ng them, his costume would have been as equivocal as his new
complexion, for he had attired himself in the scarlet coat of a British
officer of rank, with several blazing stars of glass jewels, surmounted
by a white Panama hat, in which clustered an airy profusion of ladies'
ostrich feathers, dyed blue at the edges.

In passing the spot of the recent skirmish, they found that nine horses
and two men had been killed, the latter unintentionally, besides the
rifleman of their own party. Many other horses were lying wounded, in
the struggles of death, and several of their riders were seated on the
ground, disabled by bruises or dislocations. Huertis' men buried their
comrades in a grave hastily dug with the spears which lay around him,
while the Iximayans laid their dead and wounded upon horses, to be
conveyed to a village on the plain. The former, it was found, were
consumed there the next day, in funereal fires, with idolatrous rites;
and it was observed by the travellers that the native soldiers regarded
their dead with emotions of extreme sensibility, and almost feminine
grief, like men wholly unaccustomed to scenes of violent death. But
Velasquez remarks, that the strongest emotion evinced by the young
chief, throughout their intercourse, was when he heard the word
"Iximaya," in interpreting for Huertis. He then seemed to be smitten and
subdued, by blank despair, as if he felt that the city and its location
were already familiarly known to the foreign world.

As already intimated, the distance to the city was about six miles. The
expedition found the road to it bordered, on either side, as far as the
eye could reach, with a profuse and valuable vegetation, the result of
evidently assiduous and skilful culture. Indigo, corn, oats, a curious
five-eared wheat, gourds, pine-apples, esculent roots, pulse, flax, and
hemp, the white as well as the crimson cotton, vineyards, and fruit
orchards, grew luxuriantly in large, regularly divided fields, which
were now ripe for the harvest. The villages, large and populous, were
mostly composed of flat-roofed dwellings with broad overhanging eaves or
architraves, supported by heavy columns, often filletted over spiral
flutings, in the Egyptian style, and generally terminating in foliaged
capitals, of the same character. None of the houses were mean, while
many were superb; and of the mosque-like larger buildings, which
occasionally appeared, and which were supposed to be rural temples