96 



THE VALLEY OF MEXICO* 



Though, therefore, there exists but little outward sign 

 of the present activity of the internal fires which are still 

 surely smouldering beneath the surface of the earth in 

 this part of the world, and occasionally shake the moun* 

 tain-piled continent from its foundation ; the signs of 

 their past power are such as to strike the observer with 

 great wonder and awe. 



To me the whole of the hollow valley of Mexico, with 

 its ramparts of porphyric rocks, gave the idea of a vast 

 crater, which had been, in ages of which no human tra- 

 dition remains, the grand and principal vent through 

 which the pent-up element, after, by repeated efforts, 

 heaving up the continent step by step from its primeval 

 level, finally escaped through the crust of the earth. 



Would you accuse me of yielding too freely to the play 

 of imagination, when I thought that I could read in the 

 sublime features of the vast scene before me, the unre- 

 corded history of past centuries ; and faintly picture to 

 myself the convulsions of which the valley around me 

 must assuredly have been the theatre ? At the time 

 when the earthquake was bursting those innumerable fis- 

 sures and barrancas which are observable in the surface 

 of the lower districts ; raising one sheet of level country 

 after another to its ordained elevation ; and sending up 

 one long, towering range of porphyritic mountains after 

 another from the abyss to the sky : how little can the 

 fancy paint the scenes of awful desolation which must 

 have existed here — the great combustion which may 

 have given birth to the valley, with its basins of saline 

 waters — and the successive formation and appearance of 

 the numberless cones before me. The world has grown 

 old, but the records of that age are fresh around us. 

 What must have been the signs in the earth and sky, as 

 the ungovernable and subtle element destroyed the un- 

 seen obstacles to its escape into the upper air, and the 

 surface began to yield to the tremendous force exerted 

 by the internal fires underneath. Here rose the huge 

 pyramid, based upon the wall of the surrounding moun- 

 tains ; growing, day by day and year by year, by the ac- 

 cumulation of its own refuse, amid the showers of its own 



