The City of the Sacred Well

We had reached the stage where it was very slow work for the dredge to get even a mouthful of the stiff, almost shale-like bottom of the well, but, while we brought up fewer tre...

“I arose cautiously, expecting to find an ache in every bone and muscle, and was agreeably surprised to discover myself without an ache or a pain, though a little stiff. Apparen...

José Alvarado, once a common mine laborer, an ordinary peon, became the Silver King of Mexico, so fabulously rich that he offered to pay off the whole national debt of Mexico. H...

As I have said, the art of the Mayas, and of Chi-chen Itza particularly, represents several periods of culture. Some of the oldest examples of architecture, stone point-work, ca...

Imagine yourself the sole owner of a plantation within which lies a city more than twelve square miles in area; a city of palaces and temples and mausoleums; a city of untold tr...

Yucatan has a peculiar geological structure. The soil is usually very thin, and beneath it is porous limestone rock. Owing to the thinness of the soil, vegetation, prolific as i...

On one of Don Eduardo’s trips into the country of the Sublevados he chanced across an old Indian, the troubadour of his tribe. This man had a wonderful store of ancient traditio...

It has been said that civilization is but a layer-cake of eras—a building up of strata, with the brute state at the bottom. Layer upon layer, each succeeding generation adds its...

Within the province of Mani the water-holes, the _satenejas_, were dry. For many weeks no rain had fallen and the growing corn had withered and died. The people were perishing o...

Right here in America, only a short journey from the United States and closer to them than our Panama Canal, are the remains of at least sixty ancient ruined cities—marvelous pl...

“One day when the rain and the Evil Wind conspired to keep us indoors,” says Don Eduardo, “I found it much more interesting to listen to the yarns of the Indians than to work at...

In “The Fair God” General Lew Wallace has given a somewhat fanciful but in the main faithful description of the conquest of Montezuma and the Aztecs by Cortes and his Spanish kn...

“Always in my earlier days in my City of the Sacred Well,” says Don Eduardo, “the question was in my mind as to the age of the city. Every carved stone I found, I scanned eagerl...

“I had traveled all of a hot and dusty day, on horseback, through the jungle and over animal trails. In many places my Indian guide, who went afoot, had to lead my horse over or...

Several thousands of years before that sturdy Scotch engineer John MacAdam gave to the world the broken-rock road surface known as “macadam,” which has done so much to make comm...

Whoever views the pyramids along the Nile is inevitably intrigued as to how they were built—how the massive stones were transported and placed in their elevated positions. And l...

“One particularly lovely Sunday morning, some time after taking up my abode at Chi-chen Itza,” says Don Eduardo, “I was awakened, as on other occasions, by the softly melodious...