Ch. IX.] THE EL SALTO WATERFALL. 163 



hour's rest, I started with. Velasquez in search of the Indian 

 antiquities. We rode up the right side of the river, high 

 up above the stream, as the hanks are rocky and pre- 

 cipitous ; then down a shelving road to a lower level, 

 and across undulating savannahs thinly timbered. After 

 about three miles, we came out on a small flat plain, pro- 

 bably alluvial, about twenty acres in extent, mostly covered 

 with grass, with a few scattered jicaras trees. On the 

 further end of this plain was a mud- walled, thatched hut, 

 called " El Salto," from a fall of the river close by. A 

 man was lounging about, and a woman bruising maize 

 for tortillas. The man told us that the "worked stones," 

 as he called them, were 011 the side of the plain we had 

 crossed. Before going to look at them, we went down to 

 the river to see the waterfall. Just opposite the house 

 the Juigalpa river, which comes flowing down over a flat 

 bed of trachyte, leapt down a deep narrow chasm that it 

 has cut in the hard rock. This chasm is about fifty feet 

 deep, and only twenty wide. The river was low, and 

 poured all its water in at the end of the deep notch ; but 

 when it is flooded, it must rush in over the sides also, 

 and make a magnificent turmoil of waters. Even when 

 I saw it, the water, as it rushed along at the bottom of 

 the narrow chasm, boiling and surging amongst great 

 masses of fallen rock with a steady roar, looked as if it 

 would carry all before it. Deep pot holes, some of them 

 ten feet deep, were worn into the hard trachyte rock, and 

 sections of sea-coal were shown in the sides of the chasm, 

 which could only have been formed when the falls were 

 many yards lower down. The trachyte is very hard and 

 tough ; and the sections of the pot-holes are as fresh as 

 if they had been made but yesterday. 



M 2 



