A MYSTERIOUS PAST

The Secret of the Ruins

We know that at the bottom of the New World. in the lushness of tropical forests. there are ruins, the enigma of which even the most learned scholars are powerless to resolve: they attest that powerful, educated and artistic peoples lived on this earth; but we know nothing about their past, their history, their language. of their beliefs and morals. They have been extinct for centuries.

Their writing, whose characters remain traced on the slates or engraved in the stone, appears to our eyes as indecipherable signs; the insight of scholars admits defeat in the face of these obscure rebuses.

The first pioneers who entered the virgin forest had to stop as if before a fantastic apparition, when they saw, under a mass of lianas, ferns and giant plants, these imposing and mysterious remains. They have been discovered in the most diverse parts of America in Bolivia and Peru, as well as in Guatemala and Arizona; but the most beautiful are found in Mexico.

For the exploration of the latter, the Carnegie Institution, of Washington, organized a scientific expedition which, following an agreement concluded with the Mexican government, was able to undertake excavations which have been actively carried out for several months. Led by Doctor Sylvanus Morley, the work is expected to last around ten years.

At the same time as this mission, another, headed by Dr. Herbert J. Spinden, professor at Harvard University. continues, in Honduras, research which has already led to the discovery of curious vestiges of a civilization offering strange points of resemblance with that of Egypt, and which is said to be around thirty centuries old.

This is not the first time that this connection has been made between the monuments left by the ancient Egyptians and those found in Central America: here and there, we have discovered the pyramid, the obelisk and the monolith; here and there, we see that the architecture reveals a striking kinship. And then all the stories. legends and hypotheses, about the mysterious Atlantis and its inhabitants, engulfed by a formidable cataclysm, come to mind and demand attention. Among so many proofs invoked by scientists to establish, in prehistoric times, the existence of the continent that disappeared under the waves of the Atlantic, this one is certainly not the least disturbing, nor the least convincing.

This is how the monuments which exist in the valley of Teotihuacan, approximately 45 kilometers from Mexico, and which are among the most important and most curious, all belong to the regular pyramid system: that which we designate under the name “Pyramid of the Sun” is no less than 64 meters high. They are, at the moment, the object of methodical investigations, conducted by the Direccion de Anthropolojia mexicana, whose active and enlightened leader is Mr. Gamio.

We know nothing, or almost nothing, about the Toltec people, who would have been the builders of these monuments; Nor do we know the causes which caused its disappearance and annihilation. It is, moreover, the same with the other primitive peoples of Mexico...

We only have historical details about the Aztecs, who came a long time later, and whose Spanish conquistadors were to ruin the cities and decimate the population with implacable ferocity: because barbarism came from Europe, during the conquest of the New World , destroyed with atrocious savagery, an entire remarkable civilization and artistic marvels, of which nothing remains, only rare vestiges.

So, before the arrival of Fernand Cortez and his companions, people had experienced heroic and sublime adventures, on this land from which their ancestors were brutally dispossessed by the law of the strongest; races became extinct, after centuries of prosperity and greatness, and, of a perhaps sublime epic, of a prodigious odyssey, only fragments of legends, transmitted orally from generations to generations!

All this mysterious and disturbing past, one of our compatriots long settled in Mexico, Mr. Auguste Génin, took pleasure in evoking it, in resurrecting it one could say, in a series of beautiful poems that he published under this title: Legends and Stories of Ancient Mexico. It is a whole story, vanished in the mists of time, that he parades before us, in a series of epic paintings, which would have enchanted Victor Hugo of The Legend of the Centuries.

Mr. Auguste Génin, who published countless studies and historical works on Mexico and its races, did not consider that the prose was worthy of recalling the dark and wonderful past of the country to which he is attached by a kind of tenderness admiring and passionate. The haughty and sonorous verse alone can, in fact, properly celebrate the haughty sadness and the faded splendor of dead things...

Paul MATHIEX