198 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Aug. i7, 1912 
r - 
CITY OF TIXTLA, GUERRERO, ANCIENT CAPITAL OF STATE. 
objects, of which we had come in search, were 
highly treasured ,bv the Indians who believed, as 
did their fathers, that they were the images of 
the gods of the air. The chief commanded all 
his Indians to refuse to lend us any assistance 
in digging into the mounds or other prehistoric 
remains scattered thickly about this village. He 
also hinted that we were spies, and would report 
the procession of the night before, which had 
been held contrary to law, to the authorities in 
Mexico City. 
We replied to the chief, at a formal meeting 
with him, exhibiting my concession and other¬ 
wise showing evidences of our exact intentions, 
but he professed not to believe us, and even 
went so far as to order his townspeople to sell 
us no corn, and if possible to avoid it, not even 
to let us have water for ourselves or for our ani¬ 
mals. I left the inhospitable village, therefore, 
and after a day's steady riding across hills and 
barrancas, arrived again at Xochipala, the town 
from which I had started on the memorable trip 
four years before, the trip on which I had found 
the vast ruins of Yerbabuena. Here we were 
received like long lost brothers by the chief, wh > 
immediately provided us with the same guide 1 
had had on the previous journey, and who prom¬ 
ised to go through the entire length and breadth 
of the ruins, ghosts or no ghosts. 
When we arrived at Xochipala, a monster 
dance, in which practically every inhabitant of 
the village was taking part, was in full swing. 
Some clad fantastically in the skins of animals 
and some in tight-fitting trousers or loose-flowing 
skirts, according to their sex, they moved first 
in great slow circles about the plaza, chanting 
an Indian song handed down to them from gen¬ 
erations of dancers long since dead. My servant, 
who was a native of Guerrero, and who spoke 
the Indian language fluently, informed me that 
the ceremony was in honor of a princess who had 
died, and whose body had disappeared myster¬ 
iously a short time after death. I speak of chiefs 
and princesses in this Republic of Mexico, but 
it must be remembered that these tribes of In¬ 
dians scattered through the heart of wild Guer¬ 
rero know no law but the word of their chief, 
having no knowledge of and caring less for the 
Government in Mexico City than an American 
does for the laws of the Chinese Empire. 
As a feature of the finale, a comely Indian 
'girl, resplendent in colored paper ribbons, rushed 
about among the dancers, touching here one and 
there one, apparently conferring some honor, for 
each of these so touched immediately went for¬ 
ward and prostrated himself or herself before 
the chief, who sat on a raised seat above the 
dancers. Then there was more dancing, but of 
a less formal nature, and about midnight the 
church bells rang out, there was a great beating 
of drums, blowing of horns and firing of rockets 
and everybody went home. 
Again we slept in the court house or jail of 
Xochipala, and early in the morning found our 
old guide waiting for us. Almost with the sun 
we were off in the direction of the ruins, and 
after half a day’s easy riding, arrived at the edge 
of what must have been a series of connected 
towns, all of one nation, all prepared for defense 
against some hostile foe, and once embracing, at 
a conservative estimate, at least one million 
human beings. 
Broken walls, ruined buildings, huge in size 
beyond comprehension, unless actually seen by 
the reader, marked the slopes as far as the eye 
could reach. Once this was a rolling plateau, 
dropping gently away from the mountain wall, 
but now it is cut into giant ridges by gorges 
from 200 to 1 000 feet deep — gorges whose sides 
are scarred with broken buildings, ridges covered 
with ruins of great houses, some of them larger 
than those of Mitla, and many grander in size 
than any now standing in Mexico City. 
Our journey was a rough one, but eventually 
we found the old trail I had followed four years 
before, and once on that we found the way be¬ 
coming easier on both mules and men. Presently 
as we began to draw near the great mass of de¬ 
caying grandeur that once formed the ancient 
metropolis itself, I for the second time got a 
good view of the ruins. They seemed to me even 
more wonderful than before. It must have been 
an immense nation that once dwelt here, and this 
city, or chain of cities, or district, or feudal 
estate, as you may wish to call it, must have been 
fully as large as Babylon, or Thebes, or Memphis, 
or other famous cities of remote antiquity. Its 
buildings, save those that had been erected on 
the tops of huge pyramidal bases, were of rather 
low construction, but so massive as to give the 
idea of fortresses rather than homes. 
As we journeyed along through the tangled 
underbrush we could see the faint outlines of a 
great mass of ruins that slept majestically in its 
age-old bed on the plain some distance ahead of 
us. This I afterward learned was an enormous 
arched door or gateway, and it seems probable 
that at one time it was one of the main en¬ 
trances, possibly the main entrance to the city. 
It is made of great, unhewn stones, piled closely 
and held in place by a white cement. I noted 
particularly that this binding material, this primi¬ 
tive concrete, was white, for the ruins at Mitla, 
Palenque and San Juan de Teotihuacan show only 
black cement. This to me seems to be one of 
the little signboards to the great fact that the 
civilization of the builders of Yerbabuena was 
greater than that of any other prehistoric tribe 
of Mexico, not even excluding the Aztecs. 
A few minutes before the sun sank behind 
the serrated crest of the mountain wall, we 
reached the first of the crumbling structures, 
clambered over masses of fallen stone, mounted 
a little hill, and looked out over the remains of 
a fallen nation whose grandeur probably was to 
the New World what Rome was to the Old. 
After viewing the mile on mile of shattered 
buildings, the remnants of palaces and temples 
and fortresses and homes, I descended to the 
ruins of a temple fully 6oo feet long by 200 feet 
wide, and ordered the making of a permanent 
camp. There the tent was pitched, and there, 
after a supper of tortillas and cold beans, and 
fresh fried deer meat, cut from a haunch of veni¬ 
son supplied us by the chief ere we left Xochi¬ 
pala, I rolled in my blankets, never to wake until 
the sun was turning the white walls of the tem¬ 
ple a rosy pink next morning. 
Then I began explorations in earnest. With 
my men I came on ruined walls, foundations of 
huge buildings fast crumbling to decay, all of 
which I believe will be mere piles of dust with¬ 
in the next century. We found walls twenty and 
thirty feet high which had sunk straight down 
into the earth until only two or three feet re¬ 
mained above the surface of the ground. Many 
of the houses of which these walls had once been 
parts were forty to fifty feet wide and one hun¬ 
dred feet long, facing on streets which had once 
been well paved, all laid out in regular rows 
across the rolling plateau whereon the primitive 
architects of the long ago had built the homes 
of their nation. 
We made a general survey of the place, seek¬ 
ing the best and most promising location to be¬ 
gin operations, finally choosing the interior of 
another large temple which measured 300 by 200 
feet, inside measurement. In the center of this 
