A GLIMPSE AT GUATEMALA.*
TnIS beautiful book is a rare treat in many ways. It is printed admirably on very good paper ; it is full of excellent illustrations of all kinds, done by the best and most modern processes ; and both the matter and the manner of the writing are worthy of its rich accompaniments. Seldom have a man and his wife collaborated more successfully in a literary undertaking. The diary of their campinge, ridings, bar- gainings, conversations, is almost all Mrs. Maudalay's work, and she has done it with good taste, good feeling, and some literary skill. The journey across Guatemala from the Pacific seems really to have been made chiefly with the object of approaching the famous ruined cities of Yucatan, which Mr. Maudelay has long been studying, and concerning which he has repeated much that he had discovered in former years. But to Mrs. Mandalay the journey was evidently very fresh, and she makes her readers enjoy it, as she has enjoyed it herself. The province (now Republic) of Guatemala, though bordering on British Honduras, is a country little visited, and less written about, by ordinary English travellers. Even Honduras is seldom mentioned, except for the marvellous supply of mahogany which it has long exported to Europe. But the day may yet come when both countries, full of tropical beauty, and inhabited by gentle and agreeable natives, may be visited by many English and American tourists in
search of an interesting holiday. Here is a specimen of Mrs. hIandslay's experiences
"We were riding through a veritable aviary, and small bright- plumaged birds were so numerous that at times the bare branches appeared flushed into flowering sprays. The sensontes poured forth volumes of liquid sound from every thicket ; sweet- voiced orioles arranged themselves into golden bunches; saucy blue jays, and their still more impudent cousins, the crested grey jays, circled noisily round us and perched upon branches almost within the reach of our hands, and chattered at one another as though they were discussing the propriety of letting us pass. Green and yellow fly-catchers flew from their perches, and made erratic sweeps in the air in chase of unwary insects. Now and again we caught sight of a stupid-looking mot-mot with lovely green and blue plumage, swinging his queer tail feathers to and fro in uneasy movement. Tiny iridescent humming birds flitted across our path, hovered for a moment over a flower, and then darted out of sight ; and numerous wrens, not much Larger than the humming birds, could be seen slipping through the thorny hedges and fences. Large flocks of the friendly blackbirds with unmanageably long tails, whose gregarious movements we had so often watched in the plazas and patios, gossiped together vociferously, and red-headed woodpeckers tapped loudly against the tree trunks."
There is more of it, but this will suffice as a fair description of that real travelling which begins where railways and steamers end, and where the mule or the pony is the only alternative to honest walking across the world. The photo- graphs reproduced show us splendid lake and mountain scenery, rivers flowing through forests, with villages of Indians by way of variety,—in fact, all kinds of adventure and of interest without apparently any danger. The authori-
ties of the Republic, though in danger themselves from the chronic spirit of revolution, were kind and careful regarding the travellers ; and the people, both Spanish, half-caste, and pure Indian, seemed very " decent " people.
So much may be briefly said concerning this stately volume as a were book of travels. The weightier part of it, which will attract the student, consists of short chapters on the famous dead cities of Yucatan, which first became well known to Europe over fifty years ago through Stephens's Travels in Central America. That famous book disclosed to us that, hidden in the tropical vegetation of Guatemala
and Yucatan, but within a moderate and definite area, lie the remains of cities showing a remarkable style of architecture, of ornament, and of writing, which has no exact parallel even in the Aztec and Peruvian monuments. General similarity is there, but the varieties are great and striking. These cities had been seen by Cortez and his gang, and much had been written about them by Landa, the saintly Bishop of
04 Campse at Guatemala. By A. C. and A. E. liauilslay. London : John Murray. (£4 4s. net.] Yucatan, early in the sixteenth century, who even left us a transcription of the characters into European signs. The people are still known as the Mayas, and the writing is called calculiform, each sign being enclosed in a cartouch of the general form of a pebble. Pebbles were even painted and used as script by these people or the Peruvians. Neverthe- less, even with Bishop Landa's syllabary, no satisfactory solution of the problem of Maya inscriptions has yet been found—we say this with all respect for the clever notions of Mr. Goodman, quoted at the close of the present work— and we are strongly reminded of the parallel problem of the Irish Oghams, for which also we have a medians' key, which has so far proved quite insufficient for any real reading of the extant inscriptions. However, the Maya inscriptions are sufficiently numerous, and the present language of the natives sufficiently known, to give scope to another °ham- pollion. But the translations hitherto offered to us are such chronological and cosmological rubbish that we must warn the coming decipherer of the possibility of perfectly futile results, even when the problem is really solved.
The first great difficulty is, however, to have access to proper copies of the texts, which are both on stone and on books manufactured of linden rind,—inscriptions and manu- scripts, as we should say. Mr. Maudalay has done the very useful service, not only of giving us good ground-plans of the buildings, both individually and in their grouping, but also of reproducing the texts from sculptured stones in trust. worthy copies. It appears from his preface that an American association is doing this work more elaborately in the Biologia Centrali-Americana, a work not only very expensive, but hardly to be found in European libraries. Even Mr. Mandslay's work, which he offers as a cheap reproduction of some of the plates of the Biologia, costs four guineas. Besides Stephens's book and some of the plates in Singsborough's ifexioan Antiquities, weknow De Rosny's Revue Orientale et Americaine, in eleven volumes, now long out of print and scarce, in which Baron de Waldeck has given his admirably careful drawings of some of the monuments and inscriptions. Then as regards Bishop Landa's key, and the codices, which are at Dresden, Rome, and in Spain, the leading work is the Commission Scientifique de Mexique (Vols. IL and issued under the auspices of Napoleon III. at an inauspicious moment, when he was copying his great namesake's Egyptian policy. This work contains beautiful coloured facsimiles of the Maya MS. Troano (Madrid), with a grammar and vocabulary of the Maya language, edited by Brasseur de Bourbourg, and is the most systematic study of the problem known to us. But this, again, is a rare and expensive work. Our author, by the way, supplies no bibliographical notices of his subject.
The prosecution of Maya studies seems, therefore, so far to be the privilege of the rich, either in time, or in money, or in energy to face the hardships of travel. Mr. Mandalay notices, what all explorers in Yucatan tell us, that the growth of vegetation is so rapid as to cover up the rains again, though exposed by the spade, in a few years. Thus the work of the explorer has to begin afresh. Fortunately there are a good many pyramidal structures, which stand out with their tops, and so the knowledge of the sites is at least preserved.
There are of course many problems on which we should like to ask the author for clearer information. He has not made it plain to us whether the elaborate surface ornament of reliefs and of inscriptions is carved in stone, or laid on a surface of stone in hard stucco, or both. He tells us that all these ornaments were coloured, but he only gives one slight specimen of it on the cover of his book, and never tells us whether the beautiful colours of the MS. Troano repro- duced by Brasseur de Bourbonrg correspond to the epigraphic colours of the monuments. His only specimen, in crude blue, red, and yellow, certainly does not. On the origin of the Maya civilisation he only repeats the conjectures of his pre- decessors, but adds one important fact, that there is negative evidence to show that they were people in the atone age of development. No tool of metal (though there is plenty of flint, obsidian, &c.) has ever been found by any of the explorers. Yet the people whom Cortez met on the coast appear to have bad bronze weapons and ornaments. The matter is all the more puzzling as both Landa and his suc- cessor, Cogolludo, speak of the pages of the ancient books being cleaned or preserved by washing them with a solution
of verdigris, which of course implies an intimate knowledge of copper. But at every tarn we are faced in this history by new enigmas. Let us hope that Mr. Mandalay and his col- laborators will not cease till they reveal to us the secrets of this very curious and perhaps unique civilisation.
Previous page
