ied him away from me; I lay down on the platform of the well; the
creaking of the beam served as a sort of lullaby and I had made such
progress that I was not very eager to be interrupted, when an Indian
lad arrived, who had been hunted up by my missing guide, and directed
to show me the ruins. This fact, however, he would not have been able
to communicate, but, fortunately, he was accompanied by an Indian who
spoke Spanish. The latter was an intelligent, middle-aged man, of
highly respectable appearance, but Don Simon told me he was the worst
fellow on the hacienda. He was desperately in love with a girl who did
not live on the estate, and he was in the habit of running away to
visit her, and of being brought back with his arms tied behind him; as
a punishment for a late offence of this kind, he had been prohibited
from going to the fiesta. Through him I had an understanding with my
new guide, and set out again.

In five minutes after leaving the hacienda, we passed between two
mounds of ruins, and, from time to time having glimpses of other
vestiges in the woods, in twenty minutes we came to a mound about
thirty feet high, on the top of which was a ruined building. Here we
dismounted, tied our horses, and ascended the mound. The whole of the
front wall had fallen, together with the front half of the arch; the
interior chamber was filled with dirt and rubbish nearly up to the
cornice, and the arch of the back wall was the only part above ground;
but this, instead of being of smooth stones, like all the others we had
seen in Yucatan, was plastered and covered with paintings, the colours
of which were still bright and fresh. The principal colours were red,
green, yellow, and blue, and at first the lines and figures seemed so
distinct, that I thought I could make out the subjects. The apartment
being filled up with dirt, I stood above the objects, and it was only
by sitting, or rather lying down, that I could examine them. One
subject at first sight struck me as being a representation of the mask
found at Palenque. I was extremely desirous to get this off entire, but
found, by experiments upon other parts of the plaster with the machete,
that it would be impossible to do so, and left it untouched.

In the interest of the work, I did not discover that thousands of
garrapatas were crawling over me. These insects are the scourge of
Yucatan, and altogether they were a more constant source of annoyance
and suffering than any