Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/16

 deep with purple shadow, faintly luminous with dreamy light, and a glint of water shooting like a silver arrow through the pale green foliage. Or it is a silent city far away on the horizon, its domes and towers tinted in soft shades of pink and blue and warm amber; its tiled roofs flashing; its low gray walls, with masses of drooping trees behind, barely rising from the white level of the plain, like an oasis in the desert. Or it is a forest of cactus stretching for miles in every form of contortion known to this reptile of the vegetable world; or a waste of Yucca palms, each stem tipped by a Hercules club, four feet in height, of waxen lilies; or a plain of unfamiliar flowers, gorgeous but scentless, stretching like a Persian rug to the base of the wonderful heights beyond. Always a sudden change, and each change as splendid as the one before which seemed perfection.

With unceasing difference of detail in color and outline, but the same general peculiarities, these scenes repeat themselves, until the approach to Chihuahua across the wide plain brings us near the first distinctively Mexican city. It lies below the deep purple mountains in the distance; the