Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/108

102 touched. The country is full of trees, which are also full of greenness. Church towers peer above their tops, and white and drab specks appear among the interstices, the proofs that this wide area has villages amidst its verdure.

To the right still, the landscape narrows to its closest limits, and the sierra of Guadalupe comes within three or four miles of the town. It is a range fifteen or twenty miles long, that casts its nearest and highest battlements over against the city. It is woodless, bright, of purple bloom, without a shady retreat, save such as recesses may give.

At its easternmost edge, just where it drops into the plains nearest the city, you notice several domes and towers massed together. That is the group of temples dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most famous, popular, and powerful of all the virgins of America, if not of the Church that worships her. That spot is a curious evidence of the manner in which Romanism adapts itself to the people it governs. The Indians were sullen and unsubdued after Cortez had conquered their nation. They were a dangerous element, being, like the subjects of the East India Company, a thousand to one more numerous than their rulers. How shall they be subdued? Their priests and worship were gone, but not their faith in both.

They had a seat of worship in this spot. An Indian coming over the mountains, seeking for a priest at a church built by Cortez, a mile or so from its base, is met by the Virgin, who tells him to build a church to her in that spot. He flees affrighted to the priest, and tells his tale. It is not idle words to not empty ears, though it is so assumed. He is repulsed by the priest, meets her twice again, asks a sign, has his soiled blanket filled by her hands with flowers from these barren and burning rocks, which when poured out at the feet of the incredulous archbishop are no more flowers, but

even the maiden mother herself. Her flowers had changed to a flowery Madonna, with a bud of a boy in her arms, as on a branch.