Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/104

102 Down and down we drop to the valley level, and the awful beauty of the descent is marked like a cobweb thread across the mountain-sides. Fields of pale yellow sugar-cane, bound for the harvest, like sheaves of golden spears, occasional clumps of banana-trees, and the deep green of tobacco- leaves begin to alternate with the usual crops. At the pretty station, a crowd of shy women hold up odd woven baskets of straw, filled with oranges, limes, lemons, baked meats, fresh eggs, cakes, dulces, any thing to find a customer. We pass the "Little Hell," a black chasm in which a mad river foams and frets through riven walls, and stop beyond in a paradise of flowers; for this luxurious mode of travelling allows us to stop where we will, for flowers, or sights, or dinner, or hot boxes. By the side of the little stream which runs through the valley, we find maiden-hair ferns, and a wall of small Scotch roses growing like wreaths on tendrils ten feet long; we find gigantic hibiscus like masses of flame and fire, and waxen Yucca lilies, and pale purple bells with the smell of wild violets, and wood-anemones, frail but exquisite. The cars grow drowsy with bloom and fragrance, and we throw the beautiful evanescent things