in the bovedas.  No doubt the absence of skeletons was due solely to the length of time that had elapsed, for even in the cemetery of the church Mr. Hartman found similar tombs that contained several skeletons.  These tombs were indicated by the same kind of stone circuits as the rest, but were only about three feet down in the hard clay, and had no slabs in front of the entrance.  In one of them Mr. Hartman found six corpses more or less decomposed, the sepulchre having evidently been used for a long time.  In the same cemetery the Mexicans buried their dead.

I continued my journey down the river through the country once inhabited by the Tubars.  As the heat was intense, I availed myself of the light of the full moon and travelled at night.  Now and then the read touched the big river where the croaking of the frogs was intensely doleful and monotonous, but withal so loud that on a quiet night like this they could easily be heard two miles off.

Warm winds fanned me to sleep, and only when my mule ran me against some spiny branch, did I wake to find myself in a fantastic forest of leafless, towering cacti, that stood motionless, black, and silent in the moonlight, like spectres with numberless arms uplifted.  The overwhelming noise of the frogs seemed to voice their thoughts and forbid me to advance farther.  But the mule accelerated its pace, the shadows glided quicker and quicker, up and down the stony, slippery path that wound its way through this ghostly forest.

In the daytime there was a disagreeably strong, warm wind blowing, making it difficult even to get the saddles on our mules, but the nights were calm.  At the pueblo of San Ignacio nobody speaks the Tubar tongue.  Blue herons have a permanent breeding-place here on an almost perpendicular rock, four to six hundred feet high, where I counted twenty nests.

In travelling down to Tierra Caliente there is one place at which one must leave the river and ascend to the pine region.  This is below the village of Tubares.  The river narrows here and forms rapids, and it has been calculated that the water in flood-time rises sixty-five feet.  Alligators do not go above these rapids.  In two days’ journey from Morelos one may reach the undulating country of Sinaloa, la costa, which is warmer even than the barrancas.

At San Ignacio I left the river, and turned in a northeasterly direction to Batopilas.  After five days’ pleasant sojourn at Mr. Shepherd’s hospitable home there, I again ascended the sierra, and, after visiting the Indians of Santa Ana and its neighbourhood, arrived at Guachochic.  Leaving my mules here in charge of my friend Don Carlos Garcia, I soon started again toward the northeast on my way back to the United States, passing through the Indian ranches, and finally arriving at Carichic (in Tarahumare Garichi, “where there are houses,” probably ancient) on July 31st.  At less than an hour’s distance from the place I was overtaken by a thunder-storm, the