Prologue

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_ "God sends nuts to them who have no teeth:" which ancient Spanish proverb of contrariety comes strongly to mind as I set myself to this writing.

By nature am I a studious, book-loving man, having a strong liking for quiet and orderliness. Yet in me also is a strain that urges me, even along ways which are both rough and dangerous, to get beyond book-knowledge, and to examine for myself the abstractions of thought and the concretions of men and things out of the consideration whereof books are made. And I hold that it is because I have thus sought for truth in its original sources, instead of resting content with what passes for truth, being detached fragments of fact which other men have found and have cut and polished to suit themselves, that I have gathered to myself more of it, and in its rude yet perfect native crystals, than has come into the possession of any other modern investigator. In making which strong assertion I am not moved by idle vanity, but by a just and reasonable conception of the intrinsic merit of my own achievement: as will be universally admitted when I publish the great work, now almost ready for the press, upon which, in preparatory study and in convincing discovery, I have been for the past ten years engaged. For I speak well within bounds when I declare that a complete revolution in all existing conceptions of American archaeology and ethnology will be wrought when _Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America_, by Professor Thomas Palgrave, Ph.D. (Leipsic), is given to the world.

Upon this work I say that I have been engaged for ten years. Rather should I say that I have been engaged upon it for forty years; for its germs were implanted in me when I was a child of but six years old. Before my intelligence at all could grasp the meaning of what I read, my imagination was fired by reading in the pages of Stephens of the wonders which that eminent explorer discovered in Yucatan; and my mind then was made up that I would follow in his footsteps, and in the end go far beyond him, until I should reveal the whole history of the marvellous race whose mighty works he found, but of whose genesis he could only feebly surmise. And this resolve of the child became the dominant purpose of the man. In my college life at Harvard, and in my university life at Leipsic, my studies were directed chiefly to this end. Especially did I devote myself to the acquisition of languages, and to gaining a sound knowledge of the principles of those departments of archaeology and ethnology which related to the great work that I had in view. Later, during the ten years that I occupied (as I believe usefully and acceptably) the Chair of Topical Linguistics in the University of Michigan, all the time that I properly could take from my professorial duties was given exclusively to the study of the languages of the indigenous races of Mexico, and to what little was to be found in books concerning their social organization and mode of life, and to the broad subject of Mexican antiquities. By correspondence I became acquainted with the most eminent Mexican archaeologists--the lamented Orozco y Berra, Icazbalceta, Chavero, and the philologists Pimentel and Penafiel; and I had the honor to know personally the American archaeologist Bandelier, the surpassing scientific value of whose researches among the primitive peoples of Mexico places his work above all praise. And by the study of the writings of these great scholars, and of all writings thereto cognate, my own knowledge steadily grew; until at last I felt myself strong enough to begin the investigations on my own account for which I had sought by all these years of patient preparation fittingly to pave the way.

But inasmuch as my life until a short time since has been wholly that of a scholar, and wholly has been passed in quiet ways, I truly have had no teeth at all for the proper cracking of the nuts which have come to me in the course of the surprising adventures that I have now set myself to narrate. For in the course of these adventures (necessarily, yet sorely against my will) I have been thrust by force of circumstances into many imminent and prodigious perils; much time that I gladly would have devoted to peaceful, fruitful study I have been compelled to employ in rude and profitless (except that my life was saved by it) battling with savages; and--what most of all has pained me--many curious and interesting skulls that I gladly would have added entire to my collection of crania, I have been driven in self-defence to ruin irreparably with my own hands.

All of which diversities of my likings and my happenings will appear in due order, as I tell in the following pages of the strange and wonderful things which befell me--in company with Rayburn and Young and Fray Antonio and the boy Pablo--in our search after and finding of the great treasure that was hidden, in a curiously secret place among the Mexican mountains more than a thousand years ago, by Chaltzantzin, the third of the Aztec kings. _

Read next: Chapter 1. Fray Antonio


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