I have visited uncountable waterfalls, and I can safely say that 

 this El Salto is among the most beautiful in the world. Although 

 neither its volume nor height — about five hundred feet — is great, 

 it more than makes up for any lack of grandeur by its incredible 

 coloring, its other novel features, and its great beauty. 



The falls have eaten back some 250 yards into the mountain 

 face, down the top of which the river descends by a series of 

 rapids and subfalls over great domes of rock. It then plunges 

 over one even greater dome in two major and sev;ral minor 

 spillways, the former descending directly into a large pool, the 

 lesser ones meandering into and out of the rock face via a series 

 of huge caves that go up and under the great dome. The most 

 striking feature of this part of the fall is that the whole of it, and 

 even under the lesser falls, is entirely clothed in a velvety mass 

 of dwarf aquatic and semiaquatic plants ranging in color from 

 the deepest bottle green to the vividest jades, emeralds, and 

 apple greens. Still more thrilling is the pool beneath. 



This is an enormous rimstone pool almost two hundred yards 

 across, contained by a thin, meandering wall of calcareous ma- 

 terial deposited by the water. Beyond and below this, a series of 

 other similar pools of every configuration step some five hundred 

 yards down the gentle incline like a series of fountains described 

 by some ancient teller of fairy tales, till a base level is reached 

 and the resulting river meanders off amid billowing tropical 

 forest. But this is not all, for every bit of the ten-foot-tall, three- 

 foot-thick rims of these pools, even under the pouring waters, is 

 also clothed in a continuous mat of brilliant green plants. And 

 just to bring the whole to perfection, the waters themselves are 

 slightly milky and of an intense blue color that rivals the sky and 

 in dull weather gives an ethereal and somewhat uncanny appear- 

 ance to the whole place. 



This river is throughout its course a road of enchantment, 

 vistas of the utmost beauty coming into view around every bend 

 as it winds between high cliffs that are festooned with tropical 

 growth and topped by great feathery trees loaded with strange 

 epiphytic plants, while eagles soar in the air above and parrots 

 flash in the sunlight below. Lower down, out on the plain, it is 

 bordered by a gallery of tall trees, including many Mexican 

 Cypress — which, unlike their northern counterpart, support wide- 

 spreading branches and thick, billowing foliage. There is a place 

 some miles down the valley where the milky blue waters gurgle 

 endlessly through some boulder-strewn rapids into a large pool 

 surrounded by trees in which thousands of birds make their 

 homes, among them orioles caparisoned in vivid orange and 

 black. In the pool are large numbers of huge water tortoises (a 

 species of Map Turtle) and equally huge softshell turtles. Both 

 seem extremely friendly, for, although the latter can give a 

 terrible bite, they simple come and nudge you if you float still 

 in the water. 



THE SNAKE PASS 



Crossing these same Sierras only 130 miles farther south, you 

 meet an entirely different state of affairs. Starting along the 

 magnificently engineered highway from Tamazunchale— called 

 by everybody, even the Mexicans themselves, "Thomas-and- 

 Charlie"— that nestles in a tropical valley at a height of only 

 675 feet, you go straight up, and continue to do so until you 

 reach a village named La Culebra (the Snake), which is perched 

 on a knife-edged ridge only a few hundred feet wide. This, 

 however, is still not the top, since the road crawls on upward to 

 a col at an altitude of over 8500 feet before it descends to Jacala 

 on the edge of the central plateau at 4500 feet altitude. Here the 



Sierras form a compound mass rather than a series of ranges, so 

 that when you top the first ascent you go down a little and then 

 start climbing again; and you repeat this, rising in the aggregate 

 ever higher until you reach the pass. The descent on the other 

 side is the same — brief down-goings interrupted by briefer up- 

 goings, all ending in a descent of about four thousand feet. 



The vegetation along this route is first an evergreen and then, 

 almost but not quite to the summit, a deciduous montane tropical 

 forest ending at about seven thousand feet in a belt of almost 

 pure dwarf beech. Above this the trees open out. then rapidly 

 become sparser and stunted and grass appears; and then, above 

 La Culebra on the eastern face, trees die away altogether. We 

 have passed through all the montane zones including the or- 

 chardbush and savannahs and find ourselves amid montane 

 scrublands. Over the summit on the west face we go through 

 these zones in reverse, then enter parkland with short grass 

 below the scattered trees. But here the trees are pifions and other 

 pines, junipers, and scrub oaks. As we descend, the upper peaks 

 and ridges are clothed in solid stands of these, the bigger pines 

 at the top, the junipers at the bottom, and then we gradually 

 come back into the cactus- and scrub-covered aridity of the 

 central plateau. But a lot of this is hard to see today because of 

 the works of man. 



On the eastern faces of the up-going slopes you will be 

 amazed to see cultivated fields going to the very tops of the 

 steepest peaks. Some of these fields are almost perpendicular, so 

 that one wonders not only how the cultivators can get up to 

 these dizzy heights, but also why the soil is not immediately 

 washed into the valleys below. The answer to the latter is a 

 complex business related to rainfall, type of rock, and other 

 factors into which we will not go. The point of particular interest 

 to us is that, with the exception of some deep and steep gullies 

 on the northwest faces of these mountains, every bit of the 

 growth that clothes them has been stripped away time and time 

 again throughout the ages, so that there is not the slightest hope 

 of reconstructing with any certainty what their cover was before 

 the arrival of man. And we must not forget that toolmaking and 

 bone-carving men were resident upon the central plateau of 

 Mexico certainly by 20,000 B.C., when elephants still roamed 

 that land, and probably tens of thousands of years before that. 



These mountains are not unique in their cultivation. To the 

 contrary, though there are still today vast areas on every con- 

 tinent that are not inhabited by man, a great part of the entire 

 land surface of the earth, from the centers of what are now real 

 deserts to the polar tundras, has not only been roamed over by 

 hunting man for hundreds of thousands of years, but has been 

 profoundly altered by agricultural man. Even hunting and berry- 

 picking have their effects on the natural economy, and both 

 herding and agriculture can alter its entire aspect. Mexico, with 

 the possible exception of some inner areas of the western Sierras, 

 is a land that has supported a large human population for count- 

 less centuries and during considerable climatic changes. While 

 man cannot change the weather, he can change the surface 

 "climate" of the land by clearing away its natural vegetative 

 cover, thus causing erosion, rapid run-off, and finally deserts 

 which heat up in the sun and cause columns of hot air to rise. 

 This hot air may push up the lower cloud cover as it passes over. 

 There have been deserts throughout geological history, but man 

 appears to have played a not inconsiderable part in extending or 



The Jaguar, the great spotted cat of the American tropics, 

 is common in the Mexican Sierras, especially in the west, 

 and strays over the United States border. 



286 



