ious slate-coloured beads of burnt clay. People of the district
reported, however, that small jars of earthenware had been found in
the _bovedas_. No doubt the absence of skeletons was due solely to the
length of time that had elapsed, for even in the cemetery of the church
Mr. Hartman found similar tombs that contained several skeletons. These
tombs were indicated by the same kind of stone circuits as the rest,
but were only about three feet down in the hard clay, and had no slabs
in front of the entrance. In one of them Mr. Hartman found six corpses
more or less decomposed, the sepulchre having evidently been used
for a long time. In the same cemetery the Mexicans buried their dead.

I continued my journey down the river through the country once
inhabited by the Tubars. As the heat was intense, I availed myself
of the light of the full moon and travelled at night. Now and then
the read touched the big river where the croaking of the frogs was
intensely doleful and monotonous, but withal so loud that on a quiet
night like this they could easily be heard two miles off.

Warm winds fanned me to sleep, and only when my mule ran me against
some spiny branch, did I wake to find myself in a fantastic forest of
leafless, towering cacti, that stood motionless, black, and silent
in the moonlight, like spectres with numberless arms uplifted. The
overwhelming noise of the frogs seemed to voice their thoughts and
forbid me to advance farther. But the mule accelerated its pace, the
shadows glided quicker and quicker, up and down the stony, slippery
path that wound its way through this ghostly forest.

In the daytime there was a disagreeably strong, warm wind blowing,
making it difficult even to get the saddles on our mules, but the
nights were calm. At the pueblo of San Ignacio nobody speaks the
Tubar tongue. Blue herons have a permanent breeding-place here on
an almost perpendicular rock, four to six hundred feet high, where
I counted twenty nests.

In travelling down to Tierra Caliente there is one place at which
one must leave the river and ascend to the pine region. This is below
the village of Tubares. The river narrows here and forms rapids, and
it has been calculated that the water in flood-time rises sixty-five
feet. Alligators do not go above these rapids. In two days' journey
from Morelos one may reach the undulating country of Sinaloa, _la
costa_, which is warmer even than the barrancas.

At San Ignacio I left the r