The Indians have their headquarters in straggling towns, such as Coban, San Pedro Carchá, and Cajabon, but in order to secure new ground for their plantations of beans and corn, they spread out all over the country, moving their ranchos every few years to a new clearing in the forest, or returning to some old plantation which has long lain fallow. When they are thus abroad the Ermita becomes the temporary meeting-place of the families settled round about. It usually consists of a thatch roof set upon about a dozen posts with little or nothing in the shape of wall or enclosure. At one end of it, or on one side, is a rough wooden altar supporting an open wooden box, some times protected in front by a cracked glass, which holds a crucifix or a Madonna, or the figure of the Saint after whom the Ermita is named—a figure which is sure to be tawdry and mean-looking even when one has grown used to the style of art which the Spaniard has carried with him to the West. Behind the altar usually stands a collection of wooden crosses varying in height from one to eight feet—the smaller ones the individual offerings of the pious, and the larger ones brought there by the company which assembles on the feast day of the Saint; for it is in these Ermitas that the Indians hold their fiestas, meet to transact local business, get drunk, and bury their dead. I had several times noticed the unevenness of the hard mud floor when I was setting up my camp bed, but it was not until I was trying to get the bed level above a more than usually distinct mound, that I asked a question and found out that I was about to sleep above the last addition to the majority.
The third night out was the worst we experienced; the rain had held off during the day, and we worked on until sundown. Then, as there were no Indian houses to be seen, we cooked our supper and prepared to sleep in a little walless rancho perched on the hill-side close by the path, which could hardly be dignified by the name of Ermita, for it had no altar in it, although my Indians called it by the name of a Saint. We stacked our baggage as well as we could on logs and stones, then I set up my camp-cot, Gorgonio slung his hammock between the posts, and the Indians, who for some unknown reason had brought no hammocks with them, rolled themselves up in their blankets, and fitted their bodies into the depressions in the uneven mud floor, through which protruded knobs of limestone rock, and were soon snoring. About nine o'clock down came the rain again—at first it only sprayed through the thatched roof, so that an open umbrella sufficed to protect my lamp and the book I was reading; then it began to fall in drops on the rug which covered the foot of my cot, and I had to rig up a waterproof sheet over it, which made the heat stifling; then it ran in little streams over the sloping floor, and the Indians began to shift about in hope of finding dry
