# A Glimpse at Guatemala/Chapter 23

CHAPTER XXIII.
PALENQUE.
On the 20th February, Gorgonio, José Domingo, and Caralampio Lopez arrived at Palenque, having ridden overland from Guatemala, and we at once set to work making paper moulds of the inscriptions; by the end of three weeks a large number of moulds had been dried and stored in one of the temples, and others in process of making were still adhering to the sculptured slabs, when, late one evening, a heavy rain-storm unexpectedly burst upon us. It was impossible in the dark to reach the temple where the moulds were stored, as the whole of the intervening space was covered with felled trees, and even in the daytime it was a severe gymnastic exercise to get from one building to another. When daylight came and we were able to reach the temple, we found that the waterproof sheets with which the moulds were covered had not sufficed to keep out the driving rain, and that half of the moulds had been reduced to a pulpy mass, and those in process of making had been almost washed away. The rain continued to fall all day long, the rooms where we were living were partly flooded, the walls were running with water, and the drip came through the roof in all directions. It was not until the next day that the remnant of the moulds could be carried out to dry in the returning sunshine, and then we made certain that the greater part of the work would have to be done over again.
I will not weary my readers with any further account of the troubles in engaging labourers, it was the old story of effusive offers of help and broken promises over and over again; at one time, for a few days, we actually had as many as fifty men at work, and during the next week we were left without a single one. For many days our only connection with the village was kept up by the two small boys who brought over the supply of tortillas for which a contract had been made. These plucky little fellows walked the twelve miles through the forest alone, although they were so small that on arriving at the ruins they had to help one another up and down the rather steep steps which led in and out of the Courts. Perhaps the chocolate and sweet biscuits with which they were rewarded had something to do with the persistence with which they stuck to their task.
GORGONIO LOPEZ. PALENQUE. 1891.
In the following short account of the principal buildings I shall keep to the old but somewhat misleading names by which they are known to the villagers of Santo Domingo. There is no evidence that the so-called Palace, of which a separate plan is given on the following page, was used as the dwelling of a great chief, and I am inclined to look on it as a collection of buildings raised at different periods of time and devoted to religious purposes. All trace of a stairway has disappeared from the outer slopes of the foundation mound, which are covered with stones and rubble fallen from the buildings above. In structure the separate houses which form the palace group do not differ materially from those found at Chichén and Copan; they usually consist of two narrow chambers side by side, roofed with high-pitched stone vaults. The outer piers of house A are decorated with human figures moulded in a hard stucco and surrounded with an ornamental border. The western piers of houses C and D are decorated in the same manner, and there are many other traces of similar ornament on other buildings, usually too much destroyed for the design to be made out. In some instances these decorations have been preserved in a very curious way: the water continually dripping on them from above has passed through the dense mass of decaying vegetation which covers the roofs of the buildings, and become charged with carbonic acid in the process; it has then filtered through the slabs of which the roof and cornice are built, dissolving some of the limestone on its way, and re-depositing it in a stalactitic formation on the face of the piers. Mr. Price and I worked for some weeks at clearing the carvings of this incrustation, which varied from a hardly perceptible film to five or even six inches in thickness. The thinner parts were the more difficult to deal with, as they were exceedingly hard; where the thickness exceeded two inches a ​few taps with a hammer would sometimes bring away pieces two or three inches square, and we were fortunate in some instances in finding the colours on the surface of the stucco ornament underneath still fresh and bright. An example of this colouring is given on the outside cover of this volume.
The Eastern court, after being cleared of vegetation, was found to be so choked up with debris from the half-ruined buildings which surrounded it, that it was necessary to dig it out in some places to the depth of four feet, a task which we found to be very laborious. Some idea of the appearance of the court when the digging was finished can be formed from the photograph on the following page, which was taken from the front of House C looking south-east on the last day of our stay in the ruins, and shows some of the men setting out with their loads. The house on the north side of the court was completely ruined and much of the masonry had fallen over the northern slope of the foundation mound—a destruction which was very likely due to an earthquake, as a distinct rift can be traced right across the northern end of the mound. By standing on the broken masonry, a fine view is gained over the forest-covered plain which stretches northward to the Gulf of Mexico.
PALENQUE, THE EASTERN COURT.
PALENQUE, THE WESTERN COURT AND TOWER.
The other buildings of the Palace group do not here need separate notice; some of them contain fragments of stucco or painted decoration, and one (E) has a finely-carved stone medallion let into the wall. The most curious feature of the southern half of the group is the existence of three subterranean passages leading to three long parallel chambers, of which two are enclosed within the foundation mound, and the third has doorways opening onto the southern slope. The entrances to two of the passages had been purposely blocked up, and part of one of the chambers had been walled up and filled in, probably with a view to affording a secure foundation for a building to be erected above it. Both passages and chambers are shown in the plan in dotted lines, but a part of the walls of the latter (surrounded by a wavy line) are shown in tint.
To the south-west of the Palace stands the Temple of Inscriptions, built on a foundation mound which backs against a spur running out from the hills.
The building itself is a fine one, and has been elaborately decorated on the outside, but it is especially interesting on account of the three stone panels which it contains, two of them let into the middle wail and one into the back wall of the building, on which is carved an inscription numbering six hundred glyphs, the longest continuous inscription of all those as yet discovered in Central America.
To the east of the Temple of Inscriptions, on the other side of the stream, three other temples will be found, marked on the plan as the Temple of the Cross, the Foliated Cross, and the Sun. They are all three built on much the same plan. The Temple of the Sun, which is the best preserved of the three, is shown on the Plate facing page 228, and a ground-plan and section is also given. The whole of the frieze and the piers of the façade were elaborately decorated with figures and inscriptions in stucco, of which little now remains. On the roof, above the wall which divides the two corridors, stood an ornamental superstructure (a feature common to all buildings of this class) formed of a light framework of stone, which served to support a number of figures and other ornaments moulded in stucco. The inner corridor of each of the three temples is divided by transverse walls into three small chambers; and in the middle chamber, built out from the back wall, stands the Sanctuary. The exterior of the Sanctuary was richly decorated with stone carving and stucco moulding, but the only ornament in the interior now to be seen is the carved stone panel let into the back wall.
Temple of the Foliated Cross, in which the beautifully-cut glyphs of the inscription are only lightly sketched, so as to give prominence to the central design.
The carved panels in the sanctuaries of the Temples of the Foliated Cross and of the Sun are still intact in their original positions; but the panel from the Temple of the Cross, which has perhaps received more attention from archæologists than any other monument of Maya art, has not been so fortunate. The slab to the left of the spectator only is in its place; the centre slab, after being torn from its position, broken in two, and exposed to the weather for many years, has at last found a resting-place in the Museum of the City of Mexico, and the right-hand slab, after being broken into fragments, has been carefully and skilfully pieced together, and is now exhibited in the National Museum at Washington.
The "aqueduct" marked in the plan is a stone-roofed tunnel intended to receive the water of the small stream which runs through the ruins. Unfortunately the upper end of the tunnel has become partly blocked up, and some of the water finds its way over the surface and floods the plaza after heavy rain.
PALENQUE. THE TEMPLE OF THE SUN & THE PALACE.
During the present century travellers have frequently visited the ruins, and many descriptions of them have been published; amongst the best known are those of Dupaix, Waldeck, Stephens and Catherwood, Morelet and Charnay. There still remains, however, much work to be done—none of the foundation mounds have yet been cleared of the debris which covers their slopes, and very little attention has been paid to the tombs and burial mounds, which I know to be very numerous and believe will prove most interesting. Now that the heavier timber around the principal buildings has been felled, the work of examination will be somewhat easier, but the very rapid growth of vegetation will always entail on the visitor a considerable amount of clearing before he can obtain a satisfactory view of the buildings. Mr. W. H. Holmes, of the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, who visited the ruins in 1895, only four years after I had cleared them, wrote to me to say that he had to use a plan and compass and cut his way from building to building, as a dense growth of over twenty feet in height completely obscured them from view.
THE SERPENT BIRD, TIKÁL.