Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/345

 latter had seasoned and settled. It tends to show that with small stones of the size used, about a foot long and six inches thick, the triangular ceiling as it projected toward the center in rising, required the interior support of a core to insure the possibility of construction by their methods. Once put together over such a core and carried up several feet above the top of the arch, the down weight of the superincumbent mass would articulate and hold the masonry together. It shows further that the essential feature of the arch is wanting in this contrivance.

The proof of this assertion is found in the actual presence of the unremoved core in one of these edifices in all of its apartments. Mr. Stephens found every room of the back building on the second terrace filled with masonry from bottom to top, left precisely as it was when the building was finished. He remarks that "the north half of the second range has a curious and unaccountable feature. It is called the Casa Cerrada, or 'closed house,' having ten doorways, all of which are blocked up on the inside with stone and mortar. * * * In front of several were piles of stones which they [his workmen] had worked out from the doorways, and under the lintels were holes through which we were able to crawl inside; and here we found ourselves in apartments finished with walls and ceilings like all the others, but filled up, except so far as they had been emptied by the Indians, with solid masses of mortar and stone. There were ten of these apartments in all, two hundred and twenty feet long and ten feet deep, which thus being filled up made the whole building a solid mass; and the strangest feature was that the filling up of the apartments must have been simultaneous with the erection of the buildings; for, as the filling in rose above the tops of the doorways, the men who performed it never could have entered to their work through the doors. It must have been done as the walls were built, and the ceiling must have closed over a solid mass."

It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Stephens that the masonry within each room was a core, without which a vaulted chamber in this form could not have been constructed with their knowledge of the art of building. It shows the rudeness of their mechanical resources as well as the real condition of the art among them, but at the same time increases our