Page:A Glimpse at Guatemala.pdf/194

126 look longingly at the cool stream running past their home; and, as general medical adviser, I was continually being asked, "Would bathing do me any harm?"

It was always a delightful moment for me when my household duties were over and I could join the workers in the great Plaza, where my husband, with a patience I never ceased to marvel at, was comparing the drawings made for the 'Biologia' with the original inscriptions, Mr. Dieseldorff would be clearing the debris from a stairway or tracing the line of a fallen wall, whilst Gorgonio, Carlos, and Caralampio were at work making paper moulds of the sculptured monoliths or heaping up great log-fires to dry the moulds already made.

I wish I could do justice to these imposing plazas, studded with strangely carved monuments and surrounded by lofty mounds and great stone stairways, moss-grown and hoary with age, broken by the twisted roots of giant trees, but very solemn and imposing in their decay. The huge mass of squared and faced building-stones, the profusion of sculptured ornament, boldly-carved human figures, strangely grotesque imps—half human and half animal,—elaborate scrolls, graceful and beautiful feather-work, the latter especially crisp and delicate in execution, all combined to make it difficult to believe that no metal tools were used by the ancient Indian workmen. Yet the fact remains that no implements other than stone axes and obsidian flakes have ever been found amongst the ruins, and this adds to the wonder and mystery which enshrouds them, so that one almost fears even to guess at the numbers of centuries or the thousands of busy hands and brains which, under such conditions, must have gone to the accomplishment of the work.

I was always conscious of a longing desire to witness some great ceremony at Copan, such as one's imagination conjures up amid such surroundings, and the thought constantly recurred to me that possibly in the half-Christian, half-heathen rites of the Indian pilgrims and the strange dances they indulge in on certain festal occasions some echo might yet be caught of the ancient ceremonial.

The novelist has already tried his hand both on Ancient Mexico and Yucatan, and that class of theorizer who wants as little data as possible to interfere with his pet schemes has too long occupied the field. Surely here there is scope for the more chastened scientific imagination, and the time has come for the scientific world, the folk-lorists, palaeographers, and archaeologists, who have done so much to recover for us the ancient civilizations of the East, to turn their attention to these wonders of the Western world.