Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/679

Rh the same height, while the doorways are but three feet high and eighteen inches wide. In some of those houses domestic utensils have been found, very small. Any traveler may examine the strange little houses; and doubtless the belief in the phantom



alux is an outgrowth of tradition concerning the dwarfish people who constructed them.

Directly opposed to the alux is Huahuapach, a gigantic specter supposed to put himself in the way of belated travelers and make them fall so as to injure themselves. This, again, would be some dim recollection of those big men whose bones have at various times been unearthed in different parts of the peninsula. Several historians testify to such gigantic remains having been dug from the ground in the early part of the Conquest, We have also been assured by people of Spanish descent, now living in that country, that they themselves have disinterred enormous skulls and other bones of the human body. None had the curiosity to keep them. To this may be added that on the walls of certain ancient structures there are imprints, eleven inches long, of hands that had been dipped in red liquid and pressed upon the stones, as it was customary for the owner of the building to do.