Forest and Stream 
|3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1912. 
VOL. LXXIX.—No. 10. 
127 Franklin St., New York. 
Through Unexplored Guerrero 
By PROF. WILLIAM NIVEN 
Chapter V.—Among the Cave Dwellers 
F OR the next year I devoted myself to mining 
with scattered hunting trips through Guer¬ 
rero, until one night, seated under a brush 
ramada in' a little Indian village some hours 
back in the mountains from Otatlan, one of the 
Indians turned the subject to the prehistoric 
races of the country. He was what is known 
as a "mixed’'; that is, of mixed blood, Spanish, 
Indian and possibly a trace of white from the 
mesalliance of his mother with some wandering 
American. In him was no trace of the super¬ 
stition of the pure Indian, and he cared no more 
for his dead ancestors than he did for a dead 
dog. He had been with me at the buried town 
of Yerbabuena, and again' had gone into the 
country of the mound builders. He had wearied 
of mining and wanted to loaf for awhile on the 
pretext of opening more ruins. 
"Did you know, Patron,” he said, "that peo¬ 
ple thousands of moons ago dwelt in caves in 
this country also?” 
I had seen the cave dwellings of Colorado 
and Arizona and New Mexico, but for all my 
years in Mexico I had never heard of the Trog¬ 
lodytes of Mexico’s Egypt, and we talked far 
into the night over this third mysterious race 
which had gone the way of the city makers and 
the mound builders. 
The result was that the end of February, 1902, 
found me, accompanied by this Indian, by my 
own mozo and by another tribesman of the 
south, striking out on horseback from Puente 
de Ixtla for the caves of Cacahuamilpa. These 
holes in the ground or rather, the many cham¬ 
bers and ramifications of one entrance, are larger 
than Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and probably 
will be found to be the largest caves in the world. 
Riding four hours through the mountains, 
passing over a country sadly dry and in need 
of the summer rains, we came at length to a 
gaping hole 300 feet in circumference, driven 
into the mountain side, and later cut and chiseled 
to a noticeable extent by the hand of man. Es¬ 
tablishing a permanent camp in the shade of 
a sheer cliff more than 500 feet high, at whose 
base a small spring broke from the mountain, 
we plunged at once into the cave. 
The entrance, large, and with a domed roof 
leading up probably 100 feet,- further than the 
fitful light of our mesquite torches, would throw 
its reflection, led us into a labyrinth of chambers 
of gigantic dimensions, thousands of feet in ex¬ 
tent and with roofs of unknown height. The 
passages were filled with stalagmitic furniture 
and stalactitic draperies, while the walls were 
decorated with sparkling gems of arragmite and 
with other stalactites hundreds of feet in length. 
In one chamber, which seemed only an ante¬ 
room to greater caverns beyond, the cathedral 
of Mexico City, with its two enormous towers, 
could be placed and still its spires would not 
touch the roof. Penetrating still further, walk¬ 
ing from room to room for probably half a mile, 
we began to regret that we had not ridden, in¬ 
stead of walked into the monster underground 
world. There we seated ourselves on a long 
ledge running on one side the room, and were 
surprised to find that the bench was not natural, 
but had been carved and ornamented by the hand 
of some Indian architect or stone mason. This 
set us exploring, and the further we got into the 
mountain, the more we became convinced that 
here, completely within the cave, had dwelt an 
entire tribe. Traces of fire-places, broken bits 
of pottery, spear and arrowheads, idols carved 
on the face of the living rock, seats hewn from 
the stalactites and stalagmites were found, and 
finally plain traces of stairways, now broken and 
impassable, but apparently leading to upper caves 
where the people of the lost tribe evidently had 
their separate and private homes. 
By this time we seemed to have penetrated 
more than a mile, as I had unwound ten balls 
of string, each containing two hundred yards, 
INCENSE BURNER—NOTE GENUINE JADE AMULET LYING AT BASE OF BURNER. 
