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238 and began to cut our way through the undergrowth in search of the ancient buildings, which we found to be raised on a succession of terraces to a height of over 250 feet, with slopes faced with well-laid masonry or formed into flights of steps. Those buildings marked in the plan with definite outlines are still in a fair state of preservation, but where the outlines are left indefinite the houses have fallen and become mere heaps of broken masonry. The plan must not be regarded as more than a rough sketch, as I had no instrument with me for measuring vertical angles, and the distances were judged by pacing, and checked by the occasional use of a tape measure.

The house or temple which I chose for a dwelling-place (marked A on the plan) is a long narrow structure, measuring on the outside 73 feet long by 17 feet broad. There are three doorways giving access to the single chamber, which is divided up into a number of recesses by interior buttress-walls. In the middle recess we found a cross-legged figure of heroic size, reminding me of the seated figure on the great Turtle of Quirigua; the head with its headdress of grotesque masks and feather-work was broken off and lying beside it. There appears to have been some sort of canopy of ornamental plasterwork above the recess, which had fallen down and lay in a confused heap of dust and fragments around the figure. When I first entered the house there must have been over a hundred pieces of rough pottery, similar to those here figured, strewn on the floor and clustered around the stone figure. Many of these pots contained half-burnt copal, and from the positions in which we found them it is evident that they must have been placed in the house within recent years, probably by the Lacandones, who still, I am told, hold the place in reverence. In this house, and in most of the other buildings still standing, stone lintels span the doorways, many of them elaborately carved on the underside.

On the outside of the house the lower wall surface is flat, and it seems probable that it had formerly been decorated in colours, as slight traces of colour can still be found where the plaster coating has adhered to the underside of the lower cornice. Between the lower and upper cornice is a broad frieze marked with three large and eight small niches; these niches have held seated figures and other ornaments modelled in stucco, of which only a few small fragments now remain in position. Above the upper cornice rises a light stone superstructure similar to that on the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, but here also all the ornament which it was built to support has