hair remained sacred, their mourning for the dead was unheard save at a distance, and no alien, even unto today, has ever seen the birth of their babes, the christening of their children, the burial of their dead, or the ceremonies of their shrines. The Seri and the whites were, indeed, mutually tolerant; but, so far as concerns mutual sympathy, the toleration was almost precisely on a par with that between the ranchero and the vulture-flock that scavengers his corrals—and when depredation began the toleration was of a piece with that between householders and their unwillingly domiciled rodents. It is not too much to say that the interracial mistrust and hatred of the Western Hemisphere culminates on the borders of Seriland; though the antipathy is commonly regarded by the alien tribesmen and the Mexicans as other than racial, since the Seri are felt to be hardly human—a feeling fully shared by the Seri, who undoubtedly deem themselves more closely akin to their deified bestial tutelaries than to the hated humans haunting their borders. [Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. IX HOUSE SKELETON, TIBURON ISLAND.] [Illustration: INTERIOR HOUSE STRUCTURE, TIBURON ISLAND.] * * * * * Even during the Encinas régime the Seri came in occasional contact with aliens on other parts of the frontier: on Hacienda Serna, the somewhat remoter borderland outpost on the north, the relations between the landholders and the Seri were analogous to those on the Encinas plains, though less acute in the ratio of relative distance. Occasionally small parties of warriors journeyed to Guaymas[220] on balsas or on foot to barter pelican-skin robes for Caucasian commodities, chiefly aguardiente and manta; still more rarely similar pilgrimages were made to the outskirts of Hermosillo; a few marauding raids were made to the ranches lying near Cieneguilla and Caborca; and a number of ill-advised prospecting parties, coming by land or water, paid the penalty of foolhardiness. Writing about 1864, Historian Velasco recurred to the Seri to say: [220] The accompanying plate XII is reproduced, from a photograph of a small group of Seri traders taken near Guaymas, probably during the eighties. It was kindly furnished by F. A. Ober, who purchased it in Guaymas. This handful of bandits, assassins, thieves, brutes [inhumanos], infinitely vile and cowardly, on February 28 last, on the Guaymas road, at the place called Huerfano, assassinated 4 unhappy women, including a girl of 9 years, and 7 men who were conducting them in a cart toward that port. He bitterly denounced the apparent apathy of the state and federal authorities, adding: