He gives the story of the Queen of Cofaciqui, with some additional particulars. The string of pearls which she presented to the governor made three circuits of her neck and descended to her waist. In his account, the graves in Cofaciqui became a temple containing, among other riches, more than a thousand measures of pearls, of which they took only two. Near Cofaciqui was the temple of Talomeco, over a hundred steps long by forty broad, with the walls high in proportion. Upon the roof of the temple were shells of different sizes, placed with the inside out, to give more brilliancy, and with the intervals “filled with many strings of pearls of divers sizes, in the form of festoons, from one shell to the other, and extending from the top of the roof to the bottom.” Within the temple, festoons of pearls hung from the ceiling and from all other parts of the building. In the middle were three rows of chests of graded sizes, arranged in pyramids of five or six chests each, according to their sizes. “All these chests were filled with pearls, in such a manner that the largest contain the largest pearls, and thus, in succession, to the smallest, which were full of seed-pearls only. The quantity of pearls was such, that the Spaniards avowed, that even if there had been more than nine hundred men and three hundred horses, they all together could not have carried off at one time all the pearls of this temple. We ought not to be too much astonished at this, if we consider that the Indians of the province conveyed into these chests, during many ages, all the pearls which they found, without retaining a single one of them.”[307] In the armory attached to this temple were long pikes, maces, clubs, and other weapons mounted with links and tassels of pearls. Garcilasso has an interesting story of an incident said to have occurred a few days after leaving Cofaciqui, when the troops were passing through the wilderness. [Illustration: Negro pearling camp on bank of an Arkansas river ] [Illustration: Group of Arkansas pearl fishermen; photographed shortly after the woman in the center of the group had found a pearl for which she received $800 ]