Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/214

 have erected a cross here, where an idol, with a burnished shield, once stood to catch the first rays of the rising sun, and come in procession each year, on the 3d of May, to conduct a religious ceremonial and drape it with flowers. The white summit of Popocatepetl barely shows itself above the intervening range of the Rio Frio. The officiators at the pagan altar may have hailed it sparkling afar, like another sacrificial fire. The country round about is garden-like, abounding in maize and maguey, sheep and cattle. I observed some large straw-ricks, fashioned by leisurely employés, in the prevailing taste for adornment, into the form of houses, with a figure of a saint chopped out in bass-relief. It was a calm, lovely Sunday. A fresh breeze played, though the sun was warm; cumulus clouds piled themselves up magnificently; and the tinkle of the church-bells came up from the surrounding villages.

The clouds—"luminous Andes of the air," as a poet has aptly called them—are of especial impressiveriess, I think, above this great plain. I noted them again with great pleasure at Huamantla, in the state of Tlaxcala. It is a shabby place of unpainted adobe, out of which rise the fine domes and belfries of a dozen churches, as if they were enclosed in a brick-yard. Thither Santa Anna retired for his last futile resistance, after the Americans under Scott had taken the capital; and there, according to the school history, "the terrible American guerilla, Walker, was killed in personal combat by an intrepid Mexican officer, Eulalio Villaseñnor." Near by is Malinche, a mountain dubbed with a nickname given by the Aztecs to Cortez, which is a feature of all this part of the country. It is not of great height, but of peculiar, volcanic shape. It is a long slope, made up of knobs and jags, reaching to a central point as sharp as an arrow-head. Peons are