Before Stephens's investigations the wildest reports as to the extent of the ruins were current. These varied between sixty miles and twenty miles. Stephens once and for all gave the lie to these fairy tales, and showed that the ruins did not cover a square mile. But this fact does not weigh against the assumption, so soundly based upon the grandeur and artistic glories of the buildings, that Palenque was once a great and powerful city; for, as elsewhere, the hundreds of dwellings which clustered around its temples and palaces were houses of perishable materials which long ago rotted away in the forest. The largest ruin is the palace, which stands on an oblong mound 40 feet high, 310 feet long, and 260 feet wide. This gigantic mound was once faced entirely with stone. The building on it faces east, and has a frontage of 228 feet, a depth of 180, and a height of 25. There were fourteen doorways, each about 9 feet wide. It is of stone throughout, though the whole front was once stuccoed and painted. The spaces between the doorways were carved with bas-reliefs. The chief doorway is approached by stone steps. Along the cornice outside, which projected about a foot, holes had been drilled through the stone, which suggests that by their means an immense sun-curtain was sometimes lowered to cover the fourteen doorways. Two parallel corridors run lengthwise on all four sides of the building, and it is upon the corridor to the east that all fourteen doors opened. These corridors are about 9 feet wide. The floors are of cement; the walls 10 feet high and plastered. The inner walls are broken by apertures about a foot long, doubtless for the ventilation of the interior. Some of these window slits were cross-shaped, some T-shaped. [Illustration: ELLIPTICAL TABLET IN PALACE, PALENQUE.]