races of which are still visible. The
doorways open into a narrow corridor only twenty inches wide, which
encompasses a small room eight feet six inches long and five feet wide,
having a doorway opening to the centre.

[Engraving 58: Square Building]

South-southeast from this, near an opposite angle of the clearing, and
five or six hundred feet from the sea, stands another building raised
upon a terrace, consisting of a single apartment, twenty feet front and
six feet ten inches deep, having two doorways and a back wall seven
feet thick. The height is ten feet, the arch is triangular, and on the
walls are the remains of paintings.

These were the only buildings in the clearing, and though, doubtless,
many more lie buried in the woods, we saw no other on the island; but
to us these were pregnant with instruction. The building presented in
the engraving, standing close to the sea, answers, in all its general
features, the description of the "towers" seen by Grijalva and his
companions as they sailed along the coast. The _ascent is by steps_,
the _base is very massive_, the _building is small at the top_, it is
_about the height of two men placed one above the other_, and at this
day we may say, as the Spaniards did, that, _to judge by their
edifices, these Indians appear to be very ingenious_. It is an
interesting fact, moreover, that not only our patron and sailors called
this building a "tower," but in a late article published in the
proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society at London, entitled
"Sketch of the Eastern Coast of Central America, compiled from Notes of
Captain Richard Owen and the Officers of her Majesty's Ship Thunder and
Schooner Lark," this building, with others of the same general
character, is indicated by the name of a "tower." So far as the route
of Grijalva can be traced with certainty, there is strong reason to
believe that the Spaniards landed for the first time in the bay on the
shore of which this building stands, and there is no violence in the
supposition that the building presented is the very tower in which the
Spaniards saw the performance of idolatrous rites; perhaps it is the
same temple from which Bernal Dias and his companions rolled the idols
down the steps. And more than this, establishing the great result for
which we had visited this island, these buildings were identically the
same with those on the mainland; if we had seen hundreds, we could not
have been more firmly convi