From Tabi the distance to the ruins of Labna is some twelve miles. At
Tabi you have reached the top of the first range of those sierras which
command the vast valley lands around Ticul, stretching northward toward
Merida. The road leads for the first few miles between luxuriant hedges
to the hacienda of San Francisco (where we stayed the night); and thence
it plunges into a really beautiful wooded, hilly country, the thick
foliage climbing up the sides of the bluffs which range each side of the
roadway, rearing their bare limestone crowns above the trees. It is a
forest world, very different from the desolate and dark woods of the
north-east, and as the underwood crackles beneath our feet, deer break
away from the coverts at the roadsides and bound up the wooded slopes.
At the seventh mile from the hacienda a ruin shows on a hill to the
right. It looks worth a climb, and with axe and machete we make our way
to it. It had been a two-storeyed building, but the upper portion was in
hopeless ruin. The lower storey consisted of six rooms entered by six
doorways, the front ornamented by a now much broken row of pilasters
half rounded, their attachment to the building being on the flat side.
Above these was a second row of smaller pilasters about a foot long, and
above them a coping as edging for the platform, once smooth stone, now
hopeless earth-tangle and débris, upon which the upper building stood.
Between the third and fourth doorway a flying arch still supported the
remnants of a staircase some 10 feet wide which led up to the upper
building.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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