Before daylight the next morning we were again in the saddle. For some distance back from the port the ground had been washed or overflowed by the sea, and was a sandy, barren mangrove brake. Beyond commenced the same broken, stony surface, and before we had proceeded far we discovered that Doctor Cabot's horse was lame. Not to lose time, I rode on to procure another, and at eight o'clock reached the village of Silan. In the suburbs I discovered unexpectedly the towering memorial of another ruined city, and riding into the plaza, saw at one angle, near the wall of the church, the gigantic mound represented in the plate opposite, the grandest we had seen in the country. Much as we had seen of ruins, the unexpected sight of this added immensely to the interest of our long journeying among the remains of aboriginal grandeur. Leaving my horse at the casa real, and directing the alcalde to see about getting one for Doctor Cabot, I walked over to the mound. At the base, and inside of the wall of the church, were five large orange trees, loaded with fruit. A group of Indians were engaged in getting stone out of the mound to repair the wall, and a young man was superintending them, whom I immediately recognised as the padre. He accompanied me to the top of the mound; it was one of the largest we had seen, being about fifty feet high and four hundred feet long. There was no building or structure of any kind visible; whatever had been upon it had fallen or been pulled down. The church, the wall of the yard, and the few stone houses in the village, had been built of materials taken from it. In walking along the top we reached a hole, at the bottom of which I discovered the broken arch of a ceiling, and looked through it into an apartment below. This explained the character of the structure. A building had extended the whole length of the mound, the upper part of which had fallen, and the ruins had made the whole a long, confused, and undistinguishable mass. The top commanded an extensive view of a great wooded plain, and near by, rising above the trees, was another mound, which, within a few years, had been crowned with an edifice, called, as at Chichen and Tuloom, El Castillo. The padre, a young man, but little over thirty, remembered when this Castillo stood with its doorways open, pillars in them, and corridors around. The sight of these ruins was entirely unexpected; if they had been all we had met with in the country, we should have gazed upon them with perplexity and wonder; and they possessed unusual interest from the fact that they existed in a place, the name of which was known and familiar to us as that of an existing aboriginal town at the time of the conquest.