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78 food-boxes and canteen were left behind with the mozos. The villagers were nearly all asleep, and we were told that there was no water to be obtained without scrambling down in the dark to the river 200 feet below us. However, Gorgonio was sent on a foraging expedition, and after a prolonged search returned in triumph with bread, eggs, and half a kettle full of water, so we made our coffee and ate our supper on the verandah surrounded by a pack of half-starved dogs.

Supper over we looked about for a room to sleep in. The cabildo was under repair and the only habitable room in it was occupied by the half-caste "secretario," who most politely offered to share his bed-room with us! On our refusal to put him to such inconvenience he suggested a visit to the convento on the other side of the plaza; so we all marched across to examine it by the light of a single candle. After passing in a ghostly procession through the huge empty rat-infested close-smelling rooms, we declined that lodging also, and finally put up our beds in an unfinished room in the cabildo, which was half-full of scaffolding, where the floor was inches deep in sand, the door refused to shut, and bats flitted in and out at their own sweet will; but even these discomforts and the howls of a drunken Indian locked up in the prison next door could not keep off sleep after our long day's ride.

I was awakened the next morning by a brilliant sunshine, and lay for some minutes staring up into the newly thatched roof which stretched like a great umbrella over the cabildo, and was really an attractive piece of work, so skilfully are the great beams adjusted and tied together by lianes, those ready-made ropes which abound in tropical forests. The rooms were divided from one another by partitions, but all were open to the roof, so that, with the advantage of a current of fresh air, one has to put up with the free passage of sound from the neighbouring rooms and the visits of birds by day and bats by night.

The hills around San Andres were brown with sun-scorched grass, and the village itself was not saved by the sparkling atmosphere and brilliant sunshine from an appearance of hopeless desolation. There was not a green thing to be seen, saving one huge Ceiba tree standing solitary in the middle of a great wind-swept plaza. We were told that the foolishness of a former Jefe Politico had created this dreary waste by ordering all the trees in the village to be cut down, because in his enlightened opinion trees near houses were unhealthy. As far as we could see, there was only one redeeming feature in the view, and that was the old dead stump of a tree, whose solitary branch stretching out like a withered arm supported a cluster of orchids covered with the most splendid purple blossoms. No one cared for this lovely plant and we were sorely tempted to carry it away branch and all, but