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244 and there seems little reason to doubt that they brought it from the southern part of the Maya area. Judging from the sculptures and mural paintings at Chichén Itzá, this change from south to north seems also to have been a change from a peaceful to a warlike condition, and it therefore appears likely that the peopling of Yucatan may have taken place after the Mayas had been driven by force from their peaceful southern homes, and had been compelled to cultivate the arts of war in order to save their race from extinction.

It is true that we do not possess, and are never likely to find, an account of the abandonment or destruction of Palenque or Tikál, and it cannot be actually proved that at the time of the Spanish conquest they had ceased to exist as living cities, but it can be shown that the absence of all mention of these cities in the Spanish accounts of the invasion and conquest of the country is incompatible with the theory of their existence at that time.

In Chapter XXI. we followed the earlier expeditions which coasted along the shores of Yucatan until finally, in April 1519, Hernando Cortés landed in Mexico on the site of the modern city of Vera Cruz. During the next few years the conquest of Mexico absorbed the attention of the Spanish adventurers and the land of the Mayas was neglected, but on the 12th of October, 1524, Cortés left Mexico city behind him and started on his celebrated march to Honduras, a march which occupied him for nearly two years, and carried him through regions where some of the most magnificent of the Maya ruins are still to be found. Although we have an account of this expedition both from Cortés's own pen and from that of his stout-hearted follower Bernal Diaz, it is by no means an easy matter to trace the exact course of the march and to identify the places named. The task has, however, been made easier by the researches of my friend Dr. Sebastian Marimon, who, a few years before his death, discovered, in the Lonja at Seville, a map of the Province of Tabasco drawn in the year 1579 by Melchor de Santa Cruz, which contains some place-names which have disappeared in later maps.

The earlier part of Cortés's march from the city of Mexico to the town of Guacacualcos, on the northern side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, does not now concern us. On leaving Guacacualcos he entered the province of Tabasco and crossed the low-lying and swampy plain seamed by the intricate network of streams which flow towards the Gulf of Mexico. There was no road to follow, for the good reason that no roads were in existence, the natives passing from place to place in their canoes; yet across this difficult country Cortés, with wonderful persistency, led his troops, wading through swamps, cutting his way through dense jungle, and building innumerable bridges across the streams, bridges of such dimensions that Bernal Diaz wrote, in his