Artisans were plentiful among the Mayas, who have interspersed their country with so many remarkable monuments, and whose building aptitude is notable even at the present day. Beside these edifices the town, with very few exceptions, is an assemblage of low houses having but the ground floor, while all the windows are stoutly grated to secure the inmates against housebreakers. But the impression produced by this unpromising exterior soon gives place to agreeable surprise on being introduced into spacious apartments opening on the “patio,” encompassed by Moorish cloisters. The patios are planted with flowers, shrubs, and palm-trees, which, towering above the terraced roofs, break the monotonous lines of the town panorama. Our cut shows Don Alvaro Peon’s house with its charming gallery on the first floor.
All movement and life centre towards the market-place, where Spaniards, Indians, and Meztizos are seen in their picturesque costumes; sellers are crying out their goods, consisting of pottery and baskets, the facsimiles of those we bought at Tula; somewhat further we come across some natives bending under heavy loads of “ramon,” the green twigs of a particular tree, affording the only forage in a country without grass. Here young caballeros are stopped by cumbrous carts taking up the whole street with their enormous bales of henequen; further on, women in snowy white costumes sit in long rows, offering with a pretty grace their small stock-in-trade spread before them. Among this motley crowd I spied a diminutive “aguador” looking so bonnie that I wished to take his photograph, making his less favoured companions envious thereat.[107]
The Mayas, both in type and language, are unlike both the surrounding tribes and those of the plateaux; they are said to be an ancient race, but this assumption is based on no positive proof. Cogolludo believes the first inhabitants to have come from Cuba; and Agassiz, who studied these tribes in their respective homes, leans to the same opinion. Traditions and ancient writers, confirmed in modern times by Humboldt, all are unanimous in asserting that this country was invaded towards the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century by the Toltecs.[108] Granted their building genius, seeing that both the architecture and the decorations of the edifices correspond to the descriptions left by historians respecting Toltec palaces and temples of the Uplands, we are in a position to affirm that there was no other civilisation in Central America except the Toltec civilisation, and that if another existed, our having met with no trace of it gives us the right to deny it altogether.