dreams to these more sombre pages, and no divine wisdom seemed to shed its light within these sculptured walls.
There is the credit due to early America, to the ability of her autochthonous cultures, even if they formed no permanent link in the chain of human development, but were too early cut off and faded away like the untimely fruit of a woman, that at least man rose here, in accordance with the divine mandate, arose from the dust, and if he did but build him "fanes of fruitless prayer" to strange idols and savage deities, he had that in common with the majority of the cultures of the Old World of Asia, Africa and India, where men raised temples of the utmost beauty to shelter the most inane rites or bloody religions.
Before Mitla and Palenque or Teotihuacan and Tiahuanako let us mark the skill which carved these intricate walls or raised their terraces and monoliths, the greater wonder because all that has descended from those skilled craftsmen of a bygone age on the American soil are the stolid Indian, incapable of squaring stone to stone, ignorant of the bronze chisel, degenerate and fallen. The skill and imagination which would have done credit to the Greeks or the Chaldeans lies buried in the dust, nor is likely yet to be resuscitated.
We have spoken of Teotihuacan—the name means in the ancient tongue of Mexico the "house of God"—and this, the great pyramid of the sun, the work of the shadowy Toltecs, may be seen by the traveller to-day who, taking steamer and train, will convey himself to the high plateau of Mexico, a few miles north of the capital. It is a structure of stone and rubble seven hundred feet upon its broadest side and two hundred feet high, and, anciently, upon its summit stood the golden image of Tonatiuah, whose breastplate flashed back the rays of the rising sun, what time the attendant priests chanted their savage refrain upon the terraces beneath. Restored by the Government of the Republic under President Diaz, the great monument stands up much the same as it did in days of yore. How many centuries have beaten upon it we can scarcely conjecture. It was in ruins when the defeated Cortes and his Spaniards, after the dreadful experience of the Noche Triste, the sorrowful night passed beneath its shadow and wept thereunder for his fallen comrades and his ruined enterprise.
If little we know of Teotihuacan, what shall be said of Mitla, whose mysterious halls and corridors, scarcely defaced by time, arise from the sands of Oaxaca.
And the builders of these temples, have they produced no songs of beauty, no enduring psalms? Had their dreadful religious rites nothing in common with the idea of a true Providence? Hear the psalm of Nezahual-Coyotl, the Solomon of Mexico. This is what he sang:
Truly the gods which I adore—
The idols of stone and wood,
They speak not nor do they feel,
Neither could they fashion the beauty of the heavens,
Nor yet that of the earth and the streams,
Nor of the trees and the plants which beautify it.
Some powerful, hidden and unknown God—
He must be the Creator of the Universe,
He alone can console me in my affliction.
He alone can still the bitter anguish of this heart.
So spake Nezahual-Coyotl, in what has been termed the Golden Age of Texcoco, whose historians, arts and poets were in their time renowned among the nations of Anahuac, on the high Mexican Plateau. This person was a philosopher and a poet, but the writings of the period—the picture-writings—were perversely destroyed by Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico after the Conquest—an irremediable loss.
Hear also the Inca prayer to the Creator, as chanted by the priests and nobles of Peru:
Oh Creator: Thou art without equal unto the ends of the earth! Thou who givest life and strength to mankind, saying, let this be a man and let this be a woman. And as thou sayest, so thou givest life, and vouchsafest that man shall live in health and peace, and free from danger. Thou who dwellest in the heights of heaven, in the thunder and in the storm-clouds, hear us. Grant us eternal life and have us in thy keeping.
THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: RUINS OF MITLA, MEXICO.
Vol. I. To face p. 60.
This last is from the Rites and Laws of the Incas.[5] It is but one of many similar prayers, which, as regards sentiment and language, might be taken from the Bible and Church Service.
These prayers to the Unknown God, written by the early people of America, cut off from any contact with the Old World, would seem to show that man, in the reaction from his environment, inevitably develops within him the conception of a supreme deity.
It now remains for us to choose how we shall approach the Spanish American lands. Shall we cross the Spanish Main, and land where Cortes did at Vera Cruz, the city of the True Cross, and so enter Mexico? Or shall we, still crossing the American Mediterranean, land on the Isthmus of Panama and thence, as Pizarro did, voyage along the great Pacific coast to mysterious Peru? Or shall we take steamer to the River Plate, that more prosaic route to the lands of corn and cattle? Or shall we go round the Horn? Perhaps the middle course is best, and, at the isthmus, we will first explore Central America.
Then we may say with the poet Keats:
Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold
… Or like stout Cortes … and all his men
Gazed on the Pacific … silent upon a peak in Darien.
Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see.
CHAPTER III
CENTRAL AMERICA
GUATEMALA, HONDURAS, BRITISH HONDURAS, NICARAGUA, SALVADOR, COSTA RICA, PANAMA
On Michaelmas Day, in the year 1513, a Spanish adventurer, surrounded by his followers—they had sailed from Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo, on an expedition of discovery—found himself on the high ridge of the land called Darien. His eyes, seeking the horizon, fell, not on an endless expanse of mountain and forest, such as here might have been expected to stretch away into the unknown solitudes, but upon the sheen of waters. A smothered exclamation fell from his lips. "El Mar!" ("the Sea!") he cried, and he and his followers remained a space in the silence of astonishment.
The Spaniard was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. It was one of the most dramatic of geographical discoveries. They had but traversed an isthmus, where they had expected a continent—to-day the Isthmus of Panama. They had discovered an ocean; they realized in that moment much that before had been a mystery.
Descending to the shore and wading deep into the waters, Balboa drew his sword, and waving it thereover took possession of that ocean and whatsoever shores it might wash for the King of Spain, naming it the "South Seas," for, from the curvature of the isthmus, he was looking towards the south, having crossed from the north.
Thus was the great Pacific Ocean first beheld by the white man, as far as history records.
We have already seen that Balboa's exploit preceded the Conquest of Mexico. The land of the Aztecs, like that of Peru, was undreamed of, but the discovery of both followed, as did the passage of the Magellan Strait by the explorer whose name it bears, and who first crossed the Pacific, and from its gentle and favouring gales gave it its name.
The discoverer of the isthmus and the great ocean was a hidalgo, and had been Governor of a province, but to escape his creditors in Hispaniola—according to one account—he concealed himself in a barrel on board ship, and so began his voyage. Balboa, pressing into his service a train of Indians, many of whom, it is said, died under the lash in the task, caused the timbers of two vessels to be dragged across the rugged neck of land and launched upon the South Sea, bent upon the discovery