Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/170

162 the north southward, yet they may have primarily emigrated northward from Palenque, in ages past, now lost in obscurity, from which they only emerge in historic times as returning to their former home.

We are all, presumably, acquainted with the relation, by the learned Brasseur de Bourbourg, of the native tradition of Votan. This personage, accompanied by chiefs and followers, landed, many years before the opening of the Christian era, upon the shores of the Laguna de Terminos. He ascended the great Usumacinta River, a tributary of the Tabasco, and near one of its affluents laid the foundations of a large city, which became the metropolis of a mighty empire. It was called Nachan, the city of serpents, and was none other than the beautiful Palenque, whose ruins alone we now gaze upon.

Alas for the vanity of human speculation and the insecurity of tradition! Theories, as I have previously remarked somewhere, are almost as various as the writers and investigators who have studied these ruins. There seems, however, to be a general belief that this region was the seat of a vast and influential theocratic empire. Upon the walls are sculptures which speak to us in an unknown language, hieroglyphics, and the chiselled types of a people long since departed. Regarding