Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  But this fabulous civilization was doomed by a colossal earthquake, which flooded Atlantis and severed its land bridge to Central America. “The earth rocks horribly, palaces, temples, all crashing down, crushing their human victims, flocked together like so many ants. Vast rents open at their very feet, licking with huge, flaming tongues the terrified people into their yawning mouths. And then the inundations. Mighty waves sweep over the land. The fierce enemies, Fire and Water, join hands to effect the destruction of a mighty nation.”

  Thompson later confessed his chagrin at the piece’s audacity—and in his defense, the theory was only one in a rash of at-least-as-outlandish conjectures that the first American civilizations had been founded by immigrants from Egypt, Africa, Israel, and other unlikely places. But the article made an impression on two influential members of the American Antiquarian Society, Stephen Salisbury III, scion of one of Worcester’s wealthiest families, and Charles P. Bowditch, noted Maya scholar and benefactor of Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In 1885, when they were recruiting someone to do fieldwork at Maya sites in the Yucatan, the pair, along with U.S. senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, invited Thompson to dinner and offered him the job. To help finance the work, Hoar had already persuaded President Grover Cleveland to appoint the twenty-five-year-old “consul-archaeologist” to the Mexican states of Yucatán and Campeche, making him the youngest member of the U.S. consular service.

  Thompson spent several months poring over the Maya archives at the American Antiquarian Society and acquainting himself with Spanish and Mayan. Then he boarded a steamship for Mexico, along with his wife, Henrietta, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a whaling captain (a combination that Thompson found “cannot easily be beaten as a wife and mother”), and their two-month-old baby, Alice. Landing at Progreso, on the Yucatan’s northern tip, they settled in nearby Mérida, a sleepy city of mockingbirds and church bells, where barefoot women carried their baskets to market wearing white dresses; colorful rebozos, big gold earrings; and gold chains around their necks. None of the city’s roads was paved, not even the major thoroughfares, and after a rain, residents would pay stout, bare-legged porters to carry them across the sloppy streets.

  The Thompsons began to build a bungalow in the city’s cooler outskirts. The site was the raised mound of a former Maya temple, and when workers dug the foundation, Thompson made his first archaeological discoveries—ancient potsherds, shells, fragments of obsidian, even beads of jade. Feeling a “white heat” for his work, he began to explore other sites near Mérida—the cave paintings at Loltun; Uxmal, widely considered the zenith of late Maya art and architecture; and the more modest ruins at Sayil, Kabah, and Labna. But time and again, Thompson’s imagination returned to the pagan rites supposedly conducted at the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza.

  It was a blistering April day when Thompson finally saw the ancient city. Climbing a winding path, threading his way past enormous boulders and tall trees, he was reminded of forest trails he had known in New England. Then he realized that the massive blocks he passed were intricately chiseled into columns and pillars. As he began to grasp that the forest floor was actually an ancient terrace, he peered through the trees and glimpsed an ash-colored mass shimmering in the sun. He recognized it from photographs: Chichen Itza’s great limestone pyramid, seventy-five feet tall, stepped and square and surmounted by a temple. In the woods beyond, verdant knobs jutted from the canopy—more decrepit temples and palaces waiting to be unearthed. The sense of antiquity was overwhelming.

  El Castillo before restoration, in a photo taken by Désiré Charnay around 1860. “Old and cold,” Thompson wrote on seeing Chichen Itza’s ruins for the first time, “furrowed by time, and haggard, imposing, and impassive, they rear their rugged masses above the surrounding level and are beyond description.”

  The city that Thompson admired had been home to a Maya people called the Itza, who most likely migrated inland from the Yucatan coast, perhaps around A.D. 800. It was an apocalyptic time, as the great cities that prospered in the full flush of Maya civilization—from about A.D. 250 to 900, the period archaeologists call the Classic—were tottering toward collapse. But their demise created an opportunity for the interlopers, and for the next three centuries—during the so-called Postclassic period—Chichen Itza wielded a masterful combination of conquest and trade to dominate the Yucatan like no other Maya city-state before or after. Expanding to as much as six square miles, with a population of perhaps thirty-five thousand, Chichen Itza grew into the most cosmopolitan Maya city ever built, featuring not only traditional Maya architecture but also a bold foreign style. Some of Chichen Itza’s buildings so closely resemble those at Tollan, the capital of the powerful Toltecs in central Mexico, that for decades it was thought that the Toltecs had invaded the city, or at least had come to exert some powerful sway there. Now the similarities are thought more likely a reflection of Chichen Itza’s sophisticated, determinedly mercantile outlook.

  With its lavish temples and Sacred Cenote, and the largest ball court in Mesoamerica (a geographical and cultural area including Mexico and most of Central America), Chichen Itza also became the hub of a religious cult dedicated to the creator god, the feathered serpent Kukulkan, which had originated in central Mexico, where it was known by its Nahuatl name, Quetzalcoatl. It was in honor of Kukulkan that the Itza built their iconic pyramid, masterfully engineered so that a ribbon of sunlight slithered down the west balustrade of the main stairway on the afternoon of the spring and fall equinoxes, joining with a carved head at the bottom to form a glowing serpent. And on the pyramid’s high platform, at the climax of their spectacular public ceremonies, priests would extract the beating hearts of their captives and collect their blood in shallow bowls, to sustain the god and repay him for the gift of life. Then about A.D. 1100, great Chichen Itza faltered, surpassed by its rival Mayapan, sixty miles to the west. Four centuries later, when Europeans arrived, they found only a handful of squatters at Chichen, though the cenote continued to attract pilgrims from hundreds of miles away.

  Many other foreigners had passed through Chichen Itza in the centuries before Thompson. In 1531, the conquistador Francisco de Montejo had made it his headquarters, anointing the Pyramid of Kukulkan his “castle,” perhaps for its appearance or perhaps to satisfy Spanish law, which mandated the establishment of a fortress with mounted cannon before the province could be considered conquered. The pyramid is still known as El Castillo, “the castle,” but Montejo never did overcome the Maya’s fierce guerilla resistance. In 1535, his army was driven from the Yucatan altogether, and it was left to his son Francisco to conquer the peninsula, which he finally achieved in 1546 after building walled strongholds at Mérida and Campeche. The last independent Maya king, an Itza named Can-Ek, didn’t surrender to the Spanish until 1697.

  A century and a half later, John Lloyd Stephens (“the father of Maya archaeology”) reached Chichen Itza with English architect Frederick Catherwood. Others followed through the rest of the 1800s—Désiré Charnay, who recorded the ruins in moody sepia photos; the eccentric Augustus Le Plongeon, who believed that the roots of Freemasonry would be discovered in Maya culture; and Alfred Maudslay, who documented the site in his seminal, five-volume Biologia Centrali-Americana. But before Edward Thompson, no one had tried to plumb the Sacred Well.

  In 1893, eight years after Thompson landed in the Yucatan, the spectacular World’s Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Europeans’ arrival in the New World. Determined to present “a perfect exhibition of the past and present peoples of America,” the Peabody Museum’s Frederick Ward Putnam, overseeing the fair’s Department of Ethnology, commissioned Thompson to make full-size papier-mâché casts of portions of the Maya ruins at Labna and Uxmal. For nearly fourteen months, Thompson labored in the Yucatan’s malarial wastelands, creating ten thousand square feet of molds—and nearly wrecking his health. As he accompanied his h
andiwork back to the States, he reported, his “half-conscious fever-racked body” lay in his stateroom, “tenderly cared for by [his] devoted wife.”

  In Chicago, the molds were filled with an artificial stone called staff, and the resulting “Mayan Village” was erected on the Midway alongside the world’s first Ferris wheel, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a Native American settlement, and a reproduction of a Cairo street populated by 175 Egyptians imported for the occasion. “Everyone who visited the Exposition will recall the weird effect produced on the imagination by these old monuments of an unknown past,” said the official report of the Massachusetts Board of Managers, “standing in stately grandeur amidst all the magnificence and beauty that the landscape art and architecture of today could devise.”

  Allison Vincent Armour, young heir to the meat-packing fortune and a trustee of Chicago’s new Field Museum, became a frequent visitor at Chichen Itza, and the year after the exposition, he donated the funds for Thompson to buy Hacienda Chichén, including the archaeological site and a hundred square miles around it; reports of the price range from seventy-five to five hundred dollars.

  Thompson planned to raise cattle and timber on the hacienda, using the proceeds to finance his archaeology. But first, the sixteenth-century house, located a quarter-mile’s stroll south of El Castillo, needed to be restored after its recent sacking in the great Maya rebellion known as the Caste War. Perhaps the most successful indigenous uprising ever launched in the Americas, the revolt had been sparked in 1847, when three Maya insurgents were executed at Valladolid. By the following year, federal forces had been driven from the Yucatan except for the fortresses at Mérida and Campeche, and the Maya had established independent states across the peninsula. When Thompson arrived, the war had been raging for nearly forty years, and though it would officially end in 1901 with the capture of the Maya capital of Chan Santa Cruz, it would be another fourteen years before peace was completely restored.

  Reproduction of a structure from the ruins of Uxmal, part of the “Mayan Village” constructed from Edward H. Thompson’s molds and erected on the Midway of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

  With his house in ruins, Thompson hung a hammock in the long eastern wing of the ancient palace known as “the Nunnery” for its supposed resemblance to a Spanish convent. An imposing, rambling structure complete with sacrificial altar in front, the Nunnery served as his home for the year that it took to make the hacienda habitable. Thompson’s wife, Henrietta, had gone to work as a clerk in the consulate, and though she occasionally visited Chichen Itza, she resided in Mérida, seventy miles to the northwest, where she would give birth to seven more of Thompson’s children over the next dozen years.

  Even before his house was reconstructed, Thompson began digging. Hacking the growth from a forty-foot-high mound, his workers revealed a four-sided pyramid, its main stairway flanked by serpent heads more than a yard across, with gaping jaws, bared fangs, and protruding tongues. On the pyramid’s upper terrace, they uncovered a heavy rectangular stone laid over a deep shaft.

  Thompson ordered the men to lower him into the darkness on the end of a rope. At a depth of sixteen feet, he discovered another slab, broken and dislodged. It was the first in a fantastic series of seven graves, stacked one atop the other like dominos and littered with skeletons, clay vessels, copper bells, crystal beads, and some very fine jades, including beads, pendants, and a carved head. Nothing like the tomb had ever been seen in the Americas, and it would have been a remarkable find in itself. But below the seventh grave, some thirty feet from the pyramid’s apex, Thompson’s trowel again rang on stone.

  Brushing away the dust, he discovered a smaller slab, which he pried loose with his hunting knife to reveal a dirt-packed cavity. Working with great difficulty in the cramped space, where the six-foot Thompson often found himself “sprawled out like a lizard,” he and the workers excavated another downward-leading corridor scattered with idols, jade and crystal beads, copper bells, and charred human bones. At the end of the passageway, they found yet another great stone and, lying on the ground, a jade fish. As he freed the dirt from the slab, Thompson felt a strong draft, and when he finally pried the stone loose, he found “an opening as black as night from which poured a rush of cold air as chill as the breath of death.”

  “Don Eduardo,” one of the workers told him, “this is surely the mouth of Hell.”

  “Not so,” Thompson answered with characteristic aplomb. “Since when has the mouth of Hell given forth a breath as cold as this wind?”

  He attached a lantern to the tip of his metal tape measure and lowered it over the edge. As he played out the tape and watched the dizzying shadows cast by the swinging light, he wondered whether it would ever strike bottom. When the lamp finally came to rest, Thompson read the depth—fifty-two feet. The next day he returned with rope and tackle, and the men winched him into the blackness, a lantern in his hand and a Bowie knife in his teeth. He touched down in a central chamber eighteen by twenty-five feet, with seven short passages radiating outward. On the floor, he spied a magnificent jade bead more than five inches in circumference. To one side of the chamber were fragments of a handsome white marble vase, as well as a jade torso that matched the head they had found earlier. Working by candlelight, Thompson retrieved a hoard of artifacts, including shattered clay vessels; shell beads; arrowheads of obsidian and flint; tiger’s teeth; a pair of pearls; mother-of-pearl plaques; and amulets, beads, and pendants of jade. It was, he decided, “not merely the tomb of a great priest, but the tomb of the great priest, the tomb of the great leader, the tomb of the hero god, Kukul Can, he whose symbol was the feathered serpent.” He called the place the High Priest’s Temple, one of the names by which it is still known (along with “the Ossario,” from the Spanish osario, “place of bones”).

  Despite these discoveries, or perhaps goaded on by them, Thompson never shook his obsession with the Sacred Well, which beckoned at the end of a thousand-foot-long limestone causeway. And he never lost his keenness to prove the cenote’s part in human sacrifices to the rain god Chaak. But like others before him, he had no idea how to penetrate its depths.

  The word cenote comes from dz’onot in Yucatek Mayan, meaning “well.” This was no well in the conventional sense, but a great oval sinkhole 170 feet wide, with sheer walls rising seventy-five feet above the surface of the water. Like all cenotes, it was created after rainwater absorbed carbon dioxide from the air and formed a weak acid. As the acidic water percolated through the ground, it gradually eroded the soft limestone, carving out a water-filled underground cavern, until the surface crust collapsed and the well was exposed. In the northern Yucatan, graced with few lakes or rivers, cenotes were vital sources of water for the ancient inhabitants. Though there are two cenotes at Chichen Itza, only the Sacred Well was said to have been used for religious rituals; most likely, it was the one that had given the city its name, translated as “Mouth of the Well of the Itza People.”

  When he returned to the States for a scientific conference, Thompson finally seized his opportunity. In Boston, he petitioned the Peabody and the American Antiquarian Society for a dredge, winch, tackle, ropes, steel cables, and a derrick with a thirty-foot swinging boom. He also took diving lessons. Hearing of his plan, his friends objected that no one could descend into the Sacred Well and expect to come out alive. Thompson was fit and blessed with a rugged constitution, but he was over forty years old, after all. If he wanted to commit suicide, they asked, couldn’t he find a less spectacular means? But in the end, his patrons agreed to finance the scheme, dredge, diving suit, and all.

  Thompson had the apparatus shipped to Progreso, where it was taken by train as far as the village of Dzitas. Since no trucks were available, the equipment had to be carted piecemeal the remaining sixteen miles to Chichen Itza, over the worst excuse for a road. After months of the hardest labor Thompson had ever known, it was all finally stacked
beside the Sacred Well. Assembling the machinery was quicker but no less strenuous, and time and again Thompson expected to see the jumble clatter into the cenote or bury him and his men. He would have given years of his life, he swore, for the services of “one or two brawny, profane, and competent Yankee ‘riggers.’ ”

  For weeks, Thompson sat at the edge of the Sacred Well, musing and calculating, taking measurements and soundings. Perched on a stone ruin above the cenote’s rim, he heaved in logs weighing as much as an “average native,” to gauge where sacrificial victims would have landed. Christening this the “fertile zone,” he resolved to start work there.

  On March 5, 1904, Thompson began dredging. Standing on the planked platform in his tall rubber boots and broad-brimmed hat, he felt an inexpressible thrill as the steel jaws swung out, hung in space, then plunged into the dark water of the Sacred Well. The workers strained over the winch handles. The cable tautened. Water boiled. Then the bucket broke the surface, and dripping, rose to the cenote’s edge. The workers positioned the wooden boom over the platform, and a carload of dark brown matter spewed out—decayed wood, leaves, and mostly, mud.

  Edward H. Thompson with his dredge. “I doubt if anybody can realize the thrill I felt, when, with four men at the winch handles and one at the brake, the dredge, with its steel jaw agape, swung from the platform, hung poised for a brief moment in mid-air over the dark pit and then, with a long swift glide downward, entered the still, dark waters and sank smoothly on its quest.”

  For days it was the same, the dredge working up and down, up and down, raising “muck and rocks, muck, more muck.” Once its teeth gripped an entire tree trunk, which disintegrated on the platform during the next two days, leaving only a ghostly stain. Another time, the dredge raised the commingled bones of a jaguar and a deer. And there were dozens of potsherds. These tantalized Thompson, who wanted to believe them evidence of some ancient ritual, but in the end, he found them unpersuasive: Boys are boys everywhere, he figured, and a boy’s instinct is to skip flat objects across smooth water.