Cancun is a sixteen-mile stretch, mostly dense bush; at the northern end one of the artificial mounds, examples of which we examined higher up the coast by Cape Catoche. Our old Mayan host was called Patricio Pat, quite probably a descendant of the cacique Naum Pat with whom, it will be remembered, the Spaniards made such friends on their first visits to Cozumel. He had two huts in a clearing near the water edge, surrounded by a grove of cocoa palms for the fruit of which a dory came periodically from the other islands. There was a certain distinction about the old man's face as he crouched in front of the fire on the earth floor of his hut and held his lean brown hands out to where he could half see the red flame. He had queer stories to tell of haunted ruins in the bush here; of how he had heard his name called several times, and cocks crowing and all the other noises of a village; and how, long ago, a Yucatecan fisherman, wantonly breaking up a stone that had fallen from an Indian palace front, had been struck from behind by an unseen foe, and after hours of unconsciousness had crawled to the sea beach and for weeks had been on the point of death. It was all very quaint, and the old man's droning voice and his clearcut, wizened, hairless face in the glare of the fire made just such a figure as must have crouched round the fires when Naum Pat was lord hereabouts and the caravels of Spain had yet to be sighted from the wooded shores. We early tumbled into our hammocks, but long after, in the flickering light of the fire, Robinson Crusoe squatted in front of a small stool on which stood an earthenware pot, into which he laboriously scraped and squeezed with a broken fragment of cocoanut shell the meat of a pile of cocoanuts from which he was thus extracting the oil. We were up at dawn hoping to steal a march on the enemy; but even at that early hour the insect curses of the tropics had taken down the shutters and started business. While we breakfasted, Crusoe squatted on his haunches in true Mayan fashion, meditatively rubbing his thin hands and giving us the best directions he could for our coming hunt in the bush. By seven, accompanied by Lucio and Pedro, we were off. As we dived into the woodlands at the back of the hut, the old fellow, machete on shoulder, in sack shift and patched striped cotton trousers, surrounded by a pack of leaping, barking dogs, started for the eastern shore, where he expected a dory to fetch a cargo of cocoanuts.