We gazed from the precipice at the white building, large even on so vast a plain, and began the steep descent. The little village was almost dead in appearance. There were many houses and rooms to let, but no posada; and as our mozos had not arrived, we rode to the Santuario down the single street of the town. It was wide, paved with cobbles, and bordered on either side by the booths and lodging-sheds for the merchants and devotees who still crowd the town at the festival season. Two streams, one the headwaters of the Rio Lempa, flowed across the road beneath solid masonry bridges. Into two of the posts of one of these were inserted two ancient sculptures, said to have been brought from Peten, but more probably from the neighboring ruins of Copan, just beyond the mountains. One was the grotesque head of a griffin, the other a small human figure with a preposterous head-dress. The Santuario is an imposing structure, massive rather than elegant, and dazzling in its whiteness. Towers rise at the four corners, divided into four stages, of which the lower one is broken only by a small oval window on the side; the second is pierced by an arched window and decorated with pilasters; the third, still square, rises above the general roof with two windows on each side; the fourth, octagonal in shape, has a single window on the alternate sides. A large dome rises in the midst, figures of saints and a clock mark the façade, and the whole structure rises from an extensive platform surrounded by an iron fence with masonry posts, and approached by a broad and easy flight of steps. [Illustration: SANTUARIO AT ESQUIPULAS.]