uide.

It was not till eleven o'clock the next day that I was able to set out,
and I had as a guide a major domo of another hacienda, who, being, as I
imagined, vexed at being obliged to leave the fiesta, and determined to
get me off his hands as soon as possible, set out at a swinging trot.
The sun was scorching, the road broad, strait, and stony, and without a
particle of shade, but in forty minutes, both considerably heated, we
reached the hacienda of Sijoh, two leagues distant.

This hacienda belonged to a brother of Don Simon, then resident in Vera
Cruz, and was under the latter's charge. Here my guide passed me over
into the hands of an Indian, and rode back as fast as he could to the
fair. The Indian mounted another horse, and, continuing a short
distance on the same road through the lands of the hacienda, we turned
off to the right, and in five minutes saw in the woods to our left,
near the road, a high mound of ruins of that distinctive character once
so strange, but now so familiar to me, proclaiming the existence
another unknown, nameless, desolate, and ruined city.

We continued on to another mound nearer than the first, where we
dismounted and tied our horses to the bushes. This mound was a solid
mass of masonry, about thirty feet high, and nearly square. The stones
were large, one at the corner measuring six feet in length by three in
width, and the sides were covered with thorns and briers. On the south
side was a range of steps still in good condition, each fifteen inches
high, and in general three feet long. On the other sides the stones
rose in a pyramidal form, but without steps. On the top was a stone
building, with its wall as high as the cornice standing. Above this the
facade had fallen, but the mass of stone and mortar which formed the
roof remained, and within the apartment was precisely like the interior
of the buildings at Uxmal, having the same distinctive arch. There were
no remains of sculpture, but the base of the mound was encumbered with
fallen stones, among which were some about three feet long, dug out so
as to form a sort of trough, the same as we had seen at Uxmal, where
they were called pilas or fountains.

Leaving this, we returned through the woods to the mound we had first
seen. This was perhaps sixty feet high, and was a mere mass of fallen
stone. Whatever it might have been, its features were entirely lost,
and but for the structure I had just seen, and the waste of ruins in