QUIEIGUA. 3 



until a water-tight roof had been made over the monument which was to be moulded. 

 At one time the flood-water covered all but a few feet of ground on which our palm- 

 leaf shanty had been built; everything in camp turned green with mould and mildew, 

 snakes and scorpions became very troublesome, and mosquitos were a continual 

 torment. Worst of all, the sick-list increased daily until twelve of the Indians were 

 down with fever at the same time, and all the sound ones ran away to their homes. 



I had then to undertake a long journey to the Vera Paz, and after a tedious search 

 was able to engage and bring back with me another company of labourers. Towards 

 the end of March the weather became hot and dry, and after my return to the ruins 

 we were able to work on without interruption until the end of the first week in May. 

 By that time I had secured a complete set of photographs of the monuments, 

 Mr. Giuntini, who had worked on steadily during my absence, had finished a plaster 

 mould of the Great Turtle (a mould which numbered over six hundred pieces, and had 

 consumed nearly two tons of plaster), and he had also moulded the most interesting 

 portions of two other monuments; and with the aid of my half-caste companions 

 I had made a paper mould of every inscription in hieroglyphics or picture-writing 

 which we could find in the ruins. 



Before the last of our carefully packed cargoes of paper-moulds had reached the 

 port tremendous thunderstorms accompanied by heavy showers of rain were of daily 

 occurrence, and the mountain-track had again become an alternation of mud-hole 

 and watercourse, but fortunately the moulds escaped damage. 



My next visit to Quirigua was in company with my wife, in the year 1894. 



We had passed the winter in travelling through Guatemala, and after camping for a 

 month at the ruins of Copan arrived at the village of Quirigua on the 30th March. 

 We found the place almost deserted, the villagers having formed a new settlement on 

 the banks of the Motagua, about three quarters of a mile distant from the ruins. 



On our way from the old to the new settlement we crossed the graded track 

 of the railroad from Puerto Barrios to the capital. The rails had not yet been laid, 

 but the line is now, I believe, open for traffic as far as Zacapa. During the next 

 fortnight we lived in a small rancho on the outskirts of the new settlement, which had 

 been put up for our accommodation by Mr. Price (my companion at Palenque), who 

 had come over from Belize early in March to see to the clearing away of the dense 

 vegetation which again hid the monuments from sight. 



I had brought with me from England drawings of the inscriptions made by 

 Mr. E. Lambert and Miss Annie Hunter from the plaster casts in the South Kensington 

 Museum, and most of my time was occupied in testing the accuracy of these drawings 

 by comparing them with the original carvings. Mr. Price looked after the native 

 workmen and laid out the lines for a careful survey of the site of the ruins, and 

 Gorgonio Lopez was engaged in making paper moulds of some of the sculptured stela?. 



On the 14th of April my wife and I had to start for Livingston, in order to catch 



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