Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/243

Rh The road turns up the hills, and becomes very rough and steep. A long, sharp, strong pull of a mile brings us to San Mateo—St. Matthew—a village of bamboo houses, standing in black, fat sand, and among tall and very green and very beautiful ash-trees. It is as lovely and as dirty and as dangerous as you wish or do not wish. Robbers are thick, but we are safe, for the guard is our defense.

On we climb, through a frigid vegetation and temperature, as I found it on my return—"a steady pull at the collar," as Murray puts it in his "Swiss Guide"—for a dozen miles. Behind us glowed the Mexic valley, green and glossy, where lake and tree met together. It is a magnificent landscape, and naturally set Cortez violently in love with it, as it had the Aztec and the Toltec before him. One does not tire in admiring its wonderful combination of snow range and purple mountains, of broad lake and ever-green foliage, of pretty town and grand city. The lakes here are an important part of the landscape, if landscape it may be called which they make up. Tezcoco, the largest, seems to fill all the outer section of the valley. The lesser ones near at hand are be-sprinkled with trees and towers, green and white, mingling prettily with their level lustre.

The summit is reached at La Guardia, a small collection of huts, where a breakfast that I ate not was paid for. Its contents I do not presume to describe. It takes time to learn to like cod-fish, and beans, and sauerkraut, and tomatoes, and corn-bread, and all local luxuries; why not, also, to learn to like tortillas and chili, a hot and not a cold piquanté, and other dishes I do not dare to spell any more than to taste?

Breakfast over, we cross the summit through black and barren scoria, the tossings, evidently, of craters, and ere long sight a red stone cross upon a round gray pedestal, two or three feet high, called the Cross of the Marquis. This, it is said, is the boundary mark of the possessions of Cortez, who was created Marquis of the Valley of Ojaca, and placed this cross as the beginning of his possessions.