: not a human being was to be seen; and the door of the cabildo was barricadoed to prevent the entrance of straggling cattle. Having torn it open and taken possession, they sent their servant on a foraging expedition. In half an hour he returned with one egg but he had roused the village; and the alcade, an Indian with a silver-headed cane, and seven alguazils with long thin wands of office, came down to interrogate them. Mr. Stephens showed them his passport: they could not read it, but examined the seal, and left them, after having returned the answer-which afterwards became but too familiar-no hay' (there is none)-to the demand for eggs, fowls, and milk. The alcade, however, sent them a jar of water; and they had concluded their supper of bread and chocolate, and were getting into their hammocks, when the door was suddenly burst open, and twenty-five or thirty men rushed in, the alcade, alguazils, soldiers, Indians, and mestizoes, ragged and ferociouslooking fellows, armed with staves of office, swords, clubs, muskets, and machetes, and carrying blazing pine-sticks. At their head was an insolent young man, one of Carrera's captains, who denied the validity of the passport, which neither he nor the alcade could read; threatened their lives, and peremptorily insisted upon detaining them prisoners until orders could be received from Chiquimala. The high tone assumed by Mr. Stephens, and the cool courage with which he supported it, carried them through this danger, the full extent of which they were not aware of at the time, having no idea of the lawless state of the country, and the sanguinary character of the people. The officer required him to give up the passport: this he refused to do, but said he would go with it himself, under a guard of soldiers, to Chiquimala. The offer was refused, and in spite of a learned exposition of the law of nations, the rights of ambassadors, and the terrors of the government del Norte,' from Mr. Catherwood, things were on the point of coming to a bloody termination, for Mr. Stephens and his party were well armed and resolute, when fortunately a person of a better class entered the hut, and asked to see the passport. Mr. Stephens would not trust it out of his hands, but held it up hefore a blazing pine-stick, while the man read it aloud. This somewhat stilled the storm; but they were told that they must remain in custody. Mr. Stephens demanded a courier to carry a letter to General Cascara. After some hesitation this was granted. A note was written and signed by Mr. Catherwood, as secretary to the embassy; and having no official signet, he sealed it, unobserved by any one, with a new American half-dollar, and with diplomatic dignity handed it to the alcade. The eagle spread its wings, and the stars glittered in the torch-light, and all gathered round to examine it.' At length they departed, leaving a dozen ill-looking ruffians as a guard over them. The big seal' appears to have settled the business; for in the middle of the night the whole of the ruffianly band again broke in upon them with the drunken alcade at their head. The first impression of the travellers was that they had come to take the passport by force; but, to their surprise, the alcade handed the letter back to Mr. Stephens, saying that there was no need to send it, and that they were at liberty to proceed on their journey. Our indignation,' says Mr. Stephens, 'was now not the less strong because we considered ourselves safe in pouring it out. We insisted that the matter should not end here, and that the letter should go to the general. The alcade objected: we threatened him with the consequences; and at length he thrust it into the hands of an Indian, and beat him out of doors with his staff, and in a few minutes the guard was withdrawn.' Exaggerated accounts of the fracas soon spread through the country; and wherever Mr. Stephens went, this arrest and the indignity offered to the government of the United States were the theme of conversation. The whole of the journey to Copan is full of interest and adventure, and so vividly told, that it is not without an effort that we forbear to extract it. We will resist, also, giving the lively details of the feud between the travellers and a certain Don Gregorio, the great man of the village, very rich, very tyrannical, and very churlish; and will at once introduce our readers to the ruins. There was only one man in the place who knew anything about the idols,' but he was absent in attendance on a grand cock-fight; and it was not until a late hour the next morning that they were enabled to visit them: 'We dismounted, and tying our mules to trees near by, entered the woods, José, the guide, clearing a path before us with a machete. Soon we came to the bank of a river, and saw directly opposite a stone wall, perhaps a hundred feet high, with furze growing out of the top, running north and south along the river, in some places fallen but in others entire. It had more the character of a structure than any we had ever seen, ascribed to the aborigines of America, and formed part of the wall of Copan, an ancient city, on whose history books throw but little light.. 'Dr. Robertson, in his History of America, lays it down as a «certain principle, that America was not peopled by any nation of the ancient continent which had made considerable progress in civilization.» . . . . At that time, distrust was perhaps the safer side for the historian; but since Dr. Roberston wrote, a new flood of light has poured upon the world, and the field of American antiquities has been opened. . . . The first new light thrown upon this subject as regards Mexico was by the great Humboldt, who visited that country at a time when, by the jealous policy of the government, it was almost as much closed against strangers as China is now. No man could have better deserved such fortune. At that time the monuments of the country were not a leading object of research; but Humboldt collected from various sources information and drawings, particularly of Mytla, or the Vale of the Dead; Oxichalco, a mountain hewed down and terraced, and called the Hill of Flowers; » and the great pyramid or temple of Cholula he visited himself. Unfortunately, of the great cities beyond the vale of Mexico, buried in forests, ruined, desolate, and without a name, Humboldt never heard, or, at least, he never visited them. It is but lately that accounts of their existence reached Europe and our own country. These accounts, however vague and unsatisfactory, had roused our curiosity; though I ought perhaps to say that both Mr. Catherwood and I were somewhat sceptical, and when we arrived at Copan, it was with the hope, rather than the expectation, of finding wonders. Since the discovery of these ruined cities the prevailing theory has been, that they belonged to a race long anterior to that which inhabited the country at the time of the Spanish conquest. Opposite the wall the river was not fordable: we returned to our mules, mounted, and rode to another part of the bank, a short distance above. The stream was wide, and in some places deep, rapid, and with a broken and stony bottom. Fording it, we rode along the bank by a footpath encumbered with undergrowth, which José opened by cutting away the branches, until we came to the foot of the wall, where we again dismounted and tied our mules. The wall was of cut stone, well laid, and in a good state of preservation. We ascended by large stone steps, in some places perfect, and in others thrown down by trees which had grown up between the crevices, and reached a terrace, the form of which it was impossible to make out, from the density of the forest in which it was enveloped. Our guide cleared a way with his machete (choppingknife), and we passed, as it lay half buried in the earth, a large fragment of stone elaborately sculptured, and came to the angle of a structure with steps on the sides, in form and appearance, so far as the trees would enable us to make it out, like the sides of a pyramid. Diverging from the base, and working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column, about fourteen feet on each side, sculptured in very bold relief, and on all four of the sides from the base to the top. The front was the figure of a man curiously and richly dressed, and the face, evidently a portrait, solemn, stern, and well fitted to excite terror. The back was of a different design, unlike anything we had ever seen before, and the sides were covered with hieroglyphics. This our guide called an «Idol; and before it, at a distance of three feet, was a large block of stone, also sculptured with emblematical devices, which he called an altar. The sight of this monument put at rest at once and for ever, in our minds, all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities, and gave us the assurance that the objects we were in search of were interesting, not only as the remains of an unknown people, but as works of art, proving, like newly-discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the Continent of America were not savages. 'With an interest perhaps stronger than we had ever felt in wandering among the ruins of Egypt, we followed our guide, who, sometimes missing his way, with a constant use of his machete conducted us through the thick forest, among half-buried fragments, to fourteen monuments of the same character and appearance, some with more elegant designs, and some in worksmanship equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians: one displaced from its pedestal by enormous roots: another locked in the close embrace of branches of trees, and almost lifted out of the earth; another hurled to the ground, and bound down by huge vines and creepers; and one standing, with its altar before it, in a grove of trees which grew around it, seemingly to shade and shroud it as a sacred thing: in the solemn stillness of the woods, it seemed a divinity mourning over a fallen people. The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city were the noise of monkeys moving among the tops of the trees, and the cracking of dry branches broken by their weight. They moved over our heads in long and swift processions, forty or fifty at a time, some with little ones wound in their long arms, walking out to the end of the boughs, and holding on with their hind feet or a curl of the tail, sprang to a branch of the next tree, and, with a noise like a current of wind, passed on into the depths of the forest. It was the first time we had seen these mockeries of humanity; and, with the strange monuments around us, they seemed like wandering spirits of the departed race guarding the ruins of their former habitations. 'We returned to the base of the pyramidal structure, and ascended by regular stone steps, in some places forced apart by bushes and saplings, and in others thrown down by the growth of large trees, while some remained entire. In parts they were ornamented with sculptured figures and rows of death's-heads. Climbing over the ruined top, we reached a terrace overgrown with trees, and, crossing it, descended by stone steps into an area so covered with trees, that at first we could not make out its form, but which, on clearing the way with the machete, we ascertained to be a square, and with steps on all the sides almost as perfect as those of the Romau amphitheatre. The steps were ornamented with sculpture, and on the south side, about half way up, forced out of its place by roots, was a colossal head, evidently a portrait. We ascended these steps, and reached a broad terrace a hundred feet high, overlooking the river, and supported by the wall which we had seen from the opposite bank. The whole terrace was covered with trees, and even at this height from the ground were two gigantic Ceibas, or wild cotton-trees of India, above twenty feet in circumference, extending their half-naked roots fifty or a hundred feet around, binding down the ruins, and shading them with their wide-spreading branches. We sat down on the very edge of the wall, and strove in vain to penetrate the mystery by which we were surrounded. The next morning, before we started, a new party, who had been conversing some time with Don Gregorio, stepped forward and said that he was the owner of the « Idols,» that no one could go on the land without his permission, and handed me his title-papers. This was a new difficulty. I was not disposed to dispute his title, but read his papers as attentively as if I meditated an action in ejectment; and he seemed relieved when I told him his title was good, and that, if not disturbed, I would make him a compliment at parting. Our new acquaintance, Don José Maria Asabedo, was about fifty, tall, and well dressed; that is, his cotton shirt and pantaloons were clean; he was inoffensive, though ignorant; and one of the most respectable inhabitants of Copan. Don José Maria accompanied me to the ruins, where I found Mr. Catherwood with the Indian workmen. Again we wandered over the whole ground in search of some ruined building in which we could take up our abode, but there was none. To hang up our hammock under the trees was madness; the branches were still wet, the ground muddy, and again there was a prospect of early rain; but we were determined not to go back to Don VOL. II. 10 |