ARCHIVES OF MAN I. 



263 



casa real, and when we unlocked the door we had 

 thh'ty or forty persons to enter with us. The books 

 and archives of the municipality were in the back 

 room, and among them was one large volume which 

 had an ancient and venerable appearance, being bound 

 m parchment, tattered, and worm-eaten, and having a 

 flap to close hke that of a pocket-book. Unhappily, 

 it was written in the Maya language, and perfectly 

 unintelligible. The dates, however, showed that these 

 venerable pages were a record of events which had 

 taken place within a very few years after the entry 

 of the Spaniards into the country ; and as I pored 

 over them, I was strongly impressed with the belief 

 that directly, or in some incidental expressions, they 

 contained matter which might throw some light 

 upon the subject of my investigations. 



Being Sunday, a crowd of curious and lazy look- 

 ers-on surrounded the table, but they could not dis- 

 tract my attention. I found that, though all could 

 speak the Maya, none could read it. Nevertheless, 

 I continued to turn over the pages. On the 157th 

 page, in a document which bore the date of 1557, 

 I saw the word Vxmal. Here I stopped, and called 

 upon the by-standers. The schoolmaster was the 

 only one who could even attempt to give me any 

 assistance, but he was not familiar with the Maya 

 as a written tongue, and said that this, having been 

 written nearly three hundred years before, differed 

 somewhat from that of the present day, and was 

 more difficult to comprehend. Other places were 



