ull sight, dilapidated, and having fragments of
walls on the top. We ascended the highest, which commanded a
magnificent view of the great wooded plain, and at a distance the
towers of the church of Ticul rising darkly above. The cura told me
that in the dry season, when the trees were bare of foliage, he had
counted from this point thirty-six mounds, every one of which had once
held aloft a building or temple, and not one now remained entire. In
the great waste of ruins it was impossible to form any idea of what the
place had been, except from its vastness and the specimens of
sculptured stone seen in the village, but beyond doubt it was of the
same character as Uxmal, and erected by the same people. Its vicinity
to the village had made its destruction more complete. For generations
it had served as a mere quarry to furnish the inhabitants with
building-stone. The present proprietor was then excavating and selling,
and he lamented to me that the piedra labrada, or worked stone, was
nearly exhausted, and his profit from this source cut off.

A few words toward identifying these ruins. The plan for reducing
Yucatan was to send a small number of Spaniards, who were called
_vecinos_ (the name still used to designate the white population), into
the Indian towns and villages where it was thought advisable to make
settlements. We have clear and authentic accounts of the existence of a
large Indian town called Ticul, certainly in the same neighbourhood
where the Spanish village of that name now stands. It must have been
either on the site now occupied by the latter, or on that occupied by
the ruins of San Francisco. Supposing the first supposition to be
correct, not a single vestige of the Indian city remains. Now it is
incontestible that the Spaniards found in the Indian towns of Yucatan,
mounds, temples, and other large buildings of stone. If those on the
hacienda of San Francisco are of older date, and the work of races who
have passed away, as vast remains of them still exist, though subject
to the same destroying causes, why has every trace of the stone
buildings in the Indian city disappeared?

And it appears in every page of the history of the Spanish conquest,
that the Spaniards never attempted to occupy the houses and villages of
the Indians as they stood. Their habits of life were inconsistent with
such occupation, and, besides, their policy was to desolate and destroy
them, and build up others after their own style