Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/61

Rh and numberless green shrubs divide the different crops in the long panorama of vale and hillside; great plantations of maguey extend into the far distance and even up to the undulations of the foothills, and everywhere fertility spreads the promise of abundance. Bridges and aqueducts, rivulets and ditches, open flume and covered sluiceway, distribute the bounteous, life-giving power all over the land, which teems with rich harvests in return. Soon across the clear air, beside a mass of soft white cloud, — themselves two snowy clouds lifted into the blue of heaven, — the summits of Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl rise in their sublime beauty. Unlike the great peaks of Colorado and New Mexico, which spring almost invariably from a barren and forbidding country, torn and devastated by the same force which caused the primal upheaving, and bearing still its sombre impress, these beautiful forms, wonderful in color and majesty, tower above a world as beautiful as themselves. The exquisite valley takes now a thousand shapes of loveliness. Tropical vegetation shows itself sufficiently to make the landscape rich and bounteous; the quaint, unusual architecture of town and village