[361] The word Gumarcaah means "rotten huts," according to Ximénez; translating this name into their own tongue, the Mexicans called the city Utatlán, "place of reed fields." When the Spaniards arrived, it was the most important city in Central America. In his first letter to Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, the conqueror of Guatemala, describes it in a few words saying: "This city is well built and marvelously strong." Bishop Las Casas, who arrived in Guatemala a few years after the Conquest, says in his Apologética Historia that he saw "towns enclosed by very deep moats, as was the one called Guatemala [Iximché, capital of the Cakchiquel kingdom], and another which was indeed the head of the kingdom, called Utatlán, with marvelous buildings of stone masonry of which I saw many." Another witness of that time, Dr. Alonso de Zorita, a contemporary of Las Casas, writes in his Historia de la Nueva España: "Utatlán, which is in the Province of Guatimala, was also considered by the natives of that land as a great sanctuary, and there were in it and around it many and very large temples which they call cues, of marvelous construction, and I saw some of them when I visited that land, being there Oidor in the royal Audiencia which has its residence in Guatimala, although they were in a state of ruin."
A brief but graphic description remains from the French architect, César Daly, who visited Utatlán in 1857 and says of it that "it is one of the architectural curiosities of the world: three mounds which come from a kind of abyss or ravine and which are crowned by table-lands which support cities." Daly passed close to seven weeks in the central city and made plans and drawings of this metropolis, as well as of Iximché, the capital of the Cakchiquel. See "Notes pouvant servir à l'exploration des anciens monuments du Mexique," in Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Mexique (Paris, 1865), I, 146-61.
D. Miguel Rivera Maestre made a reconnaissance of the site of Utatlán and published a map and some pictures of the ruins of the Quiché capital in the Atlas of the state of Guatemala (1832). In the narrative of his trip to Central America John L. Stephens says that he used the report of Rivera Maestre in his description of that ancient city, which he visited in 1840. The great English archaeologist Alfred P. Maudslay visited the cities of Utatlán and Iximché in January, 1887, and made surveys of the two sites. He describes the Quiché and Cakchiquel country and the Indian capitals in Volume II of Archaeology, of the Biologia Centrali-Americana, as well as in his magnificent book and that of his wife: A Glimpse at Guatemala (1899).
The historians of the Colonial Period have also left more or less exact descriptions of the capital of the Quiché and of the temple of Tohil. The clearest of these is that of Ximénez (Las Historias del origen de los Indios de esta Provincia de Guatemala, 165-67) which, summarized, is as follows: The temple, or place of worship, and the rest of the buildings of Gumarcaah were constructed over a hill surrounded by a large ravine. On top of the plateau which the hill forms were the twenty-four large houses of the lords, built around so as to make small courts, each one like a large room raised about two yards from the ground, with a corridor and straw roof. In these little courts the large dances which they had during their feasts were held. In the middle of one of these small courts a solid tower was erected which went up in the form of a pyramid with square base, having stairs on each one of its faces, and in the comers was a bastion which also tapered upward. The steps were very narrow and close, so that it was frightening to climb them; there were about thirty or forty steps in each stair-way, and all were made of stone.
Near the temple or tower, at one side, there was a thick wall one and one-half meters high by two meters wide, crowned with another, close to three meters in height and also two meters in width. This had many openings through which the ropes used to bind the victims, who were to be sacrificed, were passed, so that they faced toward the god. This tower dominated all the courts where the people assembled and all could see the image of Tohil.
At the other side of the temple was the ball-court which Ximénez describes as a large pool with very large sides of stone, with their coronations or pyramids which surrounded it; they were very wide and could hold many people in them to watch the ball games which were the entertainment of the kings and the rest of
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