it
is a matter of primary importance to note that these artificial mounds
are mentioned, not in the course of describing the Indian town, for no
description whatever is attempted, but merely incidentally, as
affording conveniences to the Spaniards in furnishing materials for
building the city, or as causing obstructions in the laying out of
streets regularly and according to the plan proposed. The mound on
which the convent stands would perhaps not have been mentioned at all
but for the circumstance that the Padre Cogolludo was a Franciscan
friar, and the mention of it enabled him to pay a tribute to the memory
of the blessed father Luis de Villpando, then superior of the convent,
and to show the great estimation in which he was held, for he says that
the adelantado had fixed upon this mound for the site of one of his
fortresses, but on the application of the superior he yielded it to him
readily for the site of the convent; and, more than all this, even in
the incidental way in which these mounds are referred to, there is one
circumstance which shows clearly that they were not at that time
disused and in ruins, but, on the contrary, were then in the actual use
and occupation of the Indians; for Cogolludo mentions particularly and
with much detail one that completely obstructed the running of a
particular street, which, he says, was called El grande de los Kues,
adoratorio que era de los idolos. Now the word "Kues," in the Maya
language, as spoken by the Indians of Yucatan at the present day, means
their ancient places of worship, and the word "adoratorio," as defined
in the Spanish dictionary, is the name given by the Spaniards to the
temples of idols in America. So that when the historian describes this
mound as El grande de los Kues el adoratorio de los idolos, he means to
say that it was the great one, or the greatest among the places of
worship of the Indians, or the temples of their idols.

It is called the "great one" of their places of worship, in
contradistinction to the small ones around, among which was that now
occupied by the Franciscan convent In my opinion, the solitary arch
found in this convent is very strong, if not conclusive, evidence that
all the ruined buildings scattered over Yucatan were erected by the
very Indians who occupied the country at the time of the Spanish
conquest, or, to fall back upon my old ground, that they were the work
"of the same race of people," or "their not very distant prog