The following is my friend’s description of one of the actual native ceremonies at which he was present: “We were up in the Intamal country about four days’ hard river travelling beyond the San Cristobal frontier. Little by little, the isolated plantations disappeared, and soon we were deep in the untouched jungle country where there are only native villages. “That day I was with the advance party, and as we were making a fairly complete cadastral survey of our route, we deviated slightly toward a largish jungle-covered hill that would furnish us with an excellent commanding position for triangulation. “My native peons were carrying our little transit theodolite and we were following a native track that led toward the hill when our party was suddenly surrounded. “A whistle blew in the jungle and out from the bush came semi-nude Indians variously armed. A few had trade guns, but the bulk carried the inevitable machete, while a minority had short bows and long quivers of obsidian-headed arrows. “They offered us no overt violence, but made it abundantly clear that they resented any party attempting to scale their hill. Most of the dialogue was in the native tongue, a debased agglutinative inflective speech similar to Nanhatl. The leader, who wore a peculiar breastplate of featherwork, could, however, talk Spanish comparatively fluently. “My greatest trouble was to induce him to understand that we were not a prospecting party and were not after gold. Talk with our men who had been with us some months finally reassured him. A chance compliment of mine about his feather breastplate, which was of quetzal feathers, opened the magic door to me. “It was astonishing to that Indian, who had probably not seen a hundred white men, as distinct from Mexicans, in all his life, to find in me a man who knew more about the mythological importance of the quetzal bird than he knew himself. “My work on the ruined cities of Yucatan and my studies of the Mittall codices and similar work had given me a sound knowledge of the worship of Quetzalcoatl the god of the Morning Star, to whom the wonderful emerald-plumaged quetzal bird is sacred. “To cut a long story short, I arranged things with the head-man so that we could camp in his village that night. The people were kindly, once they understood that we were not gold hunters and meant no harm, and my friend the head-man, having introduced me to certain elders and discussed with them my knowledge of their almost extinct faith, invited me to be present as a participant in a religious feast to be held that night. “The feast was that of the Cozca cuaptli--the feast of vultures, birds as important in the Mayan underworld as in the Egyptian ceremonies. “Shortly after dusk I left the village with them, going alone and to all external seeming unarmed. We made a long journey through the bush, climbing higher all the time, and I realized that we were actually on the sacred hill that they had forbidden us to ascend.