We hold no brief for the independent Indians, whether they be Yaquis or Mayans. They have many bad traits. The Mayans certainly are cruel, and they have become crafty and treacherous by long centuries of brutality and persecution. They have been guilty, too, of bloody reprisals; but mark that word! The story of the Spanish domination of the whole of Yucatan is a story of bloodshed, of basest cruelty, of the most hideous lust. In the name of Christ, the white race has ground down the rightful owners of the soil; evicted them, robbed them, murdered them, beaten them, defiled their women and even their children. Are not reprisals, then, fair? In a later chapter we raise the corner of the curtain on as black a story of slavery as the world has ever known, the blacker because of its cowardice and hypocrisy--the slavery of so-called civilised Yucatan. For that great cancer "Surgeon" Diaz is said to be sharpening his operating knife. And in this far-eastern portion of Yucatan, because might is right, the last pure descendants of those who had attained a great and (if Spanish historians are to be trusted) a noble civilisation are to be brutally crushed out. If Mexico values a fair name, if she wishes to be reckoned a civilised Power, she will yet turn back. She will refuse to write the last chapters of that story of blood of which the Spanish wrote the first four centuries ago. FOOTNOTES: [5] A Central News telegram recently published in the London papers read as follows: "A surprise attack by a band of Maya Indians was made on Mexican troops encamped in their district. A sharp fight ensued, and as the Indians were superior in numbers, great difficulty was experienced in driving them off. A Mexican lieutenant and eight men were killed." CHAPTER X IN SEARCH OF THE MAYAN MECCA The island of Cozumel lies twelve miles from the easternmost shore of Yucatan in the Caribbean Sea between 20° and 21° north lat. and 86° and 87° west long. Its name in Mayan means "Isle of Swallows," in allusion, tradition relates, to a Mayan deity _Tel Cuzaan_ (the swallow-legged) who was here chiefly worshipped. But the history of the island contradicts this tradition, for Tel Cuzaan appears to have been quite a minor god in the Mayan Olympus; while a religious importance, exceeding that of any other spot in the Mayan countries of Central America, seems to have attached to this island.