Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/215

Rh was planted on a rock—the colony that has colonized the whole continent down to Mexico, and will yet colonize that and all south of it.

This elaborate building was then erected in a country that for eighty-five years, nearly a century, had been under European sway, culture, and religion. So the Pilgrim Rock must abase its head before the rock-built walls of El Desierto. I would like to see it lowering its crest before any thing.

Beyond this grand forest and its romantic ruin lie the plains of Mexico. The sun blazes over them, making it all a lake of golden mist, out of which rises many a bold and brown sierra, that at our height and in this radiance looks neither bold nor brown. For forty or sixty miles this open landscape stretches. A matter of twenty miles is of no consequence in this country, so clear is the atmosphere. Emerson's "Brahma" is here fulfilled in one of its lines,

The basin is of treeless land, salt-marsh, irrigated meadow, and shallow lake, with knobs of hills embossed upon it. Just round the corner of that neighboring point of pines, to our right, lies the central spot of the park—not a rude upheaval of mountains, but a fair city, with its towers and domes and roofs flashing in the setting sun. We saw it often in our ascent hither. It is a city that perhaps best of all on earth fulfills Tennyson's description,

The monstrous plain and the dazzling sunshine envelop this town, and make it blaze like a diamond amidst diamonds.

This writing, begun at sunset on the mountain-top, is being continued before the convent walls, not long after sunrise. The rest of the party, gentlemen and gentlewomen, are practicing their pistols on the walls. Small success have most; but one, the guide and guardian of the band, puts his bullet through the mark every time. I content myself with telling Lessing's fable of the Jupiter