The next day, in sunlight which was positively grilling, we completed our journey to Tizimin. It was siesta time when we rode into the plaza under the shadow of the gaunt walls of the hideous ruined monastery. The town was quiet, almost like a city of the dead. The shops were closed; and at the long grated window-spaces sunblinds were drawn. The grass had invaded the streets; the whole place looked like a Rip Van Winkle city which had got badly "left" in the race of civic life. Stretched in the thick dust a mangy dog or two lay panting; here and there under the shadow of a wall dozed an Indian, crouched on his haunches. We rode up to the Jefetura, and there from a yawning soldier we learnt that the Jefe was taking his morning tub, so we had some minutes to wait before we could expect an official welcome. Meanwhile we had time to glance round us. The plaza was of much the same size as Valladolid. In front of the Palacio Municipal, where the becottoned National Guard were drowsing in the verandah-shade, was an avenue of orange trees loaded with fruit. On the other side of the square stood another of those huge stuccoed churches we had become so accustomed to seeing. The seventeenth-century Spaniards in Yucatan certainly had no taste in building. Nothing could be more distressing than these great piles of stucco, flat-faced as any Hottentot. Their bigot builders certainly preferred quantity to quality. Even when new, these ecclesiastical eyesores must have always been such. But now, ... with plaster peeling off, with tufts of rank weeds growing from gaps in the walls, surrounded by a courtyard half cobble, half leprous grass, the enclosing walls tumbling in ruin, the church gate sagging on its broken rusty hinges or perchance replaced by a hurdle, they admirably typify the bedraggled down-at-heel ceremonial which masquerades throughout Yucatan as religion.