RUINS OF ISAMAL
At the base of a pyramid, only remnants of this ancient city of Yucatan, there are, pl. XXV, a gigantic head modeled using a cement enveloping irregular rubble. It's kind of a big block with stones, laid with art by the sculptor in the middle of a very hard mortar, formed cheeks, mouth, nose, eyes. This colossal head is actually a building coated. Around, tangled windings, also modeled in cement, forming an irregular siding. The character of the head does not remember the kind of the sculptures of Palenque, the features are fine, the mouth is made with eyes wide without being prominent, the forehead, covered with an ornament, seems to be no escaping. This head was painted like any Mexican architecture, and traces of paint are still very visible in the mouth. Here, as we see not only the mortar is used as a means of agglutination of materials, but it serves to shape and it is a paste that implements the sculptor, and the dough, stucco was applied by very experienced workers, since he has resisted weathering for a long course of centuries, yet a primitive people, in which the arts are in a state of infancy, assembles wood blocks or accumulates [47]stone by force of arms, but it only happens very late to implement successfully a material such as mortar, which requires not only the various preparations, but a long practice and observation very difficult, it is still necessary that these manufacturers have the natural ability to races on the earth's surface, seem specially designed to use lime in their construction. Again, neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks even, never used lime and sand in their buildings. The mortar, which matter clumping together of stones just to form a rock, belongs only Turanian races or those who have received blood in their veins yellow.
The pl. XXIV presents a set of the pyramid at the bottom of the head which is modeled earlier.
The pl. XXIII shows all of the great pyramid of two storey Isamal. The base of the lower deck is not less than 250 m apart; its plateau, 200 mapproximately, its overall height is 15 to 20 m . The top pyramid has 20 m approximately. It should be noted that these pyramids high flat country are entirely solid masonry. In pl. XXIII, there are perfectly allowed to climb stairs to the upper platform, unfortunately deprived of the building that crowned it.
