166 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Aug. io, iyi 2 
STREET “CARNICERIA” OR MEAT MARKET, IN CHILPANCINGO. 
and a church, the former filled with trees and 
flowers and the latter with ancient paintings 
and images of the saints, constitutes the town. 
One thousand persons, mostly Indians, en¬ 
gaged in agriculture and the raising of goats, 
make up the population. 
These Nahuatl tribesmen are practically 
pure descendants of the Aztecs, and are scat¬ 
tered from Mexico City to the Pacific through 
the States of Mexico, Morelos and Guerrero, 
south from the Balsas River to the Rio Papa- 
gallo, and west to the divide of the Sierra 
Madre del Stir mountains. Few of these In¬ 
dians speak Spanish, but still use the old tongue 
of the Montezumas, the dominant language of 
the country when Cortez entered it. Names of 
all the towns in this area south of the Rio 
Balsas are in the Nahuatl language, while to 
the north of that stream, they are in the Tar- 
ascan. South, in the Nahuatl district, not a 
town has a name containing the letter “r”. 
while to the north, the harsh Tarascan tongue 
has plentifully sprinkled the map with guttural 
“r’s”. 
Here in this town the streets follow the 
winding trails of the ancient Indian village, 
which was here years ago, how many the 
natives themselves do not know. Flat-faced, 
with high cheek bones, broad, flat noses, these 
Nalniatls, usually short of stature, force the 
student of humanity into a strong belief in their 
Oriental origin. Carvings on their ruins lead 
one to believe this even more strongly, and 
their black, straight hair adds to the concep¬ 
tion of the transplanting. 
Zumpango del Rio stands on one bank of 
a deep barranca or gully, and, as I stood on 
the side of this barranca, gazing across at the 
brown clay wall one hundred feet away, I real¬ 
ized why the superstitious Nalniatls had 
named the town “Ancient Skulls.” There, 
staring me in the face was a layer of white 
bones, a foot thick, a thousand feet long and 
buried eight feet from the surface. It ap¬ 
peared at first to be merely a stratum of lime¬ 
stone, but when I had obtained permission from 
the Indian owner of the land, and put my men 
at work with rude hoes and shovels, I un¬ 
covered a genuine vein of death, a burial place, 
in which, as the result of some cataclysm of 
nature, thousands of human beings had been 
buried, quite probably, alive. 
Throughout this part of Guerrero the In¬ 
dians have stories of mysterious lights, playing 
along the edge • of this barranca, luminous 
bodies of various shapes which, they believe, 
point to buried treasure. I had often puzzled 
over these stories as they had been told to 
me by Mexicans from this section, but one 
glance at this layer of bones, and the puzzle 
existed no longer. The lights came from the 
phosphorus in the bones, brought into action b;, 
the dampness of the rainy season, just as the 
waters of the marsh bring forth will-o’-the- 
wisps and similar perfectly simple phenomena. 
Like a miner following a vein to the mother 
lode, I followed this vein of bones for half a 
kilometer up the barranca, I came upon traces 
of a prehistoric ruin. On and on I went, until 
I had covered nearly a league more, when the 
site of what had once been a city of fifty thou¬ 
sand inhabitants appeared. Leveled to the 
ground by the hand of nature, nothing remained 
but the foundations of many laid stone houses, 
with regular streets, the ruins of a temple, a 
large square which had been a pyramid, and 
innumerable artifacts of the forgotten race 
which had built it. Here, then, was the source 
of the bones, washed down to the mesa below 
by the giant cloudburst which overwhelmed 
city and people probably centuries before 
Zumpango del Rio had been thought of as a 
village site. 
Much as I would have liked to have gone 
into this ruin, which has never been explored 
by modern scientist, time was too pressing 
and we moved on four hours’ steady ride to the 
puebla of Chalchiutepetl—a Nahuatl word 
meaning “Hill of Jade.” Here the people, 
who speak only the Nahuatl dialect, told me 
that two kilometers further northwest were 
ruins. Thither I went, and found two pyra¬ 
mids, each forty feet high, and about three hun¬ 
dred feet in diameter. These had been origi¬ 
nally small hills, which had been smoothed 
down and then covered with laid stone, ap¬ 
parently with flat spaces at the tops, whereon 
had stood temples. 
An old Indian, who acted as my guide, 
seemed incredulous, when I investigated and 
told him that the pyramids were solid, that they 
contained no tombs, and had been erected 
merely as bases for altars and temples. He 
told me in strict confidence, and with a mys¬ 
terious air, that he had seen a fire burning on 
top of one of the pyramids several months be¬ 
fore. He solemnly assured me that there were 
spirits guarding an immense treasure which lay 
hidden in the heart of the pyramid. 
The next day, on exploring the top of this 
pyramid, I found at the foot of a crowning 
pile of stones,' which had apparently been an 
altar, an earthen jar or olla, containing rosin 
and charcoal, which bore evidence of having 
been on fire quite recently. This doubtless ex¬ 
plained the Indian’s story, as I learned after¬ 
ward that these Nalniatls of Chalchiutepetl still 
adhere to many of their ancient beliefs, and, for 
one, make fire offerings to the deities of their 
ancestors, also propitiating them with fruits 
and flowers. Thus does pagan Aztec Mexico 
still persist in the midst of the Catholic and 
supposedly Christian republic. 
Here I found more jade beads and orna¬ 
ments than I have ever found in all my travels 
in twenty-five years of life in Mexico—but 
where this ancient, valuable green stone, prized 
so highly by the builders of these olden times, 
came from is a mystery to this day. Like the 
grave of Moses, the jade mines of the prehis¬ 
toric tribes of Mexico are lost, apparently for¬ 
ever. The jade of Australia and South Amer¬ 
ica does not resemble the jade found in Mexi¬ 
can ruins, although that of China does resemble 
the jade in my collection to some extent, and 
this resemblance lias given rise to the oft-re¬ 
peated question: Did the people who built the 
ruined cities of Mexico originate in China? 
This no man can answer and prove his reply. 
From my explorations, it appears that ten to 
fifteen million people once inhabited the moun¬ 
tain ranges of Guerrero, where to-day a man 
may ride mile on mile, day on day, without 
seeing a human being. The chances of jade 
being found to-day, therefore, are much less 
than in the days when this section supported a 
large population among whom jade was a high¬ 
ly prized jewel. 
From Chalchiutepetl, we crossed the great 
barranca and rode west one whole day through 
the mountains, crossing the great canon of 
Zopilote (the buzzard) until we came to Cua- 
drilia de Xochicoltzin. This is a small village 
of possibly one .hundred Indians, and here we 
saw for the first time the Pintos in their homes. 
These Pintos are not a tribe, but are members 
of many tribes, afflicted with a horrible disease, 
known as “pinto,” from which they take their 
name. Either parasitical or the result of the 
work of a microbe, this disease manifests itself 
