The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in Yucatan

These postulates very materially narrow the area of the globe in which we can profitably look for their home; and a task which at first sight appears to rival the proverbial one...

The Yucatecans are a race of parvenus. They have been unfortunate both by inheritance and fate. The Spanish have never been successful colonisers. History teaches that they have...

There is perhaps nothing which strikes one at first sight in travelling through Yucatan so much as the absence of animal life. For the stay-at-home the usual idea of the Tropics...

There are two kinds of brigands in Yucatan. There is the honest fellow who cuts your throat without apology or waits behind a tree and puts a bullet into your back at a ten-yard...

By all means let the sluggard go to the ant, if he feels equal to the journey; but on no account let him go to Yucatan. For if he ever arrived at Merida he would never get furth...

Most of us want to do what we are not doing. In the majority of human hearts, deep down, is an intangible tormenting wish to go somewhere, to see some land, to do something whic...

Mexico city is a combination of Spanish squalor and Paris-cum-New-York civilisation--very lightly veneered over in some places. It is some five miles across, but its business li...

Across the shallow blue harbour of Isla de Mujeres and a four-mile stretch of the Yucatan Channel, clear as crystal, its small rippling waves flecked to foam by the trade winds,...

The island of Cozumel lies twelve miles from the easternmost shore of Yucatan in the Caribbean Sea between 20° and 21° north lat. and 86° and 87° west long. Its name in Mayan me...

Carriage exercise in Yucatan is no joke. It is not the gentle fiction, the make-believe of exertion played at by indolent women and invalids, to which we are accustomed. The doc...

Throughout that part of Central America which from time immemorial has been inhabited by the Mayans, in their ruined cities, on the stelae, on the door-posts, on the wooden and...

On the coast from El Cuyo to Cape Catoche and round as far east as Contoy Island are mounds, sometimes many miles apart, averaging about 50 or 60 feet in height. We examined som...

There is no field of inquiry in which the imagination of students could roam further or more uselessly than in the reconstruction of the life of a vanished people from their rui...

The very natural temptation to assign a romantically great age to the ruins of Central America has proved too much for most writers and students of the subject. We, too, would l...

At the beginning of the last chapter we stated it as our conviction that the marvellous buildings which we have described are not monuments of a vanished race. The Mayans who to...

A sea of greengage green, broken by scarce a ripple save where a shark's fin curves up shiny black in the blazing sun; a semicircle of pale sand, fringed by brown and mahogany-r...

You wake and turn in your hammock. Through the verandah doorway the breath of morn comes chill to you. The stars twinkle still, and the orange trees are blots of black shadow in...

Unless one is endowed with the appetite of the proverbial ploughboy there is surely nothing which puts you off your food more than having too much on your plate. One's sympathie...

It has ever been the fate of Yucatan to be misunderstood. Her very christening was the result of a misunderstanding. Accounts vary as to the exact place and time, and as to the...

Time did not allow of, nor indeed had we ever contemplated, a visit to Guatemala and the ruins of Copan and Quirigua, or to those scarcely less important ones in the State of Ch...

The ruins of Palenque stand shrouded in the dense forest about one hundred miles south-east of San Juan Batista, the capital town of the State of Tabasco. Their ancient name is...

These are the profits which the score or so of Yucatecan henequen growers are said to have divided in the last fifteen years. What then is this Pactolus-plant from which has bee...

As a rule it may be said that the Yucatecan is a benevolent master. It pays him better to be so, and every Yucatecan's one rule in life is to do what pays him. Indeed there is r...

Well then, we have no real pre-Conquest history. All that seems certain is that in Yucatan no kingship in the true sense existed. The land was ruled by caciques (chiefs), each t...