Then came, not unacceptably, a little cup of pasty chocolate and a long roll for each of us.  Then Don Guillermo and our host talked about their mutual acquaintances in Mexico, and we asked questions about sugar-planting, and walked about the boiling-house, where the night-gang of brown men were hard at work stirring and skimming at the boiling-pans, and ladling out coarse unrefined sugar into little earthen bowls to cool.  This common sugar in bowls is very generally used by the poorer Mexicans.  The sugar-boilers were naked excepting a cotton girdle.  These men were very strong, and with great powers of endurance, but they did not at all resemble the strong men of Europe with their great muscles standing up under their skin, the men in Michael Angelo’s pictures, or the Farnese Hercules.  They are equally unlike the thin wiry Arabs, whose strength seems so disproportionate to their lean little bodies.

The pure Mexican Indian is short and sturdy; and, until you have observed the peculiarities of the race, you would say he was too stout and flabby to be strong.  But this appearance is caused by the immense thickness of his skin, which conceals the play of his muscles; and in reality his strength is very great, especially in the legs and thighs, and in the muscles that are brought into action in carrying burdens.  Sartorius used to observe the Indian miners bringing loads of above five-hundred-weight up a hundred fathoms of mine-ladders, which consist of trunks of trees fixed slanting across the shaft, with notches cut in them for steps.

As I have said before, it is not the mere training of the individual that has produced this remarkable development of the power of carrying loads.  The centuries before the Conquest, when there were no beasts of burden, had gradually produced a race whose bodies were admirably fitted for such work; and the persistency with which they have clung to their old habits has done much to prevent their losing this peculiarity.

To complete the description of the Indians which I have been led into by speaking of the sugar-boilers,—­they are chocolate-brown in colour, with curved noses, straight black hair hanging flat round their heads and covering their wonderfully low foreheads, and occasionally a scanty black beard.  Their faces are broadly oval, their eyes far apart, and they have wide mouths with coarse lips.  Not bad faces on the whole, but heavy and unexpressive.

At ten o’clock came a heavy supper, the substantial meal of the day, and immediately afterwards we went to bed, and dreamt such dreams as may be imagined.  We were off early in the morning with a wizened old mestizo to guide us to the ruins of Xochicalco, which are on this very estate of Temisco.  The estate is forty miles across, however, and it is a long ride to the ruins.  After we leave the fields of sugar-cane, we see scarcely a hut, nor a patch of cultivated ground.  At last we get to Xochicalco, and find ourselves at