Pictographs to which we are disposed to accord a great antiquity are to be seen on the sides of caves in Nicaragua. Some grottoes in the mountains of Oajaca also bear witness to the labor of man, in the shape of coarse paintings in red ochre. Among them is frequently repeated the imprint in black of a human hand. This imprint, which is probably borrowed from some myth, seems to have played a great part in America. It is found reproduced in regions very remote from one another, standing out on the potteries, sometimes in red on a black ground, sometimes in black on a red ground. In our own days it is occasionally found in use among Indians as a totem or coat-of-arms.
All that we have just said bears witness to a still primitive condition of art. The men who executed the works, barbarous as they seem to have been, were capable of rising higher. This is proved by works of a manifestly later epoch. Guatemala, the ancient land of the Quiches and the Cakchiquels, abounds in ruins. Bas-reliefs, statues, and monoliths covered with arabesques to the height of twenty feet, meet the traveler frequently. At Quirigua, a small port on the Bay of Honduras, a statue of a woman has been found, footless and handless, with a crowned idol on its head; excavations by the side of it have brought to light a tiger's head in porphyry. At Santa Lucia Cosumalhuapa, at the foot of the Volcan de Fuego, among the cyclopean stones and the statues of tapirs and caymans, lie colossal stone heads, of a strange type, hitherto unknown. Two of these heads wear the immense ear-rings peculiar to the ancient Peruvians, and a head-dress similar to the Asiatic turbans. Farther on are bas-reliefs in hard porphyry, larger than nature, representing personages as odd in conception as in execution, and mythological scenes that have no relation to any known form of worship. The most interesting bas-relief represents a human sacrifice. The principal personage is a priest; he is naked and, according to the custom of the Aztec priests, wears a garter around his left leg; only the left foot is shod. The head-dress is a crab. One hand holds a flint, doubtless the sacrificial knife, while the other hand grasps the head of the victim to be slain. On a second plane, two acolytes are carrying human heads. One of them is a skeleton, a sinister symbol of death. Its head is of a simian shape, mingling the grotesque with the terrible. To cite more similar facts would merely involve unpleasant repetitions. We shall only add, then, that the figures are of a grinning aspect and a repulsive ugliness. The ancient American races did not seek for the beautiful, or, rather, did not comprehend it as we do, who have been taught by the immortal creators of the high art of Greece.
We have just occasion to be surprised when we think of the time that was required to execute these works, and consider what inefficient mechanical means the artists had to use. They had to detach blocks of hard stone by means of wretched tools of quartzite and obsidian, and to saw granite and porphyry with agave-fibers and emery. A
