Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/169

Rh crossing this stream. I dismounted and gave my wayward steed to the Heneral. He rode him well. They flew together, mile and mile. I can not say that I felt very bad when I saw him, on returning, dismount and lead his horse for a long stretch, almost over the very ground where it had tossed me so. The frisky fellow was blown. The high altitude and his high spirits were too much for him, and he had run himself out. The short-lived glory died away, and this very short horse was very soon curried.

That park on which we ascend is engirted with high purple hills. It is level, and hard as a dancing-floor, and the horses all dance as they touch it, and have a gay gallopade over it. It was my ignorance, probably, of that sort of floor practice that made me make so poor a display. The Coloradoist of the party said it was very like the parks of that country. It is fine for grazing, though I judge it is too high and dry for most other culture. A half hour brings us to its abrupt close.

La Barranca Grande opens at our feet. You do not know what a barranca is? Nor did I till that day. I wish you could learn it the same way. Conceive of a level plain forty miles wide, with a border of mountains. Ride along over it leisurely and rapidly, a little of both, chatting or singing as the spirit moves, when you halt, without reason so far as you can see. You move on a rod or two slowly, and down you look two thousand feet (ten times the height of Trinity steeple or Bunker Hill Monument), down, down, down. That is no black chasm into which you are peering, but a broad garden, green and brown. Here a hill rolls up in it, a mole scarcely noticed on its handsome face. There a bamboo cottage hides itself without being hid. The green forests are full of deer. Bananas, oranges, every delight is flourishing there. A river trickles through it, picking its glittering way down to the Gulf, two hundred miles away. The walls on the opposite side rise into wild, rocky mountains, and both sides come seemingly together forty miles above—though it is only seeming, for the cañon takes a turn, and goes on and up between the mountains. Eastward it has no visible end. It descends, it is said, through to the Gulf.