36 MEXICO. 
Indian Attica — when he beheld, 1 say, this tranquil scene at his feet, wha'i 
must have been the avarice and the relentlessness of an unknightly heart 
that urged him onward to the destruction and enslavement of a civilized 
and unoffending people, whose only crime was, the possession of a coun- 
try rich enough to be plundered to minister to the luxury of a bigoted 
race beyond the sea ! 
******* 
Our descent commenced from the eminence where we had halted 
awhile to survey the valley. Our coachman was an honest Yankee, 
fearless as the wild horses he drove, and they scoured along under his 
lash as if we had the level roads of New England beneath us. But, alas ! 
we had not. I question whether there are any such roads elsewhere — in 
the world — nor can you conceive them, because your experience among 
the wilds of the Aroostook or the marshes of the Mississippi, can furnish 
no symptoms of such highways. They were gullies, washed into the 
mountain side by the rains; filled, here and there, with stones and 
branches ; dammed up, to turn the water, by mounds a couple of fee*, 
high — and thus, gradually serpentining to the foot of the declivity. Yol, 
may readily imagine that there was no such thing as rolling down with 
our rapid motion over such a ravine. We literallj jumped from dam to 
dam, and rock to rock, and in many places where the steep is certainly 
at an angle of 45°, I must confess that I quailed at the impending dange? 
while the horses bounded along as fiercely as if they bore Mazeppa. But 
the driver knew what he was about, and in an hour drew up at the Venta 
de Cordova, where, when I alighted, I found myself deaf and giddy from 
the heat, dust, and irregular motion. In a few moments, however, the 
blood poured from my head and I was relieved, though I felt ill and un- 
comfortable the rest of the day. Two of the other passengers suffered in 
the same manner.* 
The succeeding distance of about thirty miles lies along the level, and 
skirts a detached range of volcanic hills between the lakes of Tezcoco 
and Chalco, the same which I described, some time ago, as rising like 
ant-heaps from the plain. We passed the village of Ayotla, and through 
a number of collections of mud-walled huts and desolate hovels, buried 
up among palm-trees and fields of barley and maguey, (resembling the 
streets of ruined tombs near Rome ;) but nowhere did I see any evidence 
of neat or careful cultivation, or of comfort and thriftiness. In this the 
valley of Mexico is, markedly, different from that of Puebla. Misery 
and neglect reigned absolute. Squalid Indians in rags exhibiting almost 
entirely their dirty bodies, thronged the road ; miserable devils corning 
* Almost all travellers suffer from giddiness and flow of blood to the head on their arrival on the Vallej of 
Mexico. This arisee from the great rarefaction of the atmosphere, 7500 feet above the level of the se&. 
