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Rh which clung to the steep slopes and helped to make up a landscape as quaint and delicate in colour as it was beautiful in outline.

We clambered up about 3000 feet, and then mounting our animals rode over the ridge and found ourselves amongst rolling hills almost bare of grass, but supporting here and there rugged-looking ocote pines, and in every sheltered nook a frangipani-tree with its bare fleshy branches tipped with glorious bunches of yellow and white blossoms. After riding for an hour or more through this desert we stopped for breakfast by the edge of a ravine where the Indians knew of a spring hidden away in a scrubby thicket. Then we continued our gradual ascent, and the oaks and pines increased in number until they formed patches of woodland. Great bunches of mistletoe of various sorts—green and orange and brown—were conspicuous amongst the oak-leaves, and the branches of the trees were laden with clusters of orchids and tillandsias. My companions gathered for me beautiful sprays of orchid blossom and gorgeous crowns of crimson leaves which surround the flowering spikes of the tillandsias, and these, added to the bunches of frangipani we had plucked on the arid hill-sides and fresh green sprigs of lycopodium, overflowed the mouths of my saddle-bags and formed a decoration to my saddle that would have been the envy of Covent Garden.

As we rode on, the marked difference in colour between the north and south sides of the hills began to disappear; a green tinge was spread over the whole. Then a turn in the track showed the main range in front of us covered with dark forest to the summit and dotted here and there with bright green patches where the Indians had made their plantations. Heavy clouds hung over the mountain-tops, marking the edge of the rainfall which deluges the country to the north up to the end of February. A short descent brought us to the bank of a brilliantly clear stream, an affluent of the Rio Negro, and half an hour later we rode into the straggling village of San Miguel Uspantan lying at the foot of the forest-clad sierra. The Alcalde allotted us a room in the convento, which had been swept and garnished with a fresh carpet of pine-needles in expectation of the arrival of the Jefe Politico of the Department of Quiché.

At Uspantan we were on the borders of the unknown, for to the north of us the map shows nothing but uninhabited mountains and forests, and rivers whose courses have only recently been traced flowing towards the land of the untamed Lacandones. In the 16th and 17th centuries both military and missionary expeditions penetrated these forests, but the memory them has faded away, and to learn their history one has to hunt through the monkish chronicles or dive into the mountains of manuscript stored in the archives at Seville. The recent additions to the map are due to the interminable M2