Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/101

Rh to this damp cavern to braid their hemp, for use in simple articles of domestic manufacture, as the moist air facilitates the process.

We sat awhile in this strange reception hall, while our man went for some coco nuts, with the sweet water of which we slaked our thirst. A great number of lizards and iguanas were running about the ledges, and I shot several that seemed new to me. One was a hideous reptile of the saurian type, with twelve callosities on his legs, each one of which, our Indian said, meant a year. Another, which I also shot with my pistol, had a pointed tail, and the Maya was much excited when I went to pick it up from the rock where it was still struggling, saying that it would throw its tail at me as it expired, inflicting a poisonous wound. There was, he said, another lizard that would bite your shadow, as you crossed its path, causing you terrible pains in the head thereby. These Indians are full of superstitions, believing in witchcraft, in avenging spirits, and in ghosts, and endowing every kind of creeping thing with some supernatural attribute.

As the sun's rays glanced horizontally along the level fields, the mules were harnessed, and we returned to San Antonio, leaving behind us those grand, suggestive, yet mute memorials of a departed people; the oldest monuments—that is, of Indians who had approached civilization—that this new country can exhibit; the oldest, perhaps, in America.