Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  The mosquitoes, however, had left their legacy. When the expedition left Kewick for the next village, Catherwood complained of a headache and asked to slow down while Stephens and Cabot rode ahead. Later that morning at the next rancho the baggage carriers came up and announced that Catherwood was down. They had left him lying in the road. When Stephens got to him, the artist was on the ground under a tree, shaking with the chills and wrapped in all the coverings he could find, including his horse’s saddlecloths. Albino was at his side. The sight shook Stephens, who recalled the severe episode that had so disabled Catherwood on their last visit. Soon the carriers came with the materials to make a covered coche and carried him to the rancho. When they arrived, Stephens found Cabot had also come down with the fever. Stephens himself began feeling the chill, and all took to their hammocks once again.

  They returned to Ticul, where they rested and recovered. There Stephens met one of the few, if only, Maya scholars on the peninsula, Juan Pío Pérez, a former government official who had authored a monograph explaining the Maya calendar. Stephens would have long discussions with Pérez, who as a regional administrator had access to many old documents in the Mayan language and made one of the first studies on how the Maya computed time. Stephens would incorporate Pérez’s research in the appendix to his book.

  By mid-February the expedition was south again at ruins called Xampon, where Catherwood created one of his most dramatic illustrations. With a moon emerging dramatically from swirling dark clouds, he used deep contrasts of black and white to cast shadows over a half-buried building, its walls fallen away to reveal inner apartments and arched ceilings. In the foreground, two dogs are running through waves of grass, bringing down a deer. In spite (or possibly because) of his frequent fever attacks, Catherwood seemed each day to be reaching higher levels of artistry, finding new ways to express the extraordinary things they were seeing. At their next stop, Bolonchen a village near the southern frontier of inhabited Yucatán, they would encounter a wonder that would require every bit of Catherwood’s artistic prowess.

  Moonlight bathing ruins at Xampon. (Catherwood)

  Throughout their journey, water was a constant concern—how to find it in this stony land of no rivers, to slake their thirst and that of their horses. And, how had the ancient and current inhabitants survived in such terrain with its long dry season? They found several answers: the natural cenotes, the man-made subterranean chultuns and lakes of the ancients, and the deep wells and storage tanks of the haciendas and villages. They had earlier witnessed the human survival skills in the deserts of the Sinai and Egypt, and here they were equally impressed by the tenacity and resourcefulness of the Yucatec Indians.

  The marvel of Bolonchen would exceed anything they had yet seen. The village had nine wells but all eventually became waterless during the dry season. When that happened the villagers had to travel to an unusual cave located nearly two miles away. Stephens and his partners had to see it for themselves. An immense overhanging rock framed the cave’s opening. Led by Indians with torches, they entered and descended several levels into the darkness, at one point climbing down a twenty-foot ladder. Finally they came to the edge of a huge cavern that dropped down at least one hundred feet. Sunlight streamed down from above through a hole in earth’s surface.

  To get to the bottom they had to descend a giant wooden ladder, much in need of refurbishing. Wrote Stephens: “It was very steep, seemed precarious and insecure.” But Stephens was determined to feed his omnivorous curiosity and see what was below. And like the boat adventure out on windy Lago de Atitlán and the black passageways in tottering ruins he had entered with no more than candle and twine, this would be one more adventure to write about.

  So down they went, the rickety dry wood snapping under their feet. They stumbled, hung on, and somehow made it to the bottom. The floor of the cavern, however, was not the end of the journey. Stephens and Cabot continued to descend ever deeper, climbing down a series of shorter ladders until they finally entered a grotto with a small basin of water. Covered with grime and black from their smoking torches, sweating in the damp heat, they could not resist. They stripped and took a quick dip. Their torches meanwhile sputtered and threatened to go out, and they were seized with fear they would never find their way out through the blackness. “We were then fourteen hundred feet from the mouth of the cave,” wrote Stephens, “and at a perpendicular depth of four hundred feet.”

  On their way back up, one ladder collapsed beneath them. Fortunately Albino arrived with a rope to pull them up to the next level. They explored three side passages that led to other water basins. To their great relief, they finally reached the main cavern, ascended the great wobbly ladder, and eventually emerged exhausted into the sunlight. Stephens could not believe it when he was told the seven thousand residents in the town and surrounding countryside depended solely on the water in the cave for their survival four or five months out of the year.

  While Stephens and Cabot explored the cave, Catherwood stayed behind in the cavern to draw the extraordinary scene before him. His final illustration, though not of a giant stelae or ancient pyramid, nevertheless ranks among his finest artistic achievements. With a master’s eye, he caught in one stunning image the story of the Indians’ determination to survive by going deep into the earth to obtain their water. The illustration succeeds not only in its vivid contrasts of light and dark, and the rigid horizontal and vertical lines of the wide, long ladder against the smooth swirl of the cavern wall behind, but in its portrayal of the unremitting human effort to carry the water upward, the Indians crawling antlike up the ladder with loaded water vessels on their backs—an image impossible to forget.

  As they continued south to a site known as Labphak (today called Santa Rosa Xtampak), Stephens noticed changes in their surroundings. The paths were much less stony and the soil was deeper and richer in loam. They encountered their first sugar rancho. At the ruins of Laphak they found an immense building, one of the largest they had seen. The structure and its surroundings were overgrown with trees. Clearing away the foliage they found a “gigantic staircase” and a large number of doorways and apartments, terraces, and a grand courtyard. Stephens was struck by wall panels stuccoed in bas-relief, unlike the limestone mosaics of the north. And the panels displayed stylized images of royalty similar to the stuccoed art of Palenque.

  We were now moving in the direction of Palenque, though, of course, at a great distance from it; the face of the country was less stony, and the discovery of these bas-reliefs, and the increase and profusion of stuccoed ornaments, induced the impression that, in getting beyond the great limestone surface [to the north], the builders of these cities had adapted their style to the materials at hand.

  Exploring the surrounding areas, they stumbled on another large building partially buried and a range of disconnected structures with ornamented façades, and they concluded that Labphak was probably at one time a good-size city. Later archaeologists would determine that as many as ten thousand people had lived in the area and the central precinct had a rich history as a regional capital going back to the classic period between A.D. 550 and 950. Stephens wanted to continue their investigations, but the Indians who helped with the preliminary clearing of the site abandoned them when a heavy rainstorm rolled from the north. With another recurrence of fever, Catherwood was too weak to work, and they decided to leave. “There was no place which we visited that we were so reluctant to leave unfinished,” Stephens wrote.

  Iturbide, their next stop to the south, was a new town at the edge of Yucatán’s southern frontier and filled with Indian immigrants from the north. It had grown from twenty-five people to 1,500 in a period of five years due to the government’s offer of free land to settlers. Given its rapid growth as a pioneer outpost, Stephens referred to it as the “Chicago” of Yucatán. (Today it is known primarily as Vicente Guerrero.) What had brought Stephens and Catherwood to Iturbide was, as usual, an account they picked up along the road of a set of rui
ns known today as Dzibilnocac, located near Iturbide. They found the remains worthwhile but Catherwood’s continuing recurrences of fever left him too weak to work. A day later, he made the effort and stood drawing before the largest structure as a neighboring tobacco farmer held an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun. Inside the structure they found remnants of paintings that reminded Stephens of those he had seen in Egyptian tombs, with the flesh of the figures painted red like those in Egyptian art. The paintings were too fragmented to be copied, Stephens wrote, “and seemed surviving the general wreck only to show that these aboriginal builders had possessed more skill in the least enduring branch of the graphic arts.”

  As Catherwood worked, Stephens and Cabot wandered around the site and counted thirty-three different mounds, all so overgrown with trees and vegetation that few features were visible. When they returned to the principal building, they found Catherwood lying down. He was too weak to continue. Stephens became so concerned for Catherwood and so disheartened by their constant struggles with illness that he suggested they call off the rest of the expedition and go home. Catherwood, however, would not hear of it and insisted they keep on.

  Beyond Iturbide, however, lay nothing but wilderness, stretching all the way south to the lowland jungles of Guatemala’s Petén. In the town they heard no reports of any further ruins in that direction, but Stephens was not convinced. “It may well be that wrecks of cities lie buried but a few leagues farther on,” he wrote, “the existence of which is entirely unknown at the village of Iturbide, for at that place there was not a single individual who had ever heard of the ruins at Labphak, which we visited just before, until they heard of them from us.” They decided, however, not to continue south. They had accomplished a great deal on their southern march, despite the recurring malarial fevers that had struck down each of them, Catherwood most seriously of all.

  There was more to come in the north, perhaps much more. And they coveted one reportedly magnificent set of ruins that like Uxmal had been a principal reason for their return to Yucatán. It had always hovered on their horizon, in their plans, and they were determined now to explore it if they could only stay healthy enough to get there.3

  19

  Chichén Itzá

  Now in early March, they had been on the road more than four months. From Iturbide they traveled one hundred miles north through several towns, visiting minor ruins along the way. After two weeks with several stops to allow Catherwood to regain his strength, they arrived at their long-anticipated destination: a dazzling group of ruins called Chichén Itzá. They already knew some history about the ruins, whose name means “Mouth of the Well of the Itzá” in Mayan. The conquistadors had briefly occupied the site in 1533 in an attempt to make it their capital, apparently attracted by its central location and its stone ruins to use as building material for their new city. In a large show of force, however, Maya warriors defeated the Spanish in a fierce battle on a plain outside the ruins. When the battle was over, 150 Spaniards lay dead and most of the remaining soldiers were wounded.1 The surviving conquistadors were able to slip away during the night. It was one of the worst defeats suffered by the conquistadors and set back the Spanish conquest of Yucatán by years.2 Stephens noted that it was therefore not a surprise that the Spaniards left very few details describing the site, considering their harried circumstances and defeat. But its existence was firmly established in the history books of the Conquest.

  “Ever since we left home,” he wrote, “we had had our eyes upon this place.” They were told in Mérida that it would be difficult for any person to miss the ruins traveling from Mérida east to Valladolid, Yucatán’s second-largest city. The taller structures were clearly visible from the road. But if they were known to the people of Yucatán, Stephens noted they were still virtually unknown to the outside world. Determined to remedy that, he and his companions spent more than two weeks meticulously examining and recording the ruins’ every crack and crevice.

  Cenote at Chichén Itzá. (Catherwood)

  The site had two large cenotes open to the sky whose water level remained the same year-round, indicating that they were being fed by a consistent subterranean water source. No doubt this was the reason the original builders had picked the location for their city. Though set amid stands of trees, which were dense in places, the main buildings were located in the middle of a large cattle ranch leased from the government by a man named Juan Sosa, who had built a hacienda nearby. Unlike many of the other sites they had explored, Chichén thus did not require laborious clearing. The cattle kept much of the underbrush down and created paths that made it easy to walk from one structure to another.

  At this point Stephens and Catherwood had visited nearly forty separate Maya ruins and could not have been faulted if they had become a bit jaded. Stephens, however, irrepressible as ever, his zeal undiminished, declared Chichén Itzá “magnificent.” Without doubt it was the most impressive site in Yucatán since Uxmal. Many of the structures were, like Uxmal’s, imposing, built on a monumental scale and in a state of good preservation, which led Stephens to speculate, as he had with Uxmal, that these cities could have been inhabited by the Indians at the time of the Conquest. Spanish records, however, made no claim Chichén Itzá was a thriving city like Tiho, on which they later built Mérida. And modern studies indicate that both Uxmal and Chichén had already reached their peak and were abandoned hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived.3

  Stephens, with none of the tools of modern archaeological science at his disposal, had vacillated about the age of the ruins from site to site. He struggled to remain open to all possibilities. “Chichen, though in a better state of preservation than most of the others,” he wrote, “has a greater appearance of antiquity; some of the buildings are no doubt older than others, and long intervals may have elapsed between the times of their construction.”4

  Along with the cattle came an extra dose of garrapatas, but as intolerable as the pests were, the men found the clearing of much of the site by the cattle well worth it. Catherwood was able to get to work immediately. They would document Chichén Itzá as thoroughly as they had Uxmal, Palenque, and Copán, even though they knew they were not the first to investigate the site. They were aware that not long before their arrival the ruins had been visited by an Austrian diplomat and an American engineer working in nearby Valladolid.5

  Their first discovery at Chichén set the tone. In the initial building they entered, called Akatzeeb (“House of the Dark Writing”), they found a tablet displaying the sculpted image of a royal lord or priest in bas-relief and rows of hieroglyphs. This once more confirmed the unity of art and writing they believed linked most of the ruins they had examined. In their travels they had now seen significant variations in architecture and exterior ornamentation, but the common denominators of a civilization—its artistic and cultural themes and its writing—were almost the same throughout. Chichén was particularly rich in hieroglyphs and bas-reliefs. It was clear to them that they had reached one of the northernmost points of the same unique and cohesive civilization they had been tracking since their visit to Copán, far to the south.

  Yet Stephens, his skills of perception by now finely honed, sensed something different about Chichén. “In general,” he wrote, “the facades were not so elaborately ornamented as some we had seen, seemed of an older date, and the sculpture was ruder”—especially compared to the delicately chiseled bas-reliefs they found at Palenque. But the sculptors of Chichén were working with much more porous stone, which did not lend itself to the detail that had so impressed them at Palenque. More than this, Chichén was clearly the most warlike site they had investigated. Carved images of warriors abounded—soldiers carrying spears and shields and decked out in elaborate war feathers. An entire platform wall in the center of the site’s main plaza was made up of rows upon rows of sculpted human skulls impaled on lances.

  Despite Chichén’s clear cultural linkage to the sites in the south, in Chiapas, Guatemala
, and Honduras, Stephens also saw that the Itzá, the people who had once ruled the city, seemed to have a closer connection with Mexico than they had seen at other sites. He detected strong similarities between one temple’s colored murals—images of the Itzá armies overrunning cities and villages and destroying their enemies—and the Mexican “picture writings” published in Lord Kingsborough’s giant volumes. He also observed that a “dance” of Itzá warriors carved on the wall of a second temple, each wearing headdresses of feathers and carrying bundles of spears, resembled images of soldiers carved into a giant “sacrifice” stone that had been dug up in the plaza of Mexico City near where one of the Aztec’s temples had once stood. He knew too that the Aztecs and other Mexican societies worshipped the feathered serpent, and scattered around Chichén were many serpent sculptures and images. Chichén seemed to Stephens a mix of the Central American culture and the Mexican. And once again his observations would prove prescient. Archaeologists would later trace many central and coastal Mexican influences at Chichén, in part due to the Itzá Maya’s success in coastal trade.

  Although the bas-relief wall figures were simpler and “ruder” than those in the south, they found a group of structures that greatly resembled the gorgeously ornamented buildings at Uxmal, Kabah, and Labna. Segregated from the rest of Chichén’s ruins in a separate section, these structures appeared so elaborate in their stonework and so elegant in overall form that they seemed constructed to imitate and outdo the façades Stephens and Catherwood had found in southwestern Yucatán. These exterior decorations and mosaics are now known as the Puuc style. Had immigrants from Uxmal and Kabah settled at Chichén and replicated their style, or had the Itzá just stolen it? Or could this style have originated in Chichén and been taken south? One modern scholar has called the Puuc style “baroque,” but a better analogy might be “rococo”—the florid, over-the-top European style of the eighteenth century. In any case, it was a form of ornamentation that seemed to be reaching for its own extreme end.