(See front cover)
Over the rough and tangled places of the hemispheres trains of men with beasts of burden have forayed during the past winter, as often for sport and recreation as for science. Rich men have vied with institutions to explore, and have made the hardy trips themselves. To do so has become a new fashion.
WESTERN HEMISPHERE
In the west, outstanding expeditions of the season have been:
Maya Curse (Field Museum of Chicago). In southwest Mexico, 35 miles south by southeast of Valladolid and at the western border of Quintana Roo, the Mason-Blodgett expedition sent by the Field Museum of Chicago came upon a highway built by ancient Mayans 40 feet wide and raised ten feet from the ground.
Except for trees which in 15 centuries have grown thickly upon it, the road was sufficiently smooth for motor driving. Directly in line with the recently discovered great causeway running southward from Coba past Lake Xkanha, this road seems part of a great Mayan passage towards Ixil. At the road's end is a flight of stone steps going up a dilapidated pyramid 70 feet high. At its top Mayan priests had the habit of tearing the hearts from living human sacrifices, of offering the warm and bloody things to an idol, and of heaving the maimed bodies into a ravine close by. There seemed a fell malison on this spot which the Mason-Blodgett troupe had found. Their muleteers ran fearfully away, carrying with them the supplies. Gregory Mason, scribe, fell from the top of the pyramid and hurt himself; he fell through the roof of a buried building and hurt himself more; the tree which held his hammock also fell, almost on him. So the expedition paused for a while.
This gave them an opportunity to look over Cozumel, island off the coast of Yucatan, and to discover, in a cave at Ucul ("hidden water") a shrine to the Mayan rain god, an excellently preserved little building whose stucco, after centuries of exposure, is still white.
Mayan Mosaic (Carnegie Institution). In the "Temple of the Warriors" at Chichenitza, stupendous Mayan ruin in Yucatan, President John Campbell Merriam and Dr. Alfred Vincent Kidder of the Carnegie Institution watched amazed as Earl Morris, their associate on the expedition, scraped away the filth that for centuries had hidden a beautiful mosaic disc containing several hundred pieces of polished turquoise. It had been lying under the carved and painted Mayan altar discovered two years ago and is the "most artistic and elaborate of all known relics of Mayan civilization."