Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/305

 Rh town on the northern frontier, to which it was driven. Eating and sleeping seem hardly to have been the custom it all till, by an unremitting guerilla warfare, the tide was turned.

When we came to "the Cajones," however, he admitted that this was a little like war. We slipped and slid all one day down the Cajones—natural, or rather most woefully unnatural, steps in the solid rock, in the midst of a dark forest. The perpendiculars are three and four feet at a time, and often there are mud-holes at the bottom; and besides, there are vines that aim to take you under the chin. The sagacious steadiness of the pack-mules, picking their steps unaided in the most critical situations, was wonderful to see.

We met peons, in white cotton, coming up with barrels of ardent spirits on their shoulders, and we came to a full stop to allow the passage of jingling mule-trains of goods. The water ran in the path with us, courteously sharing its right of way. At one place it increased and converged from every side, and the wood was full of its murmurs, as if another universal deluge were coming to overwhelm us. It was full, also, of patches of pale- green light upon moss-covered stones, and limpid pools, and delicate ferns, like snow crystals turned vegetable. Now and then some white cascade stood out of the sermi-obscurity like a beckoning Undine.

Among vegetable growths on the way was the gum-copal, not unlike our white birch. There was a tree, the cuahuete —if I may trust the pronunciation of Marcos-smooth, bronze-colored, and often of a repulsive red, as if full of blood. We saw a good many charming red-and-yellow flowers on a high bush, like butterflies alighted, and once or twice a sprig of heliotrope and a calla-lily. The amape, found in the villages, and somewhat like the