HIDDEN IN JUNGLE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10683, 1 February 1913, Page 1

HIDDEN IN JUNGLE.

The Garden of 33&ea of tie Western Ooatinoat. Writing from Los Amates,. Guatemala, Central America, Mr F. G. Carpenter, the well-known American journalist, who is engaged in writing up the Central American republics for an American newspaper syndicate, relates the story of the discovery of tho ruins of an ancient city which is said to have existed over 1000 years ago. He writes:— HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF QUIRIGUA? Seven hundred years before Columbus discovered America, when our ancestors of Northern iliurope were living in .huts, eating with their- fingers and sleeping 011 straw, it was the most civilised place in the "Western Hemisphere. it had its pyramids and its palaces, its temples and its hovels. It had men who understood fine masonry and artists who did wonderful carving. It was the cajjital of a great population, which tilled the valley of which I am writing—a valley which in its fertility is equal to that of the Nile, the Ganges, tho Amazon or the Congo. _ To-day, this valley is covered with jungle. Palm trees of a hundred varieties wave their fanlike leaves over it, and lianas bind the great trees together. _ Mixed with the palms are mahoganies and other hardwoods, so that the vegetation is almost impenetrable. The soil and climate are such that the clearing of to-day becomes a forest within a few years, and plants will shoot up, from a dozen to twenty feet in the course of six months. DIGGING IN THE RUINS. At the same time the. decay of vegetation 13 rapid." Cut it down and it rots so quickly that within a few nionths the smaller trees have disappeared, and by tho aid of the vast armies of ants the larger ones last but a few years. For this reason all of the woodwork of that ancient civilisation has long since passed away. The stonework remains, and within the last thirty or forty months American archrsologists have been digging it out of the junglo and trying to discover

the character of tho people who lived here a thousand and more year;; ago. But first let 111 c give you tho location. I doubt whether many of you have ever heard of the Motagua River and of this groat Garden of Eden known as the Motagua Valley. It was well fitted for the home of a great people. If you remember your history you will find that the first'civilisations have sprung up in valleys. The soil there is rich and the river makes it easy to cany the products from one place to another. The fight for food is not hardj and the people have leisure to cultivate the gentler arts. Other peoples come to buy. Commerce iollows, and in time civilisation grows. So the civilisation of Egypt sprang up m the vall.ey of the Nile; so that of Babylon and Nineveh in tho delta of the Euphrates, and so that of old India along the banks of the Ganges. " VALLEY 7IVE MILES WIDE. It was somewhat the same in Central America. The continent here consists ot a backbone ol mountains, with a narrow strip of lowlands along the coast. The Motagua River flows out of the mountains 111 Guatpmala, and it has a valley about five miles wide running from its backbone to the sea. The mountains are so situated that they catch the water-laden winds of the Caribbean and give it a heavy rainfail. At tho same time they shelter it trom the winds and make it a tiepical paradise. This paradise was tho Garden of Eden of this nation a thousand years ago. Its people were the Mayans. They conquered the jungle and lived there no one knows how long, until in time they were conquered by the wilder tribes and the junglo again came into its own. - And it is only now, when a railroad has been cut through to get to the highlands and when the American fruit men have begun to cut down the trees and make their banana plantations, that ajiy idea of the extent of that old civilisation has come to be known. In building the railroad the grades cut through a circular Indian mound as high as a four-storey house, and lor forty miles along the hills on one side of this valley wero found graves with walls made of smooth, round stones, brought from the creeks and the rivers. On the other side of the Motagua mounds of greater height were discovered, and in them pieces of pottery, whistles of clay, and stone utensils of various kinds. There were also pieces of jade and obsidian. It is,now known that the ruins are scattered over an area of about 300.000 acres, and that they include not only ■these grave mounds but mighty monuments and the remains of a great city. CITT OF QUIBIQUA. Our first knowledge of this city came about seventy years ago, when the Stephens expedition went- through Central America, and a man named Catherwood saw> some of the ruins. We learned more about it in 1883, when Alfred P. Maudsley made his way through this region and photographed some of tho monuments. The real -work of excavation, however, was begun just. about two years ago, when the St Louis Society of the Archaeological Institute decided to do some work in Guatemala, and at the instance of Victor M. Cutter, - manager of tho ' Guatemala 'division of the United Fruit Company, came to Quirigua and began their work here. The United Fruit Company has aided them in their work, granting them 75 acres of land, which contained the most important parts of the ruined citj' and forming what is to be known as Quirigua Park. It is in that tract that the excavations are now going on. They are under the charge of Dr Edgar L. Hewett and Professor Sylvanus G. Morley, who have gangs of natives ax work. They are now uncovering what was once the great temple city of the Mayan, and they have already cleared away the jungle over a- great part ot the tract.

Before I describe the city itself, let mo tell you something about the mighty monuments. There are thirteen of them which have been already uncovered, although some are still sunker deep in the -earth. These are gignnti monoliths, of sandstone, solid block, from 20ft to 30ft high. These great figures stand right in tb jungle. One, for instance, is sup posed to be 36ft in length. It -rise; 20ft above the ground, and it is saic' to extend at least 12ft below it. T like the Tower of Pisa, but it wa r probably vertical when it was erected. Another monument is twenty-tou: feet in height and four feet in dia- ' meter; and a third was thirty-three feet in circumference. All of these monuments are covered with carvings, and the archaeologists have translated some of the writings. They believe them to have been made about the Vear 500 A.D. HARD TO FIND MEANING. It is difficult to reconstruct a civilisation when one has nothing but stones to tell the story. So far the archaeologists have not got much beyond the translation of the dates, and they are not absolutely sure of them. They believe the monuments to be largely religious, and that the city of Quirigua was a temple city and the place of worship of many people. I can only give you the note which I have made of the monuments as they stood before me. What they mean you , must figure out for yourself. Here, for instance, is a great stone column which rises eiant feet out of the earth and extends below the surface. It is about t-eii feet wide, and the whole is covered with carving. On one side is a woman's figure. I take my tape measure and find that the face is about a foot thick. It is evidently that of a queen, for the head has a crown, and in the ears are plugs, which remind me of the womer. of Burma, who wear great plugs in their ears. The lady who sat as a model'for this engraving may have been a Mayan princess, and she was' probably vain. Many ear plugs made of jade have been found among the ruins. This monument is as big as the caboose of a freight train. Farther on is the leaning monument of which I have spoken. It is as high as a two-storey house, and has a gigantic head carved out near the top. The face is of wonderful workmanship, and it seems as if the thing might talk. TTia eyes are fat and bulgy, the forehead is low, and the beard, which hides the chin, is like that which one sees on the statues of the Egyptian kings. The great ears on each side of the face are half hidden by plugs of jade. Stranger than all these, however, is the monument which has been recently exhumed. It is a great stone upon which, in alto-relievo, is carved a face which bears the happy expression so often seen in the cartoons of Theodore Roosevelt. The open mouth shows great teeth and a joyful grin is seen at the corners. EIGHT ACKTSS CLEARED. I So much for the monuments about Quirigua. Now let us look at the main part of the city. "Workmen have already cleared a space of six or eight acres which is filled with great mounds, ; under which lie some mighty temples cf the past. The mounds are twenty or thirty feet high, and you can see the stones of temples showing. The stones I first saw wore a part o f i a frieze, and Mr Morley showed nu I

that the wall of tho temple was nine feet thick, and that the whole of the outside is covered with carving. One door has been excavated and tho slabs ovc Ihis are seven feet long. I saw one piece of sandstone which had a hole cut through it, and it seemed to me as if it might have been the top of a letter-box. From this temple t wont to others, dimbing up the steps until I could look down on the great court in which the mounds of temples lay. The whole made me think of the stadium at Athens. The city seems to have been laid with a grand plassii or court, with a smaller court adjoining for the temple or main buildings. The main buildings surround a court. They had terraced walls from thirty to sixty feet high, and some of them are rooms witli walls of square stones and doorways arched with flat stones. * To the north of the plaza is a pyramid, which is 150 feet square at the base and forty feet high. Near this pyramid is a round, carved stono so big that it would take forty horses to haul if it was put upon a waggon. This stone is covered with carvings, and among them is that of a woman, elaborately dressed. Nearby lies another great stone, which looks like the head of a tiger, and all about are blocks of carved stone. LITTLE KNOWN OF THE OLD PEOPLE. And now in closing let me say a word about_ the people who probably built this city and made these carvings. They are practically unknown, although the work of archaeologists may in time result in further knowledge. There are evidences on the monuments of skulls and crossbones, showing that they had the same symbol of life and death that we have and some of the carvings are evidences of the dates I have given. Dr Howctt believes that their civilisation was largely religious, and that the government was a theocratic republic. He thinks that they lived in houses somewhat similar to the bamboo lmts of the tropics, and that these great temples, monuments and pyramids were put up only as a means of worshiping their gods. Some archaeologists think that the faces 011 the monuments were those of the queens, kings or priestesses.