"The largest of the stone animals is perhaps the most remarkable of all the monuments. Its measurement is roughly a cube of eight feet, it must weigh nearly twenty tons and it rests on three large slabs of stone. It is shaped like a turtle and is covered with a most elaborate and curious ornament and with tables of hieroglyphics and cartouches of picture writing. The greater part of the ornament throughout these carvings is formed from the grotesque representations of the human face or the faces of animals, the features frequently so greatly exaggerated that it is most difficult to recognize them, but a careful examination enables one almost invariably to trace back to this facial origin what at first sight appears to be merely conventional scroll work. Forms derived from leaves or flowers are altogether absent; occasional use is made of a plaited ribbon and a very free use of plumes of feathers which are oftenmost gracefully arranged and beautifully carved. The fifteen monuments are divided into two groups; in one the figures are all those of men, in the other of women." The same authors give the following vivid description of the famed Lake Atitlan: "Our tent was pitched so close to the precipice that even from my bed I had a grand view into the Lake and could watch the black masses of the volcanoes looming clear-cut and solemn in the moonlight or changing from black to gray in the early dawn; then a rosy flush would touch the peak of Atitlan and the light creep down its side, revealing for a brief half hour every detail of cinder ridge and chasm on its scarred and wounded slopes until with a sudden burst of glory the sun rose above the eastern hills to strike the mirror-like surface of the Lake and flood the world with warmth and dazzling light. Every peak and mountain ridge now stood out clear and sharp against the morning sky, and only in the shadow of the hills would a fleecy mist hang over the surface of the lake far beneath us; then almost before the sun had power to drink up these lees of the night from the deep gap between the hills to the south, a linger of white cloud, borne up from the seaward slope, would creep around the peak of Atitlan only to be dissipated in the cooler air; but finger followed finger and the mysterious hand never lost its grasp until about noon great billowy clouds rolled up through the gap and the outpost was fairly captured although the crater itself often stood out clear above the cloudy belt. It was not, however, until the sun began to lose its power that the real attack commenced and the second column deployed through the gap on the southern flank of San Pedro and then from five o'clock until dark there followed a scene which no pen and no brush could adequately portray.