484 PARRAS 
The town on the lower side is encompassed with 
gardens and orchards, in which we saw pomegranate, 
fig, pear, and other trees growing with great luxuri- 
yee. On the hill back of the town, I saw for the first 
time plantations of the maguey (agavé Americana), 
the leaves of which were from six to seven feet in 
length. They are planted in rows, and surrounded by 
a hedge of the same, making a most formidable breast- 
work against both man and beast. It is from these 
plants that the pulque is made.* We had seen the 
* The sap of the maguey is obtained by making an incision in the 
central leaves or heart of the plant, which incision is converted into a 
kind of reservoir for the collection of the juice, by drawing the lateral 
leaves close together and tying their extremities. 
“This is the true vegetable spring, which keeps running for two or 
three months, and from which the Indian draws three or four times a 
day. We may judge of the quickness or slowness of the motion of the 
juice by the quantity of honey extracted from the maguey at different 
times of the day. A foot. commonly yields, in twenty-four hours, four 
cubic decimetres (or two hundred and forty-two cubic inches, English), 
equal to eight guartillos. Of this total quantity they obtain three quar- 
tillos at sunrise, two at mid-day, and three at six in the evening. A 
very vigorous plant sometimes yields fifteen quartillos, or four hundred 
and fifty-four cubic inches, English, per day, for from four to five 
months, which amounts to the enormous volume of more than eleven 
hundred cubic decimetres, or sixty-seven thousand one hundred and 
thirty cubic inches. This abundance of juice, produced by a single 
maguey of scarcely a metre and a half in height, or four and nine tenths 
feet, is so much more astonishing, as the agave plantations are in the 
most arid grounds, and frequently on banks ot rocks hardly covered 
with vegetable earth. In a barren soil, the Indian calculates the product 
of each maguey at one hundred and fifty bottles, and the value of the 
pulque furnished in a day at from ten to twelve sols. The produce is 
unequal, like that of ‘he vine, which varies very much in its quantity of 
grapes. 
