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of good quality, a richer soil producing weak fiber and an excess 
of fleshy tissue in the leaf. 
Henequen, or sisal, is the commercial name of the fiber of 
Agave rigida, known to the Yucatecos as sacet. The ancient 
Mayas used this fiber for making the ropes with which huge 
stones were dragged to the summits of their pyramids and tem- 
ples. There are now about four hundred plantations in Yucatan, 
comprising about a million acres, which yield 600,000 bales a 
year, valued at twenty million dollars. The plants are propa- 
gated from sprouts, cuttings, or seed. Very little preparation or 
cultivation of the soil is necessary. Six or eight years after 
planting, the two lowest rings of leaves are cut, and this is con- 
tinued each year for eight or ten years, when the plant produces 
a long flower-stalk and dies. The instrument used for cutting 
the leaves, called corba, is something like a machete, but is 
hooked at the end. e cut leaves are stripped of their spines 
and mashed to a pulp in huge crushers, after which the mass of 
fibers, about a yard in length, is cleaned, combed, dried, and 
compressed into bales for shipment. The fiber is woven into 
ropes, binder-twine, etc. In Yucatan, very fine hammocks are 
made of it, which sometimes sell for a hundred dollars or more. 
Merida is now a very attractive city of 45,000 inhabitants, with 
splendid streets and a perfect system of sewerage, presenting the 
strongest contrast to conditions there a few years ago. The sec- 
tion occupied by the homes of owners of henequen plantations is 
particularly attractive. A feature of Merida is the great number 
of windmills employed. The porous nature of the coral rock 
causes the water to sink some distance below the surface, where 
it runs in underground currents. These currents may sometimes 
be reached by natural openings or caverns, called locally cenotes. 
The soil used in gardens and plazas has been brought from hills 
in the interior of the peninsula, and trees have been planted in 
openings blasted in solid rock. ; 
At daybreak on the morning of December 9, we left Progesso 
for Veracruz, arriving the next day about noon, eight days after 
leaving New York. Veracruz is another city which has been en- 
tirely transformed in the past few years. The streets are asphalted 
