KE also means a _reed_. To-day the meaning of the
word is lost in Yucatan.

Cogolludo, in his history of Yucatan, speaking of the manner in which
they computed time, says:

"They counted their ages and eras, which they inscribed in their books
every twenty years, in lustrums of four years. * * * When five of these
lustrums were completed, they called the lapse of twenty years _katun_,
which means to place a stone down upon another. * * * In certain sacred
buildings and in the houses of the priests every twenty years they place
a hewn stone upon those already there. When seven of these stones have
thus been piled one over the other began the _Ahau katun_. Then after
the first lustrum of four years they placed a small stone on the top of
the big one, commencing at the east corner; then after four years more
they placed another small stone on the west corner; then the next at the
north; and the fourth at the south. At the end of the twenty years they
put a big stone on the top of the small ones: and the column, thus
finished, indicated a lapse of one hundred and sixty years."

There are other methods for determining the approximate age of the
monuments of Mayab:

1st. By means of their actual orientation; starting from the _fact_ that
their builders always placed either the faces or angles of the edifices
fronting the cardinal points.

2d. By determining the epoch when the mastodon became extinct. For,
since _Can_ or his ancestors adopted the head of that animal as symbol
of deity, it is evident they must have known it; hence, must have been
contemporary with it.

3d. By determining when, through some great cataclysm, the lands became
separated, and all communications between the inhabitants of _Mayab_ and
their colonies were consequently interrupted. If we are to credit what
Psenophis and Sonchis, priests of Heliopolis and Sais, said to Solon
"that nine thousand years before, the visit to them of the Athenian
legislator, in consequence of great earthquakes and inundations, the
lands of the West disappeared in one day and a fatal night," then we may
be able to form an idea of the antiquity of the ruined cities of America
and their builders.

Reader, I have brought before you, without comments, some of the FACTS,
that after ten years of research, the paintings on the walls of
_Chaacmol's_ funeral chamber, the sculptured inscriptions carved on the
stones of the crumbling monuments of Yucatan, and a comparative study