them, decapitating most and breaking a great many of the beautiful
statues wrought by their subjects in their honor, as mementoes by
which they remembered and venerated their memories. Chaacmol, whose
hiding place they ignored, as they did that of his elder brother,
_Huuncay_, whose statue is still where his friends deposited it, 12
meters under the surface of the ground, escaped the fury of the
enraged iconoclasts. Not so, however, the effigies and emblems that
adorned and surmounted the monuments raised to perpetuate the
remembrance of their most beneficent government, and the love they
professed for their people. Even these monuments themselves were
afterwards disgraced, being used as places for histrionic
performances.

The places of concealment of these and other most precious relics,
amongst them probably the libraries of the _H-Menes_ or learned and
wise men, yet to be excavated, were revealed to my wife and myself
on deciphering some hieroglyphics, mural paintings and bas-reliefs.

On the 5th of January, 1876, I conducted the statue of Chaacmol on
the road to [C]itas, and at about a quarter of a mile from Piste,
that is to say, far enough to put it out of the reach of mischief
from the soldiers of the post, I placed it in a thicket about 50
yards from the road. There, with the help of Mrs. Le Plongeon, I
wrapped it in oil-cloth, and carefully built over it a thatched
roof, in order to protect it from the inclemencies of the
atmosphere. Leaving it surrounded by a brush fence, we carefully
closed the boughs on the passage that led from the road to the
place of concealment, so that a casual traveller, ignorant of the
existence of such an object, would not even suspect it. Many a day
our only meal has consisted of a hard Indian cake and a bit of
garlic and water.

The queen of Itza is represented under the effigy of an _ara_,
eating a human heart, on several bas-reliefs that adorned the
monuments she raised to the beloved of her own heart, Chaacmol. The
scene of his death is impressively portrayed on the walls which the
queen caused to be raised to the memory of her husband, in the two
exquisite rooms, the ruins of which are yet to be seen upon the
south end of the east wall of the gymnasium. Those rooms were a
shrine indeed, but