Page:Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumatsintla Valley.djvu/39

Rh project four comblike droppings. This little picture most resembles certain perforated vessels in which the women wash the maize, which has been soaked in lime water. There are several more red hands above the perforated pot and the foot at a distance of about seven metres above the surface of the water. Is it possible that this picture on the rock indicates the grave of a woman ?

This simple symbolic picture may be interpreted thus : The footprint may indicate that the beloved woman has gone "upward." The overturned washing-pot probably shows that she never again will go to the river to wash out her nixtamal (softened maize), to make tortillas for her husband and children.... The red hands raised toward the sky may indicate the last greetings of those she left mourning on earth, when she ascended to celestial regions.

The representation at the left of the central picture is composed of large, broad red stripes, which run high up on the cliff, mostly in vertical lines and form large scrolls here and there. There are also two white or light yellow hands recognizable on a red ground, and adjoining this there is also a series of black lines, which, however, have become very indistinct.

After we had passed through the strait of the picture-rocks, with its poetic beauty, we turned into a bay on the southern shore where a second waterfall, shaded by tall trees, plunges foaming over the rocks into the lake. Then — as night was already approaching — we crossed the large eastern basin to our camp on the northern shore, where in the mean time our meal had been prepared, and we soon resigned ourselves to calm repose. The fact that we had explored this glorious lake even to its remotest corner without the aid of the Indians and without arousing the suspicion of these people, usually so crafty, and that, in addition, we had made use of their own cayucos, was a source of great astonishment to us. It seemed like a dream!

The entire length of the lake from the eastern margin of its large round basin to the extreme end of its western ramifications we estimated at six or seven kilometres. The diameter of the round basin, to which its name Pet-há, = Agua circular, refers, may be two kilometres, while the width of the western arms varies from two hundred to four hundred metres. We found the water of such great depth everywhere that steamships could easily sail on this lake, probably even in the dry season, when the water doubtless falls about five metres.

In the forenoon of September 6th we went again to the Roca de las Pinturas. I took some tracing paper with me in order to make a tracing of the well-preserved black drawings. A large kommchen (wood-destroying insect larvae) nest, which was attached to the cliff below the drawing, we cut to pieces with our machetes. Having thus cleared the drawing, I fastened