Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/341

Rh ladder, to the crest of our road. The path is worn in its chalk-like surface, now in narrow grooves, scarce wide enough for the two legs of the steed to stand in, now over long slippery slides, now into stairs of unequal length, but of uniform smoothness, while the echo of the tread seems ever to make us shrink and heed that order of Emerson's,

is Watts's nervous putting of our mortal estate. It is not inapplicable here, on perhaps the highest point my feet have trod in all this exalted land. As these loftiest places of earth sound hollow, so do the loftiest stations of man. The ground beneath the feet of kings and potentates is not the echoless granite, but the reverberating tepitati. It is rotten, barren, glittering, resounding dust.

Nay, more; you are of the same clay. Let us take the lesson to heart which the topmost soil that we touch on the continent so sadly preaches.

Here we take a lunch of pan y mantiquia, bettterbetter [sic] known to you as bread-and-butter, a piece of roast beef, and some German-made tarts that had, therefore, a tart in them, which Mexican dulces never have. Always choose well your table, if you can not your food. Where is a better place than this highest point in our pilgrimage? So we spread our lunch under a not-spreading cactus-tree. It makes me think of Elijah's juniper-tree, for it gives but little shade from a torrid sun, in a mountainous land. But it is something to eat a slice of meat and bread under a not-spreading cactus-tree. It will do to tell of, and it is told of. Then judgment gets the better of sentiment, and I adjourn my spreading limbs and spread bread to the large-leafed robli; so my guide told me to spell it. It is a sort of oak, with large leaves, some green, some brown. It gives shade, and the breeze gives coolness.

The view from this apex is grand. The hills, of all sorts of strange shapes, rise all about us, for miles and miles. Just below