We found at Paalmul a perfectly round building, 31 feet 8 inches high, but bigger than that measurement indicates, for it is roughly cone shaped and has a considerable diameter at the bottom. There are two stairways and four different walls or belts of masonry, looking not unlike four turrets of a battleship, placed one above another, the smallest at the top. The only room we could find was a small one in the next to the highest turned. An altar at the back of this room had been broken, exposing crevices that ran down several feet.

Cold air emerged from these perpendicular cracks, suggesting the possibility of hidden chambers, such as those E. H. Thompson found in the pyramidal structure at Chichen Itza, called the Grave of the High Pries.

In other words, this building may be a tomb. Or it may have been associated with worship of Kukulcan. God of the Air. There is one more possibility which suggests itself with much force that this peculiar edifice, like the only other round building now known to be standing in the entire Maya area the so-called Caracol at Chichen Itza was an astronomical observatory. Most of the 30 per cent of the Maya hieroglyphs that have been translated relate to the calendar and astronomy of the ancients or to methods of counting. We realize how advanced was the science of these first Americans when we consider the fact in an old Maya book, the Dresden Codex, are computations involving nearly twelve and a half million days, or about 34.000 years.

Four miles south of Paalmul, at Chakalal, we found a temple, on whose interior walls were painted red hands and the jaguar and the feathered serpent.

Mayas Used Much Color

The Mayas, like the Greeks, made much use of color. Sometimes a whole building would be painted one tint. Mural paintings are not uncommon, and from them alone has been learned much of what we know about the ancients. The red hand, a very common symbol, has been something of a puzzle. The suggestion has been made that it signifies strength, power, and mastery, and that it is the sign of some secret brotherhood.

There is reason to believe that some of the impressions of this sign were put in Maya buildings after the conquest: in short that here is a tangible piece of the old ritual remembered by degenerate descendants of great ancestors. On Cozumel Island our expedition found examples of the red hand so conventionalized by the artist that the five fingers looked like five petals of a flower or the five flames of a lamp.

Sometimes the impression was made by placing the human hand against a surface and painting around it and between the fingers. In other cases the red paint was daubed over the hand of the artist and that slapped against a wall.

Jaguars were favorite subjects of Maya artists, and the Rain Gods of the Four Quarters were given the forms of jaguars. The gods of the Mayas were many and included planets and forces of nature, as well as animals endowed with human or superhuman intelligence. In addition there seems to have been a belief in a formless Supreme Being.

Of the gods commonly portrayed in painting and sculpture the jaguar was second in importance only to the plumed serpent, Kukulcan. This serpent of ours has no plume, but he does have a bird's foot with distended claws at the extremity of a sort of dragon's leg attached to his body. This foot is held angrily below his open jaws. These would not be recognizable as a snake's jaws by a person unfamiliar with Maya art, which advanced over a course of conventionalization that took it to the pole opposite that of such realistic portrayal as is now all the rage in the literature of the United States.

All the buildings we found were of religious significance. This is true of the mysterious round building at Paalmul even if that was an observatory, for in that case it was an observatory manned by priests. It is difficult to name another race in which the religious emotion so dominated the high artistic expression of a whole people or worked to produce so ardent a search for the secrets of the universe.