Читать книгу The City of the Sacred Well онлайн

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“The former inhabitants of this once beautiful hacienda had all been massacred, many years before, by the Sublevados, the untamed tribes of Maya Indians living some miles to the south. These savages had slain every living creature on the estate and had left the several buildings in smoldering ruins. Even at the present time the Sublevados are still untamed and I have often been warned of the menace of a similar fate.

“I turned and gazed at the old gateway under which I had so recently passed—a gateway, so the records say, built in June, 1721. Under it also had passed long lines of weeping captives, and there are men living who remember the event. These poor captives were laden with the booty taken from the villages of Tunkas and Dzitas as they were urged on by their Sublevado captors in their terrible journey to Chan Santa Cruz, the distant Sublevado stronghold. And only the vigorous men with trades and the young women were spared for the journey, while the other prisoners were ruthlessly murdered. Of the prisoners left alive for the journey those who fell by the wayside were despatched with a stroke of the machete and left where they fell. I later found many of their pitiful skeletons.