The plate opposite represents the front of this building. It is one hundred and fifty-four feet in front and twenty feet seven inches in depth. It differed in form from any we had seen and had square structures rising in the centre and at each end, as seen in ruins in the engraving; these were called towers, and at a distance had that appearance. The facades of the towers were all ornamented with sculptured stone. Several of the apartments had tobacco leaves spread out in them to dry. In the centre, one apartment was encumbered with rubbish, cutting off the light from the door, but in the obscurity we saw on one of the stones, along the layer in the arch, the dim outline of a painting like that at Kewick; in the adjoining apartment were the remains of paintings, the most interesting, except those near the village of Xul, that we had met with in the country and, like those, in position and general effect reminding me of processions in Egyptian tombs. The colour of the flesh was red, as was always the case with the Egyptians in representing their own people. Unfortunately, they were too much mutilated to be drawn, and seemed surviving the general wreck only to show that these aboriginal builders had possessed more skill in the least enduring branch of the graphic art. The first accounts we heard of these ruins date back to the time of my first visit to Nohpat. Among the Indians there at work was one who, while we were lunching, sitting apart under a tree, mentioned these ruins in exaggerated terms, particularly a row of painted soldiers, as he called them, which, from his imperfect description, I supposed might bear some resemblance to the stuccoed figures on the fronts of the buildings at Palenque; but, on pushing my inquiries, he said these figures carried muskets, and was so pertinacious on this point that I concluded he was either talking entirely at random, or of the remains of old Spanish structures. I noted the place in my memorandum-book, and having had it for a long time upon our minds, and received more different accounts of it than of any other, none proved more unlike what we expected to find. We looked for few remains, but these distinguished for their beauty and ornament, and high state of preservation, instead of which we found an immense field, grand, imposing, and interesting from its vastness, but all so ruined that, with the exception of this one building, little of the detail could be discovered.