Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/202

192 that coming sun! The new paseo is paced, a pretty park and drive, whose trees were leveled to let the French balls in and the Mexican out. The road runs straight to the pyramid of Cholula, which looks as if it hugged the base of Popocatepetl, though it is twenty-five miles therefrom.

Irrigation makes the fields green; not here, as Bryant found it in Berkshire, where he wrote his "Thanatopsis," and where he says are

There is no complaining in these brooks, albeit they do "a heap" more business than those that make "a heap" more of complaint, as is the case upward through beast to man. The howling cat catches no mice, and the brawling woman that Solomon was so afraid of, and to whom in his establishment he was able to give a wide house, is not the one he describes in the last verses of his Proverbs. So this land is changed from a brown and barren desolation into beauty and abundance by trickling a few inches of water along a shovel-wide path. That is all. It is the little that makes the muckle here and elsewhere, in this and in every thing.

A ride of an hour and a half brings us to the mud-brick huts that begin the once magnificent city of Cholula. I fear the huts were about the same sort when the city was at the height of its magnificence. The pepper, or Peru, tree grows thickly and uselessly, except to the eye and the birds—the redness of its berry pleasing our vision, and its bitter pungency their taste. The maguey grows yet finer to the eye and yet worse to the taste. It stretches out superbly over these black and level fields. No wonder the dwellings are of dirt, where pulqui and pepper are the chief products of the soil.

We cross a spur of the pyramid, but leave its exploration till the end of our trip. That spur through which the road is cut reveals the artificial nature of the mound, for its layers of thin brick and thick mud are visible on either side of the road, and far up on the