American Cities and RuinsAge-adapted version

Five years ago, I set out to search for the marvelous ruins of America. I wanted to see everything with my own eyes. I wanted to measure, draw, and let the light itself bear witness—so I always carried my camera with me.

I had read a lot, but felt that many travelers had seen too little. Both text and images needed to be done anew. The more I wandered among the massive stones, the more I realized the work was too great for one man. Doubt and wonder grew side by side. Should I dare to explain who had built these walls? Or just show them as they are?

In the end, I decided: I will tell what I have seen.

And for the art of building itself, I asked M. Viollet-le-Duc, who understands everything that stands on columns and bears roofs, to set it in order. The Emperor later placed my album of American cities and ruins under his protection.

Thus my journey took shape: one pair of eyes, a heavy case of glass plates, and many questions that may never receive certain answers.

From the very first day, the puzzles mingled.

At Izamal, at the foot of a pyramid that once bore a temple, lay a gigantic head figure—modeled in hard mortar over rough stone. It reminded me of the Egyptian sphinxes. At Chichen-Itza, I saw friezes with enormous god figures that could have been called Indian. At Uxmal, beautiful, straight Greek bands ran across the facades. Palenque, in some bas-reliefs, bore an Assyrian solemnity. At Mitla stood tomb palaces that in certain features resembled the orderly courtyards of Chinese buildings.

Were these similarities only coincidental? Were they traces of legends and ideas that travel freely among peoples? Or were they mixed lineages that brought memories from northern skies and the far East, letting everything meet here?

I felt the weight of all possible explanations. I set aside my own certainty. The pictures would speak.

Everything old here bears scars from conquerors.

The first Spanish narrators were not learned. They measured new cities against Seville and Toledo, and burned the rest. Legends were colored by Bible stories. Today, they live as new translations of Genesis among the Indians' images and words.

When the Spaniards took the land, it was in their faith a virtue to destroy documents that supported idolatry. We now search in ashes for stories with half edges.

But a rumor runs through all the stones. It is audible to those who listen.

Building methods reveal lineages. Some peoples built without lime and mortar. Others early found joy in mixing stone and binding everything together. Some let house forms be born from the logic of wood. Others carried with them the habits of earth and sun-dried clay.

If you see beams and lintels in stone, you can sense an ancient wood tradition behind it. Thus one can point and say: This reminds me of that people—for method and form belong together. Mixing of peoples always makes the picture restless, but never erases all traces.

If America first received its people from the north, they either follow the strip of land between sea and mountains south from the Bering Strait. Or they fall in from Greenland over Labrador and down toward Ohio and Florida. They become acquainted with Cuba and soon Yucatán.

If currents meet, customs also meet.

The works of new travelers—and my photographs—show a land full of types. From the darkest faces to the lightest. Intermediate forms bearing traces from eastern highlands and northern cold.

Before the Spaniards came, few but clear sources say that migrations surged in from the northeast. They collided. Were pushed south. Went back. Found new valleys. Established kingdoms. Disappeared—and left behind ramparts, mounds, roads, burial chambers, and copper objects across the Ohio Valley.

Who built all this?

Not the peoples the French met there centuries later. The traces point to strangers. The great earthworks around Marietta and other places—with square enclosures and stepped platforms—cannot be merely way stations on a journey. They speak of cities guarded by fear. Of armies that pushed the population onward.

Some believe they were white peoples. In any case, the monuments from Yucatán to Ohio bear certain features reminiscent of Malay forms mixed with lighter blood. And in the midst of all this, when I hold a photograph in my hand: The white vein is there, but never alone.

In the old books, I read about the Scythians—the peoples Herodotus saw. They erected platforms of wood. Sacrificed horses and captives. Poured blood onto a sword planted as a god. Scalped enemies by cutting around the ears and shaking off the skin.

They buried their kings on beds of leaves. Walled them into wood chambers. Strangled servants and horses to accompany them. Piled a high earth mound over everything.

When I later stand among the pyramids at Teotihuacan—the two great artificial mountains for Hun-Ahpu—and hear of princes and lords resting under layers of built earth, the Scythians reappear in my thoughts.

Is it only I who sees it?

Perhaps.

But the image does not let me go.

Sagas from Iceland tell of journeys to lands with white men in America. Runestones found in Greenland and Baffin Bay bear names and dates. Names like Tula, known in Indian traditions, appear on maps from Iceland.

And strangely: When the Spaniards arrived in Florida, they found peoples living in cities with ramparts and deep water-filled moats. With king's houses built on artificial mounds. With ponds, orchards, roads, and canals. Tamed deer—and cows that gave milk and cheese.

Who had taught them that?

At the same time, the Mexicans did not know milk. They had no domestic animals left—as if something had been lost. As if a simpler tribe had drowned an older knowledge.

The pottery in Florida was exquisitely painted. On the Mississippi, large boats with eighty men floated. In some, I see a strong infusion of white blood—for here women could also inherit power, and virgins guarded the sun's fire. When a chief died, many followed in death, as I had read among the Nahua peoples. The Natchez held onto something like that well into the 18th century.

Yet: Those who lived there when the English and French arrived did not know who had built all the ancient mounds that lay like sleeping whales across the valleys.

"It was those who were here before us," they said.

And I imagined a long strip of people from New York across Allegheny and Georgia, down to the tip of Florida, west along the Mississippi and Missouri and all the way out to the Red River—and into northwest Texas. Not far, I thought, from the great pyramid at the Red River to the first Mexican teocalli.

Could they be connected?

In Mexico itself, the character changes.

North of the mountains, I find temporary earthworks on the plain—traces of wanderers. But then one enters Oaxaca, at Montalban, and encounters ruins that are not earthworks. Solid walls. Small cobblestones in lime mortar. Doorways with lintel stones and figures carved flat like Egyptian reliefs.

Here are fortresses that required lasting power to be built. Works that only a ruling class governing a large, subjugated population—with priestly power or nobility—could bring forth.

Thus it has been elsewhere in the world as well: in India, Assyria, Egypt. A victorious tribe imposes its mark, and the many carry the stones.

Mortar in Mexico and Yucatán is everywhere. Plaster surfaces in abundant use. Where there is mortar, learned men said, it is rarely only a people of the pure, dry stone tradition. There is often an admixture of peoples who have loved lime and clay since ancient times.

At the same time, I see everywhere the imprint of timber's thinking. As if the first dreams of houses were of beams, later translated in stone.

Thus the most venerable sanctuaries in Japan are also – built in wood, erected with proud rafters, reached by stone stairs.

This mixture made me gradually distinguish between two time layers or schools.

Yucatán's great palaces bear more of the bright north in their faces and arrangement. Mitla and Palenqué seem older and darker from the meeting between tribes.

I could even walk past a house in Yucatán and hear in the facades how an earlier custom of logs and wooden lattice lay hidden. At Uxmal the stonecutters emphasized beams. But here and there they placed them wrongly – over empty space instead of over a wall – as if they no longer understood the timber's proper grip.

They imitated memories. No longer the substance.

Again and again the Popol-Vuh struck me – the sacred scripture of the Quiché people.

It tells that before the sun appeared, everything was wet and muddy. When the sun finally rose, it was like a man, but powerless as a mirror image. And immediately the gods turned to stone. Arms hung again in the branches of trees. Sun, moon and stars took their places.

I thought: Is this not the moment when invisible beings became figures of stone? When belief bound itself to form?

In India, the priests taught that the true temple is the forest and the heart. But people need images, they said. And they created them.

The Popol-Vuh also tells of four first men, made of maize, who saw everything – like gods. Then the heart of heaven blew steam over their eyes and veiled their sight. They became our ancestors – too wise to be gods, sufficient to be humans.

And the peoples gathered at the city of the seven caves, Tulan. There they received gods and fire. But soon the gods demanded human life for the fire.

Then the tribes traveled westward. With heavy wandering over mountains.

The images from the north returned in new ways.

In Sweden, Adam of Bremen wrote of a great temple in Uppsala, with three main gods: one for air and weather, one for war, one for peace and joy. Every ninth year they hung animals and men in the grove by the temple. The blood ran to appease the sky.

I traveled a thousand miles from these books and yet found threads that connected them.

Who carried them? I do not know.

I only say that I recognized the same features in the face of some warriors carved in stone at Chichen-Itza as in northern portraits. One even had something like glasses – perhaps a sign for the wind, Ehecatl, who becomes the rain god Quetzalcoatl.

Then the journey in the country began.

I left Paris on April 7, 1857. Went via Liverpool with a steamboat from Cunard. To finally land in Vera Cruz late in November.

The sea has never been my friend. I only count the days until I see land.

And the city met me like a cluster of houses. Low and blackened by rain and north wind. Nothing like the beautiful adventures I had read. A few poor domes were all. The palms were few and sick.

Yellow fever held sway here as owner. Every time immigration brought fresh blood, the disease had a feast.

When the norte came, no one could grasp its force. Everything was closed. Boats chained. Ships doubled anchors. Sand-driven sneaked into the best-closed houses. The pier disappeared under white feathers of waves.

Yet the north wind was a blessing: It chased the fever away and gave humans' breath a little room again.

In the evening I often stood on the pier. Watched the blue bay and heard wingbeats and screams.

The city's secret rulers were small black vultures – zopilotes – who walked in the streets like guards. When a housewife threw out peels and waste, it was war and meal at the same time between birds and dogs. To harm them was to pay dearly: They kept the city clean, and everyone knew it.

Westward from the coast, everything was sand, swamp and scrub.

But if you climb up along bocas and rivers, after four or five miles you meet green – like songs in the foliage.

I did that. And soon decided to travel on with a wagon train, not with the diligence – because I wanted to see the country, not just arrive.

A majordomo led the wagon train, with a sergeant and a corporal under him. Each wagon had its place and kept it throughout the journey. The drivers knew their mules in the dark by voice.

We met a Frenchman who two years earlier had lost a mule. He and his Indian servant suddenly heard a bray in the plaza in Chiapas. The servant said: "There is the mule, señor." They found it.

I learned from that country that animals have names in sound, and that humans remember what concerns them.

I was immediately taken for a robber when for once we rushed up – three armed – to help a rider who came galloping. He turned his horse in terror and fled. To him we looked like three bandits trying to block him.

For the first time on Mexican soil, I was judged by sight alone.

In Paso de Ovegas, a poor French carpenter gave us a table to lie on. We learned what niguas were – small insects that creep under toenails, lay eggs in a white pearl, and cause entire toes to rot if you don't burn them away with ash or ammonia. I chose ammonia. It helped.

In Puente Nacional, where a fortress loomed over a gorge that could be held by a thousand brave men, we felt the hollow emptiness of war. Houses stood abandoned. Indians fled every day. No one wanted or could keep the road safe – which under Santa Anna had been almost secure.

I reached Mexico City over the high mountains at Rio Frio.

First the valley appears like a painting: Ixtaccihuatl, the woman of snow, glistens. Farther away, Popocatepetl lifts the most beautiful cone in the world. Everything in between—a mosaic of green water and white cities.

But it is a picturesque lie.

Going down, you find dust and stagnation. Many churches and few farmers. A city where many of the people live by the day and by will—not by work and skill. They are called leperos. They wander. Sleep in corners. Drink in the pulquerias. Let themselves be recruited when some general "pronounces"—as they say—starts a rebellion, because a salary has run out.

Then they stop carriages and take whatever they need for a new flag and a new title. Yesterday a circus acrobat. Today a commander in the square.

Such transformations I saw every week.

I felt the power of the priests in the drumbeats.

At every hour a little god on wheels rolled by, accompanied by a man ringing a bell and carrying a table. Soldiers presented arms. Everyone knelt.

Sometimes the priest was in a carriage like a French king, surrounded by shining torchbearers. All of this cost money. The world's goods went into the church, rarely out again.

When the earthquake came in July 1858, I heard the earth crack before the buildings began to dance. People threw themselves to their knees with screams in the streets. An eternity in one minute.

And then—like a miracle—the palaces still stood.

I learned a surprisingly small art one day when we were held up on the road three times.

In our traveling party sat a tall, thin man without a beard who could easily have been taken for a small-town priest. Priests in Mexico rarely wear full vestments. Often it is only a simple narrow neckband—a rabat—that shows they are clergy.

After the first robbery, our man took a dirty rabat from his pocket and said, "Friend, here is my weapon."

Afterward, when new horsemen with scarves over their faces shouted, "Get down from the wagon!", they saw the rabat and nodded gently: "Oh, padrecito, we are not thieves—just family fathers in hard times. Bless us."

They left his baggage alone.

With that I saw a piece of truth: Fellowship between priest and petty thief could be stronger than honesty and right. And had the robbers not learned the priests' habits? They asked for the blessing as payment for the life they let us keep.

In the midst of this comedy of power and piety, there were also great memories.

At Popotlan, not far from Mexico, stood an old cypress tree. Under it Cortez rested when he fled after the night the Mexicans have since called Noche Triste—the sad night.

Montezuma had been taken prisoner. While Cortez was away, Alvarado had let the chiefs dance unarmed, then murdered them in the gleam of gold. When Cortez returned, all was lost. He tried to sneak out in the rain. Men burdened with gold groped in the dark. But the bridges at Tlacopan were full of enemies.

Spanish honor drowned in mud and blood. Some barely survived—Cortez among them.

He wept under the tree.

A legend, yes. But one he made himself with his deeds.

I saw many ruins from their time: Chapels and half-cloisters in Tlalmanalco—a wonderfully beautiful mixture of Moorish pattern, Gothic leaves, and Spanish forms, all executed by Mexican hands.

In San Agustin, rich people played monte on green cloths. There a monk could come with a purse of eighty-five thousand francs, put it all on one card, win or lose without blinking, and smoke a cigarette afterward.

Finally I visited Tepeyac. There Tonantzin once inhaled copal incense, and there the Virgin today receives everyone with an eternal stream of miracles. At the foot of the cliff is a well that cures everything, they say. The faithful carry water home in clay pots.

I do not think I have the right to judge the people of this country more harshly than my own.

Humans are made of hunger, defiance, and hope in equal measure. I know from France's history that violence and foolishness belong to no one alone.

If most here are lazy—or rather seek gambling over work—it is also because the state sleeps. The schools are few. No proper work awaits them.

When money runs out, the soldier changes sides. When the cry goes up, everyone raises a barricade and rests in the shade behind it.

And yet—I saw kindness many times. And courage. And humor as dry as dust.

But I say it plainly: The fear of the northerner from the United States is great here—and rightly so. The Americans have encircled the country through California, Texas, and New Mexico.

What could one do? Some hoped for France.

So they said.

Then the road carried me to Tehuacan and Oaxaca.

With me I had Pedro—a talkative, proud, and squeamish friend. He was arrested immediately, suspected of rebellion. It cost me eight days and a telegraph message from Puebla before he was released.

We traveled through the hot zone. Met a man in a shirt, bleeding at the wrist after having been tied up. "Three bandits ahead," he said.

I thought: If they have taken everything, they will scatter.

We continued and arrived safely at Teotitlan. But I noticed a man slowly pumping a servant for information about our cargo. I decided that we should change our route at midnight—through the forest.

Pancho, our servant, promised to show the way. He got lost on the first turn.

For two hours we tore our clothes on bushes. Finally had to pay an Indian to show us back to the path under a reddish-purple torch.

When we finally stood at the Quiotepec River, a jaguar leaped like a golden flame across the road behind us. The horses bolted. The animal smiled like a cat and disappeared over the edge.

No boatman was there.

I swam across with the horse to call him, but was stopped on the far bank by armed men. I was brought before a famous figure: Huero Lopez – a fair-skinned bandit chief who had recently made peace with the liberals and now held the rank of commander.

He had just taken Teotitlan. Furnished with stories of hacked bodies and looted goods.

Pedro knew one of the men. The evening was mild. Lopez gave us chocolate and promised two new horses in the morning. We slept on the ground, plagued by talaje – small worms that eat the skin, leaving bloody rings.

In the morning I received two beautiful horses: a chestnut and a gray. I paid the coachman five pesos.

We rode with joy.

And rode into the village of Don Domingillo, where all the men ran after us shouting “Thief!” An Indian pointed at the chestnut: “My horse was stolen last week.”

Lopez’s generosity was a barter: two stolen for two lawful. We settled it with the rightful owner.

I learned from it. And Pedro said in his most solemn tone: “Virtue, thy name is empty.”

We followed the Rio de las Vueltas – crossing the water seventy times in two leagues. Then climbed into oak forest and pine forest, to Etla, and finally Oaxaca.

The city lies between three fertile valleys. But the fall from ancient wealth is evident. The square, the porticos, the market overflow with fruit from both cool hills and warm valleys. Life is easy – almost too easy.

The people love their state more than their country. Many speak more highly of Oaxaca than of Mexico. The conversation in the salons is fervent and light, but often shameless. Customs are not strict.

I heard many stories. One of them still clings to me.

The houses of Oaxaca hide flower gardens behind straight walls. Pomegranates and granadillas glow in the corners. Long roses climb around columns.

A strong man, Don Eusebio, had three daughters. Helena, the eldest, carried her beauty like a banner.

A young man from Mexico – Henrique – came to visit his father Don Rafael next door. He was a fine cavalier. Soft blue eyes. Light curly hair. A laugh that clinked emptily.

In a short time he became the darling of Don Eusebio’s house.

And the nights were filled with guitars beneath windows. Escapes on the roof. Secret meetings behind a jasmine hedge.

Don Eusebio opened the door one night and found them together.

He forced a vow of marriage. Then Helena confessed she was with child.

Henrique grew afraid. Don Rafael refused to consent.

That same night Henrique slipped out and fled.

Don Eusebio took up the chase. Rode eight leagues. The question drove him forward, and the dust hung long behind him. An Indian hid the young man in a corn loft, and Don Eusebio rode on – certain that the quarry was ahead.

The two escaped this time.

That child never came into the world.

Time passed.

And one day, when war once again passed through the city, Doña Marianita stood at the window while her son Louisito ran out into the street.

A shot.

The child fell. The bullet entered his forehead.

Thus ended that story.

I had my own battles with chemistry and light.

I mixed collodion. Washed plates. Changed baths. Some days nothing worked. In one attempt in Oaxaca, all my glass became white spots – as if the sun itself had erased the subject.

Another day I mixed all my collodion bottles in desperation. The next morning I got one negative. Then nothing. Then two. Then three – as if a miserly spirit in the solution let me take one more picture per day, but refused everything else.

Finally it gave me only positive images on glass – not negatives.

No laws. No measure.

I was close to giving up. But struck a different course and moved on.

The politics around us grew more dangerous. The liberal army was defeated and the city government fled. Only a citizens' committee kept going, and I stood night watch. The first night we shot at each other in strong wind, and a man was killed over a bag of money. A woman and a priest appeared at his bedside. Dictated a will where everything went to the church and herself.

I refused to sign.

The next morning the reactionaries marched in as victors.

Still I went out into the valleys.

Up on Monte Albán I saw great terraces of stone-anchored masonry and lime. Walls that leaned inward and met at the roof like a self-supporting arch.

Everything was heavier. Older. Different from Mitla.

It was as if two schools lay here: On the plateau a mute, wise, ancient language. In Mitla an architecture born of heavy stone blocks, pure mortar, carved into the finest meanders along smooth white surfaces.

Not a single sculpture in Mitla. The walls were vertical. Yucatán had monks, sloping walls and faces everywhere – a narrative, joyful overabundance.

Mitla was strict and pure in its lines.

Four great palaces, each around a courtyard – like at Uxmal. A teocalli stood a bit apart, now crowned by a Spanish chapel.

The largest and best-preserved palace had a great hall, divided in two by a row of columns. The columns were monoliths of porous limestone – without capitals, merely ended by truncated cones. The hall once bore a wooden roof, framed with crossbeams resting on the wall and on wooden blocks inserted into the masonry. The columns shortened the spans.

Behind, hidden by a dark passage, lay a small inner courtyard. Inside was a hall entirely covered with small stone chips, laid in patterns – meanders and grilles of all varieties.

Along the main façade there alternated wide cornices and fields full of mosaic – all in stone, cut and laid with a purity I have seen among the best Greeks and Romans. The lintels were not wood here, but huge stone blocks – five to six meters long.

Beneath the smooth plaster of the walls everything stood silent. As if old gentlemen still walked with muffled soles and did not want to wake a soul in the underworld.

At the same time I knew that here in this land several ages lay on top of each other.

Many courtyards were low – only three or four feet high – as if new people had come and used the wonders as fences for their houses. Beneath them were underground passages that the Indians had sealed with force.

In the nearby villages I saw artificial earth mounds that no one had touched. I asked permission to dig a little.

“It is the resting place of our ancestors,” they said. “We do not touch them.”

Besides, I was quite alone. Who would help me now – in a time when armies changed flags every week?

A peculiar feature of the whole landscape was the money that did not exist – and the money that was buried.

A merchant told me that a farmer in the valleys had just sold cochineal for 1500 francs. Later the same man came begging for four reales. “I have put the money away,” he said. And by that he meant: I have buried it.

No one knew where.

Sometimes children inherited nothing but a rumor of gold in the earth. A working man who had found two treasures did not touch them. “Such things should not be done,” he said.

A wise man calculated that the valleys hid nearly one and a half billion francs in coins that never entered circulation.

I knew only one who broke the pattern: an old Indian woman outside Mitla had built herself a splendid farm with garden and peacocks. She herself slept on a mat and kept a small shop on the floor, where she sold corn and mezcal. Her son-in-law, a mestizo, was fond of chairs and words.

I thought of him and of what I already knew.

When I finally took my pictures in Mitla, I varnished them with a varnish I had mixed from amber. And then I saw my clothes flaking – the albumen I had spread dried and peeled off the images.

The whole work fell apart while the siege of Oaxaca began over there on the hill. The bombs burst too high and served mostly as fireworks. People spent the evenings on the roofs.

In the end, I still managed – in a dash between rolling forces – to sneak out of town with new plates and my old coachman. I went five days without sleep. Worked like a madman under ruins and stars.

When we returned, the enemy outposts were already there.

I had done what I could.

I said goodbye – especially to Madame Lançon, who had lent me both peace and books. Bought two mules, a packsaddle, and another man – José – who asked for double wages to accompany me.

I set out with a gray horse I had traded from Huero Lopez, and a scarlet macaw on my shoulder.

The macaw was my light heart.

It was free as light, but never flew away. It sat on a pack. When it wanted to rest, it would hop over to my shoulder and gently nip my ear.

José – my precious traveling companion – carried as much mischief as common sense. He could barely saddle a mule. He knew nothing about trails. Every time I let him fasten a load, I had to undo it after a couple of hours.

When we met men in the woods, he trembled. To prove his courage, he began undressing to show scars. "I believe you," I said. "Dress yourself."

The day he told me that two lance wounds had hit him in the back, I laughed a little too loud. He sulked and only warmed up again after a glass of mezcal.

We met a mountaineer at a pass who advised us not to leave before midnight – the hiding places were full of deserters. He fetched two comrades with rifles.

We walked in pitch darkness. The mules slid on their hindquarters down trails where I had to crawl like an animal.

At dawn we were stopped by a friendly shout from a sentry: The Liberal men held the pass at Uajimoloia. A young officer gave us a pass and asked me to report from the front. I told the truth: Little shooting. Much patience. A kind of mockery of war.

We wandered on past ore heaps and works, and reached Ixtlan – the capital of the mountains – glittering in clear air with mansions and a wide street where all that remained of the old government sought refuge.

I hired a guide onward.

In Macuiltanguis, a blind man sang old songs on a cracked guitar. A girl and a boy danced, their shoes beating time against the stone floor. My good topil – who thought he had studied geography – danced like a devil with his brothers.

Sunday morning I went to church. Was surprised to find everything in progress without a priest.

A man in a chasuble sang. Then they carried two saint statues out and walked three times around – inside and outside – with deep solemnity and devotion.

"The priest left," said my host. "The people were angry with him. In many mountain villages it is like that. We manage. One reads the mass. And besides: The priest cost us four thousand pesos a year. We are saving that now."

I noticed that they were at the same time strictly religious. Sunday was observed. Every evening there was prayer. They merely deposed the priest.

I thought to myself. Perhaps it is like that where every man owns his land and every man counts his coin. But faith dwelt there just as much.

I felt it.

After eight days of rest in these clear heights, the descent came – sudden as it always does when you go eastward. The thick, wet forest rose like a wall. Pretty soon we were in half-light at midday and breathing sharply.

Trails were secured with twigs laid crosswise – like covers on an endless stairway of clay.

The few settlements at the edge of the plain belt – Cuasimulco, Yetla – bore a different pain. A mixture of people – black and brown – lay on far too rich soil that they scarcely cultivated. They distilled rum from sugarcane and drank.

I had to shout for the alcalde to get a handful of fodder. We finally got some corn and sugar beets that the mules refused.

There was as much up as down on the way to the lowlands. Yet in the end we had to climb on all fours.

One day a mule lost all four feet on the right side and disappeared. I heard the river roaring below. We hacked through lianas and found the animal lying on its belly on a bush – saved by a branch as thick as my thigh.

We hauled it up for two hours.

The day grew longer than I cared to count.

Finally I ended up by the sea of forest – at Tustepec's trade routes – and later on a boat to Yucatán.

When I landed in Sisal, men carried bare bones in the sun – prisoners on their way to Havana, sold for ten years of forced labor and a lie about freedom at the end. I left them in my heart and traveled to Mérida in a carriage at night across a plain white with salt dust.

I found my old friend, Doctor Macario Morandini – bubbling with stories from all over the globe. I learned that everything was in turmoil: the Indians had crushed a military force, and it was dangerous to go to Chichen-Itza.

This peninsula is a large limestone plateau. Without a single stream. Only wells in the ground – cenotes – and rain that disappears into openings.

And here the uprising had turned villages to ash.

I saw them burn the milpas in April – as they have done for centuries.

In the hot midday wind, when smoke sewed the sky, they set fire to everything they had felled the year before. The ash settled as fertilizer. The whole peninsula became a cauldron.

For a northerner cannot imagine the heat.

I then went to Izamal and measured two large pyramids – wide platforms that once bore temples. On one, the Spanish monastery was built.

Recently – when I was there – we found a large stucco head figure – twelve feet high – modeled over rough masonry. Stones set into the eyes as pupils. The paint still remained in the mouth.

And between Izamal and Merida ran an old road – seven to eight meters wide – laid on large stone foundations. Top layer of lime plaster two fingers thick. No wheel had worn it.

Fifteen inches of soil and time lay upon it.

It struck me that some people here had mastered both building and road-making without iron and draft animals.

Finally, the journey went toward Chichen-Itza.

We arrived at Citaz – a small outpost six leagues from the ruins. The judge divided the men between work and weapons. Half the day the village was a guard force – with drum and bell and fireworks on the church's vault to warn the neighbors.

An old priest – curious and skeptical – joined us.

"You did not come here just to draw ruins," he said gravely. "Your people have lived here. They send you to see if it can be rebuilt."

I will never forget the church in Piste – the village one league from the ruins.

It was stripped to the bone. Right in front of the altar stood a Christ with disheveled hair. Bent under the cross. Covered in mud. In a torn cloth. Face bloody.

It was the God of the poor. He was all the oppressed in one.

A great artist must once have carved his mouth.

I stood for a long time and wept.

Then we cleared a path through dense thicket to find the Nunnery Palace – the largest monument.

The walls bore enormous carved heads. Patterned crosses in small stones. A medallion with a chief in a feather diadem.

Inside, the rooms were narrow – with ceilings where sloping walls met in a narrow stone cap.

We were in the middle of an entire city: Caracol – "the snail" – the round building. The castle on a high pyramid. The prisoner's house – with three openings on the facade. And several buildings without sculptures.

In the circus's reliefs, warriors fought against snakes and jaguars. They carried clubs with stone or metal at the end – a weapon with a soft front and hard core. One of the figures bore a symbol over the eyes – perhaps for the wind.

The faces were not like those at Palenque. Yucatán's Indians have their own beautiful form. They mix with whites and create a mestizo easily recognized in the city.

We slept in the ruins every night – in hammocks with fires to keep the felines away. A young Indian made a violin from a branch and a root, and played the saddest melodies for us into the night.

When I showed the negatives in Citaz, the judge saw nothing. Photography is a sorcery that does not reveal the face until paper and light make it visible.

He thanked me, but laughed a little.

Then we went to Uxmal – via Tikul and the Hacienda San José.

On the way, no one took us in. Finally, a widow with two daughters in Sakalun. They were of Spanish blood. Their house had been burned during the uprising. The man killed. The younger girl was so beautiful that time became dangerous.

We drank water in the village's cenote – a dome underground with a hatch. I said goodbye the next morning before my heart became a habit.

Uxmal's ruins are scattered: the Nunnery Palace – a large square of four houses around a courtyard. The dwarf's house atop a high pyramid. The governor's palace – the largest building of all – with three terraces beneath it. The house of turtles. The house of doves.

In the Nunnery Palace, small stone rosettes hung like bees over doors in one wing. A long snake – a rattlesnake – had coiled in relief along the entire southern facade, making squares for the panels.

In many rooms, two or four stone eyes were set in the wall to hang hammocks – the only furniture that has traveled from the old to the new. The doors had no locks. They were closed from inside with a plank, held fast by two sticks in stone hooks.

The legend of the dwarf has a simple charm.

An old woman wanted so badly to have a child that she brooded over an egg in a corner of the hut. Out came a little creature. It grew quickly and gained a man's intellect in a year, but its growth stopped. The mother said he would become king.

He went to the king's house and challenged the king in strength. Both lifted stones. Then the king demanded that he build a palace higher than all in one night – or die.

The next morning it stood there.

Then the king demanded that they strike each other on the head with bundles of firewood. The mother sent the boy back with a wheat tortilla under his headdress. The king's wood broke against the soft crust. But when the dwarf struck back, the king's head split on the second blow.

Thus he became king.

The old woman disappeared into deep passages underground, it is said. She sells water by an underground river, with a snake at her side. She does not take money – she demands infants.

I only repeat the legend.

The night in the Nunnery Palace soon became a nightmare.

After a violent downpour, I was awakened by scraping and fluttering wings. Flat insects – large as cockroaches – crawled over my body. Hundreds. The walls were black with them.

I massacred them with a plank for two hours. Sealed the doors and tried to sleep. Two hours later they were back.

It went on for eight nights. They flew. They stung. And I looked like a man full of smallpox.

All while I was building a stone block twelve feet high on the square in front of the Governor's Palace – so my camera could reach the height of the ornaments. I ran like a raging human in the burning sun between the darkroom eighty meters inside and the instrument outside.

Collodion dries quickly. So I wrapped the cassette in a wet cloth. If I stumbled, all was lost.

And lose I did. A ray of sun crept into the frame and ruined half. Another glass got the imprint of my hand because someone had moved it in the darkroom.

I paid three boys a peso for each bottle they came running with from the Nunnery Palace – where I had left some collodion. The third item gave me the plate I needed.

Afterwards I lay in the shade of palm trees and drank milk. Felt like a human again.

On the way back, rain beat me to a rag one hour outside Uxmal. All leather bags were soaked. A steward offered comfort: his own shirt – it barely reached his navel. In the gallery stood another strange figure in a similar shirt – white as milk.

Indian girls laughed with their eyes and pulled their skirts up.

I moved on to Campeche. Sailed to Carmen. There I met Don Francisco Anizan – the French consul who lent me a bed and sent me up the Uzumacinta River in a cajuco – a hollowed log with room for a man, food, and dreams.

The conditions were a trial. On the sea, a large canoe where we lay packed together. When rain came, they threw a tarred tarp over us – it was like breathing in a black sack.

On the river it got better. But even there were stagnant nights with mosquitoes in heavy clouds and crocodiles sliding at ordinary speed into the water at the sight of the boat. I caught a small one and thought to make it a travel companion. It just yawned. I sent it back out.

Further up, the forests rose around us. And when the moon stood between the trees and the water was like a mirror, I suddenly fell silent.

No breath in the leaves. No ripple on the water. Only the stars and our little boat beneath them.

Then I heard how nature prayed.

That is the only way to say it.

Some nights it was as if God stood in the forest and separated light from darkness with a hand gesture. The animals fell silent on their own after a roar.

In such a moment, a person needs no more proof.

At San Pedro I met Don Juan – a mind rich in hunting and hospitality.

They ate caiman here. In the huts they lay tied – without tails – with jaws open in eternal rage.

Don Juan called for Cyrilo – a thin, tall Indian with nerves of steel. He took a dagger with a square blade in his teeth. Walked silently into the grass by the riverbank. Threw himself into the water after a short-tailed caiman.

The water exploded. Tail flapping shattered the surface. Blood carved patterns in the current.

Then Cyrilo appeared alone – nearly choked. He raised his hand. The outermost finger joint was gone.

“But he paid,” he said calmly.

The caiman carcass floated up on the other side.

I gave him two pesos instead of one. Asked for his dagger for twenty francs.

“Only men in San Pedro do such things,” said Don Juan. “The caiman knows them. The others attack it.”

We caught turtles the next morning – five in a small boat, speared from the bottom with poles. He told me about jaguar hunting: The safest thing in the world as long as you have a dog to take the stare. The animal stares at the dog. Forgets the human. A calm bullet through the shoulder.

Sometimes lasso from a branch.

He gave me a skin. I thanked him and moved on through swamps where we got stuck on sandbanks. Through stinking, murky channels with fallen trunks. Shot a large iguana and dreamed of making a tobacco pouch from its throat sac – it twisted dead under my knife and had to be thrown away, for everything became dandruff.

We waded the last stretch into Las Playas. I lay in a hammock and drank posole after posole until sweat poured in streams.

From Santo Domingo del Palenqué, the subprefect Don Agustín Gonzáles sent Indians ahead to clear a path to the palace.

We walked for hours in a shade so thick that midday became night. When we finally stood before the façade, it was still invisible – a black body of roots and wild trees. Only after two days could I take a complete picture.

Around lay small temples on pyramids. All with an antechamber and three rooms in a row. In the middle one was an altar like an ark with small wings at the corners – ornament like in Egypt.

The palace itself was built on a low, oblong terrace with two courtyards inside. The entire outer gallery bore a row of square pillars. On five of them were figures: One stood like a king or priest – with feathers in his hair. Two knelt and offered something. In a sixth pillar there were only signs – waiting for someone who can read them.

In addition, there were five slabs by a staircase down into the courtyard – figures of a different kind from the others. In one place I saw a goddess carried by a two-headed tiger. By the altar below lay stones for sacrifice.

In a dark chamber I found a relief with a mask held up on two crossed scepters. Placed on a podium on the backs of two figures bent in pain. Two men stood on the backs of others and offered two humans – one of them appeared to be a woman.

Everything pointed the same way: Human sacrifice was not new and not limited.

I thought of animals that were never tame here. If you have oxen and sheep, you sacrifice them. Without livestock, man gives man.

It turned into a bad expedition for the pictures.

The water in the canal under the palace gave millions of spots in the washes. The humidity burst the frames. The heat at midday burned the glue. The night loved insects – I lay awake until one with mosquito net and warm flames.

One night I heard the jaguar's breath three times.

The guide lay sleeping beside me in the glow of the fire and claimed he was keeping watch. I jumped into the fire and grabbed the revolver. The animal strolled on the roof above our heads. It laughed low in the dark.

That same night I had my greatest vision.

The moonbeam through the forest drew a cloud of women in ascending veils – an assumption into heaven, such as Murillo would paint. And elsewhere I saw God separate light from darkness – as in Raphael.

I woke Carlos. He nodded quietly. “So beautiful, so grand.”

We began to wave a burning twig. The currents in the night answered with blinking stars – fireflies by the billions gathered in a blue net that I hung under the vault.

There stood my chandelier while the rest was dark.

Such nights one does not forget.

By day I walked alone with a compass. Shot a curassow and a green snake. Found a new pyramid with a new little temple exactly like the others.

Palenque is not a city, I thought. It is a religious center. The people live scattered and come when drums call.

In Yucatán – in Chichen and Uxmal – there is a city. There are remains of institutions, places for other than god. Here everything is around a palace and a multitude of identical temples.

Who knows: Perhaps some of those who built Yucatán came from here.

I barely got out of the ruins with all the cloth bundles. Could not get the bearers back.

At San Pedro I lay three nights in the stinking cabildo waiting for men who promised to come at dawn. They stole the carrying straps and disappeared into the night.

I put a bullet in the chamber and decided to go on foot with Carlos.

We divided the load. My body gnawed at my shoulders after five minutes. Soon the pants cut into my knee – so I cut them off at the thigh and hung everything else on my belt: vest, shirt, and coat. Walked in nothing but skin, with beard on my chest, revolver, and axe.

We found a stream and ate raw ham and posol. We slept under a tarp stretched between poles while rain burst around us. The jaguar screamed far away.

In the morning I heard a rooster crow and did not want to go out to the houses. I had faith that we would soon reach Tumbala.

We did not.

At noon my courage fell. I thought of my mother at home. Of bread and wine. Of a kitchen where someone smiled at a man without a hat.

It was a moment I swore never to leave France again.

Then I raised my head in a forest of tree ferns. Thought the forest was beautiful – even when my legs trembled.

In Tumbala, the priest was everything.

He took us in when the housekeeper first refused. He gave us soup, then turkey and sherry. Later arranged for my luggage to be returned from San Pedro.

He was priest, king, and judge.

The punishment for an accident was from twelve to one hundred fifty lashes on the soles of the feet. But it cleansed, they said. One man could even ask for some lashes for an offense he intended to commit tomorrow – or that had already been done.

A mother asked for twelve lashes for her grown son because he was rude to her. He took them. They hugged afterward and went off to drink.

The priest in Citala – further north – was a learned Dominican who admired Napoleon and read everything he came across. He was alone in a poor world, but he carried the promise himself. He once heard a married couple in the same confessional – they told each other's infidelities with an open grille between them. He gave them the same penance, and they left reconciled.

"Otherwise he would have killed her," he said. "That's how it is here."

In San Cristóbal the carpet was pulled down.

I entered the cathedral. Two young deacons turned red with rage because I did not kneel. They asked if I was Catholic.

"No," I said calmly. "I am Protestant."

They shouted: "Protestant! Protestant!" – as if they had never seen one before.

I took my hat and walked out again.

Outside they kept old instruments in repair. A psaltery rang metallic under fingers that longed for a piano. The place Chamula made chairs for forty-five centimes each.

Further down, in Tuxtla, I met Don Julio Lickens – a Parisian doctor with an eternal desire to help and a certain reluctance for precision. He learned surgery on the fly and soon plucked out eyes like another picks roses, with varying success. Still he became a friend and saving angel. He helped me find horses.

Corpus Christi here was a mix of procession and wild dance. Foreigners learned best to stay indoors.

Later, on the road over the Gineta mountain, I saw both the Pacific Ocean and a green carpet of meadows before the wind caught and slammed everything together again.

In Tehuantepec there remained the stench of an American adventure: A road that was to bind ocean to ocean – laid out without thought of rain and roots. When the money was gone, the workers remained in town – hungry and pale.

The Sierra was full of "patricios" – reactionary detachments that cut all connections and collected road tolls with rifles.

I became a temporary soldier. Got a rifle from Governor Rodríguez and advanced with him against a band.

We caught such a man – wounded in the thigh. He was a general. Said to have been Santa Anna's right hand – now stripped of twenty thousand in money and gold. The commander listened. Nodded. Gave the order to shoot.

The body was hung by the path as a warning. The rest disappeared into the forest.

At night I heard new phrasings in the house where I slept: Robbers hid among the righteous.

After all this I wished to climb to the top of another world.

Popocatepetl.

I had decided I would be the first to photograph the crater and the surrounding mountains. I left Mexico again at the end of the month. Went to Amecameca and met the Pérez brothers – Don Cyrilo and Don Pablo – merchants with a love for pictures.

Rain held us back a week.

Then we rode to Tomacoco and further up to Tlamacas – the ranch with the oven for sulfur. The nights were ice cold – minus ten. The smoke from the oven compressed my lungs. I didn't understand how the Indians here endured.

We waited three days for clear weather and searched for old pots in the slope under Pico del Fraile. We found eleven red-burned jars – with coarse faces in clay – and a beautiful lamp in black on red that could have been Etruscan.

"Aztecs fled here and buried their dead far from Spanish desecrations," said the guide.

I liked the thought.

At dawn we put the attempt into action.

We wore blue glasses against snow blindness. We melted snow in mezcal and drank it at a stop. We surprised the guides by not slowing down right away. Our lungs burned, but we held on.

At a quarter past eight we stood on the crater's edge.

We became four. Louis and I climbed a bit higher.

Under our feet opened a hole like a world's abyss: A cone of snow and sand poured down towards the bottom. Two large breathing tubes – respiraderos – sent clouds of sulfur vapor up with a steady thud.

A small, greenish-brown pond collected warm water. We picked sulfur crystals in lumps around us.

"The source of this water feeds two hot baths – one at Puebla and one at Cuernavaca," Don Cyrilo said later.

The Indians up here sent soil with sulfur down this slope – la corrida – and rode the sacks like horses when the snow was not too hard.

"Shall we?" I said to Louis.

I folded my hat in four and sat on it. Took a stick in my hands.

And slid.

Hundred meters. Two hundred. A thousand. At a speed that turned air into sugar and snow into flames.

I remember laughing.

We tumbled in twenty somersaults in the ash at the bottom. Got up with our backsides on fire and hearts pounding.

It was seven minutes and almost two kilometers.

The best journey I ever had.

We got our pictures.

We went back down.

Fifteen days later I left Mexico for good.

On the way out, the stagecoach was caught between two small advance parties who shot for an hour without anyone falling. When we stopped at Rio Frio, two thin bandits in rags stepped forward and took everything.

I was allowed to keep my shirt.

My watch was hidden under my shirt – hanging behind my back on a string. When I put my hands in my pockets, I pulled the string tight, and the watch rose a little.

At exactly quarter past three it struck.

One of them laughed and said: "We have a watch."

I coughed and handed it over.

"Thank God you met caballeros," he said. "Go and sin no more."

A mestiza woman was smarter: She hid her earrings in the mouth of her four-year-old daughter. The child sat still as a stone.

After Puebla came the night and the moon again.

I traveled with a young girl – Dolorès Molina – sixteen years old, beautiful and scared. We were five in the coach. At two in the morning, horses galloped forward. Seven riders in costly clothes – with gold-embroidered hats and tiger hides as leggings – stopped us.

"Get down," they said. "Is there only one man?" asked the chief. "Only one," replied the driver.

"Go in peace," the leader said to me. "No one will harm you."

But the girl clung to me. White arms around my neck. Crying and begging me to save her.

What could I do?

They lifted her up behind a rider with polite words: "Be calm, pequeña. We are gentlemen. You will not be mistreated. But we must go. Time is running."

They disappeared into the forest.

In the next village, the driver said: "What good is a report? They'll bring her back after a while."

We arrived at Orizaba the same afternoon. Her mother was waiting.

I said what I had to.

I don't know if she ever got her child back.

On December 28, 1859, I saw again the blue bay at Vera-Cruz.

On February 2, 1861, I landed in Europe.

I had seen ruins that carried images from many lands and many times. I had known people who suffered and people who laughed. I could tell little with certainty about who started it all – but much about how it was done: With mortar and wood in the language of stones. With words that became images. With ideas that became actions.

Whether they were whites from the north, or mixtures of yellow and brown, or all together – I do not know.

I only know that someone created something great here – long before Columbus.

And I know that in a few cities – Palenqué, Mitla, Chichen-Itza, and Uxmal – enough remains for a person to listen, gently, with ear and eye, and hear an old wall say:

I still stand here. Come whenever you want.

I am ready.