128 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
roar, looked as if it would carry all before it. Deep pot-holes, 
some of them ten feet deep, were worn into the trachyte rock, 
and sections of several 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. 
The sections of the pot-holes are as fresh as if they had been 
made but yesterday. 
In reply to my assertion that the falls had produced, and 
were now working back the chasm, our guide, the lounging 
man from the house, said the rocks had always been as they 
were: he had lived there ten years, and there had been no 
change in them. Perhaps, if the buried Indians could rise 
from their graves where they were laid to rest more than three 
hundred years ago, they, too, would testify that there had 
been no change, that the rocks and the leaping river were 
as they had been and would be for ever. The untrained 
mind cannot grasp the idea of the effect of slowly-acting 
influences extending over vast periods of time. 
We asked the guide if there were any cairns near, and he 
said there was one on the top of a neighbouring hill. Up 
this we climbed. It was the rounded spur of a range behind, 
jutting out into the small plain before mentioned, and might 
be partly artificial. On the summit, which commanded a 
fine view of the country around, with the white cliffs and 
dark woods of the Amerrique range in front, was an Indian 
cairn, elliptical in shape, about thirty feet long and twenty 
broad. Several small trees had sprung up amongst the stones. 
Near the centre two holes had been dug down about four 
feet deep. Our guide told us that he and his brother had 
made them, to hide themselves in from the soldiers during 
the last revolutionary outbreak. Not a very likely story, 
that they should have chosen the top of a bare hill for a 
hiding-place, when all around in the valleys there were 
thickets of brushwood. He said they had found nothing 
in the holes. We, however, soon found fragments of two 
broken cinerary urns, one of fine clay, painted with red and 
black, the other much coarser and stronger, without ornament. 
The custom of the Chontales Indians appears to have been 
to burn their dead, and place the ashes in a thin painted urn, 
inclosed within a stronger one. This was buried, along with 
the stone for grinding maize, and a cairn of stones built over 
