The dilapidated condition of the small edifice robs it of some of its interest; yet the interior and the frieze furnish valuable details of ornamentation. First comes a decorative fragment round the niches or openings in the shape of a Tau, found both in the galleries and the apartments of the palace; next a portion of a frieze decoration in the same building, but so defaced that nothing is distinguishable, save the head of a fantastic dragon, whose neck is framed with coils, palms, or feathers, emblems of Quetzalcoatl; and lastly the ornamentation over the entrance of a round, flat-topped edifice, by far the most interesting because of the head seen in the centre with nose and forehead straight, contrasting with the retreating foreheads of the reliefs on both pillars and temples; proving that the latter are conventional types, exaggerated likenesses of a particular family, whether warrior or priest, rather than the faithful portraiture of a race. We shall also find this type at Uxmal.
Torquemada says with regard to these deformations in Mexico: “They defaced their faces so as to acquire an appearance of ferocity, enlarging their ears, nostrils, and lips by introducing silver, gold, or stone jewels. It had the twofold use of acting as a scare against their enemies and as a personal improvement; and that they might look fierce in war, chiefs were obliged in some districts to make their heads long and their foreheads broad; as Hippocrates relates of microcephales, so did these people practise.”[98] And again: “Some have pointed heads, square flat foreheads, whilst others are like the Mexicans and Peruvians, who had and still have heads something like a _martillo_, hammer, or better still, like a ship (_navio_),” meaning oblong, probably.[99]
Landa tells nearly the same thing as to these practices in Yucatan, corroborating Torquemada. These defaced heads have given rise to wild theories; some saw in these reliefs sun-kings who, in mythical times, had travelled thither from Europe; it had been more natural to take them as representations of microcephales worshipped by these people as monstrosities.
[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF DECORATION SHAPED LIKE A TAU, SURROUNDING NICHES IN THE CORRIDORS AND APARTMENTS OF THE PALACE.]