At some time, when the road was at its best, it had been bordered with low walls and deep gutters. Where the growth had broken the walls and in places filled the gutters with an accumulation of débris, the watercourses had cut new channels and here and there the jungles had actually cut completely across the road; but for the greater part it was in good condition. On either hand were still visible the marks of intensive agriculture or horticulture in the shape of fairly preserved terraces, indicating that the population had at one time been so dense as to necessitate the use of every foot of arable soil. Here and there through jungle openings could be seen ruins of what had been stately homes, and nothing save his intense desire to reach the shores of the lake restrained the doctor from halting to investigate these.
“If ever we turn him loose in here,” Wardy muttered to me with a grin, “we’ll never catch him again without a lot of work; so if he says anything we must do all we can to keep him moving. Eh?”
“He’ll not stop until he reaches those temples, or whatever they are,” I said. “But after that”
“The biggest job will be to get him to leave. We may have to run a blockade and starve him into submission,” Wardy finished hopefully.
“Not with all that stuff growing wild around here,” I remarked, pointing to a grove of wild banana plants.
But as for the doctor, he rode silently ahead with his nose turning from side to side, birdlike in quickness, for all the world like some old rook seeking a nesting place or something to steal. As we approached the shores of the lake we discovered, to our gratification, that the drive widened and at the edge of the water it formed an esplanade so broad that not even the jungle had been able to mar it. Moreover, there were rows of fine, solid buildings facing the lake as if keeping watch over the island in the center. So well constructed were these that most of them appeared intact. Many of them had been two storied, and several had imposing porticos upheld by monolithic pillars. The roofs of stone were almost as perfect as on the day they had been built, save that nearly all were green with moss, and on some, where by chance vagrant seeds had lodged, stunted trees had found growth as if bent on covering man’s handiwork. We halted and looked about us.
“We had better seek a house that is best preserved,” said Ixtual, breaking the silence that had fallen upon all of us.
“Sounds sensible,” said Wardy, and we dismounted and began our explorations.
“That one over there seems the largest,” said Benny, pointing to one near by, and we moved toward it.
The steps leading up to its porch were hollowed in the center, as if worn by generations of feet, and one of the big stone pillars was cracked but still strongly supporting its burden of weight. The doctor was in advance and would have boldly entered had not Benny called to him:
“Is it not better to be careful lest there be poisonous serpents within?”
And the doctor hesitated with ridiculous quickness, being forever in terror of anything that crawled. But Benny’s fears proved groundless, for in that house we found nothing—positively nothing—alive. A strange feature this, when I come to think of it; for we entered other houses that were alive with venomous serpents, centipedes, and tarantulas. I observed that in these latter cases the walls of the houses, or the roofs, had given way and that the first marks of ruin might have been the signal for the advance of living jungle and desert pests. But the house we entered was still immune.
We stood in a large living room with stone window seats on which were fragments of rubbish that the doctor believed had at some time been cushions, although how he arrived at that conclusion I can not say. To me they were mere heaps of dirt and mold where rain had beaten through in wet seasons. A table of inlaid stone, one of a very few we ever found, and indicating that probably the customary household furniture was of wood, stood in the center of the room. Several carved stone projections, the ends of which were hook-shaped, suggested that at some time tapestries had been hung thereon as wall coverings. Bronze fixtures in the wall evidenced some method of holding lights. Upon a stone shelf were excellent examples of Maya ceramics. Over each of which the doctor rhapsodized. The floor was of inlaid stones of diverse colors formed into a pattern which seemed curiously prevalent in all the Maya decorative designs and was still, after all those ages, intact.