Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/338

, half of which, as in the Governor's House, are dark, except as they are lighted from the doorways connecting with the rooms in front. In the fifth structure, not described, there are six pairs of similar apartments. In the building on the right there are six rooms connecting with each other, one of which, the front room, is shown in Fig. 54. This number of connecting rooms is so unusual in Yucatan architecture as to attract attention. Each of the four edifices would accommodate from six hundred to one thousand persons, after the fashion of Village Indians.

In this view of the interior of a room in the House of the Nuns, Fig. 54, which was taken from Stephens' work, is shown the form of the triangular ceiling common in all the edifices in Yucatan and Chiapas. It is a triangular arch above the line of the exterior cornice, without a keystone, and with the faces of the stones beveled, and forming a perfect vault over each apartment. But it has this peculiarity, that a space a foot or more wide in the center is carried up vertically about two feet, and covered with a cap of stone, so that the side walls which form the vaulted ceiling do not come together so as to rest against each other. The mechanical principle is the same as in the New Mexican arch, but is here applied in a more extended and more difficult scale. It is the most remakableremarkable [sic] feature in this architecture, mechanically considered. When we come to know that this vaulted ceiling was constructed over a core of solid masonry within the chamber, afterwards removed—which was the fact—it will be seen that these Indian masons and architects were still feeling their way experimentally to a scientific knowledge of the art of arts. A projecting cornice or median entablature is seen above the doorway on the exterior face of the wall, which balances somewhat the interior inward projection of the ceiling as it rises, and, since the wall is carried up flush with the cornice, the down-weight of the superincumbent mass sustained the masonry. The room shown is thirty-three feet long, thirteen wide, and twenty-three feet high to the cap-stone, and the room communicating with it is of the same width, and nine feet long. The apartments back of these are of corresponding size. There were originally lintels of hard sapote wood over the doorways, upon the decay of which a portion of the masonry has fallen. Those over the doorways through