218 THE CLIMATIC FACTOR AS ILLUSTRATED IN ARID AMERICA. 



moderately healthful. The people are in advance of the poor denizens of the forest zone, 

 but are miserably inefficient, idle, weak-willed, and immoral. The real strength of Guate- 

 mala is in the highlands, where the vegetation takes on an aspect suggestive of the temperate 

 zone. There, on the plateau amid pine-clad hills, all the large towns are now located. 

 The conditions of health, from a tropical point of view, are everywhere good. Typhus, 

 dysentery, and other disorders, to be sure, often sweep the country; and faces pitted by 

 small-pox are frequently seen. These diseases, however, although causing a high death- 

 rate, are temporary. Their ravages are as nothing compared with those of the deadly 

 malarial fevers which in the lowland forests return season after season to blight and destroy 

 the same places and the same people. 



From the coast upward, according to universal testimony, the health, energy, industry, 

 and thrift of the native Guatemalans in general show an increase. It seems a curious 

 reversal of what we are wont to call normal conditions, when one sees rich, fertile plains 

 along the coast almost uninhabited, then finds the population fairly dense on steeply 

 sloping, stony mountain-sides at altitudes of 3,000 to 5,000 feet, and finally on the hilly 

 plateau (at 8,000 feet) sees little thatched houses clustering thickly everywhere, and every 

 available bit of land almost as carefully and industriously cultivated as in China. Even 

 more curious, perhaps, is the fact that here, where the population is now so dense, there are 

 relatively few important ruins and none of the advanced type found in Peten. There is 

 no reason to think that ruins which once existed have disappeared to any greater extent 

 than has happened in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Rome, or any other country where a high civili- 

 zation in the past has been followed by a dense population at present. 



Moreover, ruins of a certain Idnd are found in considerable numbers, but they are 

 insignificant and probably of late date compared with those of Peten. The carved stones 

 which one sees, for example, at Guarda Viejo, near Guatemala City, are relatively small, 

 crudely executed, and inartistic, utterly different from the clean-cut, highly complex, and 

 truly artistic stelaj of enormous size at Quirigua. The plain, almost unadorned structures 

 at Quiche, the greatest ruins on the plateau, bear to the highly developed groups of buildings 

 and monuments at Copan about the same relation that modern Guatemalan churches bear 

 to St. Peter's at Rome. (See Plate 10, page 211; Plate 11, page 218; and Plate 12, page 

 230.) In the days of the Mayas the highlands may have been as densely populated as 

 to-day, although we have no positive proof of this, but instead of being the center of the 

 life and activity of the country they were a provincial outpost. 



Beyond the highlands, our third division (the Pacific forest) resembles the Atlantic 

 forest in certain ways, but with interesting points of difference. As already explained, 

 the lower slopes of the mountains and the inner edge of the piedmont plain (from an altitude 

 of about 500 to 4,000 feet) are covered with dense vegetation. At an altitude of approxi- 

 mately 2,000 to 3,000 feet the vegetation attains the dignity of real tropical forest with 

 mahogany trees, tree ferns, and the like, while on either side it assumes the form of forest- 

 like jungle merging gradually into pine forest toward the uplands and into jungle and bush 

 toward the coast. All except the upper mountainous part of the region is malarial and 

 unhealthful, although not so bad as the Atlantic forest because the drainage is better. 

 The strip of real forest would to-day be practically uninliabited were it not that the demands 

 of the modern civilized world have led to the cultivation of coffee, chiefly by German 

 companies with Indian labor brought from the highlands. Lower down, on the edge of 

 the plain, there would be a small population even without the impetus of coffee. A few 

 little towns like Retalhuleu, Santa Lucia, and Escuintla date back many centuries. They 

 are notoriously unhealthful, however; their inhabitants are universally pronounced in- 

 efficient and apathetic; and their population of 2,000 to 12,000 people is only 10 to 20 per 

 cent as large as that of corresponding towns on the plateau. Yet here, curiously enough, 

 we again find abundant traces of an ancient race of relatively high culture. The ruins are 



