d well
dressed in the style and costume of the capital, and under the corridor
of a corner house, with an arbour projecting into the plaza, music was
sounding to summon the people to a ball. From desolation and solitude
we had come into the midst of gayeties, festivities, and rejoicings.
But amid this gay scene the eye turned involuntarily to immense mounds
rising grandly above the tops of the houses, from which the whole city
had been built, without seeming to diminish their colossal proportions,
proclaiming the power of those who reared them, and destined,
apparently, to stand, when the feebler structures of their more
civilized conquerors shall have crumbled into dust.

[Engraving 69: Gigantic Head]

One of these great mounds, having at that time benches upon it,
commanding a view of the bullfight in the plaza, blocked up the yard of
the house we occupied, and extended into the adjoining yard of the
Senora Mendez, who was the owner of both. It is, perhaps, two hundred
feet long and thirty high. The part in our yard was entirely ruined,
but in that of the senora it appeared that its vast sides had been
covered from one end to the other with colossal ornaments in stucco,
most of which had fallen, but among the fragments is the gigantic head
represented in the plate opposite. It is seven feet eight inches in
height and seven feet in width. The ground-work is of projecting
stones, which are covered with stucco. A stone one foot six inches long
protrudes from the chin, intended, perhaps, for burning copal on, as a
sort of altar. It was the first time we had seen an ornament of this
kind upon the exterior of any of these structures. In sternness and
harshness of expression it reminded us of the idols at Copan, and its
colossal proportions, with the corresponding dimensions of the mound,
gave an unusual impression of grandeur.

Two or three streets distant from the plaza, but visible in all its
huge proportions, was the most stupendous mound we had seen in the
country, being, perhaps, six or seven hundred feet long and sixty feet
high, which, we ascertained beyond all doubt, had interior chambers.

Turning from these memorials of former power to the degraded race that
now lingers round them, the stranger might run wild with speculation
and conjecture, but on the north side of the plaza is a monument that
recalls his roving thoughts, and holds up to his gaze a leaf in
history. It is the great church and convent of Franci