Note 329 — DEMOTIC CHARACTERS (continued 4)

As an indication of the conditions for observation in Seriland, this cairn is fairly typical: it was seen but once (on December 25, 1895), and the observation was limited to a few minutes by the attendant circumstances. On the evening before the party landed at Campo Navidad, with the hope of working up the coast nearly or quite to Punta Tormenta on the following day; but before morning a downbay gale was whitening the waters of Bahia Kunkaak so fiercely as to prohibit embarkation. Meantime the supply of water—that standard commodity of arid regions—was too nearly exhausted to permit inaction; so while Mr Johnson with three guards ascended the Sierra to establish a new topographic station, the leader of the party with the remaining seven men set out in search of water. The nearest known aguaje was that of Arroyo Carrizal; but under the hypothesis that some of the better-beaten trails turning northward might lead to nearer water, one of them was taken; and after turning back from half a dozen false scents, the principal trail was followed to the well-known Tinaja Anita, 15 miles by the trail from Campo Navidad; and here the party watered. It was on the return trip that the cairn was discovered; but the party were laden with filled canteens and saucepans and coffeepots, the day was well spent, and the camp more than a dozen miles distant even over the air line traversing spall-sprinkled taluses and sharp-edged rocks; moreover, the men were naturally and necessarily heavily armed and on constant guard. Accordingly even the short stay and cursory notes involved an additional mile of darkness on a trail so rough as to cut through shoe-soles and sandals and catch scents of blood to tempt coyotes to the camp site. Thus it was that the cairn was not more critically examined and is not more fully described.