bay, and then river after river, all leading into territory covered with remains of the highest civilization an

Divine serpent with human head and hand in mouth, Yaxchilan *

indigenous American race has ever produced. Many archæological sites in the Mexican Territory of Quintana Roo, in British Honduras, in Guatemala, and in Honduras may be reached or very closely approached by water. The southernmost of this area was the cradle of the Maya civilization. The cities of Tikal and Quirigua in Guatemala and Copan in Honduras belonged to that early efflorescence of culture, which began roughly about 160 A.D., although one date of 98 B.C. has been found. Of course it must have taken years for the Mayas to perfect their system of writing and their knowledge of astronomy, so there is ground for believing that they had reached a fairly high degree

of civilization many centuries before the birth of Christ. The sculpture found in these southern cities surpasses that of the later established Maya towns in Yucatan as much as the architecture in those northern cities excels that in the south.

There are other characteristic differences between the examples of earlier architecture in the south and the structures produced by the later Maya culture in the north. All Maya buildings were made of rough blocks of limestone held with a mortar of the same material and smoothed on the surfaces. Nearly all Maya buildings, whether temples or palaces, are placed upon artificial mounds. But in the southern area there was a tendency to place these separate mounds on one large common base or artificial acropolis. This sort of acropolis was not used in the north, where the city planning seems to have been more haphazard. Indeed, it was mainly in the south, too, that cities were carefully orientated with regard to the four chief points of the compass.

Regular depressions or sunken courts, which may have been theaters, are also characteristic of the south. The same thing is true of the use of stela, or obelisks, carved with inscriptions. On the other hand, the use of columns and towers was mainly a development of that last efflorescence of Maya culture that occurred in the north, and which died out perhaps only a little while before the arrival of the Spaniards. The sight of a tall white tower, rising nobly out of the green sea of jungle, amply repays the traveler for his struggles over hot, thorny trails.

When the amateur navigator-explorer has finished this southern swing, let him point his bow north again until he has rounded that same eastern tip of the Peninsula of Yucatan which he first sighted coming over from Florida or Cuba. Then let him follow the coast line westward and southwestward to the bays and rivers of Campeche and Tabasco. If he likes fishing, duck-shooting, and turtlecatching, he will find plenty of diversion besides looking for temple towers and the faces of old gods sculptured in stone. The Grijalva, Chiapas, and Usumacinta rivers are some of those

navigable for yawls, schooners, and motor cruisers of moderate draft. It would be particularly interesting for the yachtsman to follow the great Usumacinta to the head of navigation, Tenosique, which is only a few miles from the famous city of Palenque, which some explorers have found more attractive than Chichen Itza. The yachtsman who takes with him a power dory or other light-draft, motor-driven tender to navigate the upper reaches of these rivers has has the considerable chance of making discoveries which will fix his name forever beside those of

terrifying about this unruffled basin fed by no visible brook, but whose water scarcely ever changed its level and was always cool and fit to drink. When we had the temerity to plunge in, we scrambled out immediately, with fear nipping at our heels.

From the foot of El Castillo a paved road raised three or four feet above the ground runs some three hundred yards to another pool, even more sinister than this one. The "sacrificial cenote," as archæologists call it, is one hundred and fifty feet in diameter. To the water it is a straight drop of seventy feet from the rock platform from which the jaguar priests threw the maidens who were used to placate the god of rain. The water of this second weird pool is always a deep jade color.

Mr.

Edward Herbert Thompson's feat of scouring this pool to find the proof of the tradition that the pool had been used for sacrifice was one of the most imaginative and daring performances in the history of archæology. Thompson, lowered down the precipitous side of the pool on a rope, entered the green water in a divingsuit. Later, with vast pains, he dredged the thick mud of the bottom. He found rich ornaments of jadeite and gold and a long knife used in human sacrifice. More important still, he found the bones of warriors captured in battle and sacred virgins thrown into the pool to propitiate the god of rain. These unfortunate men and girls were thrown in at sunrise. The very few who could keep afloat till noon were given another chance at life. A thorough analysis of all the objects found in this pool will soon be published by the Peabody Museum.

It is interesting to recall that our

guide, when we followed that raised roadway to the sacrificial cenote, was this same distinguished explorer. A letter just received from Mr. Thompson in Yucatan says that he has recently been tracing out another "ancient roadway said to have once led from Chichen Itza to the Cosumel sanctuaries." The island of Cosumel, once a Mecca for the Maya pilgrims, is off the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and sixty or seventy miles from Chichen Itza.

There is not space to describe all the beauty which we saw when we left that sacred pool and wandered over the former capital of the Itza clan, twice built and twice abandoned. Some winter go yourself and see the big building of eighteen rooms, called by the modern Mayas Akať'cib ("Writing in the Dark") because in the gloom over the door of an interior room there is an inscription which archæologists would sell their souls to read. Go and see the peculiar round building which may have been an astronomical observatory, the huge, triple-terraced nunnery, noted, like the Great Ball Court Temple, for the paintings of battles and religious rites still visible on interior walls. These and many other wonders your guide will show you. Insist, however, that he lead you to one other structure which is much less advertised than these, although the knowing consider it one of the most important erections of all the Maya architects.

This is a small temple atop a small pyramid of a type so common that little attention was given it until that same explorer, E. H. Thompson, discovered it to be hollow.

Guiding us, he showed us the mouth of the perpendicular shaft which he

had found under a great flat stone in the floor of the temple. (Yes, this is fact, not fiction by Rider Haggard). With the aid of a rope we descended the shaft, which is thirty-seven feet deep, nearly square, like a well, and lined with solid masonry. At the foot of the shaft a low stairway led us downward twelve feet farther to a small chamber. In the floor of this chamber was a circular hole like a manhole in a New York street. This too had been originally covered by a flat rock, and when Thompson and his Indians pulled it away, the explorer's hat had been blown off by the outrush of cold air from a large room beneath. This second chamber, forty feet deep and shaped like a bottle, with the base wider than the top, was the tomb of a high priest of the Mayas. In it Thompson found the bones of the high priest himself, and articles of jadeite and alabaster, which may be seen in the Field Museum in Chicago.

From the bottom of this lower chamber a sort of tunnel led off to one side until it was blocked, apparently, by a natural cave-in. When we had scrambled to the top of the pyramid again we fell to discussing this tunnel. Mr. Thompson remarked that in his

opinion it might have connected with that jaguar cave whose black mouth we had noticed yawning over the first visited cenote. Though invisible to us, that great pool was only some three hundred feet from the base of this pyramidal tomb. And now, just as this article is about to go to press, I hear that Dr. S. G. Morley has further excavated that tomb and finds that the old tunnel does lead to the cave which opens on that sinister pool!

Remember that, although Dr. Morley is a trained scientist, any mere tourist of courage and imagination might have made this discovery. That is one reason why we Americans as a nation ought to take more interest in our own Egypt. "The last remaining territory of high civilization which awaits the archæologists' efforts" is what Dr. Spinden calls it. And certainly the mystery of the Maya cities can never be dissolved without a good deal more of the under-paid, under-appreciated sort of labor which a score of experts like Saville, Spinden, Thompson, and Morley have been doing. But any man with a flare for adventure may go South for his vacation, and perchance stumble on a revelation which will leave him famous.