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Updated: May 22, 2025
Besides the theater, the only remains are some masses of Roman brickwork, and the massive substructions of a small temple which the natives call the tomb of Leonidas.... We spent the night in a comfortable house, which actually boasted of a floor, glass windows, and muslin curtains.
They find in them a significance which is stated as follows by Brasseur de Bourbourg: “Among the edifices forgotten by time in the forests of Mexico and Central America, we find architectural characteristics so different from each other, that it is as impossible to attribute them all to the same people as to believe they were all built at the same epoch.” In his view, “the substructions at Mayapan, some of those at Tulha, and a great part of those at Palenque,” are among the older remains.
These temples are built upon massive substructions that might support a world, almost; the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an omnibus very few, if any of them, are smaller than a carpenter's tool chest and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of masonry through which a train of cars might pass.
To dig drains, to clear out the substructions, to re-open the ancient water-courses, or to follow any improved system of cropping, is far beyond the enterprise of the poor farmer. He has neither skill, nor capital, nor savings. If nature takes the matter into her own hand, well; if not, one bad harvest irretrievably lands him in famine.
The great ravine, three quarters of a mile long, the ancient boundary which now cuts the town in two, is bridged where the main street, the Corso, crosses, the bridge resting on old Roman substructions, as everything else about here does. This ravine, always invested with mystery, is the theme of no end of poetry and legend. Demons inhabit it.
The road is literally a series of hanging stairs, which zig-zag down the face of the mountain. At certain points the rock is perforated; at others it is hewn into terraces; and at others the path rests on vast substructions of masonry.
The substructions of this mighty ruin are truly astonishing; they are so vast, so massive, so enduring, that they seem as if built by giants.
This theory has kept me from entering the discussion, whether the substructions in the cliff under the Poggio Syracuse, a royal villa, are temples of the Sirens, or caves of Ulysses.
Most of the Visigoth towers that are still erect are seated upon Roman substructions which appear to have been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion.
When the immovable native rock is no longer available, the resource is to make use of vast masses of stone, as nearly immovable as possible. The most noted example is that of the substructions which supported the platform whereon stood the Temple of Jerusalem, which was the work of the Phoenician builders whom Hiram lent to Solomon.
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