962 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
ments, half of which, as in the Governor’s House, are dark, except as they 
are lighted from the doorways connecting with the rooms in front. In the 
fifth structure, not described, there are six pairs of similar apartments. In 
the building on the right there are six rooms connecting with each other, 
one of which, the front room, is shown in Fig. 54. This number of con- 
necting rooms is so unusual in Yueatan architecture as to attract attention. 
Each of the four edifices would accommodate from six hundred to one 
thousand persons, after the fashion of Village Indians. 
In this view of the interior of a room in the House of the Nuns, Fig. 54, 
which was taken from Stephens’ work, is shown the form of the triangular 
ceiling common in all the edifices in Yucatan and Chiapas. It is a triangu- 
lar arch above the line of the exterior cornice, without a keystone, and 
with the faces of the stones beveled, and forming a perfect vault over each 
apartment. But it has this peculiarity, that a space a foot or more wide in 
the center is carried up vertically about two feet, and covered with a cap 
of stone, so that the side walls which form the vaulted ceiling do not come 
together so as to rest against each other. The mechanical principle is the 
same as in the New Mexican arch, but is here applied in a more extended 
and more difficult scale. It is the most remakable feature in this architecture, 
mechanically considered. When we come to know that this vaulted ceiling 
was constructed over a core of solid masonry within the chamber, after- 
wards removed—which was the fact—it will be seen that these Indian masons 
and architects were still feeling their way experimentally to a scientific 
knowledge of the art of arts. A projecting cornice or median entablature 
is seen above the doorway on the exterior face of the wall, which balances 
somewhat the interior inward projection of the ceiling as it rises, and, since 
the wall is carried up flush with the cornice, the down-weight of the super- 
incumbent mass sustained the masonry. The room shown is thirty-three 
feet long, thirteen wide, and twenty-three feet high to the cap-stone, and 
the room communicating with it is of the same width, and nine feet long. 
The apartments back of these are of corresponding size.’ . There were orig- 
inally lintels of hard sapote wood over the doorways, upon the decay of 
which a portion of the masonry has fallen. Those over the doorways through 
‘Incidents of Travel, ete., i, 308. 
