I was glad to get back to my "hotel," and have breakfast, with chocolate served up in jicaras. After an hour's rest, I started with Velasquez in search of the Indian antiquities. We rode up the right side of the river, high up above the stream, as the banks are rocky and precipitous; then down a shelving road to a lower level, and across undulating savannahs thinly timbered. After about three miles, we came out on a small flat plain, probably alluvial, about twenty acres in extent, mostly covered with grass, with a few scattered jicara trees. On the further end of this plain was a mud-walled, thatched hut, called "El Salto," from a fall of the river close by. A man was lounging about, and a woman bruising maize for tortillas. The man told us that the "worked stones," as he called them, were on the side of the plain we had crossed. Before going to look at them, we went down to the river to see the waterfall. Just opposite the house the Juigalpa river, which comes flowing down over a flat bed of trachyte, leaps down a deep narrow chasm that it has cut in the hard rock. This chasm is about fifty feet deep, and only twenty wide. The river was low, and poured all its water in at the end of the deep notch; but when flooded, it must rush in over the sides also, and make a magnificent turmoil of waters. Even when I saw it, the water, as it rushed along at the bottom of the narrow chasm, boiling and surging amongst great masses of fallen rock with a steady roar, looked as if it would carry all before it. Deep pot-holes, some of them ten feet deep, were worn into the trachyte rock, and sections of several were shown in the sides of the chasm, which could only have been formed when the falls were many yards lower down. The trachyte is very hard and tough. The sections of the pot-holes are as fresh as if they had been made but yesterday. In reply to my assertion that the falls had produced, and were now working back the chasm, our guide, the lounging man from the house, said the rocks had always been as they were: he had lived there ten years, and there had been no change in them. Perhaps, if the buried Indians could rise from their graves where they were laid to rest more than three hundred years ago, they, too, would testify that there had been no change, that the rocks and the leaping river were as they had been and would be for ever. The untrained mind cannot grasp the idea of the effect of slowly-acting influences extending over vast periods of time. (PLATE 15. INDIAN STATUES.)