Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/165

Rh This spot, unheard of by me unto this hour, unmentioned by any tourist I have read (and I never read one on Mexico), is now formally introduced to the American public. If you come to Mexico, come to Pachuca; and if to Pachuca, to the basaltic ravine of Regla.

We lean over the balcony of our hospitable quarters, awaiting breakfast, and see the horses tread out the silver. A yard eighty rods square, poco mas y menos, is laid down to this work. Beds of black mud are located over it, to the untrained eye precisely like the earth about it. But how different to the eye that is trained! This black mud is silver, mixed badly with other earths, mixed also with salt, sulphate of copper, and quicksilver, that, under the painful pressure of tramping steeds, are to liberate it and make it the beauty and joy of man—and plague also, as are most beauties and joys. Two hundred horses are engaged in tramping out the silver. Their tails are shaven, the mud has splashed up on their heads and backs, and they look so woe-begone, as if their labor were degrading, that it is hard for the uninitiated eye to believe they are horses at all. Mules, and even asses, they get degraded to. The making of silver seems to be as debasing as much of the spending of it is. Eighty of these march round one circle, five abreast, close together. Four such circles employ over two hundred horses and mules. Over three hundred and fifty are owned by the company, and sometimes all of them are put into service at once. The barrel system of Velasco is also employed, and water, barrels, and horses make the ore into silver.

After a most sumptuous breakfast, served by Mr. Rule, the Superintendent of Regla, a breakfast cooked in the best English fashion (and there is none better), we start for the last and not least of the points of interest that have drawn our feet and eyes this way. The horses that are brought out for us, how different from the shorn-tailed nags that are swinging around those circles! The gayest and handsomest is most unwisely but generously offered to me. He is a fine sprinkled white sorrel, and he has been in the stable many days.