Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/248

 glen, half way up the mountain. The dell was filled with tangled vines and shrubbery, growing up among lofty trees that sprung amid the rocks and debris of the hill-side. The path to the bottom of it was steep, and so covered with tall grass and bushes that it became necessary to send an Indian with a machete to cut a path.

On reaching the stream at the foot of the opposite side, the glen was found to be quite as tangled, and an Indian was again despatched to clear the way. As he cut, we climbed after each other, slowly and painfully over the sharp and rugged rocks. When near the top, however, and in sight of the entrance, a tall shelf of rock, slanting at a sharp angle with the hill, opposed itself to our farther progress. It was about four yards wide—below it the precipice plunged down almost perpendicularly for two hundred feet, while there was nothing to grasp but the bare surface of the rock, and a few threads of vines that grew from the fissures of the impending cliff. A ledge of about three inches had been chipped in this rode, along which it was necessary to pass. The barefooted Indians crossed as nimbly as cats, and those of our party who wore shoes followed with ease; but I, in a pair of water-proof, thick-soled boots, and with not the steadiest head over steep places, found the transit exceedingly difficult. I hung on, however, by the vines, and succeeded in crossing in a very lubberly manner.

The Indian women with our tortillas, and the detachment we had despatched in the morning with our cold ham, beef and sardines, had already arrived. There was a huge rock with a flat surface, upon which we spread our viands—fruit, cocoanuts, and pines—and made as picturesque a breakfast table as ever was longed for by a pic-nic party within a hundred miles of London.

I was one of the last to leave the entrance of the cave, which hangs on a huge arch of sixty feet span, fringed with a curtain of vines and tropical plants. Our party preceded me for some distance along the road that descends rapidly for the first hundred yards. Each one of the guides, Indians, and travellers, carried a light; and when I saw the swarthy crew, with their savage features, long hair, and outlandish dress, disappearing gradually until nothing was left but the dot-like glimmer of their torches in the distance, it seemed more like some spectacle of witchcraft in melodrama, than an actual scene occurring among folks on earth. I lit my torch and followed.

The first hundred yards brings you to the bottom of the cavern, and, if not warned in time, you are likely to plunge at this season of the year, up to your knees in the water. You cross a small lake, and