The Indians themselves we found friendly enough if treated fairly and kindly. The children would watch us solemnly from the hut-doors, and the boys and men followed us at a respectful distance in our wanderings through the woodlands in search of buried cities. We found little save littered stones, but our excursions satisfied us that no Chichens exist in this part of Yucatan. Chansenote itself, once a flourishing Indian town, is now a group of mud-plastered huts with possibly three dozen inhabitants. Kantunil is a larger settlement, strictly Indian now as it always has been; the government vested in an Indian chief. Here the Mayans live pretty much as did their ancestors four centuries back, cultivating their milpas, rearing their farm stock, nominally Catholics but really without religion, save a jumbled mass of superstition in which Christian Saints and pagan gods are, after the long lapse of years, inextricably mixed. Due north of Tizimin the country is still for the most part in the hands of the Yucatecans; but the cultivation of it is handicapped by a dearth of labour, for here the Indians do not submit to the conditions of serfdom existing in so-called civilised Yucatan, but will only work for fair wage, and often not long for that. Kikil, some miles from Tizimin on the north, is a straggling settlement of such working Indians, once the site of a large Indian town before the Spaniards built Tizimin. Here there were said to be extensive ruins, but we were disappointed as usual. Nothing is more disheartening than the glib way the idiotic Yucatecans send one on wild-goose chases after ruins which prove to be hideous Catholic churches of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The Indians, too, are untrustworthy guides in such matters, for they have a perfect indifference to the architectural skill of their ancestors, and speak of their productions as "_xlap-pak_" (old walls).