162 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



when reduced to the last extremity, the survivors, to the number of 2,000, threw 

 themselves with their wives and children over the precipice. 



A few miles west of Chiapa, in a lateral valley of the Grijalva, lies the little 

 town of Taxtla, which was for a few years made the capital of the state to punish 

 the rebellious inhabitants of San Cristobal Las Casas, the present capital. This place 

 stands on the site of the old Indian city of Ghouel or Ilue-Zacatlan. It has received 

 its present designation of Las Casas in honour of the valiant defender of the Indians, 

 Bartholomew de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas. Beyond the Anahuac plateau San 

 Cristobal is the highest city in Mexico, though the estimates of its altitude vary 

 from 6,240 to 7,000 feet. 



San Juan Bautista, formerly VUla Ilevmosa, capital of Tabasco, is a small 

 place occupying an opening in the extensive forest which covers the whole of the 

 delta region. It is connected by a short railway with the Grijalva, and thus com- 

 mands the magnificent system of navigable waterways ramifying over a district 

 many hundred square miles in extent, reaching from the delta to the neck of the 

 Yucatan peninsula. Though at present destitute even of carriage roads, the capital 

 is destined in the near future to become a con verging- point for the railways running 

 north, east and south towards Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala. Its outlet on the 

 Atlantic is the port of Frontora (Guadalape), on the right bank of the Grijalva. 



The Usiimacinta, which joins the Grijalva above Frontera, has no towns in 

 the part of its vast basin comprised within the Mexican States of Chiapas, Tabasco 

 and Campeachy. Palenque, or the " Palisade," the best-known place in this 

 region, is a mere village lying at an altitude of about 350 feet on one of the 

 last slopes of the plateau limited by the alluvial plains of the Usumacinta. 

 Palenque, founded during the second half of the sixteenth centur}^ under the 

 patronage of Santo Domingo, soon acquired great importance as a centre of the 

 transit trade and converging-point of the numerous tracks around the low-lying 

 plains with their ramifying system of countless canals. Despite its isolated 

 position in the midst of forests, it also became during the last century the chief 

 station for caravans journeying between Guatemala and Campeachy. But the 

 shifting of the trade routes has again consigned it to solitude. 



About ten miles south-west of Palenque lie the imposing ruins of a forest- 

 grown cit}' whose very name has perished, though supposed to have been either 

 Naclian or Colhuacan, the " Serpent City." The inhabitants of Palenque were 

 unaware of its existence till the middle of the last century, when the ruins were 

 accidentally discovered in 1746. Their systematic exploration began in 1773, 

 and since that time they have been frcquentl}^ visited, described, and reproduced 

 in drawings and photographs. But great ravages have been made by the damp 

 climate, the rank vegetation, the fires kindled in the midst of the ruins to clear 

 the ground for tillage, the eagerness of explorers to enrich public museums or 

 their private collections, by ignorant travellers carrying off souvenirs of their 

 visit, and even by the wanton love of destruction. The largest structure, known 

 as the palacio, appears to have really been a " palace " of some kind, or the 

 residence of a religious communitj, but certainly not a temple, for it is divided into 



