their beautiful overlapping slopes are lost to sight where they sink in mist towards the sea. A short ride brought us to Quirigua, which a few years ago was the site of a village of twenty or thirty houses, but now contains only the comfortable homestead of the cattle rancho belonging to Don Carlos Herrera. The ruins of Quirigua, about six miles distant, are included within the limits of the estate, which since the time of our visit has passed into the hands of President Barrios, and it is to be sincerely hoped that he will take measures to guard the monuments against depredations likely to occur by occasion of their proximity to the new railway.
Next morning we set out for the ruins. Riding first through a grove of pine-trees, and then gradually descending to the plain, we followed a narrow track into an almost impenetrable forest of coroza palms, mahogany and cedar trees, and all that marvellous tangle of creepers and climbing plants which go to make up that great wonder of nature—a tropical forest. After about an hour's ride through the forest, we crossed the line of the new railway, which was as yet innocent of rails, and half an hour later we emerged on the bank of the Motagua, about a mile distant from the ruins, and were welcomed to our new camping-ground by Mr. Hugh Price, my husband's companion and assistant in an expedition to Palenque in 1891.
The great river had shrunk to its summer limits, and had left bare long—stretches of sand strewn with the leavings of former floods, reminding one of the dumping ground of some great city, and no more picturesque than such a receptacle of rubbish. A little settlement of half a dozen houses had lately been formed on the river-bank, and a hundred yards beyond it Mr. Price, who had arrived a fortnight earlier, had built a rancho for us at the cost of about £2 sterling. With our tent pitched beside it for use as a bedroom we were well accommodated; but the situation was not a pleasant one. The herds of cattle roaming through the forest would draw down of an evening towards the river-bank, when rival bulls made night hideous with their bellowings, and we were forced to get up again and again to ward off attacks on the rather frail fence which protected our homestead, and to drive off those animals who came stumbling among the tent ropes and threatened to bring the canvas down on our heads. The poor beasts meant no harm to us, but they were searching wildly for something salt, and they would return again and again to lick and scrape the earth on the spot where we had thrown the small ration of salt which we daily gave to our mules. Woe to the man who left his garments overnight hanging on the fence to dry; nothing would be left of them in the morning but a chewed unrecognizable mass.
Unattractive as were our surroundings, it was no doubt preferable living near the river-bank, where the breeze could reach us and the water-supply
