eir calabashes, and store it away beneath heaps
of leaves in some shady nook near the house. Old Marheyo had a great
love for the waters of the spring. Every now and then he lugged off to
the mountain a great round demijohn of a calabash, and, panting with his
exertions, brought it back filled with his darling fluid.
The water tasted like a solution of a dozen disagreeable things, and was
sufficiently nauseous to have made the fortune of the proprietor, had
the spa been situated in the midst of any civilized community.
As I am no chemist, I cannot give a scientific analysis of the water.
All I know about the matter is, that one day Marheyo in my presence
poured out the last drop from his huge calabash, and I observed at the
bottom of the vessel a small quantity of gravelly sediment very much
resembling our common sand. Whether this is always found in the water,
and gives it its peculiar flavour and virtues, or whether its presence
was merely incidental, I was not able to ascertain.
One day in returning from this spring by a circuitous path, I came upon
a scene which reminded me of Stonehenge and the architectural labours of
the Druids.
At the base of one of the mountains, and surrounded on all sides by
dense groves, a series of vast terraces of stone rises, step by step,
for a considerable distance up the hill side. These terraces cannot
be less than one hundred yards in length and twenty in width. Their
magnitude, however, is less striking than the immense size of the blocks
composing them. Some of the stones, of an oblong shape, are from ten
to fifteen feet in length, and five or six feet thick. Their sides are
quite smooth, but though square, and of pretty regular formation, they
bear no mark of the chisel. They are laid together without cement, and
here and there show gaps between. The topmost terrace and the lower
one are somewhat peculiar in their construction. They have both a
quadrangular depression in the centre, leaving the rest of the terrace
elevated several feet above it. In the intervals of the stones immense
trees have taken root, and their broad boughs stretching far over, and
interlacing together, support a canopy almost impenetrable to the sun.
Overgrowing the greater part of them, and climbing from one to another,
is a wilderness of vines, in whose sinewy embrace many of the stones
lie half-hidden, while in some places a thick growth of bushes entirely
covers them. There is a wild pathway which
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