Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  While Stephens was recovering at the convent in Ticul, he was able to make several short trips to the suburbs and surrounding forests. It seemed that everywhere he turned he came upon vestiges of old structures and temples, most of them brought down by local villagers who had carried off the stones for their own construction. And he was told by Carillo, the local priest, that not far to the south lay the remains of several other ancient cities. Stephens now began to realize that at one time this part of Yucatán must have been heavily populated and dotted with sophisticated cities and sacred centers.

  During the last week of December the men wrapped up their work at Uxmal and prepared to head south toward the reported ruins. Before leaving, Stephens climbed one last time the rubble-strewn staircase of the great “House of the Magician” pyramid. It took him to the highest point above the ruins, and visible to the west, as far as he could see, lay flat green scrub forest. He stood at the top of the pyramid on a platform that jutted out dramatically, with a doorway that opened into the temple behind him, its entrance framed by ornate mosaics of stone. He flinched as he imagined the horror of the human sacrifices that were probably performed here, a practice described by the early Franciscan historian Diego López Cogolludo: the Maya priests would cut out the hearts of their victims to offer to their idols, and then throw the bodies down the stairway to the crowded courtyard below. Stephens wrote: “In all the long catalogue of superstitious rites that darken the pages of man’s history, I cannot imagine a picture more horribly exciting than that of the Indian priest, with his white dress and long hair clotted with gore, performing his murderous sacrifices at this lofty height, in full view of the people through the whole extent of the city.”

  House of Pigeons at Uxmal. (Catherwood)

  The view today. (Carlsen)

  Looking out over Uxmal he could see the man-made terraces and huge multilevel limestone platforms that formed the base of the city. Immediately before him was the quadrangle known as the Nunnery, named for the eighty-eight apartments or cells in the buildings surrounding its courtyard. On the far side of the court he could see one of the most intricate façades in Uxmal. The entablature above the doorways was covered with stone ornaments and an elaborate frieze that included two feathered serpents, entwined, running the entire length of the 173-foot-wide structure. A human head was clenched in the open jaws of one of the snakes.

  Beyond the quadrangle to his left lay two long identical mounds, their serpent-covered façades facing each other seventy feet apart. Stephens wrote: “It was our opinion that they had been built expressly with reference to the two great rings facing each other in the facades, and the space between was intended for the celebration of some public games.” They had guessed right again. Archaeologists would later determine that Uxmal’s rings and slanted walls, like similar parallel walls found at ruins in Guatemala, Mexico, and as far away as Copán, were indeed courts used for ritual ball games. To the left of these courts Stephens could see the ragged skyline of the “house of pigeons,” the Governor’s House, and the other enthralling structures of Uxmal, perched at different levels on the site’s broad terraces.

  The next day, while taking final images of the Nunnery with the daguerreotype, Stephens received a note from Catherwood. The indefatigable artist had not escaped the fever after all. Gloom descended over them all. Heavy rains started again. Catherwood was bedridden in the Governor’s House, and then Stephens and Cabot, as if in sympathy, suffered relapses of chills and fever.

  Mosaic ornamentation at Kabah. (Catherwood)

  Detail, present day. (Carlsen)

  Two days later, miserable and sick, they finally summoned the energy to depart. As they did, Catherwood pointed out that it was the first day of 1842, New Year’s Day. They had survived another year, but they were in no condition to celebrate and were even too weak to travel on horseback. The Indians from the hacienda improvised the stretcher-like coaches to carry the three men to the nearby village of Nohcacab.

  By the eighth of January they had recovered enough to ride south and arrived at a place the natives called Kabah, where they encountered a range of ancient structures that were stunning even to the experienced eyes of Stephens and Catherwood. Some of the buildings were in an excellent state of preservation and almost entirely complete. One edifice was covered with the most intricate set of stone mosaics they had yet seen. Almost rhythmic in effect, it gave the impression of a hundred eyes staring out from the wall. It was unique among the ruins because of its repetitious pattern of masks representing what would later be identified as the long-nose rain god Chaac. Nearby also stood a large ceremonial step pyramid. Hieroglyphics no different from those they had found at Copán could be seen carved on various structures, and several “comb-like” superstructures stood atop some of the roofs, similar to those at Palenque.

  All in all, Kabah was of such artistic sophistication—equal in some respects to Uxmal, if smaller in scale—that it prompted the men to wonder again at the advanced level of organization and skill that must have been required to create each site. What surprised Stephens and the others the most was that such magnificent ruins were “absolutely unknown” except to the local villagers and farmers. And it was becoming clear to Stephens that they were on much larger ground than they had ever imagined two years earlier when they stumbled awestruck through Copán and Palenque. He and Catherwood now understood they were witnessing the far-flung remains of a highly refined and interconnected civilization that had existed centuries earlier, had sprawled over a territory now encompassing three modern nations, and had vanished mysteriously and apparently abruptly with none of its history known even to the local natives. The question that would continue to haunt them through the remainder of their journey, and one they could never resolve, was why. Why had these marvelous stone cities, constructed with such labor and artistry, been abandoned, and the great civilization they represented evaporated?

  They spent a number of days at Kabah while Catherwood went to work with his pencils and paints and Stephens worked the daguerreotype. Although nothing was known about Kabah’s history, nearby villagers told Stephens the city had once been connected to Uxmal in ancient times by a great paved road that could still be found in places in the jungle. It was constructed on a fifteen-foot wide raised bed of stone that had been stuccoed over, forming a smooth finish. The road was called Sacbe, or Sacbeob in the Mayan language, meaning “white way.” Stephens and Catherwood never located the causeway, although they did discover a large archway at Kabah facing in the direction of Uxmal; Stephens said it reminded him of the ancient triumphal arches he had seen in Rome. Spanning fourteen feet, it stood alone in a clearing, its top fallen in—and, Stephens wrote, “disconnected from every other structure, in solitary grandeur.” Had they done some digging, however, they would have found that it was not isolated at all: in fact, the stone road passed under it and ran twelve miles in a nearly straight line through the forest to a second monumental arch at Uxmal. And while it is now understood that the ancient Maya never had use of the wheel, the smooth white highway must have provided an efficient way for messengers and perhaps armies, as well as regular pedestrians, to travel quickly through the jungle from one city to the other.

  At one point, some distance beyond the arch, they uncovered a group of mostly collapsed buildings buried in the forest, which even the native guides did not know about. Inside one of the buildings they found red handprints covering nearly an entire wall. The paint was bright and looked almost fresh. The broken and fallen structures, though unimpressive from the outside, also yielded another other important find. Above the doorway of one of the apartments, which was filled nearly to the top with rubble, Catherwood found an exquisitely carved wooden lintel or architrave. He had crawled in on his back to take measurements and looked up, and there was the full-length figure of a royal lord standing on a snake and wearing a feathered headdress. What was most remarkable was the figure’s striking resemblance to the figures they had seen carved in the w
alls at Palenque. It was the first image they encountered in Yucatán that provided such a clear link between the two cities.

  Stephens had to have it. He wanted to ship it to New York for display in his hoped-for museum. But the carving on the lintel took up two entire ten-foot beams embedded in the walls on each side of the doorway. He was also concerned that the villagers at Nohcacab would object, recalling the problems he had had getting even plaster casts out of Palenque. But the next day, he was able to assemble a crew of village men armed with crowbars who managed to dislodge the beams after a day of great labor. He then had the two beams carefully wrapped as he had the hieroglyphic-covered beam from Uxmal.

  Carved lintel at Kabah, shipped by Stephens to New York. (Catherwood)

  Interior at Kabah. (Catherwood)

  Catherwood would later depict the beams’ departure from Kabah in a beautifully colored lithograph showing a rare image of Stephens. It is a dramatic illustration filled with movement, and in the background most of Kabah’s principal ruins can be seen against the tropical Yucatán countryside.

  Surprised to find the architrave in such a nondescript location, they now began to take much greater care in their investigations. But while they found wooden lintels in several buildings, none were carved. Stephens did, however, come upon two six-foot-high stone doorjambs, elaborately carved and buried in a pile of unassuming remains. Like the architrave, they showed royal lords in feathered headdresses, but this time towering over other figures kneeling before them, an artistic theme they had seen worked so successfully in bas-relief at Palenque. Stephens struggled along with Indian laborers for two days to remove them for shipment to New York.1 Then he was struck down violently again with fever, as though the ruins had fixed a curse on him anytime he personally labored to disturb them. He mounted his horse for Nohcacab but could only get so far. He wrote, “I was obliged to dismount and lay down under a bush; but the garrapatas drove me away. At length I reached the village and this was my last visit to Kabah.”

  In a short time, Cabot, Albino, and this time Catherwood, too, joined Stephens in the village convent with relapses of fever. “Death was all around us,” Stephens wrote. He meant it literally. A cemetery and charnel house abutted the convent, which allowed Stephens in his weakened state to indulge in one of his favorite themes: the melancholy impermanence of life. Rows of skulls lined the top of the convent wall. “The spectacle around was gloomy for sick men,” he wrote. He never missed the incongruities of the moment. Even in the midst of this mortal gloom, he noted, another fiesta was under way.

  Stephens was the only one well enough to attend the festival’s final procession; he even helped carry the image of the town’s saint through the village to the church. “An irregular troop of women followed, all in their ball dresses and bearing long lighted candles.” Rockets and firecrackers were set off, and next came the village men, most of them half-drunk. The dance in the plaza started.

  The whole village seemed given up to the pleasure of the moment . . . there were pretty women prettily dressed; in all there was an air of abandonment and freedom from care that enlisted sympathetic feeling; and as the padrecito and myself returned to the convent, the chorus reached us on the steps, soft and sweet from the blending of women’s voices, and seeming to spring from the bottom of every heart:

  “Que bonito es el mundo;

  Lastima es que yo me muera.”

  “How beautiful is the world;

  It’s a pity that I must die.”

  Finally, on January 24, they were again well enough to travel. They had gotten hold of excellent horses and decided to travel light, leaving the heavy baggage behind. Stephens listed the few items they packed in their saddlebags or with them on horseback: “the daguerreotype apparatus, hammocks, one large box containing our tin table service, a candlestick, bread, chocolate, coffee, and sugar, and a few changes of clothes.” And, of course, Catherwood’s fold-up camera lucida, his pencils, paints, and paper, plus Stephens’s ever-present notebooks.

  Over the next six weeks, they zigzagged their way south, discovering one set of ruins after another strewn across the countryside or buried deep in the jungle. They proceeded based solely intelligence they gathered from villagers and farmers about “old stones” in the forest. Albino proved indispensable as interpreter and scout. Some sites were no more than an isolated structure in the forest while others appeared to be the remnants of sacred centers or small cities like Kabah. The first two sites they encountered south of Kabah—called by the local Indians Sayil and Labna—were such locations. Each had well-preserved buildings, some impressively large and decorated. At both places they found startling temples perched on top of pyramids or mounds, made even taller by giant ornamental, Palenque-like roof combs.

  At Labna, they spent an entire day examining a temple set atop an extremely steep fifty-foot-high mound that was almost impossible to climb without clinging to trees that had rooted in the fallen stones. At the top, the temple’s decorative roof comb rose another thirty feet. It was, Stephens wrote, “once ornamented from top to bottom, and from one side to the other, with colossal figures and other designs in stucco, now broken and in fragments . . . a row of death’s heads; underneath were two lines of human figures.” Catherwood made drawings using different angles of the sun while Stephens and Cabot worked with the daguerreotype. The white stucco was so intense in the sunlight that it was painful to look at, and some traces of brightly colored paint remained, Stephens said, “defying the action of the elements.”

  Not far from the mound, they found a stunning, remarkably proportioned arched gateway covered with abstract designs and glowering masklike images that again showed the builders’ refined artistry. Stephens and Catherwood, even with their experiences in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, could not recall any other culture that had employed the embellishments and overpowering imagery they were seeing or had mastered the intricacies of stonework in these strange and frozen images. It was obvious to both men that the façades were intended to produce a hypnotic, haunting, if not terrifying, effect on the viewer—and probably even more so when they were covered in their original paint. What must it have looked like hundreds of years ago? they wondered. Extrapolating from the few remaining traces of color, their imaginations conjured up a dreamlike vision—shimmering façades adorned with twisting, arabesque patterns in deep relief, punctuated by grotesque masks of lurid, glaring gods. The force of the imagery was staggering.

  Archway at Labna. (Catherwood)

  Present day. (Carlsen)

  Over the next month, they passed through ruins with Indian names like Sabachtsche, Kewick, Xampon, Chunhuhu, Ytsimpte, Labphak—and dozens of smaller sites with no names at all. At each, they stopped long enough for Catherwood to capture them on paper, and the other two men, if the light was right, with the daguerreotype. They were in an almost constant state of astonishment. Each site was unheralded and unknown except to the small circle of nearby natives. How could they have remained so hidden from Yucatán society, they wondered, let alone the world at large? Stephens lamented that many of the remains, already desolated by time and nature, would not be around much longer—a prediction that later proved true, as some of them would become such formless rubble the expedition’s illustrations and descriptions are the only documentary evidence of their existence. It was as if they were witnessing the last traces of this puzzling civilization dissolve before their eyes.

  This apprehension motivated them to record every significant structure they came across and to try to carry back to New York the best, most portable of the artifacts—sculpted stones, clay figures, and painted vases. Today such removal would be illegal and internationally condemned, but Stephens was acting at least in part out of a sincere desire to preserve, observing that no one in Yucatán was at all interested in protecting such treasures. He was also candid about his desire to possess them for the United States, just as France and England were acquiring ancient artifacts, sculpture, and monuments from Egypt, Greece, a
nd Italy for their own national museums.

  Village along Stephens and Catherwood’s route in Yucatán. (Catherwood)

  At the ruins outside the village of Kewick, for example, they found a striking image carved into a large stone that was embedded in one building’s ceiling. It displayed a figure painted clearly in bright red and green wearing a wild headdress and surrounded by hieroglyphics. Without objection and with great effort, the local Indians broke through the roof and lowered the stone with ropes. Measuring eighteen by thirty inches it was so heavy the ropes broke, though the stone fell to the floor undamaged. Stephens wanted to take it to New York. But it weighed too much for a mule and the Indians refused to carry it to Mérida. Stephens agreed to leave it behind but only after persuading the proprietor of the nearby rancho to place it in a covered apartment to shelter it from the rain. He said he hoped another American traveler would “bring it away at his own expense, and deposit it in the National Museum in Washington.”2

  The rains finally began to taper off and the dry season struggled belatedly to assert itself. Mosquitoes gave way to garrapatas. The bites of the tiny ticks were torture. “Frequently,” wrote Stephens, “we came in contact with a bush covered with them, from which thousands swarmed upon us, like moving grains of sand, and scattered till the body itself seemed crawling. Our horses suffered, perhaps, more than ourselves, and it became a habit, whenever we dismounted, to rasp their sides with a rough stick.”