeats and fruits for sale. One of the queerest sights are the funeral cars. Every corpse must by law be buried within twenty-four hours of death, and almost all day long the procession of tramcars is interrupted by the passing of the only type of hearse they have in the capital, a hideous black and white contrivance fitted with tram-wheels with three doors in a row admitting to three shelves upon which the coffins stand. The poorer folk go to the cemetery thus pigeonholed, the rich have a tram hearse which has a glass cover so that the coffin can be seen. All day these monstrosities run out of the city followed by a black-painted tramcar for the mourners. The cemeteries are many miles out of the city and these mournful trams follow the ordinary ones, a perpetual reminder to the gay crowds of the vanity of human joys. At nightfall the streets are picturesque in the extreme with the Indian handcarts and mule barrows carrying paper lanterns (for every vehicle must have a light after dark), with the weirdly quaint muffled figures of the Indians showing up in the fitful gleams.

We must say a word about the Museum. It is a building just out of the cathedral plaza, and is approached through a pretty courtyard filled with palms and flowering shrubs. But within is the most melancholy medley and muddle which it is possible to conceive. With opportunities unexampled, with a wealth of treasures, the very finest of all Aztec and Mayan relics, the curators, if one must misuse the word so sadly, have proved themselves about as fit to arrange and govern a national museum as schoolboys. There is literally no order; apparently no intelligence at all has been exercised in the cataloguing of the exhibits; and the elementary precaution of labelling each object with its place and date of finding has been almost entirely ignored. Thus you come across a case of ancient pottery obviously of all ages and from all parts of the Republic, and this is called "Ancient Aztec Pottery," which a large part of it is certainly not. Case after case witnesses to this ineptitude. Nothing is labelled; or if it is, the label is patently incorrect. At the door stand two cases facing each other. One is called "Forged Pottery"; the other, "Genuine Pottery." Perhaps the egregious gentlemen who have laboured to spoil what might have been one of the most remarkable collections of an ancient civilisation existing will be surprised to hear that they have got forged pottery in the genuine case and vice versa. A typical catalogue entry is "279. Fragments of Toltec column"; or "281 to 283. Three stone blocks. It has been supposed that they formed part of gigantic caryatides"; or "286. El Indio Triste. Strange human sculpture of melancholy aspect"; or "93. Aztec Goddess Citlalinicue, according to Señor Troncoso. A square flat stone with interesting reliefs on its two chief faces." How illuminating to be sure!

Here is the world-famous Aztec Calendar Stone found in the plaza in 1790 during some levelling operations, and the wonderfully carved Stone of Sacrifice, also unearthed in the plaza a year later. Here, too, is the much debated Chac Mool statue which Dr. Le Plongeon, of whom and whose work we shall have occasion to speak later, found at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. In the galleries above there is a hotchpotch of exhibits ranging from a dreadfully poor picture of the Emperor Maximilian's footman, the hair of General D. Vicente Guerrero (it is to be feared that the world has long ago forgotten that he ever lost it), a "Marble Bath Tub made of a single block, said to have belonged to the Archduchess Carlotta," and "No. 63. Wooden Tub made of one piece, presented to the Archduchess by Col. Juan B. Campos," to a plaster cast of "the ideal man of Neanderthal," specimens of human skins tattooed, Japanese armour and two human bodies naturally mummified. In truth, it is a sorry spectacle, this National Museum of Mexico, and you wander out of its bewildering galleries full of regret at the reckless way in which a great chance has been thrown away; for no one can now hope to put right what has been done wrong or to make the exhibition a good one.

The electric tram service of the city is excellent, and for a few centavos you are transported miles into the many beautiful suburbs in which the capital rejoices. Fairest of these is Chapultepec and its park, where on a Sunday you can sit under the shade of giant laurels and cypresses and listen to the really excellent music of the band of the Republican Guard (the Mexican Life Guards). Chapultepec is historic. There in 1847 the military cadets made their renowned stand against the Americans, a glorious piece of fighting which is memorialised in a statue group—the names of the fallen lads engraved on the plinth. The castle—singularly un-castle-y—with somewhat the appearance of a glorified hydropathic, stands on a rock about 150 feet high (Chapultepec means "hill of the grasshopper"), the site of Moctezuma's summer palace. Beneath it lie the palace grounds intersected by shady drives and ornamental waters fringed with a wealth of flowering shrubs. From the height you get an unexampled view, down the superb drive of the Paseo, of the city ringed round with volcanic hills purpled with a sunny mist. To the gate of the park an endless procession of trams comes, filled to overflowing. Sunday is Chapultepec's great day, and all the sunny afternoon laughing, gaily dressed crowds file through the paths or linger round the bandstand; while the roadways are packed with slowly moving lines of wonderful carriages drawn by really fine animals; and on the shady unmacadamised edges of the carriageways canter as superb a collection of riding horses as it would be possible to see in any capital outside a horse show. There is no animal lovelier than a well-bred horse, and though the Mexican steeds are small, they are—at least the bulk of them in Chapultepec are—much Arabised and magnificent creatures. The brilliant gloss of their skins, the clear, soft shining eyes, the rhythmic power and grace of their limbs, the dainty perfection of their movements, made the human crowds around them look quite mean, even in their picturesque rainbow-hued clothes, for sartorial man is at best a sloven. As we gazed on those proud heads and silky manes, and watched the play of the muscles beneath the satin coats, we felt the irony of that human phrase "the lower animals."

Northward from the Castle the country breaks into sunny uplands bordered ten miles off by majestic masses of igneous rock, scarred and grey here, there green with sprawling cactus undergrowth and stunted tree. Long stretches of pampas grass, traversed by dusty roads, dispute possession of this suburban pleasaunce with plantations of maguey—vistas of dark, serried green broken here and there by a stone-built hacienda, a distant patch of dazzling white in the sun's glare, ringed in with laurels and evergreen oaks. It is a pretty picture, and you forgive the clouds of dust, which rise at the hoofs of that file of pulque mules and which envelop that herd of white goats shepherded by barefoot Indian lassies, for the wealth of sunlight which enriches the landscape. Under the deep shade of a hacienda portico a withered Indian woman squats Turk-fashion before baskets of luscious oranges. They are four a penny, these "golden apples," and with armfuls you perch yourself on the stone culvert of the little bridge spanning the brook, once a mountain torrent on those far-off hills, which gently murmurs through the maguey gardens, and lunch like gods for fourpence.

Burke could not "find it in his heart to impeach a nation," but one is sorely tempted to forget his advice in writing of the Mexicans. As a people they are disagreeable. They are fulsomely polite, but it is just that lip-service which sets the Englishman's back up. In his inimitable verse Kipling has pointed out how politeness "takes" the English.

Cock the gun that is not loaded,
Cook the frozen dynamite,
But oh! beware my people, when my people grow polite.

It is quite true. The Englishman saves his politeness for his enemies. The Mexicans are polite all the time, but beneath the veneer of this nauseating oleaginous manner it takes no shrewd observer to see that as a people they are possessed of the most unpleasant characteristics. They are immense procrastinators. The cry of the country is mañana (to-morrow) and mañana never comes, if they can help it. Our visit to the capital had as its object the obtaining of simple passports for the exploration of North-eastern Yucatan. Yet, though the British Minister very kindly interested himself in our tour and saw the President on the matter, it took eight days for us to get these simple documents. Every morning we had to waste hours at the Ministry of Public Instruction badgering the Under-Secretary of State to carry out the very instructions which we ourselves had heard given him days before by his chief. The circumlocution methods of our War Office have deservedly become a byword, but the amiable gentlemen who, like the fountains in Trafalgar Square, "play from ten till four" in Whitehall, are veritable miniature Roosevelts in strenuosity compared with Mexican officials. A typical instance of their methods was witnessed by us. We were waiting in the anteroom for our turn to see His Excellency the Minister when the Under-Secretary hurried out to inquire as to a letter sent to the department but which had never reached the Minister. A distinguished elderly official, seated at a massive desk, was engaged in smoking a cigarette and meditating on the Infinite between the puffs. He seemed quite pained when the Under-Secretary suggested he had forgotten anything. He had forgotten such a lot in his life that he felt he had a right to complain that such a trifle as a mislaid letter should be allowed to break the even tenor of his official hours. The Under-Secretary returned to his room, and the distinguished official (his conscience was evidently gnawing) looked suspiciously round and, believing we did not see, opened a drawer of his desk, out of which he took a bundle of unopened letters which appeared to represent the official mail of the department for the past fortnight. With an ivory paper-knife he ripped open one after the other, recklessly throwing them back unread into his drawer until he found the one he sought, when he bundled back the remainder unopened, and with a radiant expression of pleased surprise, as of a man who had made an entirely unforeseen discovery, he hastened into the Under-Secretary's room. The philosophic calm with which he lit a fresh cigarette, on his return, and sank once more into his padded chair, suggested that he had satisfied his superior, perhaps even himself, that the blame rested with one of those rascally clerks who were engaged at the time in a vigorous conversation on nothing in particular in the courtyard.

Until 1876, when upon his distracted country Porfirio Diaz, innkeeper's son and born ruler, descended as deus ex machina, the state of Mexico may be summed up in the words "rapine, murder, and sudden death." But though Mexico has had—and the bulk of her population has had reason during the past thirty years to thank her lucky stars for him—an "Iron Master," the quietude of the country is only skin-deep. Law and order is represented by a blend of a rough-and-ready justice, a sort of legalised lynch-law, with an official law-administration venal to a high degree. With every second mestizo a born robber, Mexico is no place for tedious processes with remands and committals to Assizes. A man caught red-handed is usually dealt with on the spot. Such a case occurred while we were visiting the capital. Two days after we had travelled on the marvellous mountain railway, the guards of the day-train (which by the way always takes the bullion to the coast and has a carriage-load of soldiers attached as military convoy) saw, as they approached the steepest descent, two fellows loitering on the line, presumably wreckers. The train was stopped and the guards and the officer commanding the convoy gave chase, and, coming up with the men, shot them with their revolvers and kicked the bodies down the precipice. The sun and the vultures do the rest, and on the re-arrival of the train in the capital the matter may or may not be formally notified to the Government.

Even to the casual observer the difficulty of governing Mexico must seem inexpressibly great. President Diaz has succeeded not so much because he does not know what mercy means or because a rifle bullet is his only answer for those who question his authority, but because he is endowed with superhuman tact. The iron heel, like that of Achilles, has its vulnerable spot if pressed too hard upon a people's throat, and so he has little dodges by which he appears to his subjects to exercise a judicious clemency. If some redoubtable criminal is captured, some monarch of murderers, Diaz knows well that among his thousands of crime-loving fellow-countrymen the brute will have a large following. His execution will mean the declaration of a vendetta against the police. So he is put on his trial, condemned to death, and within twenty-four hours the President commutes his sentence to one of twenty years' incarceration in the Penitentiary. After about a week there, he is taken out one evening, as usual, into the prison yard for exercise under a small guard of soldiers. One of these sidles up to him and suggests that as the night is dark he might make a bolt for it. The convict believes it a genuine offer, sprints off, and is dropped at thirty yards like a rabbit by the five or six soldiers who have been waiting under the shadow of the further wall. The next morning the official newspaper states, "Last night the notorious criminal So and So, to whom His Excellency the President recently extended clemency, made an attempt to escape while being exercised in the prison yard, and was shot dead by the sentries." Thus everybody is pleased, except possibly the convict, and the President, without the least odium to himself, has rid the country of another blackguard.

Another stroke of real genius was the way in which he has succeeded in setting thieves to catch thieves. When he became President, the country was infested with bandits who stopped at nothing; but Diaz erected huge gallows at the crossways all over Mexico, and the robbers found they had to stop at those, and stop quite a long while till the zopilotes and vultures had picked their bones to the blameless white to which good Porfirio Diaz desired the lives of all his subjects to attain. After some weeks of brisk hanging-business, Diaz played his trump card. He proclaimed that all other bandits, known or unknown, who cared to surrender would be enrolled as rurales, country police, and, garbed in State uniform and armed with Winchesters, would spend the remainder of their lives agreeably engaged in killing their recalcitrant comrades. This temptation to spend their declining days in bloodshed, to which no penalties were attached, was too much for many. Thus fifty per cent, of Mexico's robbers turn police and murder the other fifty, and acute Diaz has a body of men who and whose sons have proved, and sons' sons will prove, the eternal wisdom of this hybrid Sphinx of a ruler.

But there is a comic side to Mexican justice. There is a Gilbertian humour in the go-as-you-please style in which prisoners are treated. In one crowded court, when the jury had retired to consider their verdict the prisoner was engaged in walking up and down, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth, while the police, entirely oblivious to their charge, smoked and chatted in another part of the court. We asked one officer whether they were not afraid of the prisoner attempting an escape; "Oh no," he said, "he'll wait for the verdict." Roadmaking is practically always done by gangs of convicts, and, when they think they have had enough work, they throw down their spades and picks, and warders and everybody sit down on the roadside and enjoy a cigarette and a chat. The British Minister told us that he had recently been shown over the Penitentiary, in which at the moment there was a bloodthirsty rascal whose record of crime would have shamed a Jack the Ripper. The governor of the gaol entered into a long and friendly conversation with him as to his wife and family, and, as the British Minister humorously put it, "We were all but presented to him."

The daily life of the Mexicans begins before dawn, when they all get up, apparently because it is a habit of which they cannot break themselves, for they seem to have nothing to do except to crouch round swaddled up in blankets and complain that it is "mucho frio." As soon as six o'clock and daylight come they take their coffee and roll. Most Mexicans are heavy eaters, but they reserve their gastronomic heroisms for a later hour. Many, like the Arabs, have but one big meal a day, shortly after noon, when they do eat; so heavily indeed that the rest of their day is spent, boa-constrictor fashion, sleeping off the gorge. Many others eat at 10.30 and 5 o'clock. The cooking is Spanish, only a little bit more so. Their favourite dishes are appalling stews, the greasy garlicyness of which would frighten away the appetite of an English schoolboy. One of the most popular is morli, the basis of which is said to be turkey, but it is very cleverly disguised. Of course, in the capital, foreign invasion has much modified the national fare, but the bulk of the Mexican people live to-day, as they have for centuries past, on black beans (frijoles), tortillas (flat cakes of half-baked maize, first soaked and crushed), coffee without milk, red and green peppers, a little pork, and occasionally a piece of very stringy beef. The wealthy Mexicans never entertain in our sense, even among themselves. Such a thing as a dinner party is unheard of in non-official circles. This is probably due largely to their taste for secluding their womenfolk, though it is not unfair to say that it is contributed to by their disinclination for hospitality.

The above remarks refer to the Mexicans, not to the Indians, who, as far as they can, live the lives their ancestors lived four centuries back, mingling but not mixing with their half-bred Spanish masters. The Mexican Indians are probably among the dirtiest people on God's earth, with possibly an exception in favour of the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Eskimos, and thirty years ago in favour of the now extinct Tasmanians. But the average Mexican, too, has the Spanish horror of water, and though he will keep up appearances like a schoolboy who washes down to where his Eton collar comes, he will shirk more serious ablutions whenever possible. The profuse use of scents, especially among men, is always a suspicious sign, and this is not lacking in Mexico. The disregard of the people for bodily cleanliness is only matched by their contempt for those elaborate sanitary arrangements which in most European countries have done so much to make it possible for us miserable mortals to forget the humiliating physical necessities of our daily lives. Throughout the capital there are no public conveniences. An indignant apologist for Mexico declared to us on the steamer coming home that urinals did exist in the plaza near the cathedral. All we can say is that we did not see them. An English friend of ours, far from his hotel and in temporary distress, approached a passing Mexican señor with the question, "Donde es el escusado?" To his dismay he was told that there was no such place, but was courteously invited to the stranger's house, in the course of his visit passing through the sitting-room, where the wife and young daughters sat at needlework. All over the city are the drinking-shops (pulquerias) where the beloved pulque is served all day to a jostling, elbowing crowd of tight-trousered and bespurred vaqueros (cowboys) and of the Mexican-cum-Indian city riff-raff who stand round the filthy counters. The floor is usually earth, and the corners of the shop are used by the customers to relieve themselves, without a murmur from the publican or the slightest protest from any one.

Nominally Mexico is a Republic: really she is nothing of the sort. There is a Senate, a Chamber of Deputies, periodic elections of State representatives, a Governor and Council in each State of the Federation; but for upwards of a quarter of a century these have all been but pawns on a chessboard—the player a man of such astounding nature that those who laughed at Mrs. Alec Tweedie's description of him as "the greatest man of the nineteenth century" laughed from the fullness of their ignorance. Porfirio Diaz is an autocrat. He is an autocrat fiercer, more relentless, more absolute than the Tsar of Russia, than any recent Tsar has been, almost than Peter the Great himself. He is more: he is a born ruler. He has played for the regeneration of his country. He has played, but it is too much to say he has won. Nobody could win; but he has chained the bloody dogs of anarchy and murder, chained them successfully for so many years that there are some who forget that he has not killed them outright. Diaz is literally living over a volcano: he is a personified extinguisher of the fierce furnace of his country's turbulence. But when death removes him, what then? The deluge, surely; and after that one more apotheosis of the Monroe Doctrine, and the very wholesome, if somewhat aggressive, Stars and Stripes. You must go to Mexico and live among its people to know all this. It is singular how little the English people know of the country. Only the other day a veteran Anglo-Indian officer gravely asked us, "What is the exact position of Mexico in the United States of America?" We simply gasped: words failed in such an emergency. Before Diaz came, Mexico's history was one of uninterrupted rapine, murder, and sudden death. Out of a morass of blood he has made a garden: out of robbers he has made citizens: out of bankruptcy he has made a revenue: out of the bitterest civil strivings he has almost made a nation.

He is nearly eighty: he is as upright as a dart: he has the face of a sphinx with a jaw which makes you shudder. He rarely talks, he still more rarely smiles. And yet the whole man expresses no false pride—no "wind in the head." His icy superhumanly self-controlled nature is too great to be moved by such petty things as pride and a vulgar joy in power. In manner and in life he is simplicity itself. He rides unattended in the Paseo: he comes down to the Jockey Club in the afternoon, and the members just rise and bow, and the President picks up his paper and sits quietly at the window reading. He dislikes all ostentation: his food is simple: his clothes are almost always a plain blue serge suit and dark tie: and in his winter home in the city he lives as a simple citizen. But his power is literally limitless. The Mexicans do not love him: nobody could love such a man. The lower classes fear him unreasoningly; the upper classes fear him too, but it is blended with a lively sense of what he means to Mexico. But mark you! there is nothing of the bully about him. The bully is always weak, a coward. If Diaz was arrogant, he would be assassinated in twenty-four hours. He knows that. He knows the blood of the cattle he drives. Nobody but a madman whips a blood horse; but he must have an iron wrist and a good hold on the rein. And that is why one can safely describe Diaz as a born ruler. He instinctively understands his subjects: he has not learnt it, for he began thirty years ago. He was never educated in statecraft, for indeed he had no education at all; he was merely the son of an innkeeper, first sent to a Jesuit seminary, whence he ran away and joined the army. No! the man's secret is an iron will and positively miraculous tact. Whatever he does, whatever he orders, is always done so nicely. Everybody knows it has got to be done. Nobody ever crossed Diaz and lived to boast of so doing. But he gilds the pills he thinks his people must swallow, and they gulp them down and look up with meek smiles into that awful face.

Here is a little characteristic story of him. Some while back there was an election of Governor of Yucatan. The Yucatecan people have always been one of the most restive of the presidential team. They nominated a man disagreeable to Diaz; he nominated a second. The election ballot took place. The Yucatecan nominee was successful by an enormous majority. The news is wired to Mexico City. Back comes the presidential answer: "Glad to know my man elected: am sending troops to formally inaugurate him." The troops came, and Diaz's man was formally installed. To the Chamber of Deputies no one can be elected against the President's wish. For the over-popular Governor of a State Diaz provides distinguished employment elsewhere. Such a case occurred while we were in Yucatan. Señor Olegario Molina, of whom we shall later speak more, has been for some years deservedly popular in Merida, for he has done much to improve it. President Diaz visited Merida recently, and on his return appointed Señor Molina a Cabinet Minister. When he arrived in Vera Cruz Molina found the presidential train awaiting him, and on reaching Mexico City the President and the whole Cabinet had come to the station to greet him, and drove him triumphantly to the Iturbide Hotel. Charming courtesies! how favourably the presidential eyes beam on him! Yes, but he is banished: as much banished as the shivering pauper Jew workman turned away from the London Docks. He was too powerful: he is safer in Mexico City, far away from the madding crowds who would perchance have made him State dictator. A too popular Cabinet Minister, again, is sent as Minister to Madrid: another is found essential to the pacification of a turbulent State of Northern Mexico; and so the pretty game goes on, and there is literally no kicking amongst the presidential team.

But there are fiercer exhibitions of autocracy at which people only hint, or of which they speak in whispers. There is no Siberia in Mexico, but there are the equivalents of banishment and disappearance for those who would challenge the authority of the Mexican Tsar. Even criticism is tyrannically repressed. There is a Press, but the muzzling order has long been in force, and recalcitrant editors soon see the inside of the Penitentiary. General Diaz's present (second) wife is a daughter of a prominent supporter of Lerdo de Tejada, who on the death of Juarez assumed the presidency, but was expelled in 1876 by Diaz. The alliance brought about an armed peace between the two men. But they tell this story. One day an argument arose, and hot words followed. It was at a meal; and when wine's in, wit's out. Diaz's father-in-law went far, and half in jest half in earnest said, "Why, Porfirio, you almost tempt me to turn rebel again." They all saw the President's face darken, but the storm blew over. That night it is said that Madame Diaz had to go on to her knees to her husband to beg for her father's life.

Such is the arbiter and autocrat of Mexico. What, then, is the state of the country politically, and what will be her future? Mexico's great weakness (she has many, but this overtops all others, and lowers menacing on her political horizon) is that she is not a nation. There is no true national feeling, and a moment's thought will show that the circumstances of her population forbid the existence of such. On the one side you have the Spanish Mexicans, the white population, representing the purest European blood in the country. They are but some 19 per cent. of a population of twelve million odd. Among them, and among them alone, is patriotism in its highest sense to be expected or found. On the other side you have the vast mestizo class—the half-castes—some 43 per cent., and then the purer Indians, forming the remaining 38 per cent. Of these three classes the characteristics are sufficiently marked to destroy hope of any welding or holding together. The Spanish Mexicans are sensual and apathetic, avaricious and yet indolent, inheriting a full share of that Castilian pride and bigotry which has worked the colonial ruin of Spain. Brave, with many of those time-honoured traits of the proverbial Spanish don, they are yet a people inexorably "marked down" by Fate in the international remnant basket. They have had their day. Ye Gods! they have used it, too; but it is gone. The mestizos—near half the population—have all the worst features of their Spanish and Indian parents. Turbulent, born criminals, treacherous, idle, dissolute, and cruel, they have the Spanish lust and the Indian natural cynicism, the Spanish luxury of temperament with the Indian improvidence. These are the true Mexicans; these are the unruled and unrulable hotchpotch whom Diaz's iron hand holds straining in the leash: the dogs of rapine, murder, and sudden death, whose cowardice is only matched by their vicious treachery. And last there are the Indians, heartless, hopeless, disinherited, enslaved, awaiting with sullen patience their deliverance from the hated yoke of their Spanish masters, not a whit less abhorrent to them because they have had four centuries in which to become accustomed to it. The heterogeneity of Mexico's population is only matched by the depth of the antagonism of each class to each in all their most vital interests. To a common enemy Mexico can never present an undivided front. Indeed it is not too much to say she can never have a common enemy; and whencesoever the bolt comes it will find Mexico unprepared, a land of ethnic shreds and patches, slattern in her policy, slattern in her defence, her vitals preyed upon by the vultures of civil strife. Of all lands she might best afford a realistic presentment of the sad tale of the Kilkenny cats.

The potential wealth of Mexico is almost limitless, but the indolence of the Mexican nature is inimical to its development. Under the iron rule of Diaz the country has advanced, it is undeniable, in every direction. Railway enterprise has opened up unheard-of possibilities in outlying States; banking, though still crude (the bank rate is about 9 per cent.), is becoming a feature of Mexican commerce; municipal life is assuming that beneficent tendency which it has for years possessed in most European countries; drainage and sanitation are receiving official attention, and the welfare of the people is a plank, and a big one, in the present policy. Last but not least, the educational tonic in doses for an adult, perhaps too strong, is being given to a moribund people under the supervision of an excellent Minister of Public Instruction, Señor Justo Sierra. But bulk largely as this programme of progress does, it is due to one fact and one alone—the supreme wisdom of the President in welcoming the foreigner and his capital. Behind all the great schemes of improvement one finds the foreigner. The excellent tram service of the metropolis was until recently practically owned by the late Mr. Alfred Beit and his firm; railroads are English or American built and owned; new towns such as Coatzocoalcos are creations of such mechanical geniuses as Sir Weetman Pearson. And this brings us to Mexico's second great danger, which must inevitably shape her future. She may be said to be largely in the hands of mortgagees. Of these the chief three are England, America, and Germany; and their mutual positions are pregnant with prophecy of what must come. The Germans have wrested from their rivals much of the trade; especially have they worsted the French retailers. But Germany has probably lent Mexico the last mark she will ever get. The English are chiefly centred on the mining interests, and sporadically in land and agriculture, and though the Mexican Government would eagerly welcome large English loans, it is doubtful, very doubtful, if they will be forthcoming. But American capital is rolling in, rolling in like an inexorable tide of Fate. You have only to be in Mexico a day or two to realise how irresistibly the country is sinking into the power of the American investor, and how vain—and the more vicious because of their vanity—are the efforts of Mexicans to avoid looking upon the Gorgon head of Yankee hustle which is destined to turn their somnolent national life, such as it is, into stone. If in Mexico City you say you are an American, you soon find you represent a race which is hated as much as it is dreaded. English, French, Germans are all welcome, but Americans!... Mexico has more than a cloud on her horizon. She has Texas and Arizona to remind her perpetually of her fate. Never did spendthrift heir struggle more unavailingly in the hands of Jews than does Mexico in the hands of her great neighbour.

Cassandra-like, we will prophesy unto you. Let us not be rash and attempt to fix dates; but as certainly as day succeeds night, Mexico will eventually form a part of the United States. It will probably be sooner than is anticipated even by the clearest-headed men on both sides of the Texan frontier. With the death of General Diaz, Mexico will be plunged into Kilkenny strife. Nothing can save her. The North will go like a field of sundried barley, fired in a gale of wind: the turbulent North, where even now a life is worth nothing. Some Englishmen found a rich claim recently, and sat down to work it. Presently warning came, "You had better clear. The Mexican miners are going to 'do you in.'" Well, the English went, and by a circuitous road, and it was a good thing for them that they did, for a gang of "civilised" Mexicans were waiting for them on the ordinary road, determined to knife them, not content with kicking them out of their claim. That's the North to-day, and the fear of Diaz's name just keeps the pot from boiling over; but it's on the boil, right enough. Well then, the North will go into open rebellion, and the situation will be complicated by a rising of the Indians, who will be against everybody else. Mexico in her present isolated independent condition needs a soldier ruler. Your Corrals and Limantours, your Marischals and Sierras are good enough as Cabinet Ministers, but they are not the men for the awful task which Porfirio Diaz set himself thirty years back and has brought to temporary perfection. Those who know Mexico best know there is no successor to Diaz. The very installation of a new President will only add fury to the internecine strife.

But Mexico cannot boil her pot as she likes. Other nations have helped her with too many condiments and too much stock. American troops will cross the frontier to protect American interests and capital; and when they are once in they will stop there, as the English have in Egypt. It will be a Protectorate, the maintenance of which will prove in the best interests of England, Germany, and every other Power concerned. America is inevitably marked out as the dea ex machinâ when the social earthquake in Mexico comes about. A few years, a few struggles, a bloody civil war, a rising of the miserable Indian slaves in all the States, and Mexico will vote herself inside the federation of which, despite her struggles, she is already so completely a geographical part. The Mexicans have a little weakness for calling their land South America. Whatever else Mexico is she is not South America, and their eagerness to alter stern geographical fact only underlines the fear which is in their hearts.

When one remembers that by the Nicaraguan Treaty five miles each side of the canal are definitely annexed by the United States; when one looks at the ridiculously truncated appearance of the land of the Stars and Stripes on the Map of the World; when one knows enough of the Mexicans to foresee what must happen on Diaz's death; when one tots up the vast amount of American wealth which is at stake in Mexico; when one remembers that Mexico is without military or naval resources to resist foreign interference (her army of twenty odd thousand is, as a fighting force, a negligible quantity, and her navy consists of three old gunboats and a training ship); when one realises that her difficulties will find her with an empty treasure chest, living from hand to mouth on a suicidal policy of a crushing excise system, stifling internal commerce and forcing her people to look to other lands for countless manufactures which they could tackle themselves; when one sees that the last, the greatest resource of every country, an appeal to national feeling, will be lost on ears deaf with the din of civil bloodshed, it does not need much acumen to arrive at the conclusion that Mexico as a separate State is doomed to extinction, and that the Stars and Stripes will float over all America to the Panama Canal. Yucatan (which wished to cede herself with Texas in 1845), Guatemala, Nicaragua, they must all go, and into the atrophying veins of these dying Latin races will be injected the honest virile life of a democracy triumphant, and Mexico, for certain, will rise Phœnix-like from the ashes of her hybrid Spanish past.

[CHAPTER III]
YUCATAN AND HER HISTORY

It has ever been the fate of Yucatan to be misunderstood. Her very christening was the result of a misunderstanding. Accounts vary as to the exact place and time, and as to the Mayan words used; but there seems little doubt that it was Cortes's first question of the Indians who had gathered on the beach when he landed in 1517 that settled the matter. He naturally asked what they called their country, and they as naturally, not understanding a single syllable, returned, "Matan c ubah than," "Tec te than," or some such words ("We do not understand"), which were promptly taken by the invaders to be the country's name and corrupted into "Yucatan." Bishop Landa, in his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan (1556), credits Cordoba with the christening, and says the incident took place at Cape Catoche, varying the Indian reply as "Ci u than!" meaning "How well they speak!"

But fifteen years earlier Christopher Columbus had blundered worse, for he had declared Yucatan an island, and the sight of a richly laden canoe had persuaded the sanguine Spaniard that he had reached Eldorado at last—hence Yucatan's early name among the Spanish of "Isla Rica." How bitterly the brave Spanish pioneers paid for this error, laying down their lives by scores to win a country which was all limestone bluffs and dense rank forests, will be outlined directly in the brief account we must give of Montejo's ill-fated expeditions. Here it is enough to say that as soon as the land's barrenness was known, Spain's great captains turned their backs on it. Thereafter for centuries Yucatan passed through a series of misunderstandings, political and otherwise. In her tangled woods and on her bare sunbaked limestone hills Central American civilisation had, it is now known, reached its apogee, but more than three hundred years were to pass before the peninsula reached its archæological apotheosis. Ignorant and bigoted Spaniards, intent on serving the interests of that ecclesiastical institution which the late Professor Huxley once termed "The Bloody Wolf of Rome," swept away temples and palaces, broke to pieces statues and idols, built bonfires with bark writings and sacred books (each of which to-day the Trustees of the British Museum would probably regard as cheap at a thousand guineas), murdered, pillaged and destroyed, everybody, everything, everywhere. So that while avaricious Spanish eyes were turned towards the glittering temples of Moctezuma's capital and the goldmines of Mexico, Palenque and Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Piedras Negras lay crumbling and forgotten in their forests. Yucatan passed into a backwater of history. The ancient annalists refer to her briefly or not at all: the modern Encyclopedia usually deals with her claims for notice laconically thus: "YUCATAN: see under MEXICO." Probably not fifteen per cent. of Englishmen could tell you offhand her exact geographical position, and of those fifteen per cent. there would be few whose knowledge extends beyond a vague memory from schooldays that she is physically a peninsula, and that the rattlesnake, the tapir and the giant crested lizard—the iguana—haunt her forests.

And what wonder? Porfirio Diaz, sphinx-faced, granite-hearted, who for thirty years has been dictator of Mexico, wielding a power as autocratic as that of the Tsar—he, too, if reports are credible, knew little of the easternmost portion of his realm till, a year or two ago, Yucatan's Governor, ambitious of presidential patronage and fatally forgetful of the fable of King Stork, begged the republican monarch to let the light of his countenance shine for a while on his Yucatecan lieges. And no sooner was it announced that the great Diaz would go than he received countless letters, some anonymous, some from Governors of other States, warning, imploring, declaring the Yucatecans to be little better than savages and cut-throats, that the inestimable presidential life would be not worth a moment's purchase when he landed at Progreso. Evidently his subjects knew as little of Yucatan as did their ruler.[1]

President Diaz went, he saw, and he ... was staggered. Instead of the uncouth band of savage rancheros, armed to the teeth, he found a community of sybarites among whom the only difficulty was to find a man who was not a millionaire or the son of one. Instead of a fever-haunted, poverty-stricken, one-horse town, he found the "very loyal and noble city" of Merida, a Paris in miniature for vivacity and luxury. As they passed within the gates of one great hacienda or farm, the gardens lit with myriads of coloured lights, Madame Diaz clapped her hands and cried out gleefully, "Look, Porfirio! Surely we have never seen anything so lovely!" Well might she so say, for that particular haciendado had lavished 60,000 Mexican dollars (about £6,000) to dazzle the presidential eyes for one short evening. But Merida is not Yucatan, and the henequen millionaires of Merida strained every nerve and even their Fortunatus purses to prevent their shrewd ruler from seeing, beneath the surface, the social rottenness of the country. Of the amazing and amusing efforts they made to throw dust in those terrible eyes we shall have something to say later. What the President saw, we have seen—the almost boundless wealth of Merida and the sybaritic life led by the haciendados. But we have seen more: we have seen the real Yucatan. For months we have wandered in her wilds. We have shared the huts with the Indians: we have slung our hammocks in the forests: we have slept in the palm-thatched cabins of the woodcutters: we have lived the fisherman's life on the islets of the east coast, round which in the days of Cordoba and Cortes cruised fleets of canoes, fruit and corn-laden. The primary reason of our trip was archæological exploration, but the interest which this volume must have as containing descriptions of those wondrous ruins which have earned for Yucatan the title of "The Egypt of the New World" will be, we believe, enhanced by that insight we are enabled to give into the social state of a country which for nearly all is a "terra incognita."

And now for a little history. It was on the 30th July, 1502, that Christopher Columbus, near the island Guanaja in the Gulf of Honduras, met a canoe paddled by twenty-five Indians and carrying as many women, and a cargo of fruits, cotton cloths, copper hatchets, and pottery. The men wore loin-cloths and the women were modestly draped in mantles of cotton. By signs the great Spaniard gathered that they came from a rich land to the westward. Such is the first knowledge the white world had of Yucatan! Four years later Juan Diaz de Solis and Vincente Yañez Pinzon sailed for Guanaja intent on completing the discoveries of Columbus. Reaching Guanaja they steered westward and discovered the east coast of Yucatan, convincing themselves that it was an island, but making no landing.

On the 20th May, 1506, Columbus, a victim of injustice and neglect, ended his splendid career in sadly lonely surroundings at Valladolid. His two successors in the pioneer work of Yucatan's discovery came to untimely ends, Yañez Pinzon dying in Spain a year later, while Diaz de Solis was eaten by the Indians of Rio de la Plata. In 1511, more by bad luck than good management, the Spaniards came again into contact with Yucatan. Nuñez de Balboa, Alcalde of Darien, dispatched one Valdivia in a caravel to Hayti for provisions and reinforcements. When nearing Jamaica the ship was wrecked on the Alacranes Reefs, and the Spaniards, to the number of twenty, took to the boats. Seven died of starvation, and the rest, after days of exposure, were washed on to the eastern coast of Yucatan. Here—though they were warmly welcomed—it can scarcely be said that the reception accorded to them was one which they appreciated. The Indians, making a feast-day of their arrival, swarmed down on the beach and insisted on their coming at once to the village, where, it is sad to relate, those who had been unlucky enough to preserve a little adipose tissue in spite of the hardships they had endured, were accorded the honour of becoming the "pièces de résistance" at the banquet which the chief had commanded to celebrate their arrival. The less plump ones were enclosed in glorified chicken coops, where they were fattened with succulent viands until such a time as the chief should be "disposed to put his lips to them."

Unwilling to await this distinction, the unfortunate Spaniards found an opportunity one night of breaking the bars of the coop and taking to the woods. Several died of exposure, but a few struggled through to the territory of a neighbouring cacique, who appears to have been more of a vegetarian. He rejoiced in the name of Hkin Cutz. The Spanish fugitives, for some reason or other, perhaps because they made praiseworthy efforts to pronounce his name, were taken into his service and well treated, though an eight-hour day does not appear to have been part of Hkin Cutz's programme. As Joshua, he said, "Let them live but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto my people." Under this system all died but two, Gonzalo Guerrero, a swash-buckling soldier, as his name suggests, and Jeronimo de Aguilar, a young priest. Guerrero (one can picture him the thorough captain of industry, cynical, fearless, taking his pleasure where he could) took to his new life like a duck to water: fell in love with a Mayan girl, stripped off his clothes in favour of a loincloth, painted his body and decorated his nose and ears with stone rings, winding up with a very decent imitation of reverence for the Stone Gods who had it all their own way in Hkin Cutz's kingdom.

But Aguilar was an idealist, and though, true to his Church's teaching, casuist enough to keep on the right side of Hkin Cutz, he treasured a hope of some day, somehow, returning to Spain and its Catholic joys. With a view to hastening this consummation he so devoutly wished, he took the Saints into his confidence, and, satisfied of their assistance, promised at all costs to preserve that chastity which is believed by the credulous to be still—as it doubtless always has been—the brightest jewel in the crown of the Catholic priesthood. Aguilar's misogynistic tendencies do not seem to have much troubled Hkin Cutz; but his successor Ahmay was distinctly uxorious, and in addition appears to have been something of a humorist. Aguilar's lack of appreciation of his maidens worried him somewhat, and he determined to find out whether it was the lack of opportunity or the lack of taste. When the young priest was not cutting wood or drawing water, he was sent out fishing, going overnight to the coast and sleeping on the beach till dawn, when the fish were feeding. One day Ahmay ordered him to the coast, but as a mark of his favour told him to take as his companion a very beautiful girl of fourteen, to whom the cunning cacique gave instructions that she was to "fish" for Aguilar while he—poor innocent—was seeking his lord's breakfast. Aguilar did not much care for his girl comrade, but he did not dare to refuse: so off they started, the chief first loading his faithful servant with warm garments for the night journey and a sort of en tout cas bedspread. As the coast was not far distant, and the travellers had not much to say to each other, they got over the ground so quickly that the night was not far spent when they reached Aguilar's fishing "pitch." Seeing his companion was sleepy, he gallantly made a bed for her in the woods with the wraps Ahmay had so thoughtfully provided, and then went off to the beach and lay down on the sand. But the temptations of St. Anthony were not in it with those to which that Indian minx subjected the young priest till dawn, and thus it is the more gratifying to learn that he was able to keep his arrangement with the Saints, whereby he passed into the highest favour with Ahmay, who, poor weak mortal that he was, was convinced that Aguilar was a very exceptional young man. This is a Spanish story, and must be taken with a big pinch of salt.

But to return to more serious history. Undeterred by their predecessors' misfortunes, the Spanish undertook a third expedition to Yucatan. On the 8th February, 1517, Francis Hernandez de Cordoba, with one hundred and ten soldiers and three ships, sailed from Cuba, and on the twentieth day sighted an island. On their approach five large canoes put off. Signs of friendship prevailed on some thirty of the Indians to come on board Cordoba's ships, and there such amicable relations were established that the Spaniards landed, finding to their surprise every sign of a considerable civilisation. For the first time Europeans saw stone buildings in America. In the temple, approached by well-laid steps, they saw incense being burnt in front of stone and wooden idols, while files of women ministrants chanted near the altars. Hence Cordoba christened the island "Isla de Mujeres" (Isle of Women). Another version has it that the Spaniards found gigantic female figures of stone at the south end of the island, but our careful search of the island and a consultation of its records do not support this version. Thence he sailed to the most northerly point of Yucatan, where he was welcomed by the chief, who came out with his people in twelve canoes and repeatedly exclaimed, "Connex c otoch" ("Come to our Town"), which the Spaniards believed the name of the place: hence Cape Catoche, as the point is still called.

The Spaniards, led by the treacherous cacique, landed, and were soon attacked in a thick wood by a body of Indians armed with stone axes, bows, and lances of wood hardened by fire, their faces and bodies painted, wearing on their arms an armour of plaited cotton, beating a war tune on turtle-shells and blowing horns of conch-shells. Cordoba lost twenty men, and many of the Indians were killed. Returning to their ships, the Spaniards sailed on to a point where at the mouth of the river was a large Indian town called by the natives Kimpech, the modern Campeachy. Farther on a disastrous fight took place which ended in the loss of fifty Spaniards and the retreat of Cordoba. He himself received twelve arrow-wounds, and but one soldier escaped unhurt. Within ten days of his reaching Havana, Cordoba died of his wounds. This signal disaster did not, however, deter enterprising Spaniards from looking longingly towards this veritable will o' the wisp, La Isla Rica. In 1518 an expedition led by Juan de Grijalva sailed from Matanzas. This resulted in the discovery of the island of Cozumel and a fairly complete reconnaissance of the coastline of Yucatan. A third expedition, commanded by the great Cortes, left Cuba on the 18th February, 1519, made first for Cozumel; and thence, cruising round the north-east coast, the Spaniards continued their voyage as far as what is to-day the city of Vera Cruz, where the glittering promise of Mexico once and for all removed the great Spanish captain from Yucatecan history.

But in Cortes's suite was one Francisco Montejo, a gentleman of Seville. To him, on the 8th December, 1526, a grant was made for the conquest of the "islands" of Yucatan and Cozumel. Fitting out a small armada, he sailed from Seville in May, 1527, with 380 troops. He made first for Cozumel, where he landed in September of that year, establishing friendly relations with the chief, Naum Pat. Thence, taking with him an Indian guide, he sailed to the east coast. With bombastic prematureness the royal standard was planted on the beach, and amid cries of "Viva España!" the whole country claimed for the King of Spain. But Montejo was merely beginning his troubles. A disastrous march through the dense pathless bush—his troops footsore and fever-stricken, hunger and thirst their constant comrades—ended in a battle in which, with fearful losses, the invaders barely held their own. A retreat followed; but, undismayed, in 1528 Montejo with the remnant of his army marched on Chichen Itza. The old chroniclers contradict one another as to this expedition to Chichen. We believe Montejo made but one, though time would allow for two visits and two temporary settlements there, as some writers believe. In the metropolis of the Itza tribe a friendly reception at first was accorded him; but he unwisely divided his forces by dispatching his captain, Alonzo Davila, with some foot and horse to the westward. Thus weakened he was soon driven out of Chichen, and forced to the sea at Campeachy. Davila fared no better. Arrived in the dominions of a neighbouring cacique, his request for provisions was fiercely answered by the latter, who said he "would send them fowls on spears, and maize on arrows." After two years of weary struggle with hunger and fever, harassed the while by Indians, Davila rejoined his chief at Campeachy. Nothing had been achieved: Yucatan was still unconquered. Montejo now returned to Cuba for reinforcements, and, thus heartened, he made an attack on Tabasco, leaving a few Spanish at Campeachy. These few, weakened by privations, were after some years reduced to an effective force of five only. The camp was abandoned. Gonzales Nieto, who had planted the flag amid such bombastic shoutings on the eastern beach nine years earlier, was the last to leave. In 1535 not a single Spaniard remained in Yucatan.

Two years later Montejo, whose attempt on Tabasco had signally failed, returned to the attack, landing at Champoton, where once more the Spanish flag was raised. The Indians, grown shrewd, left the heat and General Malaria to do their skirmishing, and when Montejo's camp had become a hospital, a pitched battle all but drove the Spaniards into the sea. Worse than this, the rumours of the wealth of Peru and Mexico, of the dazzling conquests of Cortes and Pizarro, caused desertions (for the poverty of Yucatan had now become notorious), and one by one Montejo's men slunk off. Nineteen stalwarts at last were all that were left at Champoton. Montejo sent his son to Cuba with urgent requests for relief. In 1539 stores and men arrived, and Montejo, distrusting his own fortune, placed the conquest of Yucatan in his son's hands. The latter marched out from Champoton, gave battle to the Indians, and completely routed them. Advancing into the land, in one day three fights took place, the Indian dead being so numerous that they literally obstructed the roadway. After a march of many months, during which his troops suffered incredible hardships and fought their way almost league by league, Montejo reached the great city of Tihoo early in 1541.

A preliminary victory ensured the invaders some months of peace. But the clouds were gathering: the caciques formed a confederation, and on the 11th of June a final battle took place. Little reliance can be placed on the figures, but if they are anywhere near the truth, the pious historian, Father Cogolludo of the Franciscan Friars, may be forgiven for exclaiming, in an ecstasy of faith, "Divine power works more than human valour!" For the Spanish mustered but 200, while the Indians, it is alleged, were 70,000 strong! Be that as it may, the Spanish firearms won the day, and the 6th January, 1542, saw the formal founding of the city of Merida, built out of the stones and on the ruined site of Tihoo. The Indians never rallied; and the brutal work of enslaving them was thenceforth to be pursued with few interruptions. In 1561 French pirates attacked Campeachy and entered Merida, and in 1575 English buccaneers sacked the city. Forced to withdraw, they renewed their attack in 1606, but unsuccessfully. In 1632 the Dutch appeared on the scene, and two years later British pirates made a descent on the coast. For the next half-century Yucatan was the prey of pirates, and Merida was attacked again in 1684. Meanwhile the country had been constituted a Spanish province under a Captain-General; a see of Merida was created, and Spanish towns built on the ruins of the Indian pueblos.

The internal history of the peninsula from 1684 during the next century and a half is a story of Spanish cruelty and bigotry, of Franciscan arrogance and vandalism. The Spanish settlers, not content with the conquest and enslaving of the Indians, busied themselves in the destruction of everything—buildings, books, statues—which had to do with earlier days. Towns were built on the ruins of Indian villages; large churches—the majority now in ruins—were constructed, for the most part, out of the stones of Indian palaces, and the great haciendas were formed and worked by gangs of miserable natives whose spirit was broken.

In 1824 Yucatan, which had borne its fair share in the War of Independence against Spain of the previous year, became a Federal State. Amicable relations with Mexico were interrupted in 1829 and again in 1840, when heavy taxation brought about an armed revolt. In the June of the latter year the rebels drove the Federal forces out of Yucatecan territory, and independence was declared. In 1843 General Santa Ana, the head of Mexico, by a successful campaign forced Yucatan into the Federation once more. In 1847 a serious Indian revolt occurred, and this was not suppressed till 1853, when a treaty of peace was signed granting autonomy to the Indians of the east. A year later trouble broke out again, but in 1860 an army 3,000 strong attacked and captured Chan Santa Cruz, the Indian capital. The town was almost at once, however, retaken by the natives with a loss of 1,500 whites, and until 1901 it remained in the hands of the Mayans. Of the war which was then declared against these stalwarts, of the injustice of its inception, and of the barbarous methods now being employed against them, we shall speak later. The Mexican Government have done their best to hide from the outside world what exactly is happening in far Eastern Yucatan, but despite official discouragement we penetrated the district and are in a position to tell the whole story.

Of the authentic history of Yucatan previous to the Conquest it might almost be written as succinctly as in the famous chapter "Snakes in Iceland": there is none. Even its ancient name is in dispute, though there is little doubt it was "Maya." Columbus is the first to record that name. For the first half-century or so after the founding of Merida, the Spanish vandals were far too busy, in their ruthless Christian zeal, with the destruction of the Mayan towns and palaces, with the butchering of men and the outraging of women, to give much thought to the past of the unfortunate race which they were bent on degrading and enslaving. Bishop Landa, one of the earliest of the Catholic bishops of Yucatan, bears terrible evidence on this point. The Indian chiefs were burnt alive in many instances; women, after outrage and gross and filthy indignities, were hanged, their babies being hanged on their feet—thus making gibbets of the mothers' bodies. Landa says that there is no doubt that until his countrymen arrived chastity was dearly prized among the Mayans: death being the penalty for both young man and maiden proved unchaste before marriage. To-day Mayan morality in all towns and centres where the Indians are in contact, or have long been in contact, with the whites is loose in the extreme. Prostitution is terribly common, practically universal.

When, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the task of collecting historical data was undertaken, naturally enough the Indians consulted had little to give but a hotchpotch of tradition and legend. With an alacrity positively suspicious the so-called books of Chilan Balam cropped up in all directions. Each important township had one of these almost worthless compilations based on the musty memories of garrulous old Mayans, who thus sought to ingratiate themselves with the domineering Franciscan friars. The Mayan hieroglyphics were, as they still are, undecipherable, the temple records and picture writings had been burnt, and the oldest Indian assisting at the manufacture of these tradition books must have been in long clothes or the Mayan equivalent when Cortes landed. Yet this lack of credibility has not prevented many who have laboured earnestly and long in the field of Mayan archæology from spoiling their work by plunging into the muddied tideway of date and legend and emerging convinced of much for which there is not a tittle of real evidence. Most of the tradition books agree in ascribing Central American civilisation to the Toltec nation, and "Toltec" has become the rallying cry, the shibboleth of those who struggle to unravel the past of Central America. Learned professors from Berlin and Dresden; enthusiastic young men from Harvard and other American universities; foreign and native writers and students, clamber or tumble headlong over the Toltec fence. With the perverse persistence of the National School child, whose memory of dates is restricted to "William the Conqueror, 1066," at which moment its infantile mind supposes England, London, the Tower, the Zoo, and Madame Tussaud's to have come into instant being, so "648 A.D. Toltecs arrived at Tula or Tulapan" crops up in everything these good people write. King Charles I.'s head never worried Mr. Dick half as much as the Toltec bogey worries them.

Where Tula or Tulapan was, is, or ever has been: where the Toltecs sprang from; what ethnical affinities they possessed; whether they were kin to those affiliated tribes which have most certainly inhabited the Americas since prehistoric times; how they came to have cut-and-dried building specifications in what were equivalent to their breeches' pockets, they never stop to tell us. One professor glibly remarks, assuming his Toltec premiss, "While this [the Toltec] race was still quite at a low stage of civilisation the Aztecs advanced out of the north from at least 26° north latitude." No conjurer ever produced rabbit from silk hat with more assurance than the professor produces the Aztecs "out of the north." That "at least" is distinctly precious. Was ever such begging of the question? The Aztecs were builders, too! Where did they get their knowledge? They certainly would have difficulty to find a hint of it in the vast North American Continent. The truth is that, stripped of all nonsensical fetish-worship, there is not an iota of real evidence for this Toltec theory. No Toltec nationality ever existed; and the explanation of that civilisation which differentiates the Mayan peoples and their Aztec neighbours from the natives of the rest of the Americas is to be sought, as we endeavour to demonstrate in Chapter XV., in an altogether different direction.

Well then, we have no real pre-Conquest history. All that seems certain is that in Yucatan no kingship in the true sense existed. The land was ruled by caciques (chiefs), each the head of a tribe or tribal family. As is natural in such a régime, the predominating power was not always in the same hands. About 1436 (Bishop Landa, writing in 1556, gives the date, and this agrees with native tradition) the tyranny of the Cocomes who ruled over the great city of Mayapan caused a rebellious confederation of lesser caciques, which ended in the overthrow of the Cocomes family and the destruction of Mayapan. This—the great event of the more recent pre-Spanish history of Yucatan—was followed by the uprise of the chief of Chichen Itza, who thenceforward till the Conquest maintained predominance. These, the only dates upon which reliance can be placed, fit in well with the date which we are inclined to assign to the superb ruins of Chichen, which we describe in detail in a later chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] While in Mexico City we visited in vain all the map shops and Government offices in search of a map of Yucatan. All the maps available were those based on the Mapa de la Peninsula (1887), which we have proved to be hopelessly inaccurate.

[CHAPTER IV]
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF YUCATAN

A sea of greengage green, broken by scarce a ripple save where a shark's fin curves up shiny black in the blazing sun; a semicircle of pale sand, fringed by brown and mahogany-red boarded barns of warehouses, with here and there a gaunt brick chimney; a thin belt of palm trees; three wooden jetties, and beyond, houses stuccoed white and salmon-pink: this is our first sight of Yucatan's only port, Progreso. There is no harbour, for the shallows stretch far seaward, and steamers of any draught dare not come within five miles of the coast.

The outward and visible signs of the town have scarcely come distinctly into view, and we have barely lost sight in the heat mist of the monster form of our liner, anchored miles in our wake, when the panting tug has come alongside the pier and we are for the first time face to face with Yucatecans. A Yucatecan crowd is a pleasant sight to look upon. Personal cleanliness, bright-coloured vests and spotless linen breeches are a welcome change for the traveller who comes from a Mexican port. The Yucatecan and the Mexican, too, are physically very unlike, and the difference is all in favour of the former. The crowd which awaits the tug is a bright, clean-faced, orderly crowd, and as we step ashore, the luggage touts, many of them remarkably intelligent-looking and handsome fellows, take your "No, muchas gracias," for an answer, which is more than you can say for the evil-smelling, vulture-faced, blackmailing gang who throng the quays at such ports as Vera Cruz and Tampico. Alas! months of sojourn in the land of the Mayans are to alter the first favourable impressions of that Progreso crowd. Verily are Yucatecans "Whited Sepulchres"!

And here perhaps it would be as well to define a Yucatecan. The population of Yucatan, speaking broadly, consists of two classes, slaves and savages. The former are the Indians, by centuries of brutality degraded and robbed of that spirit which made them foes worthy of Cortes's prowess, but still a kindly, hospitable people for whom every English heart must feel a keen sympathy. The savages are the Yucatecans, the mongrel people resulting from the early unions of the Spanish with the Indian women; and if the epithet seems harsh, we would ask our readers to reserve judgment till they have finished this volume. The tint of the Yucatecan is that of a half-baked biscuit, but the eyes are black-brown and often small, and the lank black hair suggests the Indian crossings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At the end of the jetty a lofty lich-gate of wood houses Señores los Aduaneros, Messrs. the Customs House Officers. But our passports are from headquarters and bear a Cabinet Minister's seal, so our baggage is soon passed. Over the Customs House gate might be written, varying Dante's terrible line, "All hope of cleanliness abandon, ye who enter here": for once inside Progreso town you must do battle with tropical dust at its worst. Through the railway yard, where the sun beats down with a blistering heat on trucks, mules, and men, you make your way to the train through filthy little arcaded streets, your boots disappearing at each footstep in the ill-smelling, garbage-littered compound, your eyes smarting in the clouds of it you kick up. The station is a barn, the railway a three-foot gauge, the cars are rickety, low-roofed, cane-seated yellow wood affairs. From engine to brake van the train is American-made. There seems little to choose in comfort between the classes, but for the sake of more elbow-room we "plunge" our three centavos a kilometre (the usual first-class fare all over Yucatan), a fraction less than a penny a mile, distinctly cheap if the rolling stock were better.

As the little train jolts through the outskirts of the town, ringing its bell, the dust it raises blending with the resinous smoke from the wood fire of its engine, naked yellow babies look up from their play in the dirt and scamper into shelter, while female faces peer out between the iron bars which do duty for glass windows in the one-storeyed-high flat-roofed houses. Northern Yucatan is as level as an Essex marsh, and the line runs through miles of country at first glance quite English with its dense covering of small trees like nut bushes and silver birches. Nature has been niggard of soil to the whole peninsula, but perhaps it is around Progreso that you realise most that the Yucatecan must be content to sow his seed in the "stony ground." The sundried undergrowth is of cactus, stunted shrubs, and sea grasses. Here and there this breaks to give way to swamps, rich in purple and white orchids and golden water plants, fair to look on as the sun touches the water between the waving rushes, but surely enough the happy breeding-ground of the "Yellow Jack" mosquito. Then come fields of henequen or hemp, "the Green Gold of Yucatan,"—the plants like huge green pineapples with waxy green feathers on top,—enclosed within grey stone walls like those of Scotland.

As we near the capital (the distance is but twenty-five miles) the carriages fill up, and you squeeze closer into your caned seat for two to make room for some fat Yucatecan or his ill-shaped, chalk-faced powdered dame. In the suburbs of Merida (there are miles of them) the rail runs between rows of native huts, palm-leaf thatched frameworks of wood upon which red earth is plastered and then stuccoed or whitewashed. Each has its garden, evidently the despair of its owner, for dogs, pigs, and fowls dispute possession of it with tin cans and refuse. But even in these unfavourable surroundings tropic Nature beautifies with the greeny-gold leaf of the banana and the heavy-hanging greener crown of the cocoanut palm. Over all rises a strange vista. Merida might well be called the "City of Windmills." On each side of the train you see the horizon literally crowded with air motors for pumping water from the limestone, and you hear it whispered in a tone of pride by a Yucatecan to his neighbour that there are in Yucatan's capital 6,000 of these eyesores.

Merida could claim another alias. "The City of Windmills" might as appropriately be called "The City of Cabs." And they are curious cabs too: cabs without sides or backs or fronts; mere frameworks of light wood with leather tops and cloth curtains all round, which roll up and button, or roll down and shade the "fare"; spectral four-wheelers, as if in prehistoric times a London "growler" had emigrated here and propagated a species of tropical growler, all skin and bones. Dozens of these hackney phantoms await us in the station yard; the drivers in spotless loose-flying linen shifts and linen trousers bell-bottomed over their bare brown feet shod with sandals, their headgear wideawakes of black or brown felt. The boxes are elaborately ornamented with brass nails burnished to a dazzling brightness. The back seat (you must not sit too far back or you will fall out) has room for two, and in front a shelf like that in a victoria lets down for a third passenger. There are hundreds of these cabs in Merida, and everybody uses them all the time. They are not the luxury they are in most capitals, and are quite a feature of the place. We had understood there is only one hotel in Merida (it is a libel, for there are three), and, seated in the phantom car we select, we bowl noiselessly over asphalted roads towards it.

It was on the 6th January, 1542, that amid—one can be sure—immense bombast of trumpet-blare and drum-beat the first stones were laid of the "Very Loyal and Noble City of Merida." This is what its charter, granted by His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II., called it. It is a double-barrelled misnomer. Merida has no claim to loyalty, for she revolted from Spain as soon as she conveniently could, and she has never been loyal to the Republic of Mexico, of which—much against her will—the country of which she is the capital has formed part, off and on, since the beginning of the nineteenth century. And Merida is in no sense a noble city; never has been and never can be. But she is what perhaps is better—a clean city. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Merida thinks it comes first, and she has let the other virtue lag a very bad second in her civic race.

But she has not always even been clean. Five years back her streets were Saharas of ill-smelling dust to your boot-tops in the dry season, and sloughs of despond in the wet. No one who has not visited Yucatan can realise the Aladdin-like results of the showers of gold which have fallen upon this Danaë land as a result of her staple product, henequen; but directly you enter one of the phantom cabs you come under the spell of a city which is magically perfect; as unlike any other Spanish-American town as is possible. The millionaire henequen growers are so rich that they really do not know what to do with their money; and so it came about that the ex-Governor Señor Molina conceived the idea of reupholstering Merida till its founders would never recognise their handiwork. The shape of the city is much what it was, planned on a vast chessboard system, all the streets running at right angles and parallel to one another, forming nine square miles of squat stone-built houses, almost all one-storeyed, their long windows heavily barred instead of glazed. But just as a carpet makes a room, Señor Molina saw that what Merida needed was paving, and so he proceeded to get an estimate from a French asphalt company. The amount was so huge that his brother-millionaires on the Council only smiled sickly smiles of incredulity when he suggested "voluntary contributions." But if their ill-gotten dollars would not come out of their pockets by fair means, the Governor determined that they should by foul (at least, that was the adjective which these much oppressed Crœsuses probably applied to his methods), and he taxed every bale of henequen loaded at Progreso. In this way he raised a gigantic sum for the beautifying of the capital, part of which, no less than thirty million Mexican dollars (£3,000,000 sterling), was spent in paving the streets.

It took between two and three years, and the result is perfection. From north to south, from east to west, side streets and main streets, for the full three miles' width of the city, the surface is as smooth as glass, as clean as marble. Never was there such paving, and never will there probably ever be again, for there is no parallel to the circumstances of unforeseen wealth which has come to Yucatan's capital.

We had been favourably impressed by the cleanliness of the Yucatecan crowds at Progreso, and, as we moved easily and without a vibration down street after street of well-matched and well-built houses, we rubbed our eyes and wondered whether we were in a land where it was always washing-day, for the people on the sidewalks, the people in the passing carriages, the police at the corners in their trim holland uniforms, the children playing at the pavement edge, the tradesmen at their shop-doors, and the boys and girls in their neat linens returning from school, were so spotless as to beggar all description.

But in the midst of our amazement we reached our hotel, a massive three-storeyed building in two squares, neatly floored with tiles, roofless, wide flights of stone steps leading up to galleries from which was access to the bedrooms, stone-floored, very high-ceilinged, opening through wooden sunblinds on to small balconies. We were very tired with our journey, and the coolness of our rooms and the brightness of the city had such a lulling effect that we were almost persuaded that we had reached Utopia. There was nothing disquieting in our rooms from the insect point of view, except a line of harmless-looking small black ants which were taking an afternoon walk along the tiles at the corner, and the fact that the small iron bedsteads were enveloped in mosquito-nets. We had evidently reached Utopia. The air was balmy as we composed ourselves to sleep that night, and there was not even a mosquito in our nets.

Shortly before dawn the next morning (Sunday) we were roused from a dreamless sleep by a din so terrific that to our half-sleeping wits it converted itself into a giant tattoo beat on cracked tea trays. We started up. Boom-poom (a pause). Pom-m—poom-m. The last was a ragged-edged sound, as flat as stale soda water, as lifeless as Queen Anne. Then came a shrill noise such as might be produced by a violent meeting between a butcher's steel and the treble octave of a "cottage grand." Then Pom-poom again, and then a noise as if the blacksmith of "spreading chestnut tree" fame had gone suicidally mad and had spent his dying fury and the full force "of the muscles of his brawny arms" in one fell blow on his anvil.

Something must be done; we could not patiently bear this. Perhaps it was a Utopian form of fire alarm, and we were doomed to cremation in our mosquito-netting unless we roused ourselves. At this moment our door burst open, and a fellow-traveller from Vera Cruz, in purple silk pyjamas, his hair on end, a wild look in his eyes, cried out, "Do you hear those awful bells?" Bells! Surely—we rubbed our eyes and gazed open-mouthed at him—surely they weren't bells! What superhuman intelligence was this he showed at such an early hour. We listened. Yes, they were (that anvil note again!) meant for—bells; bells as cracked as any March hare; the cathedral bells too, pounding their awful tea-tray notes right across the plaza into our windows. We had never heard such bells; nobody outside Yucatan ever has. It was bedlam in the belfry, and with our fingers in our ears we walked on to the balcony to see how the Utopianites were bearing them.

Merida was up, and did not seem to mind the bells a bit. Perhaps they are an acquired taste; the people in the streets seemed not to notice the noise, and there was as much crowd as there was din. This bell scandal was evidently the rift within the Utopian lute; and presently, thank heaven! the music was dumb, and we were able to watch in peace from our point of vantage the life of the awakening city. It was a picturesque scene. The street was alight with bright colours and pretty faces. The women of Merida were going to early mass. Here were a knot of palefaced maidens in muslins, rainbow-hued in their variety, pale blue, rose pink, saffron, heliotrope, white or green—hatless, their raven-black hair decked with flowers, their service books clasped in small hands. These were the upper middle-class femininity of the city (the wealthiest women never walk at all). But a prettier picture still were the Mestizas (half-castes, the name given by the wealthier Yucatecans to their lowlier sisters), the beauties of the people, whose soft skins were coloured a sweet brown by their Indian blood. Their dress was a long spotlessly white softly-flowing shift of linen, bordered at neck and hem with embroidery, cut open low round the neck, and with no sleeves and exposing their bare feet and ankles. It was a costume which framed their charms in quite a perfect style. And with all these mingled the Indian women and girls, their complexions a warm reddish brown, their black hair draped in cotton wraps of blue or brown, green or pink, thrown sari-fashion round the head and falling over the shoulders; their bare feet, innocent of shoe tortures, small and dainty, if a little broad. There were few men and boys about, but those looked cleaner than ever—spotless in their linens, with felt hats or panamas; the laddies, in their tight linen knickerbockers with their plump bare brown legs, looking the picture of boyish health. As the hour wore on, Indian dames passed on their way homeward from the early market, balancing on their heads large flat baskets filled with oranges, bananas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, eggs, large slices of salmon-fleshed melons dotted with black seeds, small pineapples, lemons, limes, green and red peppers and garlic, and often in the midst of this market medley sat a small hen or two, as contentedly as if they were brooding over a sitting of eggs.

A wealthy Yucatecan who has travelled much is credited with saying, "After Merida give me Paris." There is really much to be said for his patriotic view. Merida is a beautiful city. The vista down the long street from our balcony, with the gay colours of the girls' dresses, the snowy whiteness of the men's clothes, the smart brass-decked skeleton cabs, the soft yellow of the houses (all houses in Merida are by order painted yellow to prevent the unpleasant sun-glare which white walls would mean), here and there a waving crown of green peeping over the housetops from some garden-patio, made a right pleasant picture against the deep blue of the cloudless sky. But Merida owes none of her undoubted beauty to her buildings. There are but three worth mention, and this not from any architectural merits but solely because of their historical interest. These are the cathedral, the bishop's palace, and the house of Francisco de Montejo, conqueror of Yucatan. They are all in the Plaza.

The cathedral is a gaunt pile of plastered mediocrity, with naked façade flanked by two turreted towers, lair of the accursed bells which had marred the tropic beauty of the morning. It was completed in 1598 and cost some £60,000, equivalent to-day to perhaps a quarter of a million. Within, there is little worth seeing except the twelve immense columns which support the roof. The hangings and drapings are as tawdry as is the much begilded altar. The pulpit is dusty, dirty and old, and is reached by wooden steps literally rotten and in holes. But if there is nothing worth seeing there is something which is very astonishing. On each pillar is hung a notice which reads: "Sirvanse no Escupir en el Pavimento de este Templo" ("You are requested not to spit on the floor of this church"), and on the flooring of the plain yellow-wood seats, and all along each aisle at the entrance to the pews, are spittoons! Yes, it sounds incredible, but they are there—right up to the altar-rails a vista of earthenware abominations such as disfigure the sanded quaintness of the bar-parlour of an old village inn. In a later chapter on Yucatecan manners we shall have more to say of the habit thus officially countenanced by the Church. That perspective of spittoons from door to altar-rail in Merida Cathedral has probably no parallel in any country.

The bishop's palace adjoins the cathedral, and bears the date 1757. It is so hideous in its flat stuccoed plainness that it is really wonderful that even the Yucatecans do not rebel and raze it to the ground. Beneath it entrance is obtained by a large double wooden doorway to a vestibule—opening into the bishop's garden—which forms a Lady Chapel, where on a trestle, such as those upon which the cocoanut and sweetstuff men do their roaring trades on Bank holidays at Hampstead, an iron tray covered with small spikes is provided for the faithful to stick a tallow dip—value one centavo (a farthing)—in front of a plaster image of the Virgin.

The house of Montejo—now the property of one of the many branches of the Peon family, the wealthiest of all Yucatecans—bears the date 1541, and is thus the oldest building in Merida. The façade is fine, and the doorway is a typically Spanish representation of militarism plus bigotry—two knights, armed cap-à-pie, being engaged in the congenial occupation of trampling underfoot two Indians who "take it lying down," as, alas! their descendants are still doing.

Life in Merida is as artificial as—indeed more artificial than—that of Mexico City. The latter, owing, as we have said, her fashions and her veneer of civilisation to Paris and New York, is assisted by her size in still being much herself. Not so Merida. No self-respecting Yucatecan wants to be himself. All of them are pathetically striving all the time after a culture which they do not understand, and which fits them as ill as his dress suit fits the hired butler at a suburban dance. "Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar." Most Yucatecans are the vulgarest of parvenus, and by the least scratching you find the savage. They are ashamed of their Indian past, and by an exaggerated class-arrogance they try to widen the gulf between themselves and the Indians, as the purse-proud woman thinks she will be mistaken for a lady if she calls every servant a "slut." They love to emphasise their superior wealth by dubbing their lowlier brothers and sisters mestizos and mestizas. The truth is the Yucatecans form but one class, and they are all mestizos. There are few pure Indians in the capital, and those are the domestic servants of the wealthy families.

You do not see the great contrasts of wealth so marked in Mexico City. The whole town has an air of prosperity, and it is not an air merely—it is a fact. During the past twenty years the group of large henequen growers—about a score—have divided among themselves as a result of this "green gold," no less than 800,000,000 Mexican dollars. And this vast sum has percolated through the whole place. Merida is a Monte Carlo for extravagance and extortion. There is no social standard but £ s. d. A man is or is not great socially in proportion to his banking account. Nowhere in the world probably is money so absolutely God as here. We shall show later what moral effect this fact has had upon the citizens, and through them upon the whole of so-called civilised Yucatan. Corruption and venality are rampant. Few races have stamina enough to resist the corroding influences of sudden wealth. The silver mines of Mexico proved the knell of Spanish imperial greatness. Lord Beaconsfield said once, "Only a great man can stand power." In Yucatan wealth is power, the only power, and the Yucatecans stand it very badly.

In this city of mushroom millionaires everything is naturally very dear. Food is practically all imported. We had been told that at our hotel it was impossible to get a square meal for less than five dollars (ten shillings). It was not quite so bad as that, but for half that sum it is true enough you could only get just such a snack as an honestly hungry Briton would regard as a wholly inadequate quick-lunch-talk-business-while-you-eat style of meal. Few of the Yucatecans eat out of their own houses, and thus restaurants—at any rate of the cleanly and better class—are few and far between. Those which do exist are literally dens of robbers. The traveller in Yucatan—as indeed in all Mexico—has to learn what to a Briton, accustomed to more or less trust his fellow-man, is a very unpleasant lesson, namely that you can trust no one. The only safety on ordering a meal is to first drive a bargain. You must know down to the smallest roll or condiment what your repast is going to cost you. No Merida hotels or restaurants ever attach prices to their menus. They know a trick worth two of that. Each restaurateur is a gastronomic Procrustes who cuts his prices according to "the cut" of his customers. An article served at twenty-five centavos to one diner will at the next table boom to fifty at the discretion of the subtle waiter. It is very hard to always remember to do this unpleasant bargaining before you take your place at a table. But you are literally lost if you do not. On this glorious Sunday morning we were successfully caught in a place where they charged four shillings for three glasses of lemonade and three or four fly-blown cakes. The cakes you would get anywhere for a penny, and lemons could be bought in the street outside at six a penny.

The streets of Merida are full of life and bustle, the cleanliest of bustle. Even the blind beggars (blindness is rather common) who crouch against the walls, with their plaintive cry of "Pobre Ciego," are as neat as a new pin. Smartly varnished mule-drawn tramcars tinkle their way to and from the suburbs. Outside the railings of the cathedral sit all day a line of Indian women in front of baskets filled with cakes, flattish, appetising-looking, sometimes as much as two or three feet across. Under the arcades of the Municipal Palace, which forms the north side of the plaza, is a motley scene of life. Here are tiny cigar-booths; small drinking-counters whereat are dispensed hour after hour to thirsty crowds "refrescos," drinks of squashed fruits—the deliciously sweet guanabana, limes, cocoanut water, pineapple or whatnot—and iced waters; withered beldames with baskets of sweets; lottery-ticket sellers and itinerant booksellers; while at the small round tables set in the doorways the Yucatecan loafers drink coffee or the native spirits, and from within the shaded rooms is heard the eternal click-click of billiard balls (billiards, the French game without pockets, is a mania in Yucatan) as the young Yucatecans crowd round the green tables. The edges of the arcaded pavements are occupied by large chairs on daises; lolling in the chair the Yucatecan lad who will polish your boots for fifteen centavos. The Yucatecan jeunesse dorée are dandies if nothing else, and this must be the reason why there are more bootblacks to the square mile in Merida than in any capital we wot of. But the lordly bootblack who waits for you to come to him is not half as picturesque a figure as the peripatetic bootboy. All day long these little roguish-eyed rascals wander round the plaza carrying their boot boxes and begging you to let them kneel in front of you and make your boots like looking-glasses. The boys are all so pretty and have got such winning smiles that you are insanely inclined to have your boots blacked every quarter of an hour. Joking apart, boot-blacking has been reduced to a science in Merida, and the operators put out of joint the noses of the London Boot Brigade.

Time was when Merida was far more picturesque than she is to-day. In the old city, when few of the citizens were grand at reading, streets were, as indeed they were once in London, known by their signs. Thus at one corner there was a wooden image of a flamingo; this was Flamingo Street. Another was the street of the "old woman," the corner being decorated with an effigy, highly coloured, of a bespectacled dame. There was a Tapir Street adorned with a representation of that queer pig-deer which still haunts the swampy forests of Southern Yucatan and Chiapas; a Crane Street, and so on. But all this is a thing of the past. America has invaded Yucatan even to her street-naming, and Merida, with her 48th and 63rd Streets, with the street-numbers reduplicated on the corners thus: 503, 62nd Street, 503, is as maddening and intricate as New York. Only one of the old signs remains, that of the elephant.

As you cross the plaza towards the market, it is difficult to picture what the old city must have been like when roads were not roads and the plaza, now a wonderfully kept square of grass, flowers and stone, was a mangy patch of leprous grass dotted with trees, to which were tied mules which had brought in produce from the country.

But the alterations in Merida are surface alterations. The only wonder is that the city is as healthy as it is, for there is no attempt at any general sewerage system, no main drains, and every householder is a law unto himself on this vital question. Each hot season there are outbreaks, sometimes very serious, of yellow fever. But the city is a healthy city; there is no doubt about that. There is a general avoidance of well-water for drinking purposes, and as a substitute the most elaborate arrangements are made for storing every drop of rain-water during the wet season. This is done by every house of any size having enormous cemented tanks under their patios, the water-pipes from the roofs connecting with them. Thus the two huge quadrangles of our hotel were nothing but gigantic reservoirs tiled over. The rainy season practically never fails Yucatan; and, though not as regular in its advent as the Indian monsoon, keeps up year by year its average of supply. Surface refuse is dealt with summarily by the most picturesque set of road-sweepers imaginable. Neatly uniformed in white drill or brown holland, they wear pith helmets adorned with metal badges bearing their number, and look like soldiers. In front of them they push by means of a long handle a tin shovel, some four feet long, which runs on neat little wheels. These men are everywhere, and take very good care that garbage is nowhere. The water-carts, too, are worth a mention: gigantic wooden hogsheads painted in yellow stripes. These generally work at night, and take up their supply from huge water-taps which jut out from the walls of buildings, and upon which the men tie brown holland piping in the most primitive fashion to fill their carts.

The evenings at Merida are the gayest times, for then all folks, rich and poor, come out to spend the cool hours in the plaza. There is very little twilight ever in the tropics, and as soon as the sun is down and it is dusk enough, the wealthy Yucatecans have a queer habit of sitting in rocking-chairs outside their houses. A whole group of ladies will thus take the air in front of the huge doorways of the biggest houses, surrounded by two or three cavaliers. Later on the carriages are ordered, and sleepy-eyed beauties drive round and round the plaza in the dark, apparently enjoying this rather queer form of carriage exercise. In the centre of the plaza itself the town band assembles, and this is a signal for a nightly promenade of the humbler Meridians. Nothing can be more picturesque or typical. The seats are filled for the most part with the older people; fat old men, linen-suited and besandalled, armed generally with an incongruous ill-rolled umbrella, smoke and doze; beside them solid-looking Yucatecan matrons with gold chains round their necks from which hang gold coins and a metal or ivory crucifix; at their feet a baby or two, dressed in the shortest of shifts, play about.

But young Merida walks. Yet here again there is something which attracts the English eye, for there is a complete separation of the sexes. The girls walk together in twos, threes and fours one way, and the young dandies, in their spotless white-linen bell-bottomed trousers, belted with ornamental belts, over which are hung blue and white striped cloths reaching to their knees like butchers' aprons put on sideways, gaudily coloured silk-cotton vests and over these white-linen coats, walk the other. All the youths have a pretty habit of going hand in hand, or with arms round each other's necks. They are there to see the girls, and in the hope that the girls will see them. But the curious thing is that you never see them look at one another. The groups of chatting youths and maidens pass and repass one another round and round under the trees, in and out of the paths, and watch as hard as you like you will never see an ogling glance or catch a hint of that coarse chaff which is inseparable from such a congregating of lower-class youth of both sexes in a city like London. It really is quite extraordinary, the naïveté of it all, the determined way in which the eternal sex problem seems tabooed here. We sat for hours watching the orderly crowds, and never once did we see a girl stop in her walk to speak to a man or any youth attempt to speak or to walk with a maid. It was decorum in excelsis. It reminded one of the famous description of Boston as the place "where respectability stalks unchecked."

But respectability is usually perilously near being a synonym for mawkish dullness. Here it was not so. You had absolute decorum; there was no suspicion of noisy horseplay or hooliganism; there was not the slightest need for a policeman (as a matter of fact none appeared during the whole evening) to keep order; and yet the crowd was as perfect a specimen of the brightest popular life any city could show. They had all come out to enjoy themselves, and they enjoyed themselves like children, with a simple unaffected gaiety which was very infectious. With all their faults the Yucatecans have the saving grace of good temper, not from a geniality of disposition so much as from a physical apathy which makes them reluctant to the effort which losing one's temper involves. And this merry, laughing crowd in the plaza, the simple unadorned beauty of the dark-eyed lassies, the knots of handsome youths arms-linked, the plump babies contentedly playing in between the legs of the strollers, the old people dozing in the shady seats, and the mellow light from a huge electric standard dappling with a moonlike radiance the exquisitely cleanly pathways, made such a picture of pleasant contentment as was quite Utopian. In the darkened roadways the wealthier beauties of Merida drove round and round the plaza like bats circling round a lamp. But though there were many of them whose lascivious beauty would have made most men forswear their most cherished convictions, our hearts were in the plaza with the chattering, happy crowd, and we were quite sorry when the band, which, with an extraordinary display of energy, had played four tunes in two hours, struck work and the folks dispersed.

[CHAPTER V]
A YUCATECAN BREAKFAST, AND OTHER "SIGHTS"

Unless one is endowed with the appetite of the proverbial ploughboy there is surely nothing which puts you off your food more than having too much on your plate. One's sympathies go out to the irritable old gentleman at the London club who, having ordered a plate of beef and getting beef and a plate, snapped out angrily to the waiter, "Do you think I haven't eaten for a month?" The next worse thing to having too much on your plate is to have too much on the table. Every traveller knows the bewildering effect of those breakfasts served on the Paris and Mediterranean Railway, when seven dishes are placed before you, with fifteen minutes in which to eat their contents. But though there is no time-limit for feeding in Yucatan, you have got to get accustomed to the whole meal, in all its courses, being placed before you at once.

We had brought with us to Merida several letters of introduction, and on the Monday we presented one of these to a Yucatecan millionaire whom we ran to earth in his office (he was mayor of the city) transacting official business. After our preliminary greetings he said, "We Yucatecans never ask anybody to our houses, but I should like you to see the interior of a Yucatecan home. Therefore, will you breakfast with me to-morrow at 11.30?" In fulfilment of this engagement we turned up the next day in his patio at the appointed hour. The house is one of the finest in Merida, and is so typical of the people as to be worth a short description. Entering through the patio, bright with flowering shrubs, with orange trees loaded with the golden fruit, with palms and evergreens, you ascend a short flight of stone steps into a long central tiled hall forming a kind of glorified verandah on two sides of the courtyard. On the tiles are thrown a few cheap coloured mats. Ranged in two rows facing each other are eight or ten American bentwood rocking-chairs. On the walls hang a few oleographs. Here we were received by our host in a linen suit, and his Señora, a celebrated Meridian beauty, daintily dressed in a pink muslin frock, the mother, as we afterwards discovered, of seven children, though she herself looked little more than out of her teens. One or two other guests, male relatives, all in cool linens, having arrived, our hosts lead the way to the further end of the hall, out of which opens the dining-room. Not at all such a dining-room as we English associate with the sacred occupation of feeding. It is really nothing but another tiled annexe to the hall with huge doorway, but without doors (there are no real doors between the rooms in Yucatecan houses), at which the chickens and turkeys from the back yard are congregating to see the fun, hopping, cackling, out of the way of the half dozens of Indian women servants who are pattering in with bare feet from the kitchen of which you catch a glimpse down a vista of tiled yard.

But here's the table, and what a spread! There are only eight of us to breakfast, for it is the children's school hour, and thus they are not present; but if there were eighty-eight of us we feel, as we look at the groaning board, that the Indian maids would be able, when everybody's appetite was satisfied, to gather up of the fragments that remained many basketfuls. As we take our places, our host perhaps detects the amazement in our eyes, for he says with a wave of his hand, "I wished you to have a Yucatecan meal. It is always our custom to have everything on the table at once." There is certainly everything, almost everything you can think of. There is a dish of steaks; a stew of rabbit; a great plate of pork sausages; chickens stewed and chickens roasted; turkey minced with egg and turkey in puris naturalibus; a greasy mess of pork joints; a great heaped-up mass of venison; a vast soup-tureen of beef broth; a dish of chopped eggs and tortillas; a huge salted sausage in red skin, a favourite food of all Yucatecans; a minced mess of meat known throughout Yucatan as Chile con carne; a plate of veal cutlets; a large boiled fish, the famous red-snapper of the Mexican Gulf; and last but not least, turtle steaks. And for vegetables there are dishes of tomatoes, of green and red peppers, of garlick and onions, of black beans (frijoles) squashed into a greasy dark purple pulp, of snowy pyramids of rice, of boiled plantains, of sweet potatoes, and boiled Indian corn. But the sweets are here too; jellies and stewed fruits, cranberries squashed into a luscious disguise of pipless semi-liquid jelly fringed round with cream; pineapples stewed in thick slabs, and peaches floating in a wine-tinted syrup. And among all these plats de jour (the wonder is that the Indian maids have found room to place them on the table) are china baskets of fruits, apples from California, oranges from our host's farm, bananas and banana-apples, peaches and the purple-brown caumita, which looks like a cross between a rosy-cheeked apple and a nectarine and has a white soapy flesh with a taste which is somewhat like that of a green fig soaked for an hour in a lather of delicately scented soap. And to wash down this Gargantuan feast there were three cut-glass short-stemmed long-bodied goblets beside each breakfaster, which were kept filled by the Indian maids with red and white wines, aërated waters, iced lemonade made from the limes from the patio, fruit drinks, or iced milk.

Bread-throwing at school, if we remember aright, was an offence punishable with the sixth book of the Aeneid to write out and the loss of a half holiday as the minimum penalty. In Yucatan it is all the fashion in the highest circles. No sooner had we taken our places at the table than an Indian maid brought in, holding them in her brown hands, a towering pile of soft white doughy tortillas, each about as big as a large Abernethy biscuit. These she placed at the side of our hostess, who at once began to throw them to us all. It was so adroitly done that before you had recovered from the amazement with which the mere act filled you, you found yourself admiring the exquisite dexterity of the gentle thrower. Those of our readers who have visited Monte Carlo and admired, as every one must, the marvellous precision with which the croupiers flip the golden Louis to the lucky "punters," will be able to imagine something like the dexterity of our hostess. A tortilla whizzed circling across the table under your very nose, and landed with exquisite softness, like a tired dove, at the side of your host's plate. Whizz, whirr! here comes another! Why, it's like boomerang-throwing, for this last, you'll swear, circled round you before it sank nestling under the edge of the plate of steaming pork-stew in front of you. The air is thick with these doughy missiles. Nobody is the least surprised except us, and we become quite absorbed in watching the friendly bombardment. Our host engages us, as the newspapers say, in "animated conversation"; enquires the purposes of our tour, and our theories as to the origin of the Mayan people. It is hard to give him our whole attention, for we feel we are losing all the fun. For the tortillas are whizzing over the table now and round it just like boomerangs, and then the hostess's supply is exhausted. But here is a plump Indian maid with a fresh supply, snowy white and softly fluffy, such as would fill a London muffin man's heart with envy. It is all very funny, and the climax is reached when your host peels an orange of some very rare flavour, and offers you the juicy dripping quarter in his fingers, following this up with a like exhibition of his hospitable wish to share with you his apple and his peach.

We had defended ourselves as well as we could from the unbridled hospitality of our host, but all the same we felt like boa-constrictors who had made an injudicious meal of goats whole, when we packed ourselves into a skeleton cab to pay a visit of inspection to the Merida prison, which is one of the sights of the place. The drive thither was through one of the finest thoroughfares in the city, lined with substantially built bungalow-houses of stone and stucco, each standing in its picturesque tropical garden, a mass of bloom and waving fan-palms. This street debouches upon the broad Avenida de Paz, a wonderful stretch of asphalt running the full width of the city and forming its western frontier. Beyond this opens out the really fine Plaza de Porfirio Diaz, a great oval of lawn intersected by broad paths of asphalt meeting in a large central space ornamented by a small artificial lake with fountain. The Penitenciaria Juarez fronts upon the plaza, a long low building of limestone stuccoed, one-storeyed save over the central doorway, where a turreted second storey forms the residence of the President, as the governor of the gaol is called. This official met us at the doorway. He was a Mexican of about forty, a tall, handsome, military-looking man, swarthy-skinned, with a big black moustache. He impressed us very favourably, for there was in the face a certain charm of frankness and straightforwardness which is not characteristic of the Mexicans, and is almost wholly lacking in the Yucatecans. His smile was quite kindly, though behind it it was not difficult to detect a certain official grimness which suggested a man capable of anything if duty demanded. He had been imported into Yucatan because of his reputation as a specialist in the governing of gaols, and what we saw of the administration of the building under his control suggested that Yucatan had been very wise in her importation.

Armed with an ordinary walking-stick, in linen suit and a panama hat, he led the way across the central hall, where loafed half a dozen soldiers in holland uniforms ornamented with green and white braidings and wearing a cap of the French kepi type, to the interior of the prison. The iron gates were unlocked by a convict dressed in a red and white striped shirt, the President explaining that all the short-term and good-conduct men wore these, while the more desperate characters have blue and white striped shirts. From the gateway three long corridors branched off, and we passed down each in turn. Out of these opened on each side the cells, small cubicles of stone, their only furniture a wooden shelf, some three feet wide, let into the wall about three feet from the ground and supported by two wooden legs. Upon this shelf the prisoner sleeps, his bedclothes the simple blanket universal throughout the country. In the corner of the cell was a small gutter and drain for washing down the cell, which was ventilated by a small grated window in the corner furthest from the corridor. At the end of the central passage was a large stone room where convicts in blue striped shirts were busy making hammocks. The place reminded one of a hop garden in Kent. There were long rows of posts, two to each man, between which were stretched the rough string frameworks of the hammocks, the men passing up and down between the posts threading the strings backward and forwards like carpet-weaving. Passing through this, we came into a large garden quadrangle at the further end of which, in a big shed, scores of red-striped convicts were busy carpentering. At a signal from the President's stick the buzzing of lathes and saws stopped, as if by magic, and the men stood at attention. The superintendent-carpenter was called up, and explained everything to us, and the President called one or two of the men to him and asked particulars of their cases. One of these was a nigger who rejoiced in the British name of John Williams. With a broad grin which showed his white teeth to the gums, he told us that he was serving a month's sentence for fighting a man in the street. All the men looked well cared for and contented.

On the other side of the courtyard was a large washhouse with baths for the men and big sinks in which the prison washing was done. Close by was a blacksmith's shop where a score of men were engaged in all sorts of iron work, much of it quite artistic, the chief job at the moment being the designing of railings for the outside of the Penitenciaria, which had been opened only a short time. Here the President told us that much vigilance had to be exercised to prevent the more desperate men from using their opportunities to make less innocent things than railings. Only a few days before our visit one of the workmen had been found in possession of a bloodthirsty-looking knife which he had manufactured with the purpose possibly, as the President coolly said, of trying its metal upon him. Close by, sitting in the garden, were a row of men busy weaving sacks from henequen fibre. Crossing the yard, we were shown the kitchens. Here were two or three large circular blocks of masonry, into each of which were let several coppers or ovens, the fireplaces beneath. The whole building had a businesslike and cleanly air, and a couple of convicts were engaged in manufacturing a stew which had a very garlicky Yucatecan smell. We complimented the President upon these kitchens, which would certainly very favourably compare with those in even a first-rate British barracks.

After having inspected an excellent miniature hospital which formed an annexe in the rear of the gaol, we were taken by the President to his private room, where from a safe he produced the prison books. These were most interesting volumes from the criminologist's point of view. To each prisoner was devoted a page, headed by a photograph of him, stripped to the waist and with head shaved. Thereunder were entered details of his crimes, birth, parentage, age, health, weight, and any physical peculiarities. They do not go in for fingerprints in Yucatan. Two or three facts struck us as we turned the pages of these truly human documents. First, there appeared to be no Indians in the gaol. Secondly, the clean-shaven presentments of the culprits emphasised to a startling degree the physiognomical lowness of the Mexican type. The majority of the men—certainly of those imprisoned for the more serious offences—were Mexicans, and not Yucatecans. Some of them were mere lads, but one and all had features which suggested the atavism of crime. They were born murderers. And thirdly, as was logical enough, four-fifths of the offences chronicled in these books were homicide or robbery with violence. It was a curious sidelight into the condition of even this peaceful corner of the Mexican Republic—"that purple land where law secures not life." We were astonished, too, to notice that the maximum penalty for murder appeared to be fifteen years' imprisonment. The President explained that as a rule capital punishment was not inflicted, but was reserved for parricides and murderers of the most brutal kind. We ventured to suggest that, in such a land, this was a somewhat ill-judged leniency. But the President shook his head. He probably thought that it would make too serious an inroad upon the population of the Republic if every murderer was shot. The supreme penalty of the law here, as in Mexico, is always by the rifle bullet, never the rope.

The President explained in detail the administration of the prison, and the regulations seemed to be quite Utopian in their mildness. Thus each prisoner is allowed to see his relatives once a fortnight, and they can bring him food. During these visits the utmost vigilance is needed to prevent the smuggling-in of contraband articles, money and so on. As illustration of this, the President took from his desk a broken tortilla into which had been kneaded two half-dollars and the tortilla then cooked. The ruse had been discovered, and now the rule is for every tortilla brought into the gaol to be broken in two by the guards. The Gilbertian element, which we had noticed so much in Mexico, was represented here by the truly astonishing provision of a gaol band, which discoursed sweet music to the culprits every afternoon. Evidently our friend the President firmly believed, with Congreve, that

"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast."

Another benevolent regulation was that by which the prisoners received on their release all the moneys which they had earned by industries, the only deduction being for the purchase of materials and the upkeep of the working sheds. The President took us out to a gallery where were stored a quantity of really excellently made pieces of furniture, tables, writing-desks, wardrobes, washstands, chairs, and carved cupboards. In this way a prisoner on his release is sometimes entitled to as large a sum as six hundred dollars (£60). Having inspected the school department where the humanising effects of education were tried upon the criminals, we were taken up to the roof of the prison to view the method of guarding it. Between the outside street wall and the inner wall of the building was a moat some thirty feet wide. In this were stationed at intervals soldiers armed with rifles. On the outside wall, some two or three yards broad, paced more armed sentries, who thus commanded an entire view of the whole prison. In bidding the President good-bye we said, what we felt, that he was the head of an establishment which did him the utmost credit, and from the humanising and rational system of which the English Prison Commissioners might take many valuable hints.

There is a Museum in Merida, a poor affair and badly housed in three dark rooms; but there were several things we wanted to see specially, so we made our way thither after leaving the prison. With some difficulty—for our driver did not appear, with true Yucatecan stupidity, to know that his city contained such a very unnecessary adjunct—we ran the national treasure house to earth in a back street, where a small brass plate on a decayed-looking doorway announced itself as "El Museo." The director, a middle-aged Yucatecan, whose amiability was only equalled by his archæological ignorance, was routed out of his hammock by his little ten-year-old son who opened the door to us, and sleepily proceeded to do the honours of the place. It is a great pity that, with such limitless wealth and such boundless opportunities, Merida has taken no pains to establish a Museum worthy of her position as the capital city of the Egypt of the New World. What we saw, if it had not been so sad, would have been really comic. Absolute confusion reigned. There was no catalogue, the smiling director forming a peripatetic one. Exhibits bore numbers which were thus meaningless to every one but himself. It was Mexico Museum over again on a humbler scale. Wretched pieces of Spanish carved stone-work from the interiors of churches or from the façades of seventeenth-century houses, were jumbled up with really marvellous pieces of Indian workmanship, figures in bas-relief of gods and animals and warriors in feathered dress. But the good director had not been content with making a hotchpotch such as one sees in the shop of a dealer in marine stores and scrap-iron. He was guilty of archæological crime, for on the top of a Spanish church pillar he had actually cemented a carved Indian head from one of the temples. In another corner a slab of stone, an eighteenth-century Spanish coat-of-arms, had joined forces by means of cement with a wonderful Indian frieze. The result was ludicrous in the extreme; but when we expostulated with him, he smilingly explained that he had done it to "prevent them from falling about"!

There was, as far as quantity is concerned, an excellent display of Indian pottery, incense-burners, water-pots and domestic utensils, and small stone figures of gods. But these were all lying haphazard in a case with Spanish pottery and tile work. One of the most interesting exhibits from the archæologist's point of view is the much disputed "Cozumel Cross." Found on the island of Cozumel in the seventeenth century, it was brought to Merida and placed first in the patio of the Franciscan Convent, then in the Church of the Mejorada, whence it was removed to its present position. It is a very ordinary stone cross, standing some three feet high with a two-foot cross-piece. On it, in half relief, is an image of the Saviour, made of plaster, coloured, with the hands and feet nailed. Chiefly upon this relic has been based a ridiculous theory that at some remote date Christianity had been preached to the Indians and that the worship of the Cross was found to exist in Yucatan by the Spaniards. The truth is, as the American traveller J. L. Stephens showed years ago, the "Cozumel Cross" is nothing but a poorly sculptured piece of ornamentation from the first Catholic church built in the island of Cozumel by the order of Cortes. The director made vigorous efforts to convince us of its Indian origin, but one look at it was enough; and we passed on to an exhibit which was the special object of our visit.

In Guatemala, around Copan and Quirigua, skulls have been unearthed from time to time the teeth in which had in some instances been ornamented with tiny discs of polished jade. The workmanship was of the most exquisitely precise nature, and the object had evidently been adornment and not dentistry. When these skulls were submitted to expert dental surgeons in America, they declared the work so excellent as to be unsurpassable even with the present-day mechanical devices and instruments. Since these finds, archæologists have been searching for years in Northern Yucatan for some skull which exhibited a like dental ornamentation. A few months before we arrived in Yucatan their persistent hopes had been fulfilled. About twenty miles to the north-east of Merida, at a town called Motul, during casual excavations at a hacienda, a skull was found which now lay before us. Several teeth in the upper and lower jaw were missing, but in the former two of the front teeth had let into their centre tiny discs of bluey-green jade so firmly done that, after the lapse of centuries, the stone still formed a surface flush with the enamel of the tooth. Since our return to England we have seen in the British Museum a skull from Ecuador, in which some of the upper teeth are ornamented in the same way, but with gold.

Only one room of the three was devoted to Indian antiquities, and after the director had made a special point of showing us a gigantic broken stone phallus which appeared to interest him and his little son more than any of the other exhibits,—(characteristically enough, for the Yucatecans are nothing if they are not phallic worshippers),—we spent a few minutes in rambling round a medley of cases containing such incongruities as fœtal monstrosities in bottles of spirits of wine, pistols which in their youth had had the honour of dangling round the waist of Yucatecan heroes, a model of a gas engine, examples of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical furniture, moth-eaten collections of bugs and beetles, examples of the coinage of all nations (very faulty collections), and some battered Spanish armour. There is a great deal of Ego in the Yucatecan Kosmos, and these rooms represented self-complacency run amuck, with its mementoes of persecuting Catholic clerics, pseudo-heroes and municipal nonentities; with the tag-rag and bob-tail of their wretched relics, their chairs, their wigs, their coats, their walking-sticks, their slippers and their snuff-boxes. On the walls were a series of ill-drawn pictures representing poor (!) Spaniards being disembowelled, hanged, quartered, and burnt by ruthless Indians; and as we made our way to the door, our cicerones pointed out to us four large wooden wheels which had supported the truck upon which Dr. Le Plongeon had had the Chacmool he discovered at Chichen, and which we mentioned in describing Mexico Museum, brought to the coast. If Merida had not got the statue—and in the circumstances she has probably not lost much—she at least had the genuine cartwheels.

The attitude of Mexico towards foreign archæologists is that of the "dog in the manger." This is more particularly noticeable in her policy regarding the comparatively recent activity of German and American students in Yucatan. We were the first Englishmen to approach the Government for permission to cross the Peninsula, but we found ourselves somewhat the victims of the indiscretions of foreign rivals, whose conduct during the past few years has gone some way to justify the churlishness of the Mexicans. The Mexican or Yucatecan is, as a rule, an illiterate sensualist, who cares not a jot about his country's past and is incapable of differentiating between a magnificent ruined Indian palace and the stuccoed carcass of a hideous eighteenth-century church. Too mean and too indolent to enter upon researches for themselves, they regard with suspicion and dislike all who would study the ruins. The passport granted us was none too generous, and its wording made it clear enough that our archæological enthusiasm was scarcely welcomed.

In accordance with its terms, we had reckoned our most important official duty in Merida was to call on the Conservator of Monuments. We expected an Ancient of Days whose talk on Mayan problems would be a treat. But nothing is as you expect it in this Gilbertian land. We found the Conservator gently rocking himself amid the orange trees of his patio. He was a sleek, self-satisfied, shiny-booted, white-waistcoated young man, good-looking of the barber's-block style. He languidly informed us that he had never seen the ruins of Chichen: a confession equivalent to the Keeper of England's Regalia admitting that he had never set eyes on the Koh-i-noor. Our amazement was so obvious that he apologetically added that he had photographs. It was irresistibly reminiscent of poor Dan Leno as private detective, tired of watching the suspected house, taking a photograph of it and sitting at home in comfort watching that.

Months later we learned that a bitter battle had been waged in Mexico City by contending bands of German and American archæologists to influence the Federal Government to appoint their respective nominees to the then recently created post of Conservator. What might not result were the work of guarding and studying the marvellous ruins of Yucatan in able and competent native hands? The Germano-American battle had ended in a compromise. As they could not get their special candidates appointed, they had agreed that it was safest to have a nonentity. The Federal Government had certainly granted them this favour.

[CHAPTER VI]
AMID THE PALACES OF THE ITZAS

By all means let the sluggard go to the ant, if he feels equal to the journey; but on no account let him go to Yucatan. For if he ever arrived at Merida he would never get further. It is only the early bird which catches a Yucatecan train. Bradshaw would find himself in Yucatan one of the unemployed, for there is no need of railway tables. All Yucatecan trains start at dawn, one from each terminus, east, south, and west. With the rising of the sun there is a setting of railway activity, the only remaining excitement of the day being the reception of the incoming train from east, south, or west, which has also started at dawn. Early rising is accounted a virtue in most countries; in Yucatan it has become a vice. It may have something to do with sleeping in hammocks. Everybody, rich and poor, sleeps in hammocks in Yucatan, and until the last year or two a bedstead, even in Merida, was scarcely known as a curio, and even now the few existing are restricted to the hotel and one or two American houses. For even the energetic to get out of a bedstead "with the sun" is an undertaking, an enterprise, demanding real moral courage and iron will-power. But the hammock is so different. You give a sharp twist of the body to the left, raise your feet clear of the blanket, and, before you know where you are, you are up, or, to speak more accurately, you are down, for there are falls in plenty for the uninitiated in hammock-sleeping. But whether it is due to hammocks or not the Yucatecans are all early birds, though they seem to have no designs on the early worms; for they simply sit about in the dark and shudder with cold.

The stars were still bright and it was pitch dark when, cursing the unearthly hours of Yucatecan railways, we tumbled out of our beds and into our top boots on the morning of our leaving Merida. There are many pleasanter occupations than putting the finishing touches to one's baggage for a long journey in the wilds in a gloom which is almost Cimmerian. The worst of the Yucatecans is that, having forced you, by the intemperance of their railway methods, to leave your bed, they do nothing for you in the way of providing food. Though the barbarians are all up themselves and the markets opening, you could not get a square meal for love or money. We were due to catch the dawn train going eastward, and the irritability born of dressing in the dark had developed into a sullen despair by the time we reached the station. It was deadly cold, that penetrating coldness which is typical of the tropics before dawn, and, as the little ramshackle train jolted through the suburbs, we wondered at the obstinacy of a people who will get up early and will not breakfast.

This eastern railway, which now runs as far as Valladolid—a small place which we shall describe later—had only just been completed on our arrival in Yucatan. Its total length is some eighty miles. At first the scenery was much what we had seen in our journey from the coast. Desolate, flat, stony country, all grey walls and henequen. After about ten miles of this, the little ill-laid single line enters the forest, which it thereafter never leaves, except at the clearings for the stations. Some of these are primitive enough, the platforms merely mounds banked up at the side of the rail. The monotony of the journey was broken by one or two humorous incidents. The slowness of Yucatecan trains is such as to make applicable Artemus Ward's sarcastic suggestion in regard to the American trains of old times, "that it's no use having a cow-catcher on the engine, for we shall never catch up a cow. It ought to be at the rear to prevent the cows from boarding the train and biting the passengers." We did not literally face this peril, but we did suffer the indignity of being chased by a pack of barking dogs, and at one point we had to slow down for a herd of cattle which had blundered from the woods on to the track and galloped, tails in the air, in front of the engine for about five miles. After we had been delayed for some time, further on, by the wood fuel, stored on the tender of the engine, catching fire, we eventually reached Citas, whence it is some eighteen miles through the forests to the famous ruins of Chichen Itza. Citas is a dirty village with a large church. There is something pathetic about Yucatan's churches. They are all too big for their towns, and look as much out of it as a boy of sixteen at a child's party. The smallest village in civilised Yucatan always possesses a large church and a small official with a big name, el Jefe politico, "the political Chief," a kind of mayor without the sables and the chain of office. Citas's mayor had very little on but a panama hat and a shirt, but he was an intelligent fellow to whom, as strangers in a strange land, we felt gratitude, for he had provided horses and an Indian guide.

It was our first experience of a Yucatecan road, and we were not impressed. Even the best roadways resemble a Scotch trout stream with the water dried up. Ledges of rock a foot or more high; stretches, a quarter of a mile at a time, covered with boulders but a few inches apart, make riding an absorbing exercise. The horses of Yucatan have learnt to take matters quietly (they certainly would not last a week if they fussed), and your mount will balance himself on a rocky promontory, like a chamois, and deliberately look about for the best place for his next hoof-step. A hold on the rein in case of a stumble, but no steering, is the best rule for the rider in Yucatan. If you try to steer your mount, you come to grief four out of five times; he knows best. The light was fading with tropical quickness as we rode through the Indian village of Piste, a ruinous settlement, thrice the scene of battles and raidings in the native wars of last century. Thence less than a league lies Chichen, and the road, deep embowered in trees, looked like a cavern's mouth ahead of us till the moon rose.

We had been riding forty minutes or so, when of a sudden the trees parted. Looming up, momentarily blotting out moon and sky, rose a mighty pyramid, rearing its vast mass of ink-black shadow into the silver sky. As we rode towards its western shoulder, the moon touched with a glinting light the flat stones of its southern slope and struck on the huge plinths and door-lintels of the temple which crowned it. Around us, as our eyes became used to the light, we saw, rising gaunt above the tree-tops, the crumbling walls and façades of palaces and temples. It was Chichen! Chichen the magnificent! and this the "Taj Mahal" of Central America, down the steep steps of which the solemn procession of priests and victims had passed in their journey to the scene of the sacrifice! Reining in our horses, we sat there gazing up at this grand relic of a dead people. Instinctively, one almost held one's breath; there was something so sublime, so awe-inspiring in this imperishable monument to perishable gods.

EL CASTILLO, CHICHEN ITZA.

What did it all mean? The tyrant priests, majestic in their bejewelled and befeathered robes, standing at the head of those now crumbling steps, with supplicatory hands uplifted to the starlit heavens; the mighty lord of the Itzas, at whose command tens of thousands had toiled at the building for years in the blistering sunlight; the gods, to appease whom the blood of human victims had perchance flowed in rivers before their grotesque idols; all dead, unutterably dead, impotent, discredited! As we sat there, from the dark woods echoed the weird long-drawn cry of the Mayan night-jar—the pubuy—like a spirit-wail over the fallen race.

The history of Chichen Itza before the arrival of the Spaniards is as vague and as untrustworthy as all else concerning the ancient Mayans. In a later chapter we shall review the evidence available as to the date of its building. M. Desiré Charnay labours needlessly to prove that the city was inhabited at the time of the Conquest. Of that, at least, there is no doubt. Even if no credence could be given to the report of the expedition thither of the elder Montejo in 1528, there is a sufficiency of Spanish documentary evidence to show that the city was not only inhabited, but the centre of a vast and powerful population in the twenties of the sixteenth century. But there is no reason to doubt the truth of Montejo's account of his sojourn there which has been outlined in Chapter III. He found Chichen the metropolis of the vast tribe of the Itzas. The Spanish historian Herrera asserts that Montejo had a return of the population taken with a view to apportioning the Indians among his soldiers as slaves, and that each Spaniard became master of between two and three thousand. Montejo's troops possibly numbered on his arrival at Chichen some 350, and this would make the census of Indians work out at something like a million. This is obviously a gross exaggeration, for even if there was any evidence that Montejo succeeded so completely in subjugating the Itzas as to be able to enslave them, we are quite certain from a careful personal survey of the district, that the country around never could have supported, any more than it could to-day support, so many inhabitants.

But as a matter of fact it is thoroughly clear that though Montejo succeeded in making a lodgment at Chichen and possessed himself of the principal buildings, occupying these for something like two years, the vast horde of Indians were not in any sense conquered, but had simply temporarily withdrawn into the surrounding woods and village suburbs of the city. Unable in the face of firearms to recapture their palaces, the natives played a waiting game, setting about slowly but surely to starve the Spaniards into submission. Weakened by months of privation, with every square mile of woodland thick with his enemies, Montejo's position became at last desperate, and there was nothing for him but to evacuate the city. This was done in a picturesque way. Choosing a dark night, Montejo collected his men, keeping the sentries on the walls till the last moment, and then, muffling with cloths the horses' hoofs, he tied a dog to the bell-rope attached to the clapper of a bell, putting a piece of meat a few feet away, but just out of his reach. Stealthily the war-worn Spaniards moved off into the woods, and naturally, as the dog saw them going, he pulled at the rope, thus ringing the bell. When they were actually out of sight the dog presumably scented the meat, and thereafter throughout the night made efforts to reach it, ringing the bell the while. This ruse entirely succeeded, the Indians believing their enemies still in camp; and it was not until their suspicions were aroused by the continuous ringing of the bell until dawn that they approached the buildings and found them deserted. But it was too late, and the Spaniards on their horses were able to make good their escape to the coast.

At the hacienda a kindly welcome awaited us from Mr. Edward Thompson, Consul-General for America in Yucatan, who has for some years been the owner of the property. A keen archæologist, he pluckily entered into possession of the estate some fifteen years ago when the neighbourhood had long earned an unenviable reputation. The last two haciendados and their families had been massacred by the revolted Indians and the house pillaged. Even to-day Chichen, which practically stands on the borderland of the disaffected eastern district of the Peninsula, is not as peaceful as it looks. A fortnight before our arrival a village some thirty miles off called Xocen had been raided and burnt. But these outbreaks do not distress Mr. Thompson, whose sympathies are with the Indians, and who, speaking Maya like one of them, is beloved by all around. An experienced traveller himself, Mr. Thompson gained our hearts at once by introducing us, as soon as our greetings were over, to a palm-thatched bathhouse in his garden, where in a stone trough we revelled for some time in the pleasures of cold water after our dusty, burning ride.

With the dawn we were up and out at El Castillo, to use the stupid Spanish name of the great pyramid. It loses none of its majesty in the daylight. It is a truncated pyramid close on 100 feet high, squared almost to the four cardinal points, but not, we believe, orientated; the northern side being the front because in that direction lies the Sacred Cenote which we shall describe in a moment. The four base lines are each, as near as can be, 200 feet long. On each of the four sides were gigantic staircases. That on the west, still in fair preservation, up which we must climb directly, is 37 feet wide. That on the north was 44, but this latter and that on the east are so entirely destroyed as to be barely traceable. The stairs on the south, about 40 feet wide, are much broken and overgrown by cactus and shrub. The pyramid is built of rubble and earth, and was completely faced with flat-hewn slabs of limestone about 5 feet by 4 and 4 to 6 inches thick. In places these are still in position. This is particularly the case with the south front. The four corners were evidently once dressed with rounded stone blocks from top to bottom.

It is difficult to exaggerate the magnificent appearance the mound must have once presented. The stairways, which are so steep as to appear in some places almost perpendicular, were balustraded, each balustrade ending on the ground in those gigantic carved stone serpent-heads, the jaws wide gaping, which we find again and again in Mayan ruins. The climb of the 120 steps, on the average about 9 inches high and 8 broad, is an undertaking before which any one not a practised Alpine climber might be excused for quailing. Pausing for breath at the eightieth step and looking downwards, your head reels; for the edges of the steps appear to merge into one another by reason of their steepness, giving one the feeling of being perched, fly-like, on the face of a grey cliff. On reaching the top step, a few feet of platform separates you from the temple. Climbing as you have been from the western side, the real one-time grandeur of the sanctuary does not strike you. It is not the front, and you must pass to the north, where was the state entrance to the Holy of Holies. This is 20 feet wide and the lintel of the gigantic doorway is supported by two pillars, 8-1/2 feet high, carved with a snake pattern and once ending at the base in snakes' heads, open-mouthed, the now empty eye-sockets having once been filled with brilliantly painted stone or pieces of polished jade. These heads are broken up, and only enough remained for the tutored eye to reconstruct the whole. Entering, you are in a now roofless room running the full length of the building east to west, 40 feet long and 6 broad. In front of you is a second doorway, its massive doorposts carved with life-sized figures of warriors in full ceremonial dress. By this you enter the central room, 20 feet by 12. Two pillars, each 1 foot 10 inches square, carved on every side with life-sized figures of warriors or priests in feathered costumes, support beams of sapota wood, once carved, but now too decayed to permit of the designs being traced.

There is no doubt that the building formed a temple. The religious nature of the Castillo must be indubitable to any one standing in front of it. Whether the bloody rites which are known to have been celebrated by Moctezuma's people in honour of Huitzopochtli, God of War, on the pyramids of Mexico had their equivalent on Chichen's mound is a very different matter. There is really no proof for or against. And if it were argued that the fact that there is no altar stone within, as is the case, goes far to prove that there were no such rites, there would be no value in such negative evidence. If bloody deeds in honour of a Sun-Deity were here enacted, possibly the flattened serpents' heads at the outer door, which would have been in view of the congregated thousands on the plains below, formed the butcher-blocks upon which the victim's palpitating heart, after his breast had been sliced open with the silex knife, was torn from its tissues to be burned as an offering to the god in the inner Holy of Holies; while the body, scarcely lifeless, was pitched (as some writers who value the picturesque rather than the accurate would like us to believe) down the steps to be sacramentally eaten by the worshippers. On the other three sides of the building runs a corridor 6 feet wide, three doors with sculptured jambs facing almost due south, east, and west.

A woodland path, in places wide enough to merit the title of road, and here and there showing signs of an ancient cementing, leads from this grimly majestic shrine of fallen gods to perhaps the grimmest pool in the world. Yucatan is peculiar in being riverless and lakeless. Rivers and lakes there are, but these are all subterranean, generally from fifty to two hundred feet beneath the surface. But dotted over the Peninsula are deep holes or water-caves, reservoirs carved by nature out of the limestone and fed by these underground sources. For these the Mayan Indian name is "cenote," and they are often huge. Two of the largest are at Chichen. Indeed the very name is due to them; for "chi" is "mouth" and "chen" is "wells." Thus Chichen was the city at the "mouth of the wells."

But only one of Chichen's natural wells served as water supply. This flower-bordered path we follow leads to the Sacred Cenote, round which grim rumours have long collected; rumours which it is now our privilege to confirm as facts. As we approach, the trees on either side give a denser shade. A few yards further and the path debouches into a small semicircular space with tiers of stone running round it to the left, suggestive of a tiny amphitheatre. In front of you is a small stone building, one-roomed, possibly the scene of the penultimate acts of the terrible dramas played so many centuries back in this tropic woodland. A step more and you are on the brink! Hold the branch of that sapota sapling fast, for the fall is sheer! Seventy feet below you in a huge limestone basin, two hundred feet or more in diameter—so nearly a perfect circle that as you look into it you find it hard to believe it has not been engineered by man, that it has worn thus from the infinitely slow corrosive action of the rainfall and natural drainage water—seventy feet beneath you lies the black, still water. It is an inky black. High above it on the limestone sides of the great hole sprawl ferns, cactus, and orchid; higher still, fringing its verge, thorn-bushes and pale-green acacias, the grey-barked sapota, and the heavy-leafed ceibo-tree raise their branches into the sunlight. But the sun never touches that gruesome, deadly still, pitchy lake. Its very glassy stillness sends a shudder through you. In its sepia depths what wonder that Mayan priest and people saw the home of the terrible Rain God, at whose will the land might smile with plenty or the spectre of famine lay his bony hand on the shrinking townsfolk?

From the earliest days of the Spanish invasion to the present time rumour has been busy in circulating many gruesome stories of the exact sacrificial uses to which this terrible pothole in the limestone was put by the ancient Mayan Indians. If Montejo the elder, during his stay at Chichen in 1528, was cognisant of human immolation in the cenote, he has left no record of it. But this is no evidence that he was not, because, like most of his fellow-adventurers in the New World, he left no chronicles at all. The probability is, however, that he knew nothing accurately and certainly witnessed no sacrificial rites, for during the foreign occupation of their city the ritual of the Indians would almost certainly be in abeyance, or at any rate practised with the utmost secrecy. The first actual written Spanish testimony to the sacred character of the pool appears to be that of Bishop Landa in his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan (1556). He writes: "A good wide road led to a well into which in times of drought the natives used to throw men, as indeed they still do, as an offering to their deities, fully believing that they would not die, even though they disappeared. Precious stones and other valuable objects were also offered; and had the country been rich in gold, this well would contain a vast quantity, because of the great veneration of the natives for it.... On its bank rises a small building filled with idols in honour of all the principal deities in the country, exactly like the Pantheon in Rome. I cannot say whether this is an ancient practice or an innovation of the aborigines, who find here their idols to which they can bring their offerings. I also found sculptured lions, vases, and other objects, which from the manner they were fashioned must have been wrought with metal instruments; besides two statues of considerable size of one single block, with peculiar heads, earrings, and maxtli round their loins."

The bishop's remarks were based, obviously, on an actual visit he paid Chichen and upon such tittle-tattle as he could obtain from the Indian peasantry. A more serious notice of the cenote is contained in a report, clearly inaccurate in detail and based on hearsay, which was drawn up in 1579 by the Spanish Governor of Valladolid and transmitted to Madrid. It runs as follows:—

"Eight leagues from this town stand some buildings called Chicheneca. Among them there is a Cu (Maya name for pyramid) made by the hand of hewn stone and masonry, and this is the principal building. It has over ninety steps and the steps go all round so as to reach to the top of it; the height of each step is over one-third of a vara[2] high. On the summit stands a sort of tower with rooms in it.... This Cu stands between two zenotes of deep water. One of them is called the Zenote of Sacrifice. They call the place Chicheneca after an Indian named Alguin Itza who was living at the foot of the Zenote of Sacrifice. At this zenote the lords and chiefs of all the province of Valladolid observe this custom. After having feasted for sixty days without raising their eyes during that time even to look at their wives nor at those who brought them food, they came to the mouth of the zenote and at the break of day they threw into it some Indian women, some belonging to each of the lords, and they told the women that they should beg for a good year in all those things which they thought fit, and thus they cast them in unbound; but as they were thrown headlong in they fell into the water, giving a great blow on it; and exactly at midday she, who was able to come out, cried out loud that they should throw her a rope to drag her out with, and she arrived at the top half dead, and they made great fires around her and incensed her with copal, and when she came to herself she said that below there were many of her nation, both men and women, who received her, and that raising her head to look at some of them they gave her heavy blows on the neck, making her put her head down, which was all under water in which she fancied were many hollows and deeps; and in answer to the questions which the Indian girl put to them, they replied to her whether it should be a good or bad year, and whether the devil was angry with any of the lords who had cast in the Indian girls, but these lords already knew that if a girl did not beg to be taken up at midday it was because the devil was angry with them, and she never came out again. Then seeing that she did not come out, all the followers of that lord and the lord himself threw great stones into the water and with loud cries fled from the place."

During the succeeding centuries there is no record of any effort on the part of the Spaniards to solve the mystery surrounding the well. This is not at all surprising, for from the first they took no kind of interest in questions affecting the Indian past of the country, and their innate avarice was not awakened by any well-founded suggestion that jewels and the precious metals had been cast as offerings into the Zenote. The mineral poverty of Yucatan was so obvious as not to permit of such a belief gaining currency, as is clear from the quotation given above from Bishop Landa. But there was another and a stronger reason why the pool should hold its secret fast. This was the extraordinary mechanical difficulty of dredging operations. As has been said, the height from the brink of the cenote to the water-level is seventy feet, and the basin is a complete and precipitous circle all round; there thus being no means of reaching the water except by some elaborate contrivance of a crane nature. M. D. Charnay in 1881 provided himself, in anticipation of his visit to Chichen with two automatic sounding machines, one of which was capable of bringing up half a cubic metre deposit. Owing, however, to the height of the cenote walls, the depth of the water, and the enormous detritus of centuries, he could do nothing. It has been reserved for our good friend Mr. Edward Thompson, whose earnestness is only matched by his persistence and his contempt for difficulties, to wrest from this ugly hole the full measure of its secrets. Some twelve months back he had set up an elaborate crane apparatus worked by hand-winches which, projecting considerably over the cenote, and moving in a large half-circle, supported a heavy iron dredger. By means of this machinery dredging over the whole surface of the well-bottom has been done to a considerable depth.

The water, regarded still by the superstitious Indians as fathomless, is at present thirty feet deep, but was probably deeper once. The dredging operations have disclosed the bottom of the cenote to be an accumulation of earth and vegetable refuse, into which Mr. Thompson has been able to probe to the depth of over thirty feet. These investigations have once and for all established the fact that the pool was the scene of countless human sacrifices. The quantity of skulls and bones brought up by the dredger admits of no other explanation. For if it was urged, as it may be, that such "finds" point possibly to the cenote having been put to a sepulchral use, the answer is provided by the character of the skulls and bones. In a pool which was regarded in the light of a national Valhalla the majority of the skeletons would almost certainly be those of men, and men, too, of advanced age, chiefs and war-worn tribal heroes. But this is not the case. With scarcely any exceptions, the bones are those of the young. We were privileged by the courtesy of Mr. Thompson to see and handle many of the skulls, and our examination of them satisfied us that they were one and all those of young females between twelve and sixteen years of age. The disarticulated bones all exhibited a like immaturity and sex. From these facts only one deduction is possible, namely that sacrifices in the cenote did occur, and that such sacrifices were of young girls who were hurled by the priests into the chasm, possibly after defilement by the high-priests in the small building at the pool's edge, thus symbolising the simultaneous surrender of virginity and life to the Rain Deity.

It is of course impossible to say for how many centuries before the Spanish Conquest this practice prevailed, but allowing for the natural tendency of the bodies to entirely decay during anything like such a vast period as some writers would suggest is represented by the life of Chichen as a city, the quantity of skulls found in fair preservation seems to indicate a comparatively frequent repetition of this cruel rite; probably many maids each dry season. These grim mementoes of the pagan past are not the only "finds" the cenote has yielded. While the dredging has more than corroborated Bishop Landa's supposition that the mineral poverty of Yucatan forbade the hope that countless ounces of gold and silver lay hidden in the pool's muddy bottom, many archæological treasures have been recovered. There is much reason to believe that, aided by these, Mr. Thompson will be able to give the world an absorbingly interesting reconstruction of pre-Conquest life in Chichen, pieced together with that painstaking zeal which has distinguished all his previous work in other parts of Yucatan.

To these "finds" we shall have reason later to refer more in detail, but of one thing we would speak here. An enormous quantity of lumps of copal, a resin obtained from several small trees or shrubs of tropical America with compound dotted leaves, known to botanists as the order of Burseraceae, have been dredged up. This copal was used as incense in the Mayan temples, and it is certain that it was regarded as very precious, for there is evidence that tributes to overlords were paid by vassal tribes in so much weight of this resinous gum. There thus seems little doubt that part of the ritual at the cenote edge was the casting in of lumps of copal as offerings to the god, and it is more than likely that this custom is referred to unconsciously by the Spanish official reporting in 1579, when he says that "all the followers of that lord and the lord himself threw great stones into the water and with loud cries fled from the place." The pieces of copal recovered are in some cases as large as a human head.

About one hundred and thirty yards to the south-west of the great pyramid is the building known as the Tennis-Court. Running north to south are two immense parallel walls 274 feet long, 30 feet thick, 25 feet high, and 120 feet apart. At each end, some 30 yards from the walls, stand buildings roofless and wall-less on the Tennis-Court side. That on the north still shows traces of elaborate carvings from floor to roof, and on two pillars, where was once a doorway, are figure carvings. The building to the south is not so richly decorated. The clue to the purpose of this vast enclosure is given by a massive stone ring projecting from the eastern wall 20 feet from the ground. A corresponding one on the west side has fallen and lies among the bushes. We found its measurements to be 3 feet 11 inches in diameter, 11-1/2 inches thick, and the diameter of the ringhole 1 foot 7 inches. The ring still in position is obviously of the same measurements: it can be seen in the photograph reproduced. On the flat surface and on its edges each ring is carved with two serpents intertwined. These rings formed an essential part of a ball-game, which seems to have been common to the Mayan peoples in Yucatan and the Aztec subjects of Moctezuma in Mexico. The native name for this pastime was Tlachtli.

The Spanish historian Herrera, in describing the amusements at the Court of Moctezuma, has a detailed account of the game. He writes (we follow the translation adopted by J. L. Stephens): "The King took much delight in seeing Sport at Ball, which the Spaniards have since prohibited, because of the mischief that often happened at it; and was by them called Tlachtli, being like our Tennis. The ball was made of the gum of a tree that grows in hot countries, which, having holes made in it, distils great white drops, that soon harden, and, being worked and moulded together, turn as black as pitch. The balls made thereof, though hard and heavy to the hand, did bound and fly as well as our footballs, there being no need to blow them; nor did they use chaces,[3] but vy'd to drive the adverse party that is to hit the wall, the others were to make good, or strike it over. They struck it with any part of their body, as it hapned, or they could most conveniently; and sometimes he lost that touched it with any other part but his hip, which was look'd upon among them as the greatest dexterity; and to this effect, that the ball might rebound the better, they fastened a piece of stiff leather on their hips. They might strike it every time it rebounded, which it would do several times one after another, in so much that it look'd as if it had been alive. They play'd in parties, so many on a side, for a load of mantles, or what the gamesters could afford, at so many scores. They also play'd for gold, and feather-work, and sometimes play'd themselves away, as had been said before. The place where they played was a ground room, long, narrow, but wider above than below and higher on the sides than at the ends, and they kept it very well plastered and smooth, both the walls and the floor. On the side walls they fix'd certain stones, like those of a mill, with a hole quite through the middle, just as big as the ball, and he that could strike it through won the game; and in token of its being an extraordinary success, which rarely hapn'd, he had a right to the cloaks of all the lookers-on, by antient custom, and law amongst gamesters; and it was very pleasant to see, that as soon as ever the ball was in the hole, the standers-by took to their heels, running away with all their might to save their cloaks, laughing and rejoicing, others scouring after them to secure their cloaks for the winner, who was oblig'd to offer some sacrifice to the idol of the Tennis Court, and the stone through whose hole the ball had pass'd. Every Tennis Court was a temple, having two idols, the one of gaming, and the other of the ball. On a lucky day, at midnight, they perform'd certain ceremonies and enchantments on the two lower walls and on the midst of the floor, singing certain songs, or ballads; after which a priest of the great temple went with some of their religious men to bless it; he uttered some words, threw the ball about the Tennis Court four times, and then it was consecrated and might be play'd in, but not before. The owner of the Tennis Court, who was always a lord, never play'd without making some offering and performing certain ceremonies to the idol of gaming, which shows how superstitious they were, since they had such regard to their idols, even in their diversions. Moctezuma carry'd the Spaniards to this sport, and was well pleas'd to see them play at it, as also at cards and dice."

This account by Herrera of the temples surrounding the playground would be as accurate if it purported to be a description of Chichen instead of Mexico. The two roofless buildings which we found north and south of the court certainly suggested temples, but a more elaborate confirmation of the religious element in this ball-game is found at the southern end of the eastern wall, where stands another building larger than either of those described. This is called "The Temple of the Tigers," from a frieze design, marvellously lifelike, of jaguars (always called tigers in Yucatan) pacing after one another. The building is built to the same level as, and indeed forms part of, the wall of the Tennis Court. Its position, with serpent-columned doorway, facing the arena, indicates that it, too, figured in the ceremonies of the ball-game. Of the front room nothing remains but the two columns and the back wall, out of which latter a doorway leads into an inner apartment. Here are the most remarkable Mayan paintings so far discovered. They cover, or, to be accurate, they once covered (for they are much mutilated), the whole wall space. The colours used are green, red, blue, a reddish brown (the colour of the human skin in all Mayan paintings), and yellow. The designs are coarse in outline, the colours are faded, the plaster is chipped; but the humanity of it all holds you. The method employed in these mural paintings was that of placing one layer of pigment over another. Thus a green shield with yellow bosses studding it was depicted by the shield being first painted entirely over with green, discs of yellow chalky pigment being then placed on the green background. This method, which at the time of the actual painting obviously must have added to the glowing realistic effect, has its grave disadvantages in the detaching of these superimposed layers of paint by crumbling during the passage of centuries. Thus much of the original skill of the design is for ever lost to us.

But it is all very human. Life as it was lived, loved and struggled for; life with all its work and its play, its lights and its shades; the drama of life in those far-off Indian days, is here pictured for you. The long-dead past lives again in that crumbling fresco. By the magic of even that crude draughtsmanship you are transported back through the centuries into the living city. Close at hand you seem to hear the weird chanting of the priests, to smell the resinous incense; from the steaming plain below rise the sounds of hut-life, the grating of the stone rolling-pin (universal sound in every Indian village) on the metate or stone tray as the housewife crushes the maize, the cries of playing children, the barking of the housedogs, the crowing of the cocks. You seem to catch the echo of sharp words of command, of the low, long-drawn, grunting cries of the toilers as they drag huge plinths up the newly banked sides of the pyramid; while from the distant quarry comes the incessant "tap-tap-tap" of nephrite chisels as the masons shape the vast blocks of limestone. On the other wall the artist shows you warriors, shields and flint-headed spears in hand, in the full crash of battle; while above them the women have come out upon the battlements of the city to watch the struggle. Truly is there nothing new under the sun. To one's mind come those lines of Matthew Arnold:

"Men shall renew the battle on the plain;
To-morrow, as it hath been, it shall be;
Hector and Ajax shall be there again;
Helen shall come upon the walls to see."

Scrambling down the broken wall to the ground-level, at the back of this painted room is another looking towards the pyramid. The back wall, all that remains, is covered with figures of warriors carved so closely that it is hard to follow the design in the blaze of sunlight.

But there is one figure which demands attention. In the centre of this bas-relief is the presentment of a man who is distinguished from those around by the fact that he wears a beard. This is very curious and very important. Beards were never worn by the ancient Mayan Indians, as indeed they are never worn to-day. In fact, physiologically the Mayan cannot grow a beard, or at least a beard of anything but the mangiest and most scrubby nature, a fact which is evidence of that Mongolian blood which he shares in common with the American Indians of the North and South. But beards are said to have been worn by the priestly caste attached to the worship of the Mexican deity and culture-hero Quetzalcoatl. This divinity, it has been believed, can be identified with the Maya god Itzamna, and this belief certainly gains support from the appearance of this bearded figure on the sculpture of Chichen, the work of a beardless race.

In front, where the doorway of this temple once stood, are two square carved pillars, not monolithic, but built of slabs a foot or more thick; but the topmost slabs have come away and lie on the ground. Between these pillars, the back hollowed as if for a ceremonial seat, is the much broken form of a tiger (jaguar). Between this building and the pyramid are heaps of fallen stones, and in the dense bush we find and photograph huge slabs of limestone 3 or 4 feet square and more than a foot thick, upon which are carved quite brilliantly lifelike representations of a much bewhiskered jaguar and a parrot eating a nut of the mamey tree. Among these littered stones are, too, many serpents' heads and pieces of a curious frieze decorated with skulls and crossbones.

Standing on the top of the Castillo platform, looking northeastward, one sees shining white amid the trees the pillars of what is known as the Temple of the Tables, so called in allusion to its chief feature, a series of tables, huge stone slabs supported on Atlantean figures. These latter are of extraordinary interest. They have the square, severe Egyptian headdress and fillet, and so closely resemble in features and general appearance the Sphinx-forms of Egyptian mythology that one starts back in amazement on first seeing them. One curious thing, too, is that a close examination shows an extraordinary diversity of feature. Whoever the sculptor was, he was not content with producing a stereotyped face, but actually aimed at and obtained a series which one might reasonably guess to be portraits. But of these squat figures, more when we come to our conclusions as to who the Mayans were.

Away to the north of the Castillo, but a few yards from the path which leads to the Sacred Cenote, is a small ruin known as the Temple of the Cones, because in front of it are perhaps a hundred small cone-shaped stones about 2 to 3 feet long, looking for all the world like the 10-inch shells fired from modern artillery. Some writers have found a suggestion of phallic worship in these, but the close inspection we made convinced us this is not the case.

To the east of the Castillo in the dense woods are an extraordinary series of short columns, the difficulty of explaining which has so far defeated all students. Hundreds of these columns, now broken and scattered, built, as all the columns at Chichen are, of square slabs mortared on to each other, appear to have stood in rows five or six abreast, and some 12 feet apart each from each, forming the sides of an immense square. These columns would seem to have been finished by plain square capitals which lie about here and there. The most reasonable suggestion offered in explanation of these groups of pillars, none of which evidently exceeded 6 feet in height, is that of M. Charnay, who was at Chichen in 1881. He believed them to mark the site of the market-place of the ancient city, and found in the columns the supports for that low colonnade which, he pointed out, was known to have bordered the market-places in Mexico at the time of the Conquest. He quoted Clavigero, who wrote: "In Mexico the judges of the commercial tribunal, twelve in number, held their court in the market buildings, where they regulated prices and measures and settled disputes. Commissioners acting under their authority patrolled the market-place to prevent disorder." The position of these strange columns at Chichen, in the very heart of the old city, as they must have been, within a hundred yards of the Castillo, certainly seem to support M. Charnay's guess, and there is no difficulty in believing that a large arcade supported by rows of five columns abreast ran round the market-place to afford shelter from the sun to those who, like the judges mentioned by Clavigero, had by reason of their duties to be there all day. M. Charnay, however, does not attempt to explain what has become of the roof of such arcade, for there is no sign of it among the littered stones. The explanation undoubtedly is that the roof would have been formed not of stone but of a framework of light beams thatched with palm-leaves, the thatch periodically renewed, as is the case to-day with every Indian hut where the thatching lasts little more than a year. This roofing of the arcade would have of course long ago entirely rotted away.

In the woods to the south-east of the Castillo are a series of ruins which, while intrinsically interesting, are perhaps of most value in the discussion as to the actual age of Chichen. We shall refer to them in a later chapter, and at present would content ourselves with saying that we believe them to represent an older Chichen than that which flourished at the time of Montejo's visit. They consist of a series of mounds some 30 feet high, crowned with now ruined buildings. In their midst are two temples. The first is very remarkable. Its roof has gone, but the majestic carved pillars, 10 feet high, which supported it are still for the most part in position. Here Mr. Thompson recently unearthed a life-sized recumbent statue of the Chacmool type to which a reference was made in our description of the Museum at Mexico City. Its head is half turned, and its features and headdress are those of the Atlantean statuettes. A hollow in the body between the navel and ribs, three inches wide by three-quarters of an inch deep, suggests a receptacle for incense-burning; the figure probably being altar and idol combined.

To the immediate south of this, with the walls nearly adjoining, is a second temple, now roofless. Against its southern wall stand three carved pillars some 10 feet high, but the peculiar feature is a platform 3 feet high and 5 feet wide and 12 feet long on the north side which has all the appearance of an altar; while a second feature, which we saw nowhere else in Yucatan, was a terraced ledge at the eastern end about 4 feet wide running the full width of the building and approached in its north-east corner by a flight of five stone steps well laid. Still further to the south of these twin temples were two mounds parallel to each other about 50 yards apart. Owing to the dense growth of bush accurate measurements were difficult; but each appeared to be between 40 and 50 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 25 to 30 feet high. Excavations on the second one showed three small stone houses, apparently communicating.

In the woods to the south of the Castillo are a group of large and well-preserved ruins. First the "Red House," a literal translation of the Indian name Chichanchob, in allusion to the extensive colouring of the inner walls. The building, which is 43 feet long and 23 deep and has a richly ornamented cornice, stands on a low mound 62 feet long and 50 odd wide, approached by a stairway 20 feet wide. It has three doors admitting to a room running the full length of the building; and out of this again there are three doors to three inner rooms. Along the top of the wall of the front room runs a tablet covered with two lines of hieroglyphics. They are much worn, and we found it impossible to get a satisfactory mould of them. The paints on the walls are still vivid, but no pattern is traceable; the only striking feature being that "red hand," which we found in far better preservation at a city we discovered some months later in the island of Cozumel, and of which we shall write later.

To the south-east of the Chichanchob is a most puzzling building, unique as far as Yucatan is concerned. The Caracol, or "Winding Staircase," stands on two rectangular stone-faced terraces reached by steps. The lower terrace measures 220 feet north to south, 150 feet east to west, and is 20 feet high. The masonry is very rough, and may have been plastered. At one end are the remains of four small pillars, and around the building we found at intervals carved heads hollowed in the crowns to serve as incense-burners. The stairs are on the west side, and are 45 feet wide; the broken remains we found suggested there had been serpent balustrades. The second or upper terrace is 60 feet east to west, 80 north to south, and 12 feet high; the steps being a continuation of the lower flight. The building is a large squat turret of about 40 feet diameter and about 25 in height. Upon this turret a smaller one, now largely fallen, stood. The main turret consists of two concentric walls, enclosing two annular rooms and a circular core or pillar.

THE CARACOL ("WINDING STAIRCASE"), CHICHEN ITZA.

THE TENNIS COURT, CHICHEN ITZA.

The walls are some 2 feet thick. There are four doorways facing the cardinal points of the compass in the outer, and four facing the sub-cardinal points in the inner, wall. The core is about 7 feet thick at the floor-level and 8 feet at ceiling. The roof of each of these annular rooms ends in a very pointed arch. Facing the north-east door is a small opening in the core about 4 feet from the floor and measuring about 28 by 24 inches. J. L. Stephens in 1842 abandoned the attempt to explore this, but we were luckier. By a total disregard of our clothes and of the probability that the passage sheltered at least one rattlesnake, we squirmed through and came out at the side of the topmost turret some 10 feet from the top. Undoubtedly this was once a stairway, for we could feel (it was too dark to see) the broken edges of the steps. It is reasonable to surmise that this unique winding-stair building was in the nature of an observatory, though whether in connection with Sun or Star worship it is of course impossible to say.

To the south of the Caracol stands a ruin of remarkable beauty and in wonderful preservation. The Spaniards called it "La Casa de las Monjas" (Nuns' House), and there is much reason to believe that this is a thoroughly appropriate title, and that this building did actually house those virgins of noble birth of whose dedication to religious uses we shall have to speak at some length in a later chapter, when reviewing the whole subject of Mayan religion. The peculiar feature of the building is the manner of erection. Apparently at first it stood on a solid foundation of masonry 30 feet high and of the same size as the building itself except to the north, where there was a platform 30 feet wide. At some period, whether during erection or after completion it is impossible to tell, the architect must have come to the conclusion that the building was top-heavy, and decided to strengthen it by continuing the northern platform all round. This new wall was not spliced and mortised into the other as one would expect. A wall was built to the outer dimensions of the support only 2 feet thick, and the space between this and the main building was filled up with rubble and loose building waste. The abutment on the northern side, down which thirty-four steps lead to ground-level, was built in the same manner, giving it an unsubstantial lean-to appearance. But we shall have more to say upon this mode of building when attempting to date these structures in a later chapter.

The buildings on the platform are two in number. The larger is 104 feet long and 30 wide, and contains seven rooms, the largest on the south side measuring 47 feet by 9 feet wide, its inner walls bearing traces of figure paintings from floor to roof. The space on the northern side corresponding to this room has apparently been filled up. The niches for the doorways exist, but they are sealed to the lintel with masonry, whether because sepulchral or to give support to the building above, it is impossible to say. On either side of this closed space are two smaller rooms and two more in corresponding places on the south side, while at the east and west ends a room runs from north to south. The lintels of the three sealed doorways, both underneath and on the facings, are covered with hieroglyphics, as are also those of the doors on either side, and the fact that none are found on the southern chamber suggests that the sealing was for an important reason. Returning to the north side and climbing sixteen steps, you reach the second platform, on which stood a second house now merely a heap of stones. It was one-roomed with two doors, looking north and south.

As we came down the steps we disturbed a huge iguana, which darted up the face of the ruin and ran along its edge, stopping motionless at the corner to peer over at us, its grey dewlapped head and hideous blinking eyes making it look like some animated gargoyle. Once more on the ground, we turned towards the eastern annexe of the nunnery, containing five open and two closed rooms. Its façade has scarcely a parallel in Central America. The twining-serpent frieze, the "elephant trunk," the diamond pattern, and other designs common in Mayan ornamentation are lavishly used, as can be seen from the illustration, while in a central arched niche is a bust with a headdress of feathers. Over the door are twenty curious cartouches, five in a row, and over these are six ornaments like capital T's stuck into the building by their stems. As we approach, two or three asses, startled from their grazing at the doorways, clatter off into the stony woodland. Lizard and wild ass! Could better illustration than these desolate, gaping palace chambers be found for Omar Khayyam's lines:

"They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram—that great hunter—the wild ass
Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep"?

We sat awhile amid the fallen blocks of masonry in what must have been the nunnery courtyard, watching the swallows as they flew in and out of those timeworn doorways. Here and there amid the stunted wiry grass rose clumps of cactus and coarse thistle-like plants, while over all climbed a large blue convolvulus, its centre striped purple-red, making Nature's perfect harmony of colouring with a dainty butter-yellow foxglove-shaped flower which filled the air with a subtle musky perfume. Huge butterflies of orange and sulphur, of striped black and scarlet, of black and white, flitted among the blooms; while over us blazed the sun in a sea of blue, the rich blue of the eternal Carib summer.

A few yards south-eastward of us stood Akad-zib, "House of the Mysterious Writing," eighteen-roomed and unique as being the only building in Chichen not on a mound. Its façade—a contrast to the palace—is severely plain, but the building has importance. In the room looking south, over the dark lintel of a doorway leading to an inner chamber, are two rows of hieroglyphics,—the best preserved in Chichen,—while on the ceiling of this doorway, carved in relief and seated in front of what appears to be a basin of incense, is a figure in full-feathered dress, a right angle of glyphs running round to its left. Southward beyond the Akad-zib we could just see that greener patch of woodland which marks where lies the huge cenote whence the Itzas drew their water supply. Approached by a winding path which runs to the water's level, the broken sides of the chasm admit the sunlight, and the blueness of the water and the golden green of the palm-leaves make a true tropic picture.

And so the reader has wandered with us round two square miles of woodland, and glanced at the wonders of a city which in the days of its greatness numbered its citizens by scores of thousands; a city which architecturally, though possibly not culturally, remains the greatest monument of Central American civilisation.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Vara—a linear measure used in Spanish America, equal to thirty-three English inches.

[3] Chaces—an old-time form of spelling "chases."

[CHAPTER VII]
VALLADOLID AND AFTER

There are two kinds of brigands in Yucatan. There is the honest fellow who cuts your throat without apology or waits behind a tree and puts a bullet into your back at a ten-yard range; and there is the oily-tongued "con permiso" (detestable phrase! ever on Yucatecan lips) rascal who, permission or not, will see to it that your last centavo is his, if he can manage it. At Valladolid, whither we went from Chichen, we made our first serious acquaintance with the latter. One or two pleasant little episodes had occurred at Merida, but they were only in the nature of dress rehearsals.

Valladolid—railhead, frontier-town—is the back of beyond in Yucatan. To-day it is the most important township on the border-line dividing the enslaved Indians from those few thousands who are still maintaining their independence against the criminal-recruited forces of Diaz. In the revolt of 1847 and in all the lesser Indian risings it has been the jumping-off ground for the rebels. It is a long dirty street of shabby houses, ending in a weed-choked down-on-its-luck sort of plaza, at one side of which is a huge gaunt stuccoed church surrounded by tumbling three-foot walls. The whole place has a shamefaced, seen-better-days kind of air; and if it is indeed true that it has claims to be reckoned a health resort, one feels, as did the martyr to gout, when recommended to a very dull town for its baths, that "one prefers the gout."

It was on the 28th of May, 1543, that Montejo founded the town on the sight of the Indian settlement of Chanac-há. This native name means "large water," in reference to a great lagoon of sweet water on the northward. It was the fertility of the country around due to this swamp (for it was nothing else) which had attracted the Spaniards. But this in turn betrayed them, for, ere a year had elapsed, the place had proved so malarious that it was determined to move the town to the neighbouring Indian pueblo of Zaci. There on the 24th of March, 1544, the Valladolid of to-day was founded, its plaza being on the site of a huge Mayan temple built on a lofty pyramid. Not a stone or trace of the Indian work now remains, but tradition relates that in the temple was an idol of pottery, regarded as of great sanctity and to which the Indians for miles round made pilgrimages for adoration.

There is some reason to believe that this idol was in the form of the tapir, in Maya called "tzimin." There is no doubt that the queer "pig-deer," which is still found in the southern forests of Yucatan and in Chiapas, held an important place in Mayan mythology; and the account of this idol of pottery at Zaci worshipped as Ah-Zakik-ual, "Lord of the East Wind," which is described as being shaped like a huge vase moulded in front into an ugly face, suggests that there was here a temple dedicated to that tapir god replicas of whose image have been found moulded in vase form in many parts of Southern Yucatan, and especially in Guatemala. The interior of the huge vase was not probably used for the burning of copal, the figure thus being, as appears to have been so often the case, idol and altar in one.

We had left Chichen, as we had reached it, in the dark. But this time it was the darkness before dawn, and, with no moon, the Castillo looked gloomy and awesome in its setting of black woods. With our pockets full of oranges from the hospitable trees of the hacienda and our hearts full of wonder at the ruins amid which we had spent so many interesting days, we turned our horses' heads once more towards Citas, where we were due to catch another early train. It was perilous work picking your way in the gloom amid the boulders of the "camino real," as the Spaniards euphemistically call these execrable highroads. One wonders what a sham "camino" would be like, if this is a "real" one. But the dawn was worth seeing in those dark woods, dripping with the heavy tropical dew.

The glorious sun came, and the slate-greys and blacks turned to silvers and lustrous greens, and the dank sodden boughs changed to fairy wands, trimmed with diamonds as the sun touched them. And the sombre sky turned into such a blue, and the reds and ambers, the azures and the greens, of birds and butterflies as they woke for another day were so wonderful, that one caught the infection of it, the magic of God's tropic woodland, and we forgot the troubles of boulder-strewn roads and horn-pommelled Mexican saddles.

We found Citas the same dirty little place we had left it a week past and the people as stupid as ever. But after some difficulties with our baggage, we did eventually reach Valladolid towards midday. To the Jefe Politico there we had a letter from the Governor of Yucatan, bidding him treat us "in a very special manner." The Jefe was a feeble, melancholy, epicene little man, who wore spring-side boots, carried a lady's silver-topped umbrella and a fan, and perpetually smoked straw cigarettes. His hair was dyed and his manner was wistfully bored. He was fetched from his hammock to receive us, and extended a damp bird-like claw of a hand. He offered us no hospitality but led the way down the street to a filthy shop, in the rear of which was a barn, furnished with two hammocks and an enamelled bowl perched on an empty soap-box, serving as dressing-table and washstand. For food he directed us to a reeking little drinking-den. Having thus exhausted his energies in this "very special manner," he retired, promising to return in the evening to assist us in the purchase of stores for our journey through the forest.

There was very little to see in Valladolid. The Spanish vandals had taken care of that. All traces of the old Indian domination had been effectually wiped out. At the Jefetura, the Court House or Town Hall in the plaza, signs were not lacking of the troubled state of the country. Bands of soldiers were loitering under the verandahs cleaning rifles and smoking cigarettes. We call them soldiers, because that is what they call themselves; but they were certainly the sloppiest, most ill-disciplined body of men who ever disgraced that name. They were dressed in loose flying cotton shifts and cotton trousers, rolled up to the knee. Their feet were sandalled, and on their heads were queer pudding-basin-shaped straw hats with red ribbon lettered in black 5 Bat. G.N., which means 5th Battalion, National Guard. Ever since the war of extermination, some of the iniquities of which we shall presently relate, was started, Valladolid never knows quite where she is. Raiding-parties of Indians loiter in the woods to the eastward, and make periodic descents upon outlying houses and Government convoys. We attached to us a Yucatecan lad, sadly enough far advanced in consumption, who, unlike his fellow-citizens, was frank and pleasant-mannered and anxious to please. With him as our guide we visited a neighbouring cenote, the water supply of the ancient Indian city. This was very unlike those at Chichen, for it was not very deep down and was of open approach. In a basin some hundred feet wide lay the water, grass-green with water-weed, and far over it jutted a natural roof of rock, from which hung stalactites, a row of grey stone icicles some thirty feet long, like a fairy fringe over the pool. We made our way down the steep rocky side to a narrow ledge of rock which ran half way round the cenote, some twenty feet above water-level. Here there were caves where we were told jaguars sometimes sheltered.

The Jefe Politico was due to join us at eight o'clock, and on our return to the town we waited with what patience we could for him. But he never appeared. So we made the best of a bad bargain and a tour of the shops, succeeding in being swindled over each item of our commissariat. On the morrow, anxious to be starting, we walked over to the Jefetura to wake the Mayor up. There under the verandah in a ring sat the "rude forefathers" of this Yucatecan hamlet, the ancient Jefe in the middle. There is a local proverb, "Hay mucho vago en Valladolid" ("There are many loiterers in Valladolid"), and no better realisation of its truth could there have been than this band of venerable officials, drowsing their morning away. We were invited within the "magic circle," but even our execrable Spanish failed to rouse them. They had nothing to do, so they sat in the shade and did it; and the street crowd had nothing to do, so they hung on the verandah railings and stared at the first Englishmen reckless enough to visit the City of Dolittles. But smoking cigarettes and endeavouring to remember the past and future tenses of irregular Spanish verbs pall as occupations, and, losing all patience, we informed the somnolent Mayor that unless our wants in the matter of horses and a servant were promptly satisfied we would make a complaint to the Governor of the State. This threat galvanised the band of Vallado-littles into a frenzy of energy. Soldiers were summoned and came forward at the salute with fixed bayonets. Two were dispatched to get us hammocks; a third went off to seek a horse-dealer; while a fourth, actually the sentry on duty, under the directions of the Jefe, solemnly laid aside his rifle and set to work to peel a plate of oranges which had been produced to assist in our pacification.

The hammock-seeking warriors returned with a string of Indian women, each nursing "a special line" of hammocks. Of course prices had rushed up at the mere rumour of us, and having been assured in Merida that hammocks, a staple product of the town, were cheap in Valladolid, we were naturally disappointed to find that the commonest of those brought to be shown us were about three times their normal value. But hammocks we had to have, so we bought a couple of strong cloth ones at an exorbitant price, and a portion of the National Guard were told off to string them.

Then came the horse-dealers with all the maimed, the halt, and the blind of equine Valladolid. The prices asked for these chargers were truly tropical, and had grown to a great height. But no Englishman had ever visited the town before, and it was far too good a chance to be lost. We do not want to libel the somnolescent Jefe, but it was probably as much as his place was worth to refuse to "cock the blind 'un" on the frauds which his fellow-citizens were attempting to play on us. He was no man for half-measures in such a delicate matter, so he retired into the Mayor's Parlour to take a nap while we argued. None of the mounts were in the first flush of their giddy youth, and some looked Methuselahs. There was a horse with a sore on its back as big as a cheese plate, which the owner resolutely declined to part with for less than a hundred dollars; while another steed, badly spavined, was so precious to its lucky proprietor that with tears in his avaricious eyes he assured us it would break his heart to accept for this peerless mount less than double that sum. Fortunately we knew something about horses and were able slowly but surely to weed out the "crocks," though the rapacious crowd did all in their power to fool us. It ended in our giving a hundred dollars too much for the three horses we selected; but they were at least sound in "wind and limb," though the strongest, a stallion, was blind in the right eye. The Mayor, having been waked up by a soldier, then regretfully took an active part in the proceedings. To prevent horse-stealing, the purchase of a horse in Yucatan is attended by the utmost official ceremony. If the occasion had been an auction of blood-stock at Tattersall's these fatuous Yucatecan officials could not have made more fuss. Armed with note-books they waltzed round our sorry purchases, marking down their peculiarities. We did not see the books, but it is quite likely that they were entered as having "four legs and a tail." At any rate it took the united efforts of the Town Council to make out the official receipts, which bore so many stamps as must have crippled the resources of the local G.P.O. for some weeks.

But it is one thing to buy a Yucatecan horse, and it is quite another to load him with portmanteaux sewn into sacks. The stallion, which, as the strongest of the trio, we had selected to carry the heaviest of the baggage, had not "signed on" for any such nonsense; and fixing us with his one eye, which rolled as viciously as it could in its deserted state, he signified intense dissatisfaction with all loads and portmanteaux in particular by letting out his heels at the Mayor, and then rearing up and pawing the air, Pegasus-fashion, over a knot of sloppy becottoned troops who broke and ran in all directions. He was really quite a nice horse. We afterwards nicknamed him Cyclops, in affectionate allusion to his ocular defects, and grew to be quite fond of him. But he was not at all nice on first acquaintance, and a crowd of jeering Vallado-littles—far too scared to come within the lash of his hoofs—collected at a respectful distance to watch the fun. The Mayor had half an hour before presented us with a soldier servant who owned the name Contrario, and rejoiced on all occasions in deserving it by his obstinacy. We had come into the country expecting to find every man a Buffalo Bill; but these troops were very disappointing; they were so obtrusively foot-soldiers. They evidently agreed with the Psalmist that "a horse is a vain thing for safety," and Contrario, told to hold Cyclops, absolutely refused. But the crowd was growing with our anger, and it was no time for mutiny, so by sheer physical force we made the poor shivering wretch carry out our orders. Again and again we tried to get the baggage on. No sooner did Cyclops feel the first pressure of the load, which we adroitly brought up on his blind side, than he plunged and bucked like the veriest broncho, throwing the baggage into the dust. Disappointed in their malicious hope that we should have to give it up, one or two of the crowd began to take a friendly interest in our efforts, and one man, a big fellow for a Yucatecan but obviously as timid of horses as our soldier servant, volunteered to help. This time we got the twin sacks well over the stallion's back before he plunged, and a rope, adroitly thrown round, kept them in position till he quieted down and made up his mind to the inevitable. It was all over except the jeering, and, fearful as we were of mounting our saddle horses and leaving the recalcitrant Cyclops with his hated load to the feeble management of Contrario, we ignominiously led the horses out of the horrid little town amid an accompaniment of this from the citizens. But it was such an infinite relief to turn our backs upon the city of do-littles and brigands that we could have calmly borne twice the mockery hurled at us by that yellow-faced shambling crowd.

Our way lay for the next few days through forty-odd miles of a country densely wooded but traversed by a fair road. This latter had earned a bad reputation of late as being infested by bandits, Mexican criminals shipped from Vera Cruz to serve against the Indians, who had deserted and betaken themselves to the woods with their rifles. Only a few days before our arrival a gang of them had murdered three Indians who were in charge of a drove of pigs. It had been such collar-work inducing the Do-littleians to do even the little they did that it was wearing well on to four o'clock before we found ourselves out into the open. Once past the outlying huts of Valladolid, the dust of the rock-strewn road changed into a brick-red loam. In many parts of Yucatan for scores of miles at a time the tracks through the forest are red like this, suggestive of nothing so much as a rough cart road to an English brick-field. Once you have seen one such road you have seen them all, for they are as like as two pins. The dense woods hemmed us in on each side, and the monotony was only broken now and again by meeting straggling parties of Indians, naked but for breechcloth, with rough plaited straw hats, their long guns slung on their brown backs, a linen hunting bag at their waist, on their way to shoot in the woods. Throughout Eastern Yucatan every Indian is out at dawn and sundown to pick up something for the pot. Their guns are for the most part antiquated muzzle-loaders, single-barrelled, sometimes of obviously home manufacture. They are poor sportsmen from the English point of view, for they are out to kill, and they think nothing of following a bird up for a mile or two till they can shoot it sitting. They were a very different breed of men from those Indians we had seen nearer Merida, and some of them even looked truculent. But they gave us a very civil "Buenas tardes!" ("Good afternoon!") as they stopped to rest on their guns and gaze with wonder at such an unusual spectacle as two khaki-clad Englishmen and the three laden horses.

We were not able to make much progress before the sun was near setting, and we kept our eyes open for a likely spot to make our camp. Shortly before six we halted on the Tizimin side of the small Indian village of Cursuc. We cut our way some fifty yards into the wood and with axes made a clearing of some twenty feet square, slinging our hammocks between the trees. Tethering the horses to stout saplings, we sent Contrario to the village for water; but before we had got our saucepans boiling, darkness was on us, and we had to make the best of a meal eaten in a gloom which made it impossible to tell a spoonful of black beans from a spoonful of egg till you tasted them. In this Cimmerian darkness we managed to make the deplorable discovery that we had forgotten to provide cups, and we found ourselves in the ludicrously Tantalus-like position of having a saucepan, too hot to drink from, of boiling Cadbury's cocoa, and nothing to put the precious liquid in. Then one of us had the happy inspiration of utilising the saucepan lid. A great deal of real fun can be got out of drinking boiling hot cocoa from a saucepan lid. It is so aggravatingly shallow, so infernally hot to hold, and so top-heavy. But we were far too tired with the dusty tramp, after our long day's battle with the detestable inhabitants of Valladolid, to make mountains out of molehills. If we had had cups we should have got through the precious draught far too quickly, we reminded ourselves. Pleasure is anticipation; and waiting in the dark, seated on a boulder by the fire we had built in the red road, for your turn at the shallow draught was a real joy. We got outside our precious Cadbury, the black beans, and the eggs, and then we rolled ourselves into our hammocks, making cocoons of ourselves in our Mexican blankets, and, with our soldier servant stretched on a blanket on the ground between the two of us, we were soon fast asleep.

Each day of our march through this forest country was much the same as the last. We waked in the bitter cold of the early dawn, huge drops of dew falling from the trees overhead upon the rubber sheeting which we had had the foresight to take with us to act as counterpane. Each night we camped afresh in the forests, making a clearing some little way from the road; and despite the alarmist rumours which had reached us in Merida and elsewhere of the dangers attending such forest campings, we had but one serious alarm. We had been asleep some hours, dead-tired with our day's march, when we waked to find the fire, which we had left on the roadside mere embers, flaming three feet high. We did not know why we waked and we do not know now, for there was no noise to disturb us, and it was quite an unusual thing: as a rule we slept like logs. All we know is that we did wake and to our astonishment saw the fire, which we had carefully stamped out on turning in, blazing high. We were wondering what this could mean, when in the rear of us we heard stealthy footsteps, the brushwood crackling as if some two or three people were creeping in upon us. It was a very dark moonless night, and altogether the position was decidedly uncanny. We reached for our revolvers, which always hung by their belts at the hammock head, and sat up waiting. Whoever it was had seen us move, for all was still at first, and then, after a few minutes of dead silence, we distinctly heard the footsteps retreating. Possibly, as our horses were tethered on the side nearest the road, the robbers did not care to venture in that way, but made up our fire that the glare might guide them in a wide detour through the wood in rear of us. They had no doubt hoped to find us asleep, to have dashed in upon us and given us a slash over the head with their long knives, and then ransacked our baggage at their leisure. Finding that we were awake, however, and that they would have to fight for this privilege, they decamped.

But brigand alarms, though the most dignified, were not our only troubles in the forests. All Yucatan, wherever there are cattle, is cursed with an insect pest—a cattle louse known as the garrapatas. In these first days we suffered much from them. To look at they are like a cross between the ordinary bed-bug and a sheep-tick, but they often have markings on their backs like those on a garden spider. They get on to coat-sleeve or riding-breeches, often tiny as money-spiders, in scores at a time. They hang in brown patches upon the leaves and branches of shrubs and bushes, and if you just brush against these, before you have time to notice almost, the insects have climbed all over you, in a few minutes fixing themselves in the flesh and digging their way in till nothing but the rounded tops of their backs are visible. Their bites are not at first painful, but become intensely irritable after a day or two and cause troublesome swellings, if in any great numbers. It is nothing uncommon to find fifty or a hundred of these tiny plagues on one after a day's riding through the bush. Cleanliness is no prophylactic against them. The only thing we found any good was to make a strong solution of tobacco and smear this well over legs, thighs, and arms when dressing. This keeps some of the less hardier ones at bay; but the really big ones (we found one as big as a threepenny piece fastened on to the hinge of the lid of a box-tortoise in the woods at Chichen) stop at nothing, and no pulling will get them out. The only thing to do is to let them work their wicked will of you, when, after a day or two, they fill up with blood and turn a deep purple colour like a black Hamburg grape. In this aldermanic condition of repletion they are very easily detached, ... and alas! squashed.

The Yucatecans are a cleanly people and bathe a great deal, the poor as well as rich; but nothing astonished Contrario more than our rubber bath. This, which we had bought in London, folded into so small a space that it was a treat to watch his face when we first unfolded it and he saw an admirable bath four feet in diameter, spread out as if by a conjuring trick. If we stopped early enough and the sun was still up, we would send him down to the nearest well and have a glorious time splashing about and sponging cool streams of water over ourselves, while gorgeous butterflies of blue, scarlet, and amber fluttered round us in the thicket, and green parakeets and the bushy-tailed grey squirrels perched on the trees to watch us. Though probably as immoral as any race in the world, the Yucatecans are singularly modest, and, though he saw us minus everything but a smile revelling in the cool limestone water and he would sit mournfully by trying to pick the garrapatas out of his legs and thighs, nothing would induce him to take advantage of our rubber bath, presumably because he feared we might look while he was in the "altogether."