wood graven with the hieroglyphs that have baffled science.

"Step softly, or it may vanish," whispered one of us. "The gods who hung it there, growing angry that man leaves it to decay in this desolation, may haul it up to Olympus to worship it themselves."

Indeed, such is El Castillo's delicacy and grace that you feel the temple is suspended from the stars, a mirage of beauty which may disappear while you look.

On our left, as we emerged into the open field, were two long parallel walls of dissolving masonry, a big stone ring projecting from the middle of one wall, and a similar ring fallen at the bottom of the other. This was the court where the ancients played a game that was the ancestor of modern basketball. But so does El Castillo dominate all the attractions of Chichen that we did not stop until we reached the foot of the chief temple.

Originally, there was a staircase on each of the four sides of the pyramid, long stone serpent bodies forming the banisters. We climbed the western stairway, the only one preserved, and the view from the top repaid us for our pains. Near by, on every hand, were signs of what had been a great metropolis in the day when Yucatan had probably the densest population in the world-a population so ample that all work was done by man power. Human muscle had raised all the stone blocks about us, and carved them with only tools of harder stone.

Following a corridor which runs around three sides of the temple, we went through a door on the north side into a dim chamber with two great square pillars covered with carved figures of warriors and priests. These stone pillars supported two massive beams of the long-enduring zapote

In this chamber, darkened with the smoke of centuries of incense, quiet now as the mouths of the men who had once filled it with booming prayer, we felt ourselves at the very heart of the secret. secret. If only these walls could speak, if only these inscriptions could be read! No man of normal imaginative power could leave this holy place without taking away a mordant desire to know, a gnawing ache to comprehend, like an acute hunger of the body.

Since that day in 1517 when the first Spanish conquerors saw what their historian, Bernal Diaz, reported as "some very large houses well built of stone and plaster, which were the sanctuaries of their Idols, where we saw figures of great serpents and other Idols carved and painted on the walls surrounding an altar which was drenched with blood still fresh"since that day the curiosities and intelligences of white men have been ever at work to piece together the story of the Indians who built those temples filled with examples of plastic art in many ways superior to the art of the Egyptians.

But the end is not yet. Although the Spanish conquistadores apparently found Indians worshiping in some of the same temples that you may see in Yucatan to-day, nevertheless the Spanish left the whole subject shrouded in doubt. They were preeminently warlike men of acquisition and not scientists, those freebooting dons of old Spain, and they were too busy robbing the natives to take many notes on native customs. Besides, their few reports tend to indicate that the accounts given by the Indians of their own civilization were far from definite.

MERIDA

For instance, an account of the ruined city of Uxmal, given in 1586 by a companion of Alonzo Ponce, a Franciscan delegate, says:

"The Indians do not know surely who built these buildings nor when they were built, though some of them did their best in trying to explain the matter, but in doing so showed foolish fancies and dreams, and nothing fitted into the facts or was satisfactory."

Thus it is not difficult to understand how a thousand and one wild theories about the origin of these ruined cities were built up when the freebooter gave way to the planter, and the white man in middle America began to look about him. One of the most popular myths and one of the hardest to kill was the speculation that Yucatan had once been part of the lost continent of Atlantis which Plato mentioned as having sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, there are sober Yankees in Mexico to-day who do not hesitate to put forward this motheaten dream.

Another guesser who let his imagination run away with his common sense was Lord Kingsborough, who tried to prove that the lost tribes of Israel had wandered into the isthmus connecting North and South America and there flowered into a renaissance of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The flimsiest trifles have been used as foundations for the heaviest theories. Because some of the stone statues along the coast of Yucatan have teeth filed in a manner still practised by certain tribes of Africa, it has been suggested that the stone cities of Central America were built by negroes.

Some of the earliest explorers were entirely misled by the huge noses jutting from "mask panels" which adorn the façades of many a limestone temple. Failing to recognize the other features in the highly conventionalized faces containing these noses, these early explorers dubbed the stone snouts "elephant trunks." As there are no elephants in the Americas, this mistake in identification led to the wild conjecture that these temples must have been built by emigrants from a country of elephants, that is, India or Africa!

Some of the modern natives of Yucatan, who are the Maya Indians, wear at various times a short apron from waist to knees and a sort of towel wound around the head, with the ends hanging down the back. Garments similar to these may be found in basreliefs from Egypt, a fact which has been the basis for many a vigorous smoking-room argument that the ruins of Yucatan must have been built by Egyptians. It is astonishing how little proof satisfies the amateur scientist. There are among the Mayas, as there are among many other Indian tribes of Mexico, a good many persons with long, narrow eyes like the eyes of Orientals. This fact and the fact that some Chinese laundrymen in Merida learn Maya more easily than they learn Spanish has convinced not a few theorists that the stone palaces in the jungle were constructed by Chinese.

In China I met an apparently reliable American who said he had found a reference in early Chinese history to a voyage made by a Chinese missionary three or four centuries after Christ. This earnest preacher of Buddhism seemed to have crossed the Pacific, coasted along what is now California

and the west coast of America until he reached Central America. There, according to my friend's translation of Chinese history, he remained several years.

Of course it is not at all improbable that careless early voyagers from China, India, or Africa may have been blown to the coasts of Central America. In fact, it is more than likely that America was "discovered" centuries before the birth of Columbus. Most of the romantic souls who theorize amateurishly about the ruins in Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Honduras like to attribute their origin to some such early emigration from the so-called "Old World." A refreshing exception to this monotonous dreaming was provided by that indefatigable, though over-imaginative, Frenchman, Le Plongeon. This gentleman, whose active work in the field was as valuable as his subsequent theorizing was useless, presented the world with the creed that Central America had been the cradle of the human race, and that the civilization of Europe, Asia, and Africa had been founded by emigrants from the isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Charmed by his originality, if nothing more, many of our fathers in the age of the bicycle flocked to the support of this garrulous Gaul.

In one particular at least modern science supports Le Plongeon. With virtually no dissenting voices, modern archæologists and ethnologists agree that the crumbling cities of Middle America were the work of an indigenous race. Where they differ from the Frenchman very emphatically is in the matter of the antiquity of these ruins. It is agreed that virtually all these structures now standing for us to see

were built between the birth of Christ and the arrival of the earliest Spanish conquerors. Credit for their construction is given to the ancestors of the Maya Indians still living in Yucatan, and who, though a good deal degenerated, are probably the cleanest and most industrious native race left in the Americas.

But if you question a modern Maya about those ruins, will he give you any satisfaction? He will mutter something about their being the work of "los antiguos" (the ancients), and that is all. Apparently, there is not a trace of a tradition among the living Mayas to connect their own ancestors with the palaces of Chichen Itza and Uxmal.

Here, to a layman, is the great weakness in the theory of the scientists. They will tell you that the ignorance of the modern natives is due to the centuries of systematic cruelty practised by the Spaniards with the very object of stamping out all adherence to original beliefs and memories in order to implant the religion of Rome. But does not the case of other conquered peoples, like the Poles, the Finns, and the Armenians, show that the more ruthlessly you try to stamp out the patriotism of a suppressed nation, the more passionately those people cling to memories of their proud past? And the Mayas are just as brave and just as fond of liberty as the Poles, Finns, or Armenians.

Hence it was difficult for a good many mere laymen like the writer to accept whole-heartedly the theory of a native origin of the ruins until it was supplemented by another theory recently emphasized, especially by that