"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
—Shakspeare.
I sprang to my feet with all the eagerness of joy, and was about to rush into the arms of Pio, when he suddenly checked my enthusiasm by extinguishing the light. I stood still and erect, like one petrified into stone. That moment I felt a hand upon my arm, then around my waist, and ere I could collect my thoughts, was distinctly lifted from the ground. But I was carried only a few steps. On touching the floor with my feet, I was planted firmly, and the arms of my companion were tightly drawn around my own so as to prevent me from raising them. The next instant, and the stone upon which we stood suddenly slid from its position, and gradually sank perpendicularly,—we still retaining our position upon it.
Our descent was not rapid, nor did I deem it very secure; for the trap-door trembled under us, and more than once seemed to touch the shaft into which we were descending. A few moments more and we landed securely upon a solid pavement. My companion then disengaged his hold, and stepping off a few paces, pronounced the words "We are here!" in the royal tongue, and immediately a panel slid from the side of the apartment, and a long passage-way, lighted at the further end by a single candle, displayed itself to view. Into that passage we at once entered, and without exchanging a single word, walked rapidly toward the light.
The light stood upon a stone stand about four feet high, at the intersection of these passages. We took the one to the left, and advanced twenty or thirty yards, when Pio halted. On coming up to him, he placed his mouth close to the wall, and exclaimed as before. "We are here." A huge block of granite swung inward, and we entered a small but well-lighted apartment, around which were hanging several costly and magnificent suits of Palenquin costume.
Hastily seizing two of them, Pio commenced arraying himself in one, and requested me by a gesture to don the other. With a little assistance, I soon found myself decked from head to foot in a complete suit of regal robes—panache, sash, and sandals inclusive.
When all was completed, Pio, for the first time, addressed me as follows: "Young stranger, whoever you may be, or to whatever nation you may belong, matters but little to me. The attendant guardian spirit of our race and country has conducted you hither, in the most mysterious manner, and now commands me to have you instructed in the most sacred lore of the Aztecs. Your long residence in this palace has fully convinced you of the danger to which we are both exposed; I in revealing and you in acquiring the key to the interpretation of the historical records of my country. I need not assure you that our lives are both forfeited, should the slightest suspicion be aroused in the breasts of the Princess or the nobility.
"You are now dressed in the appropriate costume of a student of our literature, and must attend me nightly at the gathering of the Queen's kindred to be instructed in the art. Express no surprise at anything you see or hear; keep your face concealed as much as possible, fear nothing, and follow me."
At a preconcerted signal given by Pio, a door flew open and we entered the vestibule of a large and brilliantly illuminated chamber.
As soon as we passed the entrance I saw before me not less than two hundred young persons of both sexes, habited in the peculiar garb of students, like our own. We advanced slowly and noiselessly, until we reached two vacant places, prepared evidently beforehand for us. Our entrance was not noticed by the classes, nor by those whom I afterwards recognized as teachers. All seemed intent upon the problem before them, and evinced no curiosity to observe the new comers. My own curiosity at this moment was intense, and had it not been for the prudent cautions constantly given me by Pio, by touching my robes or my feet, an exposure most probably would have occurred the first night of my initiation, and the narrative of these adventures never been written.
My presence of mind, however, soon came to my assistance, and before the evening was over, I had, by shrewdly noticing the conduct of others, shaped my own into perfect conformity with theirs, and rendered detection next to impossible.
It now becomes necessary to digress a moment from the thread of my story, and give an accurate description of the persons I beheld around me, the chamber in which we were gathered, and the peculiar mode of instruction pursued by the sages.
The scholars were mostly young men and women, averaging in age about twenty years. They all wore the emblem of royalty, which I at once recognized in the panache of Quezale plumes that graced their heads. They stood in semi-circular rows, the platform rising as they receded from the staging in front, like seats in an amphitheatre. Upon the stage were seated five individuals—two of the male, and three of the female sex. An old man was standing up, near the edge of the stage, holding in his hands two very cunningly-constructed instruments. At the back of the stage, a very large, smooth tablet of black marble was inserted in the wall, and a royal personage stood near it, upon one side, with a common piece of chalk in his right hand, and a cotton napkin in the left. This reminded me but too truthfully of the fourth book of Euclid and Nassau Hall; and I was again reminded of the great mathematician before the assembly broke up, and of his reply to that King of Sicily, who inquired if there were no easy way of acquiring mathematics. "None, your Highness," replied the philosopher; "there is no royal road to learning." Labor, I soon found, was the only price, even amongst the Aztecs, at which knowledge could be bought. Each student was furnished with the same species of instruments which the old man before-mentioned held in his hands.
The one held in the left hand resembled a white porcelain slate, only being much larger than those in common use. It was nearly twenty inches square, and was divided by mathematical lines into thirty-six compartments. It was covered over with a thin crystal, resembling glass, which is found in great quantities in the neighboring mountains, and is perfectly transparent. The crystal was raised about the one eighth of an inch from the surface of the slate, and allowed a very fine species of black sand to move at will between them. The instrument carried in the right hand resembled the bow of a common violin, more than anything else. The outer edge was constructed of a beautiful yellow wood, polished, and bent into the arc of a quarter circle; whilst a mass of small cords, made of the native hemp, united the two ends.
The method of using the bow was this: The slate was shaken violently once or twice, so as to distribute the black sand equally over the white surface, and then the bow was drawn perpendicularly down the edge of the slate, very rapidly, so as to produce a quick whistling sound. The effect produced upon the grains of sand was truly wonderful to the uninitiated in the laws of acoustics. They arranged themselves into peculiar figures, sometimes in the form of a semicircle, sometimes into that of a spiral, sometimes into a perfect circle, or a cone, or a rhomboid, or an oval, dependent entirely upon two things: first, the place where the slate was held by the left hand; and second, the point where the bow was drawn across the edge. As the slate was subdivided into thirty-six compartments, by either one of which it could be held, and as there was a corresponding point, across which the bow could be drawn, there were seventy-two primitive sounds that might be produced by means of this simple contrivance. Each of these sounds inherently and necessarily produced a different figure upon the slate, and there were consequently just seventy-two initial letters in the Aztec alphabet.
The mode of instruction was extremely simple. A word was pronounced by the aged teacher at the front of the stage, written upon his slate, exhibited to the scholar at the black tablet, and by him copied upon it. The whole class then drew down their bows, so as to produce the proper sound, and the word itself, or its initial letter, was immediately formed upon the slate.
After the seventy-two primitive letters or sounds had been learned, the next step was the art of combining them, so as not only to produce single words, but very often whole sentences. Thus the first hieroglyphic carved upon the tablet, on the back wall of the altar, in Casa No. 3 (forming the frontispiece of the second volume of Stephens's Travels in Central America), expresses, within itself, the name, date of birth, place of nativity, and parentage, of Xixencotl, the first king of the twenty-third dynasty of the Aztecs.
The hieroglyphics of the Aztecs are all of them both symbolical and phonetic. Hence, in almost every one we observe, first, the primitive sound or initial letter, and its various combinations; and, secondly, some symbolic drawing, as a human face, for instance, or an eagle's bill, or a fish, denoting some peculiar characteristic of the person or thing delineated.
But to return to the Hall of Students. The men and women on the stage were placed there as critics upon the pronunciation of each articulate sound. They were selected from the wisest men and best elocutionists in the kingdom, and never failed to detect the slightest error in the pronunciation of the tutor.
The royal tongue of the Aztecs is the only one now in existence that is based upon natural philosophy and the laws of sound. It appeals both to the eye and ear of the speaker, and thus the nicest shades of thought may be clearly expressed. There is no such thing as stilted language amongst them, and logomachy is unknown.
And here I may be permitted to observe that a wider field for research and discovery lies open in the domain of sound than in any other region of science. The laws of harmony, even, are but imperfectly understood, and the most accomplished musicians are mere tyros in the great science of acoustics. There is every reason to believe that there is an intimate but yet undiscovered link between number, light, and sound whose solution will astonish and enlighten the generations that are to succeed our own. When God spake the worlds into being, the globular form they assumed was not accidental, nor arbitrary, but depended essentially upon the tone of the great Architect, and the medium in which it resounded.
Let the natural philosophers of the rising generation direct their especial attention toward the fields I have indicated, and the rewards awaiting their investigations will confer upon them immortality of fame.
There is a reason why the musical scale should not mount in whole tones up to the octave; why the mind grasps decimals easier than vulgar fractions, and why, by the laws of light, the blood-red tint should be heavier than the violet. Let Nature, in these departments, be studied with the same care that Cuvier explored the organization of insects, that Liebig deduced the property of acids, and that Leverrier computed the orbit of that unseen world which his genius has half created, and all the wonderful and beautiful secrets now on the eve of bursting into being from the dark domain of sound, color, and shape, will at once march forth into view, and take their destined places in the ranks of human knowledge.
Then the science of computation will be intuitive, as it was in the mind of Zerah Colburn; the art of music creative, as in the plastic voices of Jehovah; and the great principles of light and shape and color divine, as in the genius of Swedenborg and the imagination of Milton.
I have now completed the outline of the sketch, which in the foregoing pages I proposed to lay before the world.
The peculiar circumstances which led me to explore the remains of the aboriginal Americans, the adventures attending me in carrying out that design, the mode of my introduction into the Living City, spoken of by Stephens, and believed in by so many thousands of enlightened men, and above all, the wonderful and almost incredible character of the people I there encountered, together with a rapid review of their language and literature, have been briefly but faithfully presented to the public.
It but remains for me now to present my readers with a few specimens of Aztec literature, translated from the hieroglyphics now mouldering amid the forests of Chiapa; to narrate the history of my escape from the Living City of the aborigines; to bespeak a friendly word for the forthcoming history of one of the earliest, most beautiful, and unfortunate of the Aztec queens, copied verbatim from the annals of her race, and to bid them one and all, for the present, a respectful adieu.
Before copying from the blurred and water-soaked manuscript before me, a single extract from the literary remains of the monumental race amongst whom I have spent three years and a half of my early manhood, it may not be deemed improper to remark that a large work upon this subject is now in course of publication, containing the minutest details of the domestic life, public institutions, language, and laws of that interesting people.
The extracts I present to the reader may be relied upon as exactly correct, since they are taken from the memoranda made upon the spot.
Directly in front of the throne, in the great audience-chamber described in the preceding chapter, and written in the most beautiful hieroglyphic extant, I found the following account of the origin of the land:
The Great Spirit, whose emblem is the sun, held the water-drops out of which the world was made, in the hollow of his hand. He breathed a tone, and they rounded into the great globe, and started forth on the errand of counting up the years.
Nothing existed but water and the great fishes of the sea. One eternity passed. The Great Spirit sent a solid star, round and beautiful, but dead and no longer burning, and plunged it into the depths of the oceans. Then the winds were born, and the rains began to fall. The animals next sprang into existence. They came up from the star-dust like wheat and maize. The round star floated upon the waters, and became the dry land; and the land was high, and its edges steep. It was circular, like a plate, and all connected together.
The marriage of the land and the sea produced man, but his spirit came from the beams of the sun.
Another eternity passed away, and the earth became too full of people. They were all white, because the star fell into the cold seas, and the sun could not darken their complexions.
Then the sea bubbled up in the middle of the land, and the country of the Aztecs floated off to the west. Wherever the star cracked open, there the waters rose up and made the deep sea.
When the east and the west come together again, they will fit like a garment that has been torn.
Then followed a rough outline of the western coasts of Europe and Africa, and directly opposite the coasts of North and South America. The projections of the one exactly fitted the indentations of the other, and gave a semblance of truth and reality to the wild dream of the Aztec philosopher. Let the geographer compare them, and he will be more disposed to wonder than to sneer.
I have not space enough left me to quote any further from the monumental inscriptions, but if the reader be curious upon this subject, I recommend to his attention the publication soon to come out, alluded to above.
Some unusual event certainly had occurred in the city. The great plaza in front of the palace was thronged with a countless multitude of men and women, all clamoring for a sacrifice! a sacrifice!
Whilst wondering what could be the cause of this commotion, I was suddenly summoned before the Princess in the audience-chamber, so often alluded to before.
My surprise was great when, upon presenting myself before her, I beheld, pinioned to a heavy log of mahogany, a young man, evidently of European descent.
The Princess requested me to interpret for her to the stranger, and the following colloquy took place. The conversation was in the French language.
Q. "Who are you, and why do you invade my dominions?"
A. "My name is Armand de L'Oreille. I am a Frenchman by birth. I was sent out by Lamartine, in 1848, as attaché to the expedition of M. de Bourbourg, whose duties were to explore the forests in the neighborhood of Palenque, to collate the language of the Central-American Indians, to copy the inscriptions on the monuments, and, if possible, to reach the Living City mentioned by Waldeck, Dupaix, and the American traveler Stephens."
Q. "But why are you alone? Where is the party to which you belonged?"
A. "Most of them returned to Palenque, after wandering in the wilderness a few days. Five only determined to proceed; of that number I am the only survivor."
Here the interview closed.
The council and the queen were not long in determining the fate of M. de L'Oreille. It was unanimously resolved that he should surrender his life as a forfeit to his temerity.
The next morning, at sunrise, was fixed for his death. He was to be sacrificed upon the altar, on the summit of the great Teocallis—an offering to Quetzalcohuatl, the first great prince of the Aztecs. I at once determined to save the life of the stranger, if I could do so, even at the hazard of my own. But fate ordained it otherwise. I retired earlier than usual, and lay silent and moody, revolving on the best means to accomplish my end.
Midnight at length arrived; I crept stealthily from my bed, and opened the door of my chamber, as lightly as sleep creeps over the eyelids of children. But——
[Here the MS. is so blotted, and saturated with saltwater, as to be illegible for several pages. The next legible sentences are as follows.—Ed.]
Here, for the first time, the woods looked familiar to me. Proceeding a few steps, I fell into the trail leading toward the modern village of Palenque, and, after an hour's walk, I halted in front of the cabilda of the town.
I was followed by a motley crowd to the office of the Alcalde, who did not recognize me, dressed as I was in skins, and half loaded down with rolls of MS., made from the bark of the mulberry. I related to him and M. de Bourbourg my adventures; and though the latter declared he had lost poor Armand and his five companions, yet I am persuaded that neither of them credited a single word of my story.
Not many days after my safe arrival at Palenque, I seized a favorable opportunity to visit the ruins of Casa Grande. I readily found the opening to the subterranean passage heretofore described, and after some troublesome delays at the various landing-places, I finally succeeded in reaching the very spot whence I had ascended on that eventful night, nearly three years before, in company with the Aztec Princess.
After exploring many of the mouldering and half-ruined apartments of this immense palace, I accidentally entered a small room, that at first seemed to have been a place of sacrifice; but, upon closer inspection, I ascertained that, like many of those in the "Living City," it was a chapel dedicated to the memory of some one of the princes of the Aztec race.
In order to interpret the inscriptions with greater facility, I lit six or seven candles, and placed them in the best positions to illuminate the hieroglyphics. Then turning, to take a view of the grand tablet in the middle of the inscription, my astonishment was indescribable, when I beheld the exact features, dress and panache of the Aztec maiden, carved in the everlasting marble before me.
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