greatly increased when they found out that I had a saw with me some rough planks were soon produced, and Gorgonio and I spent the morning making the child's coffin. In the afternoon the rain ceased, and the body was carried off to be buried in the small ermita in the forest. I did not go with the burial party, but could hear in the distance the report of my gun, which had been borrowed to fire a last salute over the grave. The Indian told me that he and his wife belonged to Cajabon, and returned there for a week once or twice a year, but that they spent all the rest of the year in this rancho, where they kept their live stock and planted their milpa. However, they had found the situation to be very unhealthy, and this was the third child they had lost within a year of its birth.
We were obliged to spend another night in the overcrowded rancho; then, as the weather had cleared, on the 24th we went on our way, and this day crossed a small stream flowing to the westward towards the Usumacinta. This great river, which, after a course of nearly five hundred miles, eventually pours its waters into the Gulf of Mexico, rises within the frontier of British Honduras as the Rio Santa Isabel or Sepusilhá and flows for some distance in a south-westerly direction. After crossing the boundary-line of the colony it receives the water of numerous streamlets and becomes known as the Rio Cancuén, and at the end of its sweep to the south it is joined by the Rio Chajmaic, a stream which rises in the mountains to the north of Lanquin. After its junction with the Chajmaic the river is named the Rio de la Pasion; it then takes a northerly direction and is joined in its course by two considerable affluents from the east, the Machaquilá, which rises on the British frontier, and the San Juan. On reaching the latitude of 10° 40′ N. the Rio de la Pasion makes a sharp bend to the westward, and about thirty-five miles down stream is joined by the Rio Chixoy, a large river which drains the northern side of the great backbone of Guatemala mountains, and is the same stream which under the name of the Rio Negro we crossed near Uspantan in the year 1894. Below the junction of the Pasion and Chixoy the river flows in a north-westerly direction and is known as the Rio Usumacinta, and after a course of about twenty miles is joined from the south by the Rio Lacandon, which drains a considerable portion of the State of Chiapas.
Throughout the whole of its length the Rio de la Pasion must be a very sluggish stream. In its westerly course before its junction with the Chixoy there are reaches of the river where during the dry season hardly any current it is perceptible, and after heavy rains the flood-waters extend for so many miles through the forest that one is almost led to think that this region from the mouth of the Chajmaic northward may at one time have formed the bed of a great lake. Where we crossed the Cancuén, at a distance of not more
