Dead Cities

Out of it all but this remains:     I was with one who crossed wide chains     Of the Cordilleras, whose peaks     Lock in the wilds of Yucatan,     Chiapas and Honduras. Weeks     And then a city that no man     Had ever seen; so dim and old,     No chronicle has ever told     The history of men who piled     Its temples and huge teocallis     Among mimosa-blooming valleys;     Or how its altars were defiled     With human blood; whose idols there     With eyes of stone still stand and stare.     So old the moon can only know     How old, since ancient forests grow     On mighty wall and pyramid.     Huge cebas, whose trunks were scarred     With ages, and dense yuccas, hid     Fanes 'mid the cacti, scarlet-starred.     I looked upon its paven ways,     And saw it in its kingliest days;     When from the lordly palace one,     A victim, walked with prince and priest,     Who turned brown faces toward the east     In worship of the rising sun:     At night ten hundred temples' spires     On gold burnt everlasting fires.     Uxmal? Palenque? or Copan?     I know not. Only how no man     Had ever seen; and still my soul     Believes it vaster than the three.     Volcanic rock walled in the whole,     Lost in the woods as in some sea.     I only read its hieroglyphs,     Perused its monster monoliths     Of death, gigantic heads; and read     The pictured codex of its fate,     The perished Toltec; while in hate     Mad monkeys cursed me, as if dead     Priests of its past had taken form     To guard its ruined shrines from harm.