The monks had hospitably pressed us to stay till their mid-day meal, but we preferred having it at the shop down in the village, so as to start directly afterwards.  Here the people gave us a regular reception, entertained us with their best, and could not be prevailed upon to accept any payment whatever.  The proprietor of the meson sat down before the barley-bin which served him for a desk, and indited a long and eloquent letter of introduction for us to a friend of his in Oculan, who was to find a night’s lodging for us.  Before he sealed up the despatch he read it to us in a loud voice, sentence by sentence.  It might have been an autograph letter from King Philip to some foreign potentate.  Armed with this important missive, we mounted our horses, shook hands with no end of well-wishers, and rode off up the valley.

For a little while our path lay through a sort of suburb of Chalma, houses lying near one another, each surrounded by a pleasant garden, and both houses and people looking prosperous and cheerful.  Our directions for finding the way were simple enough.  We were to go up the valley past the Cerra de los Atambores, “the hill of drums,” and the great ahuehuete.  What the Cerra de los Atambores might be, we could not tell, but when we had followed the valley for an hour or so, it came into view.  On the other side of the stream rose a precipitous cliff, several hundred feet high, and near the top a perpendicular wall of rock was carved with rude designs.  People have supposed, it seems, that these carvings represented drums, and hence the name.

Had we known of the place before, we should have made an effort to explore it, and copy the sculptured designs; but now it was too late, and from the other side of the valley we could not make out more than that there seemed to be a figure of the sun among them.

A little further on we came to the “Ahuehuete.”  The name means a deciduous cypress, a common tree in Mexico, and of which we had already seen such splendid specimens in the grove near Tezcuco, and in the wood of Chapoltepec.  This was a remarkable tree as to size, some sixty feet round at the lower part where the roots began to spread out.  A copious spring of water rose within the hollow trunk itself, and ran down between the roots into the little river.  All over its spreading branches were fastened votive offerings of the Indians, hundreds of locks of coarse black hair, teeth, bits of coloured cloth, rags, and morsels of ribbon.  The tree was many centuries old, and had probably had some mysterious influence ascribed to it, and been decorated with such simple offerings long before the discovery of America.  In Brittany the peasants still keep up the custom of hanging up locks of their hair in certain chapels, to charm away diseases; and there it is certain that the Christians only appropriated to their own worship places already held sacred in the estimation of the people.