Page:Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumatsintla Valley.djvu/36

28 character. The smoke had colored these vessels a beautiful dark-brown. From the rafters also hung bundles of tobacco leaves, which were most carefully wrapped in banana leaves. My men could not resist the temptation of taking a few of these for their own use. Several bows and arrows and other small trifles lay on the timbers at the base of the roof or hung on the vertical poles of the walls. In various gourds which I examined I found tree-resin, wax, aromatic herbs, seed-corn, lime, points of flint for arrows, and even alligator teeth, which were probably intended for the necklaces of the women, etc. Small spindles with cotton threads, small wooden spoons, tufts of feathers, and skulls of peccaries, deer, and apes were also stuck between the poles. There were even some billets of pitch-pine, ocotl, which must have been brought from a distance, for there are no pine-trees in the neighborhood of Pethá. In one of the small open huts hung a large gourd, which served for a bee-hive. It had a small hole on one side through which the bees passed in and out. My attention was attracted by some bird-cages, prettily plaited of a fine kind of bejuco, pear-shaped and having little trap-doors, and also by other baskets of simple but pretty shape. Of the different skins of small mammals, a yellowish one with brown spots seemed to me especially interesting, inasmuch as I had no knowledge of the little creature to which it belonged. Against the wall of the largest hut there was a wide board resting on pegs, which held a dozen of those well-known incense vessels each of which has the face of a god in front (Fig. 8). The majority of these were much larger than those which I had once found in the temples of Yaxchilan, but were less graceful and so completely covered with copal, chapopotl, burned quite black, that their shape was hardly recognizable. Knowing how unwilling the Lacantuns are that a stranger should approach their gods, I improved this opportunity to take the incense vessels for a moment out of the dark hut, and because they were so black, directly into the sunlight, in order to photograph them with my camera (Plate VI, 6) before we should be surprised by Indians who might come this way. When