Page:Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan.djvu/469

Rh friend, Padre Solis, as poor and energetic as the padre was rich and inert. At the last village we had been told that it would be impossible to procure Indians for the next day on account of the fiesta, and had made up our minds to remain; but my letters from the Mexican authorities were so effective, that immediately the juez held a parley with forty or fifty Indians, and, breaking off occasionally to cuff one of them, our journey was arranged through to Palenque in three days, and the money paid and distributed. Although the wildness of the Indians made us feel a little uncomfortable, we almost regretted this unexpected promptness; but the juez told us we had come at a fortunate moment, for many of the Indians of San Pedro, who were notoriously a bad set, were then in the village, but he could select those he knew, and would send an alguazil of his own with us all the way. As he did not give us any encouragement to remain, and seemed anxious to hurry us on, we made no objections, and in our anxiety to reach the end of our journey, had a superstitious apprehension of the effect of any voluntary delay.

With the little of daylight that remained, he conducted us along the same path trodden by the Indians centuries before, to the top of the cone rising at the corner of the table-land, from which we looked down on one side into an immense ravine several thousand feet in depth, and on the other, over the top of a great mountain range, we saw the village of San Pedro, the end of our next day's journey, and beyond, over the range of the mountains of Palenque, the Lake of Terminos and the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the grandest, wildest, and most sublime scenes I ever beheld. On the top were ruins of a church and tower, probably once used as a look-out, and near it were thirteen crosses erected over the bodies of Indians, who, a century before, tied the hands and feet of the cura, and threw him down the precipice, and were killed and buried on the spot. Every year new crosses are set up over their bodies, to keep alive in the minds of the Indians the fate of murderers. All around, on almost inaccessible mountain heights, and in the deepest ravines, the Indians have their milpas or corn-patches, living almost as when the Spaniards broke in upon them, and the juez pointed with his finger to a region still occupied by the "unbaptized:" the same strange people whose mysterious origin no man knows, and whose destiny no man can foretell. Among all the wild scenes of our hurried tour, none is more strongly impressed upon my mind than this; but, with the untamed Indians around, Mr. Catherwood was too much excited and too nervous to attempt to make a sketch of it.

At dark we returned to the cabildo, which was decorated with