We had accomplished our purpose, that of exploring the hitherto unmapped and untraversed north-eastern portions of Yucatan and her eastern islands. Negative results are very often quite as valuable as positive results. As we shall later show, a great deal hangs, as far as our explanations of the origin of the Mayan civilisation are concerned, upon the question, until now undecided but raised by Stephens more than sixty years ago, of how high a degree of perfection the buildings in North-East Yucatan had attained. Our tour has satisfied us that we have once and for all an answer to that question. Our results are negative. We have proved that students of the Mayan problem need waste no time in expeditions to the north-east. Ruins there are, without doubt, which time and the denseness of the vegetation prevented us from discovering; but those ruins, if found and carefully studied, would not add an iota of value to the mass of evidence for and against the theories which have been advanced in explanation of the Mayan problem. For the future, work must be concentrated, if it is to be of any value, upon the extreme southern districts of Yucatan and the Guatemalan border. The troubled state of that country, the hostility of the tribes which range it, its physical difficulties, must for some years to come render investigations extremely hazardous and unsatisfactory. But when eventually the districts south of Lake Peten are opened to archæology, immense progress may be expected. Under the ægis of Mexico the opening up of this country cannot, we venture to believe, ever become an accomplished fact. But when the relations between the governing class and the Indian tribes have assumed that fitting aspect of benevolence and mutual good-feeling which they will assume so soon as Central America forms a portion of the United States, the whole of that archæologically rich district will yield up its secrets--probably to American students, who are already showing that they grasp the importance of Southern Yucatan. We had always intended, if time permitted, to travel to the south of Merida and view for ourselves the wonderful group of ruins of which the chief are Uxmal, Labna, Kabah, and Sayil. Thus, after a day or two's rest and before we threw off our uniform of khaki and returned to the normal collar-and-tie state of civilisation, we started out for Ticul. This is the most important town on the southern branch of Yucatan's railways. In the very heart of cultivated Southern Yucatan, it lies under the northern slope of that chain of limestone hills or sierras which runs across Yucatan from Maxcanu in the north-west to Tekax in the south-east. Some ten miles after leaving the southern suburbs of Merida is the pueblo of Acanceh, near which are the remains of an Indian city. Here an elaborately carved wall has been discovered.