ABSTRACT
The ruins of Mexico are certainly not old by European standards, yet they have about them the air of belonging to a past so irrevocable and strange that, as one looks at a pyramid standing sharp and clear in the lucid sun, one gets the overwhelming feeling that here indeed is the real past, a past so gone and dead that it could have had no connection whatsoever with human activity and memory. Perhaps it is because the Mexican ruins are the work of peoples now almost completely submerged, while the European monuments, for all their age, are yet familiar and living, the result of their continuous human use; they are old, but they are not strange. The number of Mexican excavations is small and they are not always accessible, nor when excavations have been made are they always in a finished state. But occasionally one finds work on a pyramid far enough along so that the interior can be entered. Then one learns that what on the surface appears to be a solid block of stone is in fact a series of layers, one superimposed upon the other, the topmost being merely the last addition by the most recent people to have utilized the structure. Time, which had hitherto seemed static and one-dimensional, now takes on perspective in depth: one sees the first people coming on the place, building on it, worshipping there, sanctifying it by human use, passing under; followed by another people, taking over the site, catching up the note of the past, adding to it something uniquely their own, forgetting the people who had been there before them, but continuing in their own way their predecessors’ work; then passing under in their turn, followed by yet another people who also build there and are also submerged, and so up into time. Each is drawn to the site, attracted by its power; each rejects the past only to reshape it to its own needs and uses; each adds a layer both of masonry and meaning, until the whole structure is permeated with significance. Yet it is not until the innermost core is reached that the meaning of the whole is revealed, and, as one penetrates deeper and deeper into the pyramid, reversing in a few light moments the barely perceptible movements of heavy time, layer upon layer is seen, in one pyramid as many as seven, each differing from yet dependent upon the other, each with a character of its own but which can be fully understood only in relation to the others, until the centre is reached, the core upon which the others have grown up and which binds together and unifies the layers into a single comprehensive structure.
