Mexico (23 page)
Since my father's death scholars have concluded that the Indians who made the right choice reached the high valley of Toledo about twenty thousand years ago, but, as I said before, some argue it might have been as much as forty thousand years ago. At any rate, from a level thirty feet below the bottom of our pyramid, archaeologists have excavated charcoal remains that radium analysis puts at not less than five thousand years old, while along the edges of the prehistoric lake that once filled the entire valley others have dug up the skeletons of elephants killed by spears at least fifteen thousand years ago.
I have spent many idle hours, on plane trips or when my eyes were too tired to read, trying to visualize these ancient Indians of the primitive period, and at times they have seemed very real to me. Fifteen thousand years before the birth of Christ they had developed some kind of civilization in the high valley. They chipped out rude spear points for hunting and carved dishes for serving food. We know little about them, but they must have feared the gods, worshiped the sun, and wondered about the accidents of birth and death. From the day of my first talks on this subject with my father I never forgot that where I lived at the Mineral, men had been living for thousands of years, and you could not say that of Richmond, Virginia or Princeton.
Therefore, when in the early years of the seventh century a certain tribe of Indians gained control of the high valley, its members, some of whom we now know by name, seemed to me almost like close relatives, and when the story is told that sometime around the year 600 one of these men became leader of the tribe and began building the great pyramid, he becomes so real that he fairly shouts at me from the distant past, and the fact that the oral traditions of Toledo indicate that he was one of my ancestors gives me great pleasure.
In the year 600 the high valley looked pretty much as it does today. The last volcano had erupted some four thousand years earlier; the fantastically old lake had finally dried up; and the mountains stood exactly as they do today. In the intervening years the great piles of rock have lost possibly an inch and a half in height, due to wind erosion, but probably no more.
Far to the north, still living in caves along jungle rivers, hid the uncivilized tribes who were eventually to develop into the Altomecs and the Aztecs, but in these years they were of no consequence. To the south, living in splendid palaces decorated with silver, gold and jade, were the Mayas, whose gaudily dressed messengers sometimes reached the high valley to arrange treaties of commerce. In the valley itself my ancestors were well established, a tribe of slim, fairly tall, dark-skinned Indians who had no real name but who were known throughout central Mexico simply as the Builders, for they had the capacity to construct finer edifices than any other peoples in the area. They knew how to quarry huge blocks of rock and transport them for miles, and they could make bricks with which to build their lesser structures.
Shortly after the year 600 a leader with a new kind of vision gained control of the tribe. He was Ixmiq, and today in Toledo a statue and a yearly festival honor his name. He had a tightly controlled personality that was ideal for exerting leadership, so for nearly fifty years he ruled unchallenged, and this gave him time to accomplish many important projects.
Waiting for an auspicious day on the calendar, he announced to his council, "I have in mind to erect a holy place for our gods ten or twenty times larger than any we have attempted before." Before his advisers could protest he added, "And we shall build it not here in the city but in a special area that shall hereafter be reserved for holy rites."
He forthwith led his elders from the rude palace, which then occupied the site of today's cathedral, and took them in a northerly direction some distance from the city to where the pyramid now stands. Using piles of stones, he directed his men to lay out what seemed to them a gigantic square, but which -was only about half the size of the pyramid as we now know it. His councilors protested that such a building was impossible to build, but Ixmiq insisted on its construction.
His workmen spent two years scraping away the loose earth until they reached firm earth or solid rock. He then divided the tribe into several units, which were assigned particular duties, and appointed a captain for each. Some went to live at the quarries and remained there for thirty years, passing their entire lives chipping rock. Others were the transport teams, who, with constantly increasing skill, mastered the trick of moving twenty
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and thirty-ton rocks into position. Most of the men worked at the pyramid itself, inching the great blocks into position and then filling in the central portion of the structure with basketfuls of rubble, so that year by year the structure rose more impressively, and always with a flat top that grew smaller as the pyramid grew in height. These were years of peace in the high valley, nearly six centuries going by without an arrow being shot against an enemy, so that it was not imprudent for Ixmiq to assign his people to widely scattered areas and to a task that utilized the efforts of the entire community.
When the huge pile had reached the intended height, it was leveled off and its spacious flat top was laid in huge blocks that took six years to work into place. Then a beautiful wooden altar was constructed so that when a priest stood at it he faced east. Four gods shared the altar and their statues lined it, with their faces turned to the west. The most important was the god of rain, for he was responsible for the flowers and the grain. Next came the sun god, the goddess of earth and a mysterious god who represented flowers, poetry, music, statesmanship and the family, and was carved in the form of a serpent with a bird's head and scales of flowers.
The pyramid of Ixmiq was a monument to peace and in the fortieth year, when it neared completion, the ceremonies that consecrated it were testimonials to peace and to one of the gentlest societies that ever existed in Mexico, or indeed, anywhere else on the American continents. The dedication ceremonies, insofar as we can reconstruct them from old carvings, consisted of prayers, dancing, the offering of hundreds of thousands of flowers, and a gigantic feast that lasted for three days. It is notable that for the first four hundred and fifty years of this pyramid's existence not a single human life was sacrificed on its altar, or lost in any other way, except for the occasional case later on when some drunken priest or reveler accidentally tumbled from its height and broke his neck.
It was a pyramid of joy and beauty, a worthy monument to the benign gods and to the farsighted man who had built it. In City-of-the-Pyramid, as the area came to be called, irrigation projects brought water from the hills down to the flat land, where flowers and vegetables were grown in abundance. Honey was collected from bees kept among the flowers, and turkeys were raised both in enclosures and in large guarded fields. Fish were available in the rivers and were kept in ponds.
The Builders dressed well in cloth made of cotton, hemp and feathers, while leaders like Ixmiq ornamented themselves with gold and silver carved with religious symbolism, which workmen also applied to some of the finest pottery ever made in the Americas. Many little statues have come down to us, representing one or another of the four major deities, and each seems to be a god whom a family could have cherished. When I was a boy we had in our home a clay figure of the earth goddess, and she was a delightful fat little woman smiling and making the land fruitful with her blessing. Whenever we looked at her we felt good, and I can think of no primitive gods that were gentler than those of Toledo. I know of few civilizations that came so close to providing an ideal life for their people.
Carved hieroglyphics have been recovered outlining Ixmiq's code of laws, and although it is likely that we are misreading some of them, it is not conceivable that we have misunderstood them all. In Toledo, in the year 650, a woman whose husband had died leaving her with children not yet old enough to work was given a share of the produce of land owned by families with grown sons. On the other hand, a woman who committed adultery once was publicly shamed; on the second offense she was killed. It was conspicuous in the law of Ixmiq that priests had nothing to do with the execution of criminals; this was carried out by civil officials. In fact, in the entire history of these six centuries there is no record of priests being other than the spiritual heads of the community. They lived intimately with the gods and advised the populace of decisions made in heaven.
We have one old stone, dug out of the pyramid in the 1950s, which shows a dignified leader who might have been Ixmiq. He is depicted as a stocky man with
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long, straight nose, high cheekbones, Oriental eyes and powerful arms. He wore a towering headdress, probably ornamented in gold and silver, that must have stood about two feet high and that had feathers and flowers streaming from it in profusion. He carried a scepter topped by an animal's head, a ceremonial robe of cotton and feathers, and a bunch of flowers. He was naked to the waist, but wore a kind of sarong and sandals.
Ixmiq certainly was in touch with the Mayas to the far south and with the nondescript tribes that flourished to the southeast around what is now Mexico City, for he had a zoo in which he kept animals from distant areas and in it were birds from the seacoast areas controlled by the Mayas. But he seems to have been ignorant of the dreadful Altomec and Aztec tribes that were gathering strength in their caves to the north.
It is impossible to guess how large City-of-the-Pyramid was in those early days, but my father once estimated that it would have required no fewer than fifteen hundred men to work constantly for forty years to build the first pyramid, and he guessed that each man would have to be served by three others who quarried and transported the building blocks. This would mean about six thousand men, or a total population of somewhere around twenty thousand people. We know from excavations undertaken at the time of the building of the cathedral and the aqueduct that these people, whatever their number, lived in a sprawling Indian city built of mud and wood and located around the plaza that now serves as the center of modern Toledo.
I stress these matters because throughout my adult life I have been irritated by people who glibly suppose that Spaniards brought civilization to Mexican people who had previously been barbarians, when this was clearly not the case.
In the year 600 the civilizations of Spain and Mexico were roughly comparable, except for the fact that the former had profited from the invention of the wheel, the development of the alphabet and the knowledge of how to smelt hard metals. In any event I choose to measure advances in civilization by noting such things as soundness in the organization of the state, the humaneness of the religion, the care given to the indigent, the protection of trade, the advances in sciences such as astronomy, and the cultivation of music, dancing, poetry and other arts. In these vital respects my ancestors in City-of-the
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Pyramid were just about even with my ancestors in Spain and infinitely far ahead of all who shivered in caves in what would become Virginia.
In the matter of astronomy, Ixmiq was incredible. He calculated the orbits of the planets and based his century on the movements of Venus, whose behavior he had calculated within an error of only a few days. Unaided, so far as we know, by a single hint from Europe or Asia, Ixmiq solved most of the major problems of keeping time and had even discovered that in the year of 365 days that he had devised, even if he added four days every thirteen years, at the end of his fifty-two-year cycle he would still be one day short of the world's exact movement, so for that time he added an extra day. It is possible that he may have borrowed his major concepts from the Mayas, but everything he took he perfected.
I have mentioned the portrait believed to be that of Ixmiq; there is another--but some argue that it is not Ixmiq--which shows a man as I like to think he must have been. He is seated in the center of a huge stone carving and about him are flutes, trumpets, drums made of snakeskin, and shell horns; pitch pine from the forest serves as a torch. The ground seems to be covered with woven mats and ambassadors are waiting to talk with him.
Ixmiq had fifteen or twenty wives and from one of these sprang the line that ruled City-of-the-Pyramid for nearly half a millennium. Around the year 900 one of these descendants known as Nopiltzin inherited the kingdom, which was now somewhat changed from the days of Ixmiq. For one thing, the pyramid had been rebuilt twice in the interim and was now approaching its present size. The enlargements had been accomplished by the simple process of resurfacing the entire structure with two or three layers of new rocks quarried from the original site. Just when these resurfacings took place we do not know, but each probably occupied the community for fifteen or twenty years, for with any enlargement the number of blocks required to cover the structure increased considerably. Thus in 900, when Nopiltzin took command, each side of the huge edifice was five hundred feet long with a height of about two hundred feet, producing an enormous flat top for the various wooden temples that now crowded the platform.
The effectiveness of the pyramid as a religious edifice had also been enhanced by a simple improvement. Ixmiq's original structure had resembled an Egyptian pyramid, with straight, unbroken edges running from the ground to the platform above, but in subsequent rebuildings four huge setbacks had been constructed, yielding four spacious terraces on which religious celebrations could be held. Furthermore, to provide a series of terraces, the angle of incline between the various terraces varied sharply, with the result that a worshiper standing at the base of the pyramid and looking upward could see only so far as the edge of the first terrace; the great temples at the top were no longer visible and the pyramid seemed to soar into the clouds.