1878.] The Home of the Harpy-Eagle. 147 
los dos mares, the two oceans, at the same time! I only charge you 
one real (twelve cents) extra.” 
He who has never seen two oceans at the same time will very 
likely invest a real. The view is grand indeed. You stand on 
the back-bone of the American continent, which measures less 
than two hundred English miles from shore to shore here, and 
see the Gulf of Mexico so plainly that you might distinguish the 
smoke-trail of the New Orleans packet, or the glittering towers 
‘of St. Juan de Ulloa, while the Pacific, though thirty or forty 
miles nearer, glistens faintly through a gap of the Chiapas coast- 
hills, and but for the sharp-drawn line of its horizon might be 
mistaken for a mountain lake. Yet it is not the water that con- 
stitutes the grandeur of the alta vista, it is the land, the main- 
land of the western world, of which you see a larger and fairer 
portion from the parapet of Fort Tarija, than from perhaps any 
other point between Mount St. Elias and the Peak of Aconcagua. 
Far from the north, from the distant border state of Sonora, 
descends a mountain chain which is easily recognized as the 
Sierra Madre, the main and “%entral chain of the American con- 
tinent, the southern prolongation of the Rocky mountains of 
New Mexico and Colorado, A second Sierra, a continuation of 
_ the California Contra-costa range, lifts itself in the north-western 
sky, and may from here be traced through a succession of fainter 
but snowier summits that seem to rise with the distance, till they 
culminate in a stupendous peak, the extinct volcano of Culiacan, 
which looms like a jagged white cloud over the edge of the 
horizon. About ten leagues, or thirty English miles, from the 
Fort the two Sierras unite, and between their icy ridges, their wild 
Crags and their forests of evergreen pines enclose a mountain- 
land which is perhaps, after all, the true paradise of the western 
hemisphere. 
- From the regions of eternal snow to the lakes and fruit-groves 
in the valleys that communicate with the primeval forests of the 
tierra caliente, this vast triangular terrace-land, the great mountain 
valley of Oaxaca, exhibits every degree of elevation, the climatic 
extremes with all their intermediate grades and almost every 
Variety of the American fauna and flora. On a surface of six 
thousand English square miles the eastern half of the state of 
Oaxaca unites a greater abundance and variety of animal and 
Pele life tan any other American country of equal extent, 
