and the weather became so hot and dry, that we were able to work on steadily until the first week in May. By that time I had secured a complete set of photographs of each of the monuments; Mr. Giuntini had finished a plaster mould of the great turtle—a mould of over six hundred pieces—and he had also moulded the most interesting portions of two other monuments. In addition to this, with the aid of my half-caste companions I had taken a mould in paper of one entire monument, and of every table of hieroglyphics and picture-writing which could be found, and Mr. Brockley had made a careful survey of the site of the ruins. The work of packing and transporting the moulds to the port was one of even greater difficulty than bringing the material, for there were over a thousand pieces of plaster moulding of all shapes and sizes with delicate points and edges which had to be protected from the slightest jar, and large paper moulds, some of which measured nearly five feet square. The last loads were not over the mountains when the rains commenced again with tremendous thunder-storms, and the mountain tracks were again an alternation of mud-holes and watercourses. A few of the paper moulds were damaged by damp on the passage home, but, on the whole, the result of the expedition has been very satisfactory.
Since 1883 one other fallen monument has been discovered, and we have learnt that the stone-faced mounds are the foundations of temples similar to those at Copan, but much more completely ruined. It was mainly with the purpose of more thoroughly examining these foundation-mounds and correcting the survey that we revisited the ruins in 1894. During our short stay we took a number of moulds and had finished all the clearing and made the necessary preparations for the survey, which Mr. Price was to carry out after our departure. But, alas! a very few days after we left the ruins both Mr. Price and Gorgonio were prostrated by a very bad type of fever, and it was with much difficulty that they succeeded in reaching Yzabal, where, owing to the kind attention they received from Mr. and Mrs. Potts, to whom many a traveller owes a debt of gratitude, they recovered sufficiently to start, Gorgonio for his home at Coban, and Mr. Price for England.
The survey was necessarily left unfinished, and the plan here given is taken from Mr. Brockley's survey, amended as far as possible from Mr. Price's notes. As both Mr. Price and Gorgonio were too ill to attend to the packing of the moulds, that work was perforce left to the local carpenter at Yzabal, with the result that more than half the moulds were found to be in a hopelessly ruined condition, when, after some unexplained delay, they arrived six months later in England. I spent an unhappy day at the Museum opening the packing-cases and rescuing the less-injured moulds from the evil-smelling mass of mildewed paper, and returned home only to be sent to bed for what the doctor first of all called an attack of influenza, but on the next day declared to be undoubtedly malarial fever, whether caught from germs conveyed from the tropics in the rotting paper, who shall say?
