Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/50

42 even cities to be abandoned. A notable example is the city of Valladolid, once a large and flourishing centre of trade, noted for its manufactures of cotton, but now nearly abandoned and in ruins.

In numbers, these Indians are not strong, the largest estimates being no higher than seven thousand; in fact, there are not probably more than two thousand. They are, however, fierce and revengeful,—a different people, seemingly, from the timorous Indians of Merida, whose ancestors probably built the magnificent temples that now lie in ruins throughout Yucatan. They are more like the Caribs, the people that once possessed the southern West Indies, the Spanish Main, and the Mesquita Coast. Though few in number, they have succeeded in completely terrorizing the entire country, and are as difficult to find as were the Seminoles of Florida forty years ago. The wildest stories circulate about them, and the people of the city tremble at their very name. If a stranger penetrate to their country, they seize him at once and hack him in pieces with their machetes without listening to a word of explanation; or they reserve him for torture, tying him by a long line to a stake by a ring through the nose.

Though so atrociously cruel, yet who can blame them, when he remembers the torments inflicted upon the ancestors of these people by the early Spaniards? To them, every man with a pale face is a Spaniard, whose abhorred presence is to be rid of by death. They hold guarded intercourse with the English in Belize, but allow no white man to penetrate to their city. This city, whose inhabitants must yet retain much of their aboriginal simplicity, much of ancient cunning in the arts of their progenitors,—what traveller would not like to visit and describe it?

Annually, their territory is increasing in extent, and that of the whites and agricultural Indians becoming restricted; rancho and hacienda, farm and plantation, village and town,—one by one they are destroyed, and the land they covered added to that of the dreaded sublevados, or insurgents. It was rumored in 1881 that all the Indians of Yucatan, Central America, and Honduras