fflora, 43 



The Mexican Southern Railway, from Puebla to Oaxaca, descends 

 in a few hours, by a series of fertile terraces, from an elevation of seven 

 thousand feet to one of about seventeen hundred and fifty feet, when 

 ths wonderful Canon de los Cues is reached, a region of cocoa-nuts and 

 bananas. But all the valleys and terraces in March are green or yellow 

 with wheat and corn and sugar-cane. It confuses one's ideas to pass a 

 field of wheat, the green blades just springing from the ground, and 

 then a field ripe for harvest, and then a threshing-floor where the grain 

 is being trodden out by mules. This means that you can plant and 

 reap every day in the year, if you can obtain water in the dry season, 

 and do not wait for the regular and copious summer rains. 



The magnificent arboreal vegetation embraces one hundred and 

 fourteen different species of building timber and cabinet woods, includ- 

 ing oaks, pines, firs, cedars, mahogany, and rosewood ; twelve species 

 of dyewoods ; eight of gum trees : the cacao and india-rubber, copal, 

 liquid-ambar, camphor, turpentine, pine, mezquite yielding a substance 



the other side to Cuernavaca. Mexico City has an elevation of seven thousand five 

 hundred feet, Tres Marias of about ten thousand, and Cuernavaca of five thousand. 

 The descent by the wagon-road is in length only twelve miles, but the drop in that 

 distance is five thousand feet, so that the traveller passes very quickly from temperate 

 to tropical conditions. . . . 



" From the heights Cuernavaca seems to lie in a plain, but it is really on a pro- 

 montory between two barrancas, and the whole country beyond is broken, till the 

 terraces fall off into more tropical places, where the view is bordered by purple 

 mountains. Indeed, the little city in the midst of this tumultuous plain is surrounded 

 by lofty mountains. The country around, and especially below to the south, is irri- 

 gated, and presents a dozen contrasts of color in the evergreen foliage, the ripening 

 yellow crops of sugar-cane and grain, the clusters of big trees here and there about a 

 village or a hacienda, and the frequent church-towers. All this is loveliness, a mixture 

 of temperate and tropical grace, but there is grandeur besides. Looking to the east, 

 say from the Palace of Cortez, over the fields of purple and green and yellow and 

 brown, where the graceful palms place themselves just as an artist would have them 

 in the foreground of his picture, the view is certainly one of the finest in the world. 

 There is in the left the long mountain range with the peaks of Tres Marias, and along 

 the foot of it haciendas and towers, cones of extinct volcanoes and noble rocky 

 promontories. To form the middle-distance mountains come into the picture, sloping 

 together to lead the eye along from one " value" to another, violet, purple, dark or 

 shining as the sun strikes them, while on the left is a noble range of naked precipices 

 of red rock, always startling in color. It is some two thousand feet up the side of 

 one of these red cliffs that there is the remains of an ancient city of Cliff-dwellers 

 almost inaccessible now, but once the home of a race that understood architecture and 

 knew how to carve. The lines of this natural picture, the fields, the intervening 

 ledges, the lofty mountains, all converge to the spot the artist would choose for the 

 eye to rest, and there, up in the heavens, are the snow-clad peaks of Popocatepetl 

 and Iztaccihuatl, about seventeen thousand five hundred feet above the sea, volcanic 

 creators of the region, and now undisputed lords of the landscape. In the evening these 

 peaks are rosy in the sun ; in the morning their white immobility is defined against 

 the rosy sunshine." 



