CAVE OF CACAHUAWAMILPA. 193 
glen, half way up the mountain. The dell was filled with tangled vines 
and shrubbery, growing up among lofty trees that sprung amid the rocks 
and debris of the hill-side. The path to the bottom of it was steep, and 
so covered with tall grass and bushes that it became necessary to send an 
Indian with a machete to cut a path. 
On reaching the stream at the foot of the opposite side, the glen was 
found to be quite as tangled, and an Indian was again despatched to clear 
the way. As he cut, we climbed after each other, slowly and painfully 
over the sharp and rugged rocks. When near the top, however, and in 
sight of the entrance, a tall shelf of rock, slanting at a sharp angle with 
the hill, opposed itself to our farther progress. It was about four yards 
wide — below it the precipice plunged down almost perpendicularly for 
two hundred feet, while there was nothing to grasp but the bare surface 
of the rock, and a few threads of vines that grew from the fissures of the 
impending clifi". A ledge of about three inches had been chipped in this 
rock, along which it was necessary to pass. The barefooted Indians 
crossed as nimbly as cats, and those of our party who wore shoes fol- 
lowed with ease ; but I, in a pair of water-proof, thick-soled boots, and 
with not the steadiest head over steep places, found the transit exceedingly 
difficult. I hung on, however, by the vines, and succeeded in crossing 
in a very lubberly manner. 
The Indian women with our tortillas, and the detachment we had des- 
patched in the morning with our cold ham, beef and sardines, had already 
arrived. There was a huge rock with a flat surface, upon which we 
spread our viands — fruit, cocoanuts, and pines — and made as picturesque 
a breakfast table as ever was longed for by a pic-nic party within a hun- 
dred miles of London. 
CAVERN OF CACAHUAWAMILPA. 
I was one of the last to leave the entrance of the cave, which hangs m 
a huge arch of sixty feet span, fringed with a curtain of vines and trop- 
ical plants. Our party preceded me for some distance along the road 
that descends rapidly for the first hundred yards. Each one of the 
guides, Indians, and travellers, carried a light; and when I saw the 
swarthy crew, with their savage features, long hair, and outlandish dress, 
disappearing gradually until nothing was left but the dot-like glimmer of 
their torches in the distance, it seemed more like some spectacle of witch- 
craft in melodrama, than an actual scene occurring among folks on earth. 
I lit my torch and followed. 
The first hundred yards brings you to the bottom of the cavern, and, 
if not warned in time, you are likely to plunge at this season of the year, 
up to your knees in the water. You cross a small lake, and immedi 
