Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/513

Rh sumptuous games, where the board was a courtyard laid out in marble pavement, on which living draught-men clothed in green, red, yellow, and black, walked the circuit and hustled one another off the squares. Our Anglo-Indians sometimes catch the enthusiasm; and there is an often-told tale of that official personage who, when he paid his native servants their wages, would sit down with them to a match at pachisi, and sometimes win his money back. In London toy-shops they sell board and pieces for what they profess to be the game, but these really belong to the modified form of it known in India as chûpur, in which, instead of cowries, stick-dice numbered on the four long sides are thrown, these Indian dice being in England replaced by our common cubical ones. This shows the change from lots to dice in games of the backgammon sort, and it is curious to notice how clearly the new rules for counting by the dice are modeled on the old rules for throws of cowries. Having now sufficiently mastered the peculiarities of pachisi, let us pass from Asia to America, and compare them with the details of the Mexican game of patolli.

When the Spanish invaders of Mexico gazed half in admiration and half in contempt on the barbaric arts and fashions of Aztec life, they particularly noticed a game, at which the natives played so eagerly that, when they lost all they had, they would even stake their own bodies, and gamble themselves into slavery, just as Tacitus says the old Germans used to do. The earliest particulars of the Mexican game come from Lopez de Gomara, whose "Istoria de las Indias" was printed in 1552, so that it must have been written while the memory of the conquest in 1521 was still fresh. He says: "Sometimes Montezuma looked on as they played at patoliztli, which is much like the game of tables, and is played with beans marked with lines like one faced dice, which they call patolli. These they take between both hands, and throw them on a mat or on the ground, where there are certain lines like a checker-board, on which they mark with stones the point which came up, taking off" or putting on a little stone." This may be supplemented from three other old Spanish writers—Torquemada, Sahagun, and Duran. The figure on the mat is spoken of as "a painted cross full of squares like checkers," or as an "aspa," which word means a +, a Greek cross, the sails of a windmill, etc., descriptions which come as close as may be to the pachisi-board. Also, it appears that the stones moved on the board to mark the numbers thrown by the beans were of different colors, one account mentioning twelve stones, six red and six blue, between the two players.

According as the game was played, three to five beans were thrown as lots or dice, and sometimes these beans were marked on one side with a hole, and left plain on the other, while sometimes they seem to have had dots or lines indicating various numbers. If both ways were really used, then the game was known in both its stages, that of two-faced lots and that of numbered dice, just as in India it is played as