The gobernador here was an original and peculiar character.  First he wanted me to camp in La Comunidad, to which I objected; but he was bent upon having me as closely under his supervision as possible, and I had to agree to establish my camp only half the distance that I had intended from the village.  As soon as my tent had been put up, he came, accompanied by one of his friends.  He had a passion for talking, which he indulged in for two hours, interrupting himself about every twenty seconds to spit.  His companion wrapped himself in his blanket and began to nod, and whenever the gobernador stopped for expectoration, the other one would utter an assenting “hay” ("yes").  The Cora language is guttural, but quite musical, and when I heard it at a distance it reminded me in its cadence of one of the dialects of central Norway.  However, the gobernador’s monologue soon became very tiresome, and finally I made my bed and lay down.  After a while they retired, but every evening as long as I stayed in the place, his Honour came to bore me with his talk.  I generally took him out to my men, who entertained him as long as they were able to keep awake.  He wanted to hear about other countries, about the bears we had met, and the great war, because he thought there must always be war somewhere.  When everybody was asleep after midnight, he would retire.  He was a widower, and he was the most un-Indian Indian I ever met.

About five miles east of Mesa del Nayarit the descent toward the pueblo of Jesus Maria begins.  The valley appears broad and hilly, and the vegetation assumes the aspect of the Hot Country.  Specially noticeable were the usual thickets of thorny, dry, and scraggy trees, seen even on the edge of the mesa.  They are called guisachi, and in the vernacular of the common man the word has been utilised to designate a sharper.  A man who “hooks on,” as, for instance, a tricky lawyer, is called a guisachero.  It is the counterpart of the “lawyer palm” among the shrubs of tropical Australia.

Jesus Maria looks at a distance quite a town, on a little plain above the river-bank.  A fine, grand-looking old church, in Moorish style, a large churchyard surrounding it, and the usual big buildings connected with the churches of Spanish times, make all extraordinary impression among the pithaya-covered hills.  The rest of the houses look humble enough.  I went a little beyond the pueblo to the junction of arroyo Fraile with the river of Jesus Maria.  As a violent wind, caused by the cooling off of the hot air of the barranca, blows every afternoon, I did not put up my tent, but had my men build an open shed.  The wind lasts until midnight, and the mornings are delightfully calm and cool.  The Coras consider this wind beneficial to the growth of the corn, and sacrifice a tamal of ashes, two feet long, to keep it in the valley.

The Cora of the canon, and probably of the entire Tierra Caliente, is of a milder disposition than his brother of the sierra, but he looks after his own advantage as closely as the rest of them.