Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/320

312 face of a tremendous cliff, now doubles on itself till the locomotive can stare into the windows of the rear car, and now T at a dizzy height it spans some abyss with a bridge which looks like a cobweb suspended in the air. After climbing about eight thousand feet into cloud land, the track begins to dip toward the great Valley of Mexico. The air is thin and pure, the mountains are bare and bleak, with trees of stunted growth and open levels of pasture-land from whose heights are seen still loftier summits crowned with eternal snow.

One of the finest views of Orizaba the peerless is seen from these high grounds. Dr. Haven thus describes it: "How superbly it lifts its shining cone into the shining heaven! Clouds had lingered about it on our way hither, touching now its top, now swinging around its' sides, but here they are burned up, and only this pinnacle of ice shoots up fourteen thousand feet before your amazed uplifted eyes. Mont Blanc, at Chamouni, has no such solitariness of position, nor rounded perfection, nor rich surroundings. Everything conspires to give this the chief place among the mountains of the earth." Passing on and down, the City of Mexico is reached at last, from the north. The general direction of the track is westward, but it enters the capital near the famous shrine of Our Lady of Guadaloupe. The train which started at midnight from Vera Cruz passed the mountains by daylight not only to give the passengers an opportunity to enjoy the scenery, but to avoid the car-wreckers and brigands who so infest the country that a guard of soldiers is necessary on every train, besides the armed and mounted police at each station on the road. The run from the coast to the capital is now made in twenty hours.