It took between two and three years, and the result is perfection. From north to south, from east to west, side streets and main streets, for the full three miles' width of the city, the surface is as smooth as glass, as clean as marble. Never was there such paving, and never will there probably ever be again, for there is no parallel to the circumstances of unforeseen wealth which has come to Yucatan's capital. We had been favourably impressed by the cleanliness of the Yucatecan crowds at Progreso, and, as we moved easily and without a vibration down street after street of well-matched and well-built houses, we rubbed our eyes and wondered whether we were in a land where it was always washing-day, for the people on the sidewalks, the people in the passing carriages, the police at the corners in their trim holland uniforms, the children playing at the pavement edge, the tradesmen at their shop-doors, and the boys and girls in their neat linens returning from school, were so spotless as to beggar all description. But in the midst of our amazement we reached our hotel, a massive three-storeyed building in two squares, neatly floored with tiles, roofless, wide flights of stone steps leading up to galleries from which was access to the bedrooms, stone-floored, very high-ceilinged, opening through wooden sunblinds on to small balconies. We were very tired with our journey, and the coolness of our rooms and the brightness of the city had such a lulling effect that we were almost persuaded that we had reached Utopia. There was nothing disquieting in our rooms from the insect point of view, except a line of harmless-looking small black ants which were taking an afternoon walk along the tiles at the corner, and the fact that the small iron bedsteads were enveloped in mosquito-nets. We had evidently reached Utopia. The air was balmy as we composed ourselves to sleep that night, and there was not even a mosquito in our nets. * * * * * Shortly before dawn the next morning (Sunday) we were roused from a dreamless sleep by a din so terrific that to our half-sleeping wits it converted itself into a giant tattoo beat on cracked tea trays. We started up. _Boom-poom_ (a pause). _Pom-m_--_poom-m_. The last was a ragged-edged sound, as flat as stale soda water, as lifeless as Queen Anne. Then came a shrill noise such as might be produced by a violent meeting between a butcher's steel and the treble octave of a "cottage grand." Then _Pom-poom_ again, and then a noise as if the blacksmith of "spreading chestnut tree" fame had gone suicidally mad and had spent his dying fury and the full force "of the muscles of his brawny arms" in one fell blow on his anvil.