268 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 



ously a bad set, were then in the village, but he could 

 select those he knew, and would send an alguazil of 

 his own with us all the way. As he did not give us 

 any encouragement to remain, and seemed anxious to 

 hurry us on, we made no objections, and in our anxiety 

 to reach the end of our journey, had a superstitious ap- 

 prehension of the effect of any voluntary delay. 



With the little of daylight that remained, he con- 

 ducted us along the same path trodden by the Indians 

 centuries before, to the top of the cone rising at the cor- 

 ner of the table of land, from which we looked down on 

 one side into an immense ravine several thousand feet 

 in depth, and on the other, over the top of a great 

 mountain range, we saw the village of San Pedro, the 

 end of our next day's journey, and beyond, over the 

 range of the mountains of Palenque, the Lake of Ter- 

 minos and the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the 

 grandest, wildest, and most sublime scenes I ever be- 

 held. On the top were ruins of a church and tower, 

 probably once used as a lookout, and near it were thir- 

 teen crosses erected over the bodies of Indians, who, 

 a century before, tied the hands and feet of the curate, 

 and threw him down the precipice, and were killed and 

 buried on the spot. Every year new crosses are set up 

 over their bodies, to keep alive in the minds of the In- 

 dians the fate of murderers. All around, on almost in- 

 accessible mountain heights, and in the deepest ravines, 

 the Indians have their milpas or corn-patches, living al- 

 most as when the Spaniards broke in upon them, and 

 the justitia pointed with his finger to a region still oc- 

 cupied by the " unbaptized :" the same strange people 

 whose mysterious origin no man knows, and whose des- 

 tiny no man can foretell. Among all the wild scenes 

 of our hurried tour, none is more strongly impressed 



