twenty houses, to lodge the cacique and his attendants. At the foot of this elevation they mark out a square place, according to the size of the village, around which the leading men have their houses.... To ascend the elevation they have a straight passageway from bottom to top, fifteen or twenty feet wide. Here steps are made by massive beams, and others are planted firmly in the ground to serve as walls. On all other sides of the platform the sides are cut steep.”[181] Thomas quotes further from Garcilasso: “The chief, whose name was also Guaxule, came out with five hundred men to meet him and took him in the village (pueblo) in which were three hundred houses, and lodged him in his own. This house stood on a high mound (cerro) similar to others we have already mentioned. Round about was a roadway sufficiently broad for six men to walk abreast.”[182] Again he quotes Le Page Du Pratz, who visited the Natchez in 1720: “As I was an intimate friend of the sovereign of the Natchez he showed me their temple, which is about thirty feet square, and stands on an artificial mount about eight feet high, by the side of a small river.”[183] There was also still another reason for building on mounds or elevated platforms; the reason, or at least one great reason, why the Mayas and Mexicans built on them, namely the desire to protect the foundations. In Louisiana the Taensas, in the time of La Salle, built of “sun-baked mud mixed with straw, arched over with a dome-shaped roof.”[184] Now a structure of this kind if reared on ordinary ground would soon be destroyed by the rains and moisture sapping its foundations, but by placing it on an elevated platform, where its footing would be comparatively dry, it would endure a long time. A sacred house would be likely to be so placed, if not others. [Illustration: MISSISSIPPI VALLEY METHOD OF USING JACAL CONSTRUCTION, ACCORDING TO THOMAS] [Illustration: CLIFF OUTLOOK, CANYON DEL MUERTO, ARIZONA] Every tribe had some kind of a sacred structure, the Omahas carrying from place to place the three sacred tents referred to. The sacred structures, too, were generally of the same style as the house of the chief. Each village of the Natchez had a house devoted to the dead, besides others dedicated to different sacred objects. The death-house was oval, “having a circumference of one hundred feet—a simple hut without a window, and with a low and narrow opening on the side for the only door.”[185] Here were “garnered the choicest fetiches of the tribe, of which some were moulded from clay and baked in the sun. There, too, were gathered the bones of the dead; there an undying fire was kept burning by appointed guardians as if to warm and light and cheer the departed.”[185] “Hard by the temple, on an artificial mound of earth, stood the hut of the Great Sun; around it were grouped the cabins of the tribe.”[185]