CHAPTER V.
We passed over trails where the tired animals stumbled, and once we aroused a chorus of dog protests as if we had disturbed a village. Ixtual seemed ever anxious that we hasten our pace, and sometimes was impatient because we made no faster progress; but when the dawn burst and broke with the speed it always has in those latitudes, the Maya seemed relieved that we had come to the borders of what appeared to be a virgin jungle. He sought a place that permitted us to enter it, found it, and led us through what was nothing more than a narrow path into its depths, where we rested. Looking back as if through the egress of a tunnel, I saw plantations below me, the occasional thatched roof of a nipa hut, the stretch of a gentle declivity up which we had climbed in the darkness, and, f
