CHAPTER XII

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MAYA BUILDINGS

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 likewise at Chi-chen Itza one is bound to speculate as to how the heavy stone-work was transported from its quarries, how it was so intricately carved, and by what predetermined plans it was erected into buildings which have stood for centuries, defying tropical nature.

I have found the Sacred City an absorbing topic upon which to ponder, fitting together the known facts and drawing upon imagination to piece in the gaps, until the mental picture of the building of its ancient temples is an unbroken fabric. My own visualization of the process of building a Maya temple is no doubt faulty in many respects, and I have no wish to precipitate an archæological controversy by claiming it to be hole-proof; I offer it merely for the sake of the reader who has not the opportunity to create his own vision of the subject from a first-hand view of these ancient edifices.

Imagine an army of workers—a hundred, yes, a thousand times as many as would be employed in the erection of a great modern building,—short, squat, powerful, sun-browned men, sweating at their task of quarrying and moving huge stone blocks.

In the quarries the blocks for the monolithic serpent heads, the column sections, and all the larger pieces used in the building are being channeled from the solid ledge rock, or from isolated boulders, by the _pa-tunich_, or quarry master, and his many assistants. The ring of blows struck with stone or wooden mallets upon chisels tipped with flint or calcite attests their industry. Some workers do not use the mallet and chisel, but score the soft limestone ledge with flint-bladed hatchets, while others ply long wooden poles as wedges and levers. On the quarry floor the master stone-cutters are squaring and smoothing the rough blocks and laying against them, from time to time, their wooden gauges, satisfied only when the stones are smooth and square and of the right dimensions. Under the finished stones are inserted wooden rollers and about them are knotted cables made of fiber or of tough vines, and long lines of men grasp the cables and bend their backs to the task of hauling the big blocks from the quarry to the building site.

Lines of men like toiling ants carry on their shoulders baskets of earth and stones. Slowly the terrace or substructure is built up to the first level, its sides faced with smooth stones, and each side bisected with a broad stairway. And up to this level is built an inclined roadway for the workers and their burdens. And slowly, up and up, grows terrace after terrace, each smaller than the preceding one, and the pyramid takes shape, leaving a flat stone platform at the top upon which the temple will be erected. Here the _pol-tunich_, the master stone-mason, and his artisans are busy in the finishing of the stones and in their intricate carving. Flint-edged hammers are used to work the grosser outlines, but the finer details are worked out with more delicate implements—gouging-tools of flint and calcite and keen-edged chisels of polished nephrite. Such a chisel Don Eduardo dug up near the base of one of the temples.

The finished stones, one by one, are dragged up the long inclined roadway, to the floor-level of the temple, and put into their places under the direction of the master builder. Stone upon stone, the walls take shape and the column sections are set in place. Then come the workers in mortar. Every crevice is filled and the column sections firmed into place with small stone wedges and thick lime mortar. With a cement-like plaster of sifted lime and white earth mixed with water and the juices of the _chi-chibe_ plant, the workmen fill each crack in the walls and columns and burnish it to stony hardness and exceeding smoothness.

Next come the sculptors—men of renown, artists famed for their skill, who spend months and years with knives of obsidian, nephrite and flint chisels, and tiny cutting-tools of copper and calcite. At last the stone-and-mortar surfaces are covered with deep-carved masks and portraits and battle scenes and hieroglyphs and friezes, until scarcely a square inch of plain surface remains. With pencils of red _chac-ti_ wood and with soft-plumed brushes dipped in brilliant pigments the carvings are further adorned—various shades of brown, the blue-green of the sacred quetzal bird, the emerald of the forest, the azure of the cloudless sky, the ultramarine of the deep sea, the gold of the noonday sun, the velvet blackness of a cloudy night, twilight purples in the long shadows of trees reflected in the pool of the Sacred Well, the gray of aged stone that has battled for countless years with the elements; vermilion of the turkey-head blossom, the rusty hue of red-earth dust. From triple-vaulted roof to temple floor the colors are applied with consummate artistry.

Speaking of the tools used by the sculptors, the finds of Don Eduardo throw a new light upon this previously puzzling subject. Many cutting-edges and rejects of flint and calcite have been found. Some archæologists have stated that chisels of metal were not used, and probably these were but little employed, yet from the Sacred Well were raised several small hard copper chisels. There can be no doubt, to judge from the shape and the marks upon them, that they are chisels. One of Don Eduardo’s most precious finds is a nephrite chisel discovered at the base of the Great Pyramid. Concerning it he says:

“While working one day around the base of the Great Pyramid of El Castillo, taking measurements and digging below the surface accumulations to get at the base line of the structure, I came upon a curiously shaped fragment of worked stone—heavy, close-grained, and dark green in color. Closer inspection showed it to be the edged portion of a cutting-tool.

“The unbroken tool must have been of the typical celt type, about six inches long and three inches wide at the cutting-edge, tapering to a rounded head. The part found was rather less than a half of the whole, but nevertheless the more interesting and important part because it contained the polished cutting-edge. It was an unusual find, indeed. Stone points and cutting-edges of local material, like flint and calcite, are not uncommonly encountered in favored places after heavy rains that wash away the earth covering and expose them to view, but tools fashioned from costly, imported material like nephrite were rarely used and were not carelessly cast aside when broken, for even the fragments had their value and could be worked over into smaller implements or into ornaments.

“The location in which this broken nephrite chisel was found, no less than the chisel itself, has an antiquarian bearing. Here was not only an authentic museum piece, but testimony as to its use, for clearly the chisel was used in making the sculptures of El Castillo and was lost there in the course of the work.

“Nephrite, or kidney-stone, was used in prehistoric, ancient, mediæval, and later times as a remedy for kidney diseases. It was taken, of course, in pulverized form. In prehistoric times nephrite was as needful to the skilled artisan as tempered tool steel is to the modern craftsman. Nephrite was found in lands far distant from the Mayas; and pieces of unworked nephrite were bartered and sold, as was nephrite dust. This dust packed on a rawhide surface became an effective abrasive for shaping and polishing the nephrite tool. Nephrite carried by ancient ways of commerce, by barter and trade and conquest and plunder, reached the Mayas to a limited extent. I have no doubt its value to these ancients was greater than that of gold.”

Century after century has passed and the work of these amazing craftsmen still stands, even to the hair lines of the lintel carvings and the faint traces of pigment still clinging to the smooth walls. The epitaph is imperishable, even though the names of the artists, like their very bones, have vanished.

Those who directed the work of temple-building not only built well, but had an eye to efficiency, also. No stone was wasted; rejects, fragments too small for carving or fashioning into building blocks—all were utilized as filling or ballast for the terraces. The stone chips from the mason’s hammer and chisel were used as grouting. Even the stone-dust was collected and sifted and mixed, in the ratio of three to one, with powdered lime, plant juice, and water, to make mortar. When the temple was completed to the point where the sculptors and painters took up their task, the inclined roadway was removed.

Then when the massive temple, smooth-walled and roof-crowned, stood complete on its serrated pyramid of receding terraces; when the broad stairways were finished and the undulating stone serpents and the paneled terrace faces all were perfectly aligned and the whole majestic structure appeared as frosted silver against the velvet blue of the sky—then only did the master builder consider his work complete.

With the exception of the Snail-shell or Watch-tower, all of the Maya buildings are rectangular. None are lofty, all are massive. Yet in all respects they are excellent in their architecture, of appropriate dimensions, symmetrical, and well constructed. Stones are fitted with infinite pains. Many have even been drilled. It has been shown that sharpened bird bones twirled about on the stone were employed as drills. Stones having drilled holes of six inches or more in depth are not uncommon. Mortar, plaster stucco, and cement were as good as or better than similar materials of the present time and were expertly applied. The use of pigments as understood by these ancient artisans is a lost art and it is doubtful if we have any colors as durable and unfading.

Monolithic columns of great size, chiefly of serpent-head motif, are found everywhere. Built-up columns, both square and round, were used. Inlays, mosaics, and stone screens, bas-reliefs, full reliefs, murals, panels, cornices, balustrades, sills, lintels,—virtually the whole gamut of architectural design and embellishment known to the best of ancient or modern architecture,—were known and used by these builders isolated by two oceans from any foreign influence.

Lintels were made of stone and of sapote, that iron-hard wood of Yucatan which defies the wear and tear of time like the teak of the Orient.

In one respect Mayan architecture might be considered inexpert, from the standpoint of our present knowledge of building construction, and that is their method of roofing their structures and of building arches. Like the old Greeks, they did not know how to build an arch employing a keystone. Only by gradually receding courses of stone did they achieve an arch having a capstone instead of a keystone. The result, in the building of a roof, was a steep-pitched affair, comparatively low at the eaves and high at the peak. The vertical rise from eaves to peak was usually as great as the distance from floor to eaves. Being of stone, this roof was of great weight. Where a considerable expanse of roof was needed, the triple-vaulted arch was used. The Maya arch is not ungraceful, even though it is massive.

In the Nunnery, or La Casa de las Monjas, we see successive stages of building where a part of an edifice is filled in with rock to provide a foundation for a superstructure erected later. This, too, is a very common practice of the old builders and gives the impression that no very well-thought-out plans were employed. I think, however, that none of these buildings was built without a predetermined plan, which was probably drawn out upon some substance in great detail, so that priests and king as well as the builders knew the size and shape and mode of decoration before the building was started. Moreover, people so skilful at drawing and with so considerable a mathematical knowledge might surely have been able to produce in some simple form the plans of these structures. The stones are too well fitted, the dimensions of the buildings too well proportioned, the orientation too accurate to have been the result of chance. Everything bespeaks foreordination, careful planning carried through to completion.

In several of the other ancient cities are found curiously carved stelæ, monolithic slabs of stone resembling the totem-poles of Alaska. These are elaborately sculptured with human figures and glyphs. Many are carved with amazing skill. In his book John L. Stephens describes a number of these stelæ and his descriptions are accompanied by the faithful drawings of Catherwood, made directly from first-hand observation and often with great difficulty. Frequently a small altar is found before these monuments. There is considerable reason to believe, from legend and the ancient Chronicles, that they were the date-records erected every twenty years, and if we could but read the hieroglyphs we might learn the important happenings in each score of years.

From a close study of the architecture of the buildings and their decorations it is clear that there were several stages of culture. Mayan architecture and art followed the rise and fall of the nation, becoming more and more refined up to the golden age represented in the temples of old Chi-chen Itza, gradually deteriorating in the newer temples, improving again under the influence of the Nahuatl conquerors, and sinking into utter desuetude several hundred years before the coming of the Spaniards.

The story of the Mayas furnishes one more epic in the history of the human race; one more cycle of rise and fall; one more meteor flash of brilliancy followed by the darkness of oblivion. There have been in every part of the world similar instances of this groping toward knowledge and culture and their slow achievement, to be followed by decline and savagery, as though the life of a nation were a thing of nature which, like a tree or an animal, flourishes a brief while, then withers and dies.

Is the twentieth century an exception to the age-old rule? Have our ability to commit our knowledge to the printed page and our great advance in the science of transportation set at naught the old rule? Or will our civilization also crumble with the passing of the years?