Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/170

160 The sunlight of a warm September afternoon, so it feels, pours over the whole, glowing grandly on these mountains, pouring a flood of light on the upper terminations where the hills clasp hands over the valley, and glistening sweetly from the home-like landscape below.

One would not tire of gazing, or of going down, though the latter is an hour's job, the former a second's. It is wonderful what great gifts God spreads out on the earth for his children, and how solitary the most of them are. Bryant could not make solitude more solitary than in those lines of his,

So here sleeps this wonderful ravine, with its towering mountains, in sun or moon, in midnight blackness or midday splendor, and rarely looks on the face of man. Does not the Giver of every good and perfect gift enjoy His own gifts? "For His pleasure they are and were created." Then the Barranca would be satisfied if no mortal eye ever took in its beauty. It smiles responsive to the smile of its Lord.

Long we hang above the picture. At risk of life we creep to the outermost twig, and gaze down. It stands forth a gem of its own. No rival picture intermeddleth therewith. "It is worth a journey of a thousand miles," said a distinguished traveler to me to-day, "to see the Barranca Grande and the Regla Palisades." And I say "ditto" to Mr. Burke.

We are back to Regla and off to Pachuca none too early, for it is four and one-fourth of the clock ere we leave our too-hospitable friends of the valley, and turn homeward our horses' heads and our own—well-turned these latter be already by what we have seen. It is dark at six, and the ride is five hours, and the country full of robbers. Dark falls on us before we reach Velasco—thick, soft, warm. We begin to climb the mountains and pass the lower entrance of Real del Monte, when I get a bigger scare by far than that which frighted us near Omatuska.