e at work was one who,
while we were lunching, sitting apart under a tree, mentioned these
ruins in exaggerated terms, particularly a row of painted soldiers, as
he called them, which, from his imperfect description, I supposed might
bear some resemblance to the stuccoed figures on the fronts of the
buildings at Palenque; but, on pushing my inquiries, he said these
figures carried muskets, and was so pertinacious on this point that I
concluded he was either talking entirely at random, or of the remains
of old Spanish structures. I noted the place in my memorandum-book, and
having had it for a long time upon our minds, and received more
different accounts of it than of any other, none proved more unlike
what we expected to find. We looked for few remains, but these
distinguished for their beauty and ornament, and high state of
preservation, instead of which we found an immense field, grand,
imposing, and interesting from its vastness, but all so ruined that,
with the exception of this one building, little of the detail could be
discovered.

Back of this building, or, rather, on the other front, was a thriving
tobacco patch, the only thriving thing we saw at Iturbide; and on the
border another ancient well, now, as in ages past, furnishing water,
and from which the Indian attending the tobacco patch gave us to drink.
Beyond were towering mounds and vestiges, indicating the existence of a
greater city than any we had yet encountered. In wandering among them
Dr. Cabot and myself counted thirty-three, all of which had once held
buildings aloft. The field was so open that they were all comparatively
easy of access, but the mounds themselves were overgrown. I clambered
up them till the work became tiresome and unprofitable; they were all,
as the Indians said, puras piedras, pure stones; no buildings were
left; all had fallen; and though, perhaps, more than at any other
place, happy that it was our fortune to wander among these crumbling
memorials of a once powerful and mysterious people, we almost mourned
that our lot had not been cast a century sooner, when, as we believed,
all these edifices were entire.

CHAPTER XI.

End of Journey in this Direction.--Lake of Peten.--Probable Existence
of Ruins in the Wilderness.--Islands in the Lake of Peten.--Peten
Grande.--Mission of two Monks.--Great Idol of the Figure of a
Horse.--Broken by the Monks, who in Consequence are obliged to
leave the