s of information opened to us
through him, some places which are presented in these pages would
perhaps never have been discovered. He had always eight Indian sextons,
selected from the most respectable of the inhabitants, to take care of
the church, who, when not wanted to assist at masses, salves, or
funerals, were constantly lounging about our door, always tipsy, and
glad to be called in. These sextons knew every Indian in the village,
and the region in which he had his milpa, or cornfield; and through
them we were continually making inquiries. All the ruins scattered
about the country are known to the Indians under the general name of
"Xlap-pahk," which means in Spanish "paredes viejas," and in English
"old walls." The information we obtained was in general so confused
that we were unable to form any idea of the extent or character of the
ruins. We could establish no standard of comparison, as those who told
us of one place were, perhaps, not familiar with any other, so that it
was necessary to see all; and we had one perplexity, the magnitude of
which can hardly be conceived, in the extraordinary ignorance of all
the people, whites and Indians, in regard to the geography of their own
immediate neighbourhood. A place they had never visited, though but a
few leagues distant, they knew nothing about, and, from the extreme
difficulty of ascertaining the juxtaposition of places, it was hard to
arrange the plan of a route so as to embrace several. To some I made
preliminary visits; those from which I expected most turned out not
worth the trouble of going to, while others, from which I expected but
little, proved extremely interesting. Almost every evening, on
returning to the convent, the padrecito hurried into our room, with the
greeting, "buenas noticias! otras ruinas!" "good news! more ruins!" and
at one time these noticias came in so fast that I sent Albino on a two
days' excursion to "do" some preliminary visits, who returned with a
report justifying my opinion of his judgment, and a bruised leg from
climbing over a mound, which disabled him for some days.

As these pages will be sufficiently burdened, I shall omit all the
preliminary visits, and present the long line of ruined cities in the
order in which we visited them for the purposes of exploration. Chichen
was the only place we heard of in Merida, and the only place we knew of
with absolute certainty before we embarked for Yucatan; but we found
that a vast fi