Green Mansions

Out of Mexico came the story of an ancient, charming and all but extinct people--the Lacandon Indians in the remote southern state of Chiapas, who trace their beginnings to the ancient Mayans. Husky, gun-toting Gertrude Duby, a Swiss explorer, visited the Lacandones in Chiapas, returned to Mexico City last week with many a tale about them.

The Little People. Lacandones rarely grow more than five feet tall. No more than 200 of them survive. Their thatched huts are hidden deep in the forest, approached by secret paths. They are hunters and farmers. But they work only when and as they please. When they want to do nothing, they do nothing.

Lacandon girls get engaged when they are five or six years old. The elders believe in long engagements; not until the girls are ten or eleven, and old enough to make tortillas, are they permitted to marry. The Lacandones are polygamous in theory. In practice, the scarcity of women limits most of them to one wife. Husbands sometimes lend their wives to distinguished callers, are much upset if the offer is refused.

Following tribal custom the men do not cut their hair. But men & women are equally beardless; both sexes wear indeterminate gowns. All of them are intensely modest. When Miss Duby and a doctor in her party gave them medical injections, to kill the parasitic flies which often lodge in their skins, they acted as though they were being seduced.

The Peaceful People. In the 17th Century, Spanish friars and soldiers failed to convert the Lacandones, who still worship Mayan gods. Unlike some of their fierce, Christianized Indian neighbors, the Lacandones seldom fight, almost never commit murder. They moan and chant, burn incense of copal and rubber at the altars of jungle-grown Mayan cities 1,500 years old. In a cave near a blue, sacred lake lives an evil minor god. Two Lacandones, sick with fright, guided Miss Duby there. In the cave was an ancient stone idol; on the entrance were carved hieroglyphics. The last of the Mayans begged her to read them, but she could not.

The Lacandones know little about the outside world. When told that Mexico once had a "landlord" (Spain), an old man replied: "There are no landlords here; only water, trees and sky." They had heard that a German lived in Ocozingo, a tiny Mexican settlement on the edge of their territory. When World War II was described to them, they got a vague idea that there must be much going on in Ocozingo.

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